The Red Convertible Quotes

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I thought maybe she'd whisk us off by magic, or at least hail a taxi. Instead, Bast borrowed a silver Lexus convertible. "Oh, yes," she purred. "I like this one! Come along, children." "But this isn't yours," I pointed out. "My dear, I'm a cat. Everything I see is mine." She touched the ignition and the keyhole sparked. The engine began to purr. [No, Sadie. Not like a cat, like an engine.]
Rick Riordan (The Red Pyramid (The Kane Chronicles, #1))
Mrs. Winalski owned a candy-apple-red 1965 Mustang GT convertible, and she drove it like she could die at any minute and needed to get five things done before that happened.
Lish McBride (Hold Me Closer, Necromancer (Necromancer, #1))
You'll let me drive his little red one? The combustible?" Why not? I nod. "Yep. The convertible. Deal?
Anna Banks (Of Poseidon (The Syrena Legacy, #1))
Being a murderer with a sensational but incomplete and unorthodox memory, I cannot tell you, ladies and gentlemen, the exact day which I first knew with certainty that the red convertible was following us.
Vladimir Nabokov (Lolita)
Andrews threw the convertible in gear, and I trailed a hand over the bright red finish. Probably fresh off the lot—unlike my little hatchback, which had been factory assembled in the same decade witches came out of the broom closet.
Kalayna Price (Grave Witch (Alex Craft, #1))
You have a sixty-seven GTO convertible, in factory red.” He stood in reverent silence for ten full seconds. “I think you have to marry me now. You’re the first woman besides Loo who’s seen her and known what she is. I’m pretty sure we’re engaged.
Nora Roberts (The Obsession)
In Santa Barbara they stopped at a fish restaurant in what seemed to be a converted warehouse. Fenchurch had red mullet and said it was delicious. Arthur had a swordfish steak and said it made him angry. He grabbed a passing waitress by the arm and berated her. "Why's this fish so bloody good?" he demanded, angrily. "Please excuse my friend," said Fenchurch to the startled waitress. "I think he's having a nice day at last.
Douglas Adams (So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish (Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, #4))
The real Julian Wells didn't die in a cherry-red convertible, overdosing on a highway in Joshua Tree while a choir soared over the sound track.
Bret Easton Ellis (Imperial Bedrooms)
Similar (of course, far from identical) irritations in similar conditions call out similar reflexes; the more powerful the irritation, the sooner it overcomes personal peculiarities. To a tickle, people react differently, but to a red-hot iron, alike. As a steam-hammer converts a sphere and a cube alike into sheet metal, so under the blow of too great and inexorable events resistances are smashed and the boundaries of “individuality” lost.
Leon Trotsky (History of the Russian Revolution)
Turn up the radio. Turn up the tape machine. Look into the sunset up ahead. Roll the windows down for a better taste of the cool desert wind. Ah yes. This is what it’s all about. Total control now. Tooling along the main drag on a Saturday night in Las Vegas, two good old boys in a fireapple-red convertible … stoned, ripped, twisted … Good People.
Hunter S. Thompson (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas)
two good old boys in a fireapple-red convertible … stoned, ripped, twisted … Good People.
Hunter S. Thompson (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas)
It was becoming more and more evident that Salem was a town that celebrated individuality, a real live-and-let-live kind of place. Melody felt a gut punch of regret. Her old nose would have fit in here. "Look!" She pointed at the multicolored car whizzing by. Its black door were from a Mercedes coupe, the white hood from a BMW; the silver trunk was Jaguar, the red convertible top was Lexus, the whitewall tires were Bentley, the sound system was Bose, and the music was classical. A hood ornament from each model dangled from the rear view mirror. Its license plate appropriately read MUTT. "That car looks like a moving Benton ad." "Or a pileup on Rodeo drive." Candace snapped a picture with her iPhone and e-mailed to her friends back home. They responded instantly with a shot of what they were doing. It must have involved the mall because Candace picked up her pace and began asking anyone under the age of fifty where the cool people hung out.
Lisi Harrison (Monster High (Monster High, #1))
The calling is to Love. To Love without agenda. Without even the agenda of trying to “save” anyone. Love does not include “only ifs.” Love does not love “so that.” People are not projects. They are not potential converts. And they are certainly are not our customers. People are friends. People are family. People are fellow human beings with whom we share life. Love loves. It’s as simple as that.
Jamie West Zumwalt (Beloved Chaos: moving from religion to Love in a red light district)
Britannia, that unfortunate female, is always before me, like a trussed fowl; skewered through and through with office-pens, and bound hand and foot with red tape. I am sufficiently behind the scenes to know the worth of political life. I am quite an Infidel about it, and shall never be converted.
Charles Dickens (David Copperfield)
She was going to go home after this and sip red wine and stare at the wall, I could tell. She would wonder why she was doing this, struggling against commercial interests at a corporate hospital when all she wanted to do was help people, and in the morning, when she walked out of her beautiful home and unlocked her convertible, she would remember.
Max Berry
When we're young, we think we are the only species worth knowing. But the more I come to know people, the better I like ravens. ("Revival Road
Louise Erdrich (The Red Convertible: Selected and New Stories, 1978-2008)
Earth and sky touch everywhere and nowhere, like sex between two strangers. There is no definition and no union for sure. ("The Antelope Wife")
Louise Erdrich (The Red Convertible: Selected and New Stories, 1978-2008)
Isak Dinesen said that life is no more than a process for turning healthy young puppies into mangy old dogs and man but an exquisite instrument for converting the red wine of Shiraz into urine.
Barbara Vine (A Fatal Inversion)
Representations of pre-Color humans stand beside casualty statistics. One hundred and ten million died for Gold to rule. Then their bombers dropped solocene into the troposphere and neutered an entire race. Didn’t even have to convert them to the Color hierarchy. Just had to wait a century for them to die out. Bloodless genocide. Give one thing to the Conquerors. They were efficient. Pricks.
Pierce Brown (Iron Gold (Red Rising Saga, #4))
I am still vaguely haunted by our hitchhiker’s remark about how he’d “never rode in a convertible before.” Here’s this poor geek living in a world of convertibles zipping past him on the highways all the time, and he’s never even ridden in one. It made me feel like King Farouk. I was tempted to have my attorney pull into the next airport and arrange some kind of simple, common-law contract whereby we could just give the car to this unfortunate bastard. Just say: “Here, sign this and the car’s yours.” Give him the keys and then use the credit card to zap off on a jet to some place like Miami and rent another huge fireapple-red convertible for a drug-addled, top-speed run across the water all the way out to the last stop in Key West … and then trade the car off for a boat. Keep moving. But this manic notion passed quickly. There was no point in getting this harmless kid locked up—and, besides, I had plans for this car. I was looking forward to flashing around Las Vegas in the bugger. Maybe do a bit of serious drag-racing on the Strip: Pull up to that big stoplight in front of the Flamingo and start screaming at the traffic: “Alright, you chickenshit wimps! You pansies! When this goddamn light flips green, I’m gonna stomp down on this thing and blow every one of you gutless punks off the road!” Right. Challenge the bastards on their own turf. Come screeching up to the crosswalk, bucking and skidding with a bottle of rum in one hand and jamming the horn to drown out the music … glazed eyes insanely dilated behind tiny black, gold-rimmed greaser shades, screaming gibberish … a genuinely dangerous drunk, reeking of ether and terminal psychosis. Revving the engine up to a terrible high-pitched chattering whine, waiting for the light to change … How often does a chance like that come around? To jangle the bastards right down to the core of their spleens. Old elephants limp off to the hills to die; old Americans go out to the highway and drive themselves to death with huge cars.
Hunter S. Thompson (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas)
You'll teach me to drive your car if I let you get in the water?" "Uh, no. I'll teach you how to drive Galen's car if you let me get in the water. You're not touching my car without a license. A real one, not some shiny plastic thing Rachel made between afternoon talk shows." Even if Galen doesn't have insurance, he's got enough in his wallet to buy a new one. I, on the other hand, have just enough in saving to cover my deductible. Her eyes go round. "You'll let me drive his little red one? The combustible?" Why not? I nod. "Yep. The convertible. Deal?" She grabs my hand from the couch to pull us both up. Then she shakes it. "Deal! I'll go get the keys from Rachel.
Anna Banks (Of Poseidon (The Syrena Legacy, #1))
We entered the cool cave of the practice space with all the long-haired, goateed boys stoned on clouds of pot and playing with power tools. I tossed my fluffy coat into the hollow of my bass drum and lay on the carpet with my worn newspaper. A shirtless boy came in and told us he had to cut the power for a minute, and I thought about being along in the cool black room with Joey. Let's go smoke, she said, and I grabbed the cigarettes off the amp. She started talking to me about Wonder Woman. I feel like something big is happening, but I don't know what to do about it. With The Straight Girl? I asked in the blankest voice possible. With everything. Back in the sun we walked to the edge of the parking lot where a black Impala convertible sat, rusted and rotting, looking like it just got dredged from a swamp. Rainwater pooling on the floor. We climbed up onto it and sat our butts backward on the edge of the windshield, feet stretched into the front seat. Before she even joined the band, I would think of her each time I passed the car, the little round medallions with the red and black racing flags affixed to the dash. On the rusting Chevy, Joey told me about her date the other night with a girl she used to like who she maybe liked again. How her heart was shut off and it felt pretty good. How she just wanted to play around with this girl and that girl and this girl and I smoked my cigarette and went Uh-Huh. The sun made me feel like a restless country girl even though I'd never been on a farm. I knew what I stood for, even if nobody else did. I knew the piece of me on the inside, truer than all the rest, that never comes out. Doesn't everyone have one? Some kind of grand inner princess waiting to toss her hair down, forever waiting at the tower window. Some jungle animal so noble and fierce you had to crawl on your belly through dangerous grasses to get a glimpse. I gave Joey my cigarette so I could unlace the ratty green laces of my boots, pull them off, tug the linty wool tights off my legs. I stretched them pale over the car, the hair springing like weeds and my big toenail looking cracked and ugly. I knew exactly who I was when the sun came back and the air turned warm. Joey climbed over the hood of the car, dusty black, and said Let's lie down, I love lying in the sun, but there wasn't any sun there. We moved across the street onto the shining white sidewalk and she stretched out, eyes closed. I smoked my cigarette, tossed it into the gutter and lay down beside her. She said she was sick of all the people who thought she felt too much, who wanted her to be calm and contained. Who? I asked. All the flowers, the superheroes. I thought about how she had kissed me the other night, quick and hard, before taking off on a date in her leather chaps, hankies flying, and I sat on the couch and cried at everything she didn't know about how much I liked her, and someone put an arm around me and said, You're feeling things, that's good. Yeah, I said to Joey on the sidewalk, I Feel Like I Could Calm Down Some. Awww, you're perfect. She flipped her hand over and touched my head. Listen, we're barely here at all, I wanted to tell her, rolling over, looking into her face, we're barely here at all and everything goes so fast can't you just kiss me? My eyes were shut and the cars sounded close when they passed. The sun was weak but it baked the grime on my skin and made it smell delicious. A little kid smell. We sat up to pop some candy into our mouths, and then Joey lay her head on my lap, spent from sugar and coffee. Her arm curled back around me and my fingers fell into her slippery hair. On the February sidewalk that felt like spring.
Michelle Tea
The discomfort she felt with Avery Lawford was nothing compared to what she felt when their third partner arrived a few moments later in a classic green Jaguar convertible, from which she emerged like a celebrity being handed onto the red carpet.
Wendy Wax (Ten Beach Road (Ten Beach Road #1))
It made me feel like King Farouk. I was tempted to have my attorney pull into the next airport and arrange some kind of simple, common-law contract whereby we could just give the car to this unfortunate bastard. Just say: “Here, sign this and the car’s yours.” Give him the keys and then use the credit card to zap off on a jet to some place like Miami and rent another huge fireapple-red convertible for a drug-addled, top-speed run across the water all the way out to the last stop in Key West … and then trade the car off for a boat. Keep moving. But this manic notion passed quickly.
Hunter S. Thompson (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas)
It was the gift that every girl dreams of, to be dead long enough for your parents to realize how meaningless their lives were without you, how they were suddenly and at once deeply sorrowed at all of the horrible injustices they caused you, how they had truly never appreciated your natural gifts of beauty and grace, being that their beautiful angel would have such a short time on earth and should have spent that time driving the restored 1965 convertible Mustang she had openly AND PUBLICLY desired. But nope, she spent her last, short, fleeting moments driving a 1980 Chevy Citation, every so clearly a GRANDMA car, with fake red-velvet upholstery, a hatchback, and an interior that smelled like spoiled milk and sometimes meat. Being temporarily run over by a car was the best present I had ever received, and I didn't even have to do anything dramatic to get it, like write a note or buy some rope.
Laurie Notaro (An Idiot Girl's Christmas: True Tales from the Top of the Naughty List)
intersection of Main Street, Nancy stopped and the girls looked in both directions. “I see a bright-red convertible!” George said, pointing to the right. Nancy drove as fast as she dared. The car she was chasing had the top down. The man at the wheel was threading his way expertly through the traffic. “Oh, we mustn’t lose him!” Bess urged. Nancy was doing her best to catch up with the gray-haired Toby Simpson, but as she came to a signal light, it turned red. The convertible had gone ahead and was making good speed. The girls chafed under the delay and the instant the light became green Nancy shot ahead. By now the chase was hopeless. Toby
Carolyn Keene (The Clue of the Tapping Heels (Nancy Drew, #16))
Nancy thanked him, then went to her convertible. She drove carefully through the city traffic and finally reached Hilo Street. Mrs. Stewart’s apartment house was Number 76. Nancy scanned the buildings and found that this one was the largest on the street. It was ultramodern in design and about twenty stories high. After parking her car, she smoothed her hair and got out. A red-coated doorman nodded pleasantly to the young detective as she entered the building a minute later. Nancy checked the directory and saw that Mrs. Stewart was in Apartment Three on the fourth floor. She rang the elevator button. Almost instantly, aluminum doors slid open noiselessly, and Nancy stepped inside the carpeted elevator. It was self-operated, and Nancy pushed the fourth-floor control.
Carolyn Keene (The Bungalow Mystery (Nancy Drew, #3))
Jacob’s dogs were soon the envy of other men, who offered to buy them. Instead, he traded a day’s work for the stud of the male cur with cunning wolfish eyes. When the smallest of our bitches bore the wolf-dog’s litter, Jacob trained her puppies and traded four of the five for what seemed a mountain of treasure, which he quickly converted to gifts that proved how well he had come to understand Laban’s daughters.
Anita Diamant (The Red Tent)
carbohydrate controls insulin; insulin controls fat storage. Carbohydrates are not used as structural components in the body; instead they are used only as a form of fuel, whether burned immediately while passing by different organs and muscles or stored for later use. All forms of carbohydrates you eat, whether simple or complex, are eventually converted into glucose, which the brain, red blood cells and nerve cells generally prefer as a primary fuel.
Mark Sisson (The Primal Blueprint)
A few more years of the same, though, and I got used to it: I would load entire libraries from country castles and city mansions, fine, rare, leather- and Morroco-bound books, load whole trains full, and as soon as a train had thirty cars, off it would go to Switzerland or Austria, one kilogram of rare books for the equivalent of one crown of convertible currency, and nobody blinked an eye, nobody shed a tear, not even I myself, no, all I did was stand there smiling as I watched the train hauling those priceless libraries off to Switzerland and Austria for one crown in convertible currency a kilo. By then I had mustered the strength to look upon misfortune with composure, to still my emotions, by then I had begun to understand the beauty of destruction and I loaded more and more freight cars, and more and more trains left the station heading west at one crown per kilogram, and as I stood there staring after the red lantern hanging from the last car, as I stood there leaning on a lamppost like Leonardo da Vinci, who stood leaning on a column and looking on while French soldiers used his statue for target practice, shooting away horse and rider bit by bit, I thought how Leonardo, like me, standing and witnessing such horrors with complete composure, had realized even than that neither the heavens are humane nor is any man with a head on his shoulders.
Bohumil Hrabal (Too Loud a Solitude)
Human beings tend to think that light-sensitive molecules exist only in the eyes, but they come in four major types: rhodopsin (in the retina, which absorbs light for vision), hemoglobin (in red blood cells), myoglobin (in muscle), and most important of all, cytochrome (in all the cells). Cytochrome is the marvel that explains how lasers can heal so many different conditions, because it converts light energy from the sun into energy for the cells. Most of the photons are absorbed by the energy powerhouses within the cells, the mitochondria.
Norman Doidge (The Brain's Way of Healing: Remarkable Discoveries and Recoveries from the Frontiers of Neuroplasticity)
I have tamed that savage stenographic mystery. I make a respectable income by it. I am in high repute for my accomplishment in all pertaining to the art, and am joined with eleven others in reporting the debates in Parliament for a Morning Newspaper. Night after night, I record predictions that never come to pass, professions that are never fulfilled, explanations that are only meant to mystify. I wallow in words. Britannia, that unfortunate female, is always before me, like a trussed fowl: skewered through and through with office-pens, and bound hand and foot with red tape. I am sufficiently behind the scenes to know the worth of political life. I am quite an Infidel about it, and shall never be converted.
Charles Dickens (David Copperfield)
At the end of its eight-minute journey from the sun, light passes through the stained glass of St Matthias Church in Richmond, London, and enters the dual darkrooms of Jasper’s eyeballs. The rods and cones packing his retinas convert the light into electrical impulses that travel along optic nerves into his brain, which translates the varying wavelengths of light into ‘Virgin Mary blue’, ‘blood of Christ red’, ‘Gethsemane green’, and interprets the images as twelve disciples, each occupying a segment of the cartwheel window. Vision begins in the heart of the sun. Jasper notes that Jesus’s disciples were, essentially, hippies: long hair, gowns, stoner expressions, irregular employment, spiritual convictions, dubious sleeping arrangements and a guru.
David Mitchell (Utopia Avenue)
At the end of its eight-minute journey from the sun, light passes through the stained glass of St. Matthias Church in Richmond, London, and enters the dual darkrooms of Jasper’s eyeballs. The rods and cones packing his retinas convert the light into electrical impulses that travel along optic nerves into his brain, which translates the varying wavelengths of light into “Virgin Mary blue,” “blood of Christ red,” “Gethsemane green,” and interprets the images as twelve disciples, each occupying a segment of the cartwheel window. Vision begins in the heart of the sun. Jasper notes that Jesus’s disciples were, essentially, hippies: long hair, gowns, stoner expressions, irregular employment, spiritual convictions, dubious sleeping arrangements, and a guru.
David Mitchell (Utopia Avenue)
The Islamic revolution in Iran is a positive development. At the same time, the Islamic revolution of Afghanistan, sprung exclusively from spiritual roots, dealt a heavy blow to the communist regime in the former Soviet Union. In face of that revolution, the red Soviet empire had to concede that it is incapable, in spite of its military superiority, to defeat the Mujaheddin, whose main weapons were their right and their spiritual strength. Another quite new situation appeared as a consequence of the Islamic revolution in Iran, that destroyed the Zionist rule in that country and shook its foundations in that part of the world. Khomeini's letter to Gorbachev, in which he was inviting the latter to convert to Islam, had great symbolic power! What is new again is the movement of Islamic rebirth and the continuous decay of the strength of the colonial government bodies directed from afar by Israel in many Islamic countries." "The Islamic system has remained stable in Iran even after the death of Khomeini and the change in the person of the leader and of the leadership group the only one to remain stable in the entire Islamic world. On the contrary, the demise of the Shah meant at the same time the collapse of his regime, his artificial form of government, and his army. All that went to the dust-bin of history. The same fate awaits the other regimes that prevail in the muslim world. Israel knows that very well. She tries desperately to cause the wheel of history to stand still. However, any strike against Iran or against the growing Islamic movements, will cause the anger of the muslim masses to grow, and the fire of the Islamic revolution to ignite. Nobody will be able to suppress that revolution.
Otto Ernst Remer
The first day we rode our bikes to Chelsey and parked them. It was a terrible feeling. Most of those kids, at least all the older ones, had their own automobiles, many of them new convertibles, and they weren't black or dark blue like most cars, they were bright yellow, green, orange, and red. The guys sat in them outside of the school and the girls gathered around and went for rides. Everybody was nicely dressed, the guys and the girls, they had pullover sweaters, wrist watches and the latest in shoes. They seemed very adult and poised and superior. And there I was in my homemade shirt, my one ragged pair of pants, my rundown shoes, and I was covered with boils. The guys with the cars didn't worry about acne. They were very handsome, they were tall and clean with bright teeth and they didn't wash their hair with hand soap. They seemed to know something I didn't know. I was at the bottom again. Since all the guys had cars Baldy and I were ashamed of our bicycles. We left them home and walked to school and back, two-and-one-half miles each way. We carried brown bag lunches. But mot of the other students didn't even eat in the school cafeteria. They drove to malt shops with the girls, played the juke boxes and laughed. They were on their way to U.S.C.
Charles Bukowski (Ham on Rye)
Constantine soon began to renege on the promise of religious freedom as far as Jews were concerned. In 315, he issued a new edict, forbidding Jews—and only Jews—from proselytizing. Much later in the fourth century, however, Judaism demonstrated its continuing appeal for outsiders by attracting large numbers of Arabs, with whom the Jews had generally lived in amity throughout the early Diaspora, in Himyar (now Yemen). The Arab converts to Judaism proved just as intolerant of Christians as Christians were proving to be of Jews in late antiquity, and expended a fair amount of effort in the fifth century trying to wipe out the Christians among them. In the end, around 525, the Arab Jews of Himyar were vanquished when a much larger force of Ethiopian Christian troops crossed the Red Sea to attack them. (Today a tiny remnant of those Arab-descended Jews—no more than a few hundred—still live in a Yemen descending into chaos as militant Shia Houthi rebels—whose slogan is “Death to America, Death to Israel, Damnation to the Jews”—have seized power. The United States and Britain, which tried to get the remaining Jews out of Yemen, both closed their embassies as a result of escalating violence in 2015. Suleiman Jacob, the unofficial rabbi of a community of just fifty-five Jews in the capital of Raida, said in a poignant interview, “There isn’t a single one of us here who doesn’t want to leave. Soon there will be no Jews in Yemen, inshallah.”8)
Susan Jacoby (Strange Gods: A Secular History of Conversion)
In order to grasp these types of behavior, it’s important to review the nature of human emotions. E-motions are energy in motion. They are the energy that moves us—our human fuel. Our emotions are also like the red light oil gauge on our car signaling us about a need, a loss or a satiation. Our anger is our strength; our fear is our discernment; our sadness is our healing feeling; our guilt is our conscience former; our shame signals our essential limitation and is the source of our spirituality. When our emotions are shamed, they are repressed. Repression involves tensing muscles and shallow breathing. One set of muscles is mobilized to block the energy of the emotion we’re ashamed to feel. Sadness is commonly converted into a false smile (reactive formation). I have often smiled when I felt sad. Once the energy is blocked, we no longer feel it. However, it is still a form of energy. It is dynamic. I already gave you the example of how repressed anger intensifies. Our anger explodes because it cannot be repressed anymore. In reenactment, the emotional energy is “acted out” or “acted in.” The behavior that set up the shaming event is repeated with surrogates who reenact the original shaming scene, or a person shames himself in the way he was originally shamed. This can occur through destructive self-talk, or it can happen when a person cuts himself or drives himself mercilessly, refusing to take breaks, get proper rest or take legitimate vacations.
John Bradshaw (Healing the Shame that Binds You)
Is this a date? Are you on a date with him? And who the hell’s car is this?” Before I can answer, Genevieve makes a move toward me, which I dodge. I run behind the pillar. “Don’t be such a baby, Lara Jean,” she says. “Just accept that you lose and I win!” I peek from behind the pillar, and John is giving me a look--a look that says, Get in. Quickly I nod. Then he throws open the passenger door, and I run for it, as fast as I can. I’ve barely got the door closed before he’s driving off, Peter and Gen in our dust. I turn back to look. Peter is staring after us, his mouth open. He’s jealous, and I’m glad. “Thanks for the save,” I say, still trying to catch my breath. My heart is pounding in my chest so hard. John is looking straight ahead, a broad smile on his face. “Anytime.” We stop at a stoplight, and he turns his head and looks at me, and then we’re looking at each other, laughing like crazy, and I’m breathless again. “Did you see the looks on their faces?” John gasps, dropping his head on the steering wheel. “It was classic!” “Like a movie!” He grins at me, jubilant, blue eyes alight. “Just like a movie,” I agree, leaning my head back against the seat and opening my eyes wide up at the moon, so wide it hurts. I’m in a red Mustang convertible sitting next to a boy in uniform, and the night air feels like cool satin on my skin, and all the stars are out, and I’m happy. The way John is still grinning to himself, I know he is too. We got to play make-believe for the night.
Jenny Han (P.S. I Still Love You (To All the Boys I've Loved Before, #2))
Palo Mayombe is perhaps best known for its display of human skulls in iron cauldrons and accompanied by necromantic practices that contribute to its eerie reputation of being a cult of antinomian and hateful sorcerers. This murky reputation is from time to time reinforced by uninformed journalists and moviemakers who present Palo Mayombe in similar ways as Vodou has been presented through the glamour and horror of Hollywood. It is the age old fear of the unknown and of powers that threaten the established order that are spawned from the umbra of Palo Mayombe. The cult is marked by ambivalence replicating an intense spectre of tension between all possible contrasts, both spiritual and social. This is evident both in the history of Kongo inspired sorcery and practices as well as the tension between present day practitioners and the spiritual conclaves of the cult. Palo Mayombe can be seen either as a religion in its own right or a Kongo inspired cult. This distinction perhaps depends on the nature of ones munanso (temple) and rama (lineage). Personally, I see Palo Mayombe as a religious cult of Creole Sorcery developed in Cuba. The Kongolese heritage derives from several different and distinct regions in West Africa that over time saw a metamorphosis of land, cultures and religions giving Palo Mayombe a unique expression in its variety, but without losing its distinct nucleus. In the history of Palo Mayombe we find elite families of Kongolese aristocracy that contributed to shaping African history and myth, conflicts between the Kongolese and explorers, with the Trans-Atlantic slave trade being the blood red thread in its development. The name Palo Mayombe is a reference to the forest and nature of the Mayombe district in the upper parts of the deltas of the Kongo River, what used to be the Kingdom of Loango. For the European merchants, whether sent by the Church to convert the people or by a king greedy for land and natural resources, everything south of present day Nigeria to the beginning of the Kalahari was simply Kongo. This un-nuanced perception was caused by the linguistic similarities and of course the prejudice towards these ‘savages’ and their ‘primitive’ cultures. To write a book about Palo Mayombe is a delicate endeavor as such a presentation must be sensitive both to the social as well as the emotional memory inherited by the religion. I also consider it important to be true to the fundamental metaphysical principles of the faith if a truthful presentation of the nature of Palo Mayombe is to be given. The few attempts at presenting Palo Mayombe outside ethnographic and anthropological dissertations have not been very successful. They have been rather fragmented attempts demonstrating a lack of sensitivity not only towards the cult itself, but also its roots. Consequently a poor understanding of Palo Mayombe has been offered, often borrowing ideas and concepts from Santeria and Lucumi to explain what is a quite different spirituality. I am of the opinion that Palo Mayombe should not be explained on the basis of the theological principles of Santeria. Santeria is Yoruba inspired and not Kongo inspired and thus one will often risk imposing concepts on Palo Mayombe that distort a truthful understanding of the cult. To get down to the marrow; Santeria is a Christianized form of a Yoruba inspired faith – something that should make the great differences between Santeria and Palo Mayombe plain. Instead, Santeria is read into Palo Mayombe and the cult ends up being presented at best in a distorted form. I will accordingly refrain from this form of syncretism and rather present Palo Mayombe as a Kongo inspired cult of Creole Sorcery that is quite capable
Nicholaj de Mattos Frisvold (Palo Mayombe: The Garden of Blood and Bones)
When should you be skeptical? Any time you see a report that a single food, beverage, supplement, food product, or ingredient causes or reduces the risk for obesity, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, or cancer, it is a good idea to envision a red warning flag flying high in the air. The studies may have identified associations between the food factor and the disease, but associations can be due to any number of other causes. Dietary patterns, not single factors, are what matter to health. Look out for words like “miracle” or “breakthrough.” Science tends to proceed in small increments and rarely works that way. And please be especially skeptical of “everything you thought you knew about nutrition is wrong.” Science does not work that way, either. Whenever you see “may” or “might”—as in “may reduce the risk of heart disease” or “might improve cognition in the elderly”—recognize that these also mean “may not” or “might not.” Overall, it is always a good idea to ask whether study results seem plausible in the light of everything else you know. As an eater, you should be wary of media hype about whether fat or sugar is a more important cause of health problems. This question ignores basic principles of nutrition: we eat foods, not nutrients, and how much we eat is often just as important as what we eat. Diets of enormous variety, from Asian diets traditionally based on rice (carbohydrates that convert to sugar in the body) to Mediterranean diets rich in olive oil (fat), can all promote long and healthy lives. The basic principles of eating healthfully have remained remarkably constant over the years: eat a wide variety of relatively unprocessed foods in reasonable amounts. Note that these same dietary principles apply to prevention of the entire range of diet-related chronic diseases. If an industry-funded study claims miraculous benefits from the sponsor’s products, think, “Advertising.
Marion Nestle (Unsavory Truth: How Food Companies Skew the Science of What We Eat)
I turn to see what she’s looking at, and it’s a red convertible Mustang driving down our street, top down--with John McClaren at the wheel. My jaw drops at the sight of him. He is in full uniform: tan dress shirt with tan tie, tan slacks, tan belt and hat. His hair is parted to the side. He looks dashing, like a real soldier. He grins at me and waves. “Whoa,” I breathe. “Whoa is right,” Ms. Rothschild says, googly-eyed beside me. Daddy and his Ken Burns DVD are forgotten; we are all staring at John in this uniform, in this car. It’s like I dreamed him up. He parks the car in front of the house, and all of us rush up to it. “Whose car is this?” Kitty demands. “It’s my dad’s,” John says. “I borrowed it. I had to promise to park really far away from any other car, though, so I hope your shoes are comfortable, Lara Jean--” He breaks off and looks me up and down. “Wow. You look amazing.” He gestures at my cinnamon bun. “I mean, your hair looks so…real.” “It is real!” I touch it gingerly, I’m suddenly feeling self-conscious about my cinnamon-bun head and red lipstick. “I know--I mean, it looks authentic.” “So do you,” I say. “Can I sit in it?” Kitty butts in, her hand on the passenger-side door. “Sure,” John says. He climbs out of the car. “But don’t you want to get in the driver’s seat?” Kitty nods quickly. Ms. Rothschild gets in too, and Daddy takes a picture of them together. Kitty poses with one arm casually draped over the steering wheel. John and I stand off to the side, and I ask him, “Where did you ever get that uniform?” “I ordered it off of eBay.” He frowns. “Am I wearing the hat right? Do you think it’s too small for my head?” “No way. I think it looks exactly the way it’s supposed to look.” I’m touched that he went to the trouble of ordering a uniform for this. I can’t think of many boys who would do that. “Stormy is going to flip out when she sees you.” He studies my face. “What about you? Do you like it?” I flush. “I do. I think you look…super.
Jenny Han (P.S. I Still Love You (To All the Boys I've Loved Before, #2))
With the introduction of radio, we now had a superfast. convenient, and wireless way of communicating over long distances. Historically, the lack of a fast and reliable communication system was one of the great obstacles to the march of history. (In 490 BCE, after the Battle of Marathon between the Greeks and the Persians, a poor runner was ordered to spread the news of the Greek victory as fast as he could. Bravely, he ran 26 miles to Athens after previously running 147 miles to Sparta, and then, according to legend, dropped dead of sheer exhaustion. His heroism, in the age before telecommunication, is now celebrated in the modern marathon.) Today, we take for granted that we can send messages and information effortlessly across the globe, utilizing the fact that energy can be transformed in many ways. For example, when speaking on a cell phone, the energy of the sound of your voice converts to mechanical energy in a vibrating diaphragm. The diaphragm is attached to a magnet that relies on the interchangeability of electricity and magnetism to create an electrical impulse, the kind that can be transported and read by a computer. This electrical impulse is then translated into electromagnetic waves that are picked up by a nearby microwave tower. There, the message is amplified and sent across the globe. But Maxwell's equations not only gave us nearly instantaneous communication via radio, cell phone, and fiber-optic cables, they also opened up the entire electromagnetic spectrum, of which visible light and radio were just two members. In the 166os, Newton had shown that white light, when sent through a prism, can be broken up into the colors of the rainbow. In 1800, William Herschel had asked himself a simple question: What lies beyond the colors of the rainbow, which extend from red to violet? He took a prism, which created a rainbow in his lab, and placed a thermometer below the color red, where there was no color at all. Much to his surprise, the temperature of this blank area began to rise. In other words, there was a "color" below red that was invisible to the naked eye but contained energy. It was called infrared light. Today, we realize that there is an entire spectrum of electromagnetic radiation, most of which is invisible, and each has a distinct wavelength. The wavelength of radio and TV, for example, is longer than that of visible light. The wavelength of the colors of the rainbow, in turn, is longer than that of ultraviolet and X-rays. This also meant that the reality we see all around us is only the tiniest sliver of the complete EM spectrum, the smallest approximation of a much larger universe
Michio Kaku (The God Equation: The Quest for a Theory of Everything)
As the subject watches the movies, the MRI machine creates a 3-D image of the blood flow within the brain. The MRI image looks like a vast collection of thirty thousand dots, or voxels. Each voxel represents a pinpoint of neural energy, and the color of the dot corresponds to the intensity of the signal and blood flow. Red dots represent points of large neural activity, while blue dots represent points of less activity. (The final image looks very much like thousands of Christmas lights in the shape of the brain. Immediately you can see that the brain is concentrating most of its mental energy in the visual cortex, which is located at the back of the brain, while watching these videos.) Gallant’s MRI machine is so powerful it can identify two to three hundred distinct regions of the brain and, on average, can take snapshots that have one hundred dots per region of the brain. (One goal for future generations of MRI technology is to provide an even sharper resolution by increasing the number of dots per region of the brain.) At first, this 3-D collection of colored dots looks like gibberish. But after years of research, Dr. Gallant and his colleagues have developed a mathematical formula that begins to find relationships between certain features of a picture (edges, textures, intensity, etc.) and the MRI voxels. For example, if you look at a boundary, you’ll notice it’s a region separating lighter and darker areas, and hence the edge generates a certain pattern of voxels. By having subject after subject view such a large library of movie clips, this mathematical formula is refined, allowing the computer to analyze how all sorts of images are converted into MRI voxels. Eventually the scientists were able to ascertain a direct correlation between certain MRI patterns of voxels and features within each picture. At this point, the subject is then shown another movie trailer. The computer analyzes the voxels generated during this viewing and re-creates a rough approximation of the original image. (The computer selects images from one hundred movie clips that most closely resemble the one that the subject just saw and then merges images to create a close approximation.) In this way, the computer is able to create a fuzzy video of the visual imagery going through your mind. Dr. Gallant’s mathematical formula is so versatile that it can take a collection of MRI voxels and convert it into a picture, or it can do the reverse, taking a picture and then converting it to MRI voxels. I had a chance to view the video created by Dr. Gallant’s group, and it was very impressive. Watching it was like viewing a movie with faces, animals, street scenes, and buildings through dark glasses. Although you could not see the details within each face or animal, you could clearly identify the kind of object you were seeing. Not only can this program decode what you are looking at, it can also decode imaginary images circulating in your head.
Michio Kaku (The Future of the Mind: The Scientific Quest to Understand, Enhance, and Empower the Mind)
Jackie was sitting behind the wheel of her black BMW convertible when Kristen turned off Kessler Boulevard onto Winthrop Avenue. Her house, a small red brick bungalow, was the third one from the corner. She pulled her mini-van into the driveway behind Jackie’s car and shut off the motor. Jackie had already slid from behind the wheel and was hurrying toward her when Kristen opened her door. “What’s going on, Sis?” Jackie asked, wearing a semi-worried look on her face. “You sounded stressed on the phone.” “I wanted to talk to you before the girls got home from school,
David Heilwagen (Remember Last Summer)
His father was a Baptist preacher who was saved after a dream about flying an airplane over a landscape of erupting volcanoes. A wall of flame appeared in front of him and he opened the door and jumped. He felt himself drifting softly, safely, toward earth and he looked up and saw that Jesus had him by the hands and was using his own sacred body to parachute him down. This seems like a specifically Baptist dream. Catholic dreams haven’t caught up to airplanes yet. The dream that converts a Catholic is more likely to take place in a medieval prison, or on a slave ship in the days of Ben-Hur, or in a sinister outhouse filled with red light.
Patricia Lockwood (Priestdaddy: A Memoir)
Signs of Hokkaido's muscular dairy industry tattoo the terrain everywhere: packs of Holsteins chew cud unblinkingly in the sunlight, ice cream shops proffer hyperseason flavors to hungry leaf gazers, and giant silos offer advice to the calcium deficient: "Drink Hokkaido Milk!" Even better than drinking the island's milk is drinking its yogurt, which you can do at Milk Kobo, a converted red barn with cows and tractors and generous views of Mount Yotei, which locals call Ezo Fuji. Kobo sells all manner of dairy products, but you're here for the drinkable yogurt, which has a light current of sweetness and a deep lactic tang, a product so good that the second it hits my lips, I give up water for the week.
Matt Goulding (Rice, Noodle, Fish: Deep Travels Through Japan's Food Culture)
If you think of your life as just a series of problems to be solved, you’re going to be pretty anxious. I prefer to look at problems as speed bumps on an otherwise smooth and open highway—and as long as this is my metaphor, I might as well imagine that I’m driving in a little red convertible with my driving gloves and sunglasses on. Pretty cute, aren’t I?
Barbara "Cutie" Cooper (Fall in Love for Life: Inspiration from a 73-Year Marriage)
walked to my car, a red Jeep Convertible. I got in and drove to the station with the top down. I bought my favorite sandwich at Juice ‘N Java Café, called Cienna. It had a Portobello mushroom, yellow tomato, goat cheese arugula, and pesto on Pugliese bread. I figured I had earned it after the morning I had. The police station was located inside of City Hall, right in the heart of Cocoa Beach. I knew the place well, even though I was usually located at the sheriff’s offices in Rockledge. Cocoa Beach was my town, and every time they needed a detective, I was
Willow Rose (Eleven, Twelve ... Dig and Delve (Rebekka Franck #6))
But I’ve finally recognized my body for what it is: a personality delivery system, designed expressly to carry my character from place to place, now and in the years to come. It’s like a car, and while I like a red convertible or even a Bentley as well as the next person, what I really need are four tires and an engine. I don’t require a hood ornament. It’s not about how my body looks at this point; it’s about how it works.
Anna Quindlen (Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake: A Memoir of a Woman's Life)
But I was too quick to declare victory. The bailout package may have been big, but it was viewed by the Russian oligarchs not as a backstop but as a massive piggy bank that they could use to convert their rubles into dollars in order to get that money as far away from Russia as possible.
Bill Browder (Red Notice: A True Story of High Finance, Murder, and One Man’s Fight for Justice)
Aten, a minor solar god – a red disc from which long rays emanated and reached down to earth – was converted into the supreme God, in fact the one and only god, by Akhenaten, the heretic pharaoh. Aten evolved into Jehovah, and Akhenaten’s religion evolved into Jewish monotheism. Akhenaten, or someone very close to him, is the true Moses of the Bible, standing up for the One God against Egyptian polytheism, and leading a mass Exodus of his monotheistic followers away from pagan Egypt to a new Promised Land. Jehovah, therefore, is just a modification of a minor Egyptian sun god.
Jack Tanner (Fixed and Mobile Souls: Resurrection Versus Reincarnation)
The boys hurried to the convertible and sped away. Soon the outlines of a Ferris wheel came in sight. “Quite a show,” Joe remarked as he and Frank got out of the car. Just inside the entrance gate a man standing on a platform was announcing loudly: “Ten dollars, I said! Ten dollars ! Easiest way in the world to earn ten dollars! All you have to be is smart!” The barker held up a large padlock. “You just have to open this. Sure, it’s a trick lock. But it’ll cost you only a dime to try. Step this way, gentlemen!” Frank nudged Joe. The first customer to ascend the stairs was Chet Morton! The crowd roared with laughter as Chet struggled with the padlock. He seemed determined to win the ten dollars. “Hey! You better quit before you bust,” cried one of the bystanders. Chet was bent double and was very red in the face. “It’ll cost you more than ten dollars for a doctor!” another man shouted. Frank and Joe were grinning from ear to ear. They knew their friend thought he could open the padlock because he had heard so much about locks and keys lately. But Chet finally gave up and turned away to buy some peanuts.
Franklin W. Dixon (The Secret Panel (Hardy Boys, #25))
The apparent brilliance of the Sun outshines Sirius, brightest star seen in the nighttime sky, by a factor of nearly 11 billion. At age 4 ½ billion years, converting hydrogen to helium, it will deplete its stellar core to then become a red giant, eventually and finally fading and shrinking into an inert white dwarf.
Steven Beyer (The Star Guide: A Unique System for Identifying the Brightest Stars in the Night Sky, Revised, Celestial Sport Edition (Guide Stars to the Universe Series))
We read of Christians bound in chains of red-hot iron, while the stench of their half-consumed flesh rose in a suffocating cloud to heaven; of others who were torn to the very bone by, shells or hooks of iron; of holy virgins given over to the lust of the gladiator or to the mercies of the pander; of two hundred and twenty-seven converts sent on one occasion to the mines, each with the sinews of one leg severed by a red-hot iron, and with an eye scooped from its socket; of fires so slow that the victims writhed for hours in their agonies; of bodies torn limb from limb, or sprinkled with burning lead; of mingled salt and vinegar poured over the flesh that was bleeding from the rack; of tortures prolonged and varied through entire days.
Philip Schaff (History Of The Christian Church (The Complete Eight Volumes In One))
When Mrs. Freeman sent her a box of cookies that December with a note that read, “The home is woman’s paradise,” Sylvia wrote to Aurelia, “No doubt she considers herself a missionary, converting the wayward.”71 Plath would always fight against the collective pressure to sublimate her creative identity.
Heather Clark (Red Comet: The Short Life and Blazing Art of Sylvia Plath)
The Altamont Correctional Facility had originally been built as a hospital for the criminally insane, a hundred and fifty years ago. The Altamont Lunatic Asylum, as it was then called, was a grand Victorian Gothic complex of spires and crenellated towers. Its forbidding red-brick walls were stained dark with soot from a century of internal-combustion engines. Some forty years ago the mental hospital was shut down and converted into a medium-security prison, but it still looked like the sort of place a homicidal maniac escapes from, then terrorizes the nearby summer camp. It also reminded me a little of the high school I’d gone to in Malden. They’d done some renovation since the days of straitjackets and lobotomies. There was a concrete perimeter wall thirty feet high, topped with coils of razor wire, watchtowers, and banks of high-mast lights. Inside the walls, the old Gothic prison complex was surrounded by a luxuriant green lawn that wouldn’t have been out of place at Pebble Beach.
Joseph Finder (Vanished (Nick Heller, #1))
She understood that becoming a nun was a lifetime commitment. Testing her daughter’s resolve was wise. The Koehler family together, 1923 First Homes As an adult, I visited Rosie’s first home at 83 Beals Street in Brookline, Massachusetts, to get a sense of her early life and that of her famous family. The compact Victorian residence stands three stories tall on a small lot in the Boston suburb. It was easy to picture the young Kennedy children playing in the back yard. Rose Kennedy wrote in Times to Remember, her 1974 autobiography: “It was a nice old wooden-frame house with clapboard siding; seven rooms, plus two small ones in the converted attic, all on a small lot with a few bushes and trees . . . about twenty-five minutes from the center of the city by trolley.” 5 The family home on Beals Street is now the John Fitzgerald Kennedy National Historic Site, run by the National Park Service. From the deep browns and reds of the rugs on the hardwood floors to the homey couch and chairs, the home felt warm and comfortable to me. I suppressed a desire to kick off my sandals and flop on the sofa. The Kennedys’ house on Beals Street, Rosie’s first home But my perspective as a child would have triggered a different impression. I would have whispered to my mother, “They’re rich!” (I’ve since discovered that money isn’t the only measure of wealth. There’s wealth in memories, too.) A lovely grand piano occupies one corner of the Kennedys’ old living room. It was a wedding gift to Rose Kennedy from her uncles, and she delighted in playing her favorite song, “Sweet Adeline,” on it. Although her children took piano lessons, Mrs. Kennedy lamented that her own passion never ignited a similar spark in any of her daughters. She did often ask Rosemary to perform, however. I see an image of Rosemary declaring she couldn’t, her hands stretching awkwardly across the keys. But her mother encouraged Rosie to practice, confident she’d
Elizabeth Koehler-Pentacoff (The Missing Kennedy: Rosemary Kennedy and the Secret Bonds of Four Women)
A shiny red BMW convertible pulled up to the front of the Academy and one of the cool girls with perfect hair was behind the wheel. It was her sixteenth birthday and the car was a gift from her parents. I stood there staring at her in shock. A brand-new car?
Monica Seles (Getting a Grip: On My Game, My Body, My Mind... My Self)
First Week of January 2013 Continuation of my Message to Andy (part 5)   Hi Andy, Are you back from your Tasmanian rowing expedition? Did your team win? I hope so. If I remember correctly, you were always an excellent rower and your teammates at Daltonbury Hall venerated your feathering mastery. I’d love to hear your adventures.☺   Back To My OBSS Escapades   As we headed to Jules’ makeshift office (a classroom temporarily converted), Kim was overtly skittish. He had surmised we would be consigned to cleaning the OBSS lavatories as punishment for our playful misdemeanour. I assured the teenager that that wouldn’t be the case; a more propitious outcome would be in order. Yet, he continued to brood, blaming me for my impertinence. Instead of arguing with him, I kept silent.               I couldn’t help but notice a sardonic smug on Jules’ handsome face when we entered. “Young, will you keep watch outside while I have a word with this young man?” he instructed. I sat on a nearby bench, waiting my turn. Minutes passed, and I needed to use the restroom. I wasn’t sure if I should leave, in the event I would be called upon, but I decided to go. Just as I was finishing my business, I heard a commotion outside. In states of disarray, my leader and tent-mate were being escorted out of the office by a couple of burly guards from the senior officer’s HQ. I was shocked to witness such an unanticipated occurrence. For a brief moment, Kim looked my direction before they marched into the darkness. The unforgettable terror on his face was of a man about to be hanged. It didn’t take long for rumours to circulate around camp that the two were caught red-handed doing unspeakable things to one another. Yet, none of the gossipmongers could provide a definitive account. The next day, Jules and Kim were gone. They had both been hastily expelled without having a chance to say goodbye. My three remaining days at OBSS, I was flummoxed. It was my final evening in Singapore when the truth came to light. My ex-OBSS leader was coming out of a bar in Bugis Street when I stumbled upon him. It was then that I heard the entire narrative from the horse’s mouth.
Young (Turpitude (A Harem Boy's Saga Book 4))
car, a late-model van and a bright red BMW convertible.
T. Jefferson Parker (Red Light (Merci Rayborn #2))
An incandescent lamp is made with a wire filament enclosed in a bulb without oxygen and glows as the filament is heated. Less than 10 percent of the electrical power into an incandescent light bulb is converted into light, and the rest is converted into heat. Lamps of this type are still used, but they are being replaced with fluorescent lights or light emitting diodes. The incandescent lamp therefore is a resistor that just happens to give out light. But what type of light? White light is measured by its color temperature in degrees Kelvin (K). Typically, when we look outside on a sunny clear day, the Sun along with the blue sky provides a color temperature of about 4,500 to 5,500 degrees Kelvin. As the sun starts to go down in the afternoon, the color temperature drops to about 3,000 to 4,000 degrees Kelvin. Finally as the sun sets, we can clearly perceive the sunlight with a yellow to red tint, which means the sun’s color temperature has dropped below 3,000 degrees Kelvin. Human eyes adapt to the color temperature for the most part from about 3,000 to 5,000 degrees Kelvin and perceive light in this range as “white,” albeit at 3,000 degrees Kelvin, it has a warm tone. A standard incandescent bulb for room lighting such as a 100 watt bulb provides light at about 2,700 degrees Kelvin, which provides warm white light. For studio or movie lighting, generally the color temperature is a bit whiter (between 3,200 and 3,500 degrees Kelvin, and sometimes up to 4,000 degrees Kelvin). Halogen lamps or white photoflood lamps provide light in this color temperature range. Incandescent lamps exceeding 4,000 degrees usually are specially made and they are often coated in blue. For standard low-power lamps such as flashlight bulbs or indicator lights, the color temperature is somewhere between 2,000 and 3,000 degrees Kelvin.
Ronald Quan (Electronics from the Ground Up: Learn by Hacking, Designing, and Inventing)
Once I fell asleep on the grass and Michel filled my pockets with flowers. Today I am fifteen and I'm taking stock of my life. Even though I want to go to university and eventually buy Michel a red convertible, when I think of those Sundays in the Jardin des Plantes, I want to do things for people they will never forget. Maybe that's the best I can do in life.
Simon Van Booy
And it came to pass that the Lord led the people of Israel about, through the way of the wilderness toward the Red Sea, until they encamped at the sea, in front of Baal-zephon. The steep mountains on either side shut them in. Pharoah hears about it. He approaches them to attack them. The people of Israel are in danger of losing their lives and are terribly afraid. This is usually the case with the believer. When he is converted to Christ, he marches out of worldly Egypt and begins his spiritual journey. He says to himself, “Now I will always be happy.” He has a light heart and an eager spirit. His chains are off and he no longer feels the lash of his conscience. “Now,” says he, “I may have a short life, but it will be a happy one.”  “A few more rolling years at most, Will land me on fair Canaan’s coast.” God himself sent the Israelites a great trial. There was the Red Sea in front of them. Now, it was not an enemy that put the sea there, it was God. Therefore we may conclude that the Red Sea represents some great and stressful trial from God. The Lord is sure to place some obstacle in the path of every newborn child of God to test his faith, and to test the sincerity of his trust in God.
Charles Haddon Spurgeon (Peace and Purpose in Trial and Suffering)
course, Disneyland in blue California was now Transtopia, with the “Small World” boat ride now called “Flotilla of Fluidity” and entirely devoted to the countless gender identities, while the Matterhorn had been converted into a huge fiberglass representation of a sex toy. In the red, Disney had been dissolved following a horrific pedophilia scandal not long after the Split. Disney World in Orlando was now Patriot Land, featuring Ernie Eagle and a muscular, flying version of the sixteenth president called Super Abe. EPCOT was converted into a huge beer garden, since the only interesting thing to ever do at EPCOT was drink.
Kurt Schlichter (Overlord (Kelly Turnbull/PEOPLE'S REPUBLIC Book 8))
Roasted beets, full of sugar, benefit from a splash of red wine vinegar, which offers contrast to the naturally earthy flavor of beets that is so off-putting to some. Season them with olive oil and salt, and all of a sudden even the staunchest beet-phobe will be converted.
Samin Nosrat (Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat: Mastering the Elements of Good Cooking)
The boys hurried to the Hardys’ convertible. A red glow of sunset suffused
Franklin W. Dixon (The Disappearing Floor (Hardy Boys, #19))
Mile after mile raced beneath the wheels of the convertible as it steadily neared the old battlefield named for the stream Rocky Run. Late in the afternoon they drove through the little town of Centerville. The main street, paved with red brick, was flanked by two rows of huge live oak trees. Behind them, quaint old houses stood in the shade of spreading magnolias. Farther on, the street led to a square, along which sprawled a handful of stores, a small stately courthouse, and a tall-pillared hotel. A solitary, bewhiskered man sat on the porch of the hostelry, smoking a pipe and rocking. “Looks mighty sleepy around here,” Chet remarked. “I think I’m going to fit right in with this life!” “A peaceful old town,” the general replied, smiling. “My place is a quarter mile down the road.
Franklin W. Dixon (The Secret of the Lost Tunnel (Hardy Boys, #29))
Em was a convert to this local recipe, even though they’d only had it a few times. The Caribbean spiny lobster was boiled, but instead of being plopped on a plate with butter and lemon, the crustacean still had a culinary journey ahead of it: the lobster was de-shelled, chopped, and added to a pan of sautéed red, green, and Scotch bonnet peppers, thyme, and garlic, with chicken stock added. Served over rice, it was heavenly.
Nick Sullivan (Deep Focus (Deep #5))
You’ll never spend one goddamn second jealous while I’m your man.” He pauses, as if wanting that statement to sink in…and boy, does it. Right down to my toes. “My Pontiac. Yeah, she’s a beauty. Red leather interior. A convertible, which means my big ass fits inside.
Jessa Kane (Pound of Flesh)
Not much history was taught in the village, but there was one piece every child learned: the arrival of the first king to Orlica and his quest to unite all its pagan tribes. It was not an easy task; they worshipped different deities, frequently quarreling among themselves. Their conflicts eventually diminished after the king converted to the Faith and the Church took root in Orlica. Over years, pagan traditions and holy ones blended together, minor deities receiving the names of saints and pagan rituals becoming incorporated into the Church’s holy days. Red ribbons, weavings of straw, offerings to spirits—these are remnants of Orlica’s pagan past. So is magic.
A.B. Poranek (Where the Dark Stands Still)
His early reading took him from Flavel’s Keeping the Heart to Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, to Adam Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, to Robert Owen’s A New View of Society. This last was an extreme rationalist work, maintaining, almost as B. F. Skinner would later, that since we are born empty or blank we can be taught anything at all, if given early and complete enough training. Owen claimed he could teach a tiger if he got it early enough.1 From Owen Alcott moved on to Pestalozzi, the great Swiss educator who laid the foundation for modern primary education. Fired with enthusiasm for teaching, Alcott abandoned peddling and opened the first of a series of schools. In 1828 he came to Boston to teach, heard Emerson, and married Abigail May. In 1830 he went to Germantown, Pennsylvania, where over the next three and a half years he both kept school and did his serious reading. In 1833 he discovered and was instantly converted to Platonism. He marked the day in red on his calendar, a distinction used otherwise only for his marriage, the birth of his daughters, the opening of the Civil War, and the death of Lincoln. He also read Carlyle, Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection, Proclus, Plotinus (in Thomas Taylor’s edition), Herder, Swedenborg, a life of Boehme, and two books on Kant.2
Robert D. Richardson Jr. (Emerson: The Mind on Fire)
beard who had worked in mills most of his life and operated a company, Family Heir Loom Weavers, in a small town near York called Red Lion. Kline agreed to meet with Yang and said he could offer him work. “How much will you pay?” Yang wondered. “Seven dollars an hour,” Kline replied. As they were talking, Yang knelt down and picked up a length of thread from the floor. He toyed with it for a moment, then skillfully tied a weaver’s knot. “Okay,” Kline said. “Eight dollars an hour.” In the coming years, Kline and his family essentially adopted Yang, allowing him to live rent-free in a room in an old cigar factory that they had converted into a weaving mill. Yang worked sixty hours a week at nine
Patrick Radden Keefe (The Snakehead: An Epic Tale of the Chinatown Underworld and the American Dream)
The Casa Hogar Elim orphanage was about a dozen miles from the Texas border town of Laredo and a world away for us kids from church youth group. There were about a hundred of us that first time I went. On the bus from the airport in San Antonio, we leafed through magazines, showing each other a Ford Mustang convertible we had to have and the red, white, and blue Tommy Hilfiger ad for the white polo that was different from every polo we already had because this one was Tommy Hilfiger.
Jessica Simpson (Open Book)
He simply knew he did not belong in prison, although he admitted it had done him some good at eighteen, when he hadn't known how to be a criminal and so had taken lessons from professionals. Now that he knew all there was to know, however, he couldn't see the point of staying in prison and taking the same lessons over and over. "A hate factory" he called it once, and said it manufactured black poisons in his stomach that he couldn't get rid of although he poked a finger down his throat and retched and tried to be a clean and normal person in spite of everything. ("Scales")
Louise Erdrich (The Red Convertible: Selected and New Stories, 1978-2008)
There is nothing more vengeful and determined in this world than a cowboy with sore balls, and Gerry soon found out. He also found that white people are good witnesses to have on your side since they have names, addresses, social security numbers, and work phones. But they are terrible witnesses to have against you, almost as bad as having Indians witness for you. ("Scales")
Louise Erdrich (The Red Convertible: Selected and New Stories, 1978-2008)
But is it proper for the young to be so disappointing? ("Revival Road")
Louise Erdrich (The Red Convertible: Selected and New Stories, 1978-2008)
It is difficult for a woman to admit that she gets along with her own mother. Somehow, it seems a form of betrayal. So few do. To join in the company of women, to be adults, we go through a period of proudly boasting of having survived our mothers' indifference, anger, overpowering love, the burden of their pain, their tendency to drink or teetotal, their warmth or coldness, praise or criticism, sexual confusion or embarrassing clarity. It isn't enough that our mothers sweated, labored, bore their daughters nobly or under total anesthesia or both. No. They must be responsible for our psychic weaknesses for the rest of their lives. It is all right to forgive our fathers. We all know that. But our mothers are held to a standard so exacting that it has no principles. They simply must be to blame. ("Revival Road")
Louise Erdrich (The Red Convertible: Selected and New Stories, 1978-2008)
THE COMPANY INSPECTOR SAID, “You’ve been high-grading, Webb.” “Who don’t walk out of here with rocks in their dinner pail?” “Maybe over in Telluride, but not in this mine.” Webb looked at the “evidence” and said, “You know this was planted onto me. One of your finks over here. Maybe even you, Cap’n—” “Watch what you say.” “—no damned inspector yet ain’t taken a nugget when he thought he could.” Teeth bared, almost smiling. “Oh? seen a lot of that in your time?” “Everybody has. What’re we bullshittin’ about, here, really?” The first blow came out of the dark, filling Webb’s attention with light and pain. IT WAS TO BE a trail of pain, Deuce trying to draw it out, Sloat, closer to the realities of pain, trying to move it along. “Thought we ‘s just gonna shoot him simple and leave him where he fell.” “No, this one’s a special job, Sloat. Special handling. You might say we’re in the big time now.” “Looks like just some of the usual ten-day trash to me, Deuce.” “Well that’s where you’d be wrong. It turns out Brother Traverse here is a major figure in the world of criminal Anarchism.” “Of what’s that again?” “Apologies for my associate, the bigger words tend to throw him. You better get a handle on ‘Anarchism’ there, Sloat, because it’s the coming thing in our field. Piles of money to be made.” Webb just kept quiet. It didn’t look like these two were fixing to ask him any questions, because neither had spared him any pain that he could tell, pain and information usually being convertible, like gold and dollars, practically at a fixed rate. He didn’t know how long he’d hold out in any case if they really wanted to start in. But along with the pain, worse, he guessed, was how stupid he felt, what a hopeless damn fool, at just how deadly wrong he’d been about this kid. Before, Webb had only recognized it as politics, what Veikko called “procedure”—accepting that it might be necessary to lay down his life, that he was committed as if by signed contract to die for his brothers and sisters in the struggle. But now that the moment was upon him . . . Since teaming up, the partners had fallen into a division of labor, Sloat tending to bodies, Deuce specializing more in harming the spirit, and thrilled now that Webb was so demoralized that he couldn’t even look at them. Sloat had a railroad coupling pin he’d taken from the D.&R.G. once, figuring it would come in handy. It weighed a little over seven pounds, and Sloat at the moment was rolling it in a week-old copy of the Denver Post. “We done both your feet, how about let’s see your hands there, old-timer.” When he struck, he made a point of not looking his victim in the face but stayed professionally focused on what it was he was aiming to damage. Webb found himself crying out the names of his sons. From inside the pain, he was distantly surprised at a note of reproach in his voice, though not sure if it had been out loud or inside his thoughts. He watched the light over the ranges slowly draining away. After a while he couldn’t talk much. He was spitting blood. He wanted it over with. He sought Sloat’s eyes with his one undamaged one, looking for a deal. Sloat looked over at Deuce. “Where we headed for, li’l podner?” “Jeshimon.” With a malignant smile, meant to wither what spirit remained to Webb, for Jeshimon was a town whose main business was death, and the red adobe towers of Jeshimon were known and feared as the places you ended up on top of when nobody wanted you found. “You’re going over into Utah, Webb. We happen to run across some Mormon apostles in time, why you can even get baptized, get a bunch of them proxy wives what they call sealed on to you, so’s you’ll enjoy some respect among the Saints, how’s that, while you’re all waiting for that good bodily resurrection stuff.” Webb kept gazing at Sloat, blinking, waiting for some reaction, and when none came, he finally looked away.
Thomas Pynchon (Against the Day)
Another case in which fish oils may be useful is the individual who does not convert omega-3 fats into DHA sufficiently. These people may be more prone to depression, allergies, and inflammatory skin disease such as eczema. There are blood tests available for a physician to analyze the fatty acid balance on red blood cell membranes and thereby determine a deficiency of DHA or omega-3 fat.
Joel Fuhrman (Eat to Live: The Amazing Nutrient-Rich Program for Fast and Sustained Weight Loss)
Dude, are you turning into the bald fat man in the red BMW convertible?
Timothy Ferriss (The 4-Hour Workweek)
The Quran also teaches that Jesus will return “as a Muslim,” destroy every Cross, and murder every Christian and Jew who does not convert to Islam. Also, Islam’s “messiah” (the Mahdi) is said to do everything that our Holy Book’s “AntiChrist” is prophesied to do. Our sacred Books are not the same, and our Gods are most definitely not the same. There have also been other red flags raised about the Pope’s sincerity to Biblical doctrine, and one of those has to do with his stance toward Israel.      Since
Michael Sawdy (The Signs of Our Times: 12 Biblical Reasons Why This Could Be the Generation of the Rapture)
I was walking all along just going for a walk outside after the party, I just felt good, I didn’t know if I wanted to sing, dance, and or cry; I was that happy getting to be with Marcel, so I went to my spot in the old car in the junkyard. I have to jump the face and rip my tank top or something like that yet it worth it, to see my dream car, sitting there I not a girlie girl but I love this cute thing it's sex looking like me. I found this old car at colleen’s junkyard it like right next door, I freak’n loved this old piece of crap, I even had sex with myself in the back seat, I took the old hood ornament off myself and keep it, my dad said it was off of Neveah’s dad's car, yet it was given to my mom and that why it just sitting outside for all the kids like me to rip the parts off of and sell on eBay. My stepmom hated Kristen, my real mother, so that is why the car ended up where it’s at, it was passed down yet the step-monster made sure I would never have it. My stepdad said the emblem is of a 1950 Nash that I found, little did I know it doesn’t go on that car yet, I think it’s a good fit, I was getting the car on my eighteenth birthday- I freaked up and had to die, just like me in the graveyard we both are retreating away. My stepdads had the 1950 Nash which he said was the first real sports car and it’s all steel, so I put it back on without him knowing that I did, funny maybe that's why I passed doing something like that… it was like it was meant for that car, or so he said and I did also. There is an old fender off what likes to be some old ford over there too that is rusty red, I am not sure of the year it’s too damn old for me to know. I remember right my dad said that grand-ma Nevaeh went to school in something like a 1965 Cadillac Deville convertible, yet, I don’t see that she had like nothing, I don’t know what that thing is. Like with these old cars, don't think you have a seat belt, you just cracked your head off the dash of the Nash and then they wiped it off, and sold it to some other poor ass hole.
Marcel Ray Duriez (Nevaeh They Call Out)
An Offer. This is where the rubber meets the road, so to speak. You have to establish a price and make an offer. Don’t sell yourself short. I price-tested my e-books at $9.99, $19.99, and $29.99. I actually sold more at $19.99 than $9.99. I think this is partly due to the fact people impute value based on price. If you charge more (within reason), they assume the product is worth more. 7. Call to Action. You must ask for the sale. This is known as a call to action. It must be clear, unequivocal, and positioned in a prominent place. I suggest the upper-right-hand corner of the page. Ask yourself, What is the single action I want visitors to this page to take as a result of reading my copy? I indicate my call to action with a big red button. If you are launching a new product, service, or cause, you need a landing page that delivers results. This is essential if you are going to convert readers to customers and, from there, to tribe members. 114 THIRTY-ONE
Michael Hyatt (Platform: Get Noticed in a Noisy World)
There was still blood going down Henry's chin, but he didn't notice it and no one said anything, even though every time he took a bite of his bread his blood fell onto it until he was eating his own blood mixed in with the food.
Louise Erdrich (The Red Convertible)
That word again. 'Freedom.' It is the golden tuning fork wielded by pied pipers and charlatans alike to realign a vast demographic of people who fundamentally crave simplicity. Since the birth of the steam engine and the rapid march of industrialism, a ceaseless parade of phony advocacy has tried to wield the hate and frustration of an American underclass that has been zapped and eroded time and time again by future shock. The playbook is simple: play off of differences, vilify anyone who can be made to appear as other, stress moral purity, canonize simplicity, decry any sort of establishment within convenient hating distance, code power with subtle signs of sex, and convert a foundation of fear to its stronger, more virile corollary--military power. When in doubt, capitalize on deeply ambiguous ideological symbols such as 'freedom,' re-appropriate historical moments as examples of conservative triumph, and constantly wave the red, white, and blue.
Dan Johnson (Catawampusland)
In the beginning? In the beginning the universe belonged to the darkness -- And then there was light. For seven hundred years, the universe was nothing but blinding white light. Then the darkness fought back and the white light was splintered. Every sentient being born from the light now contributes to its emotional spectrum. Our state of being adds to its respective light. And it can be condensed into power. Today, the red rage all life feels is harnessed by an ancient enemy of the guardians of the universe -- Atrocitus and his pack of red lanterns. The orange light of avarice has been claimed, like the lives of the orange lanterns, by the obsessive and gluttonous Larfleeze. The blinding yellow terror is wielded by the renegade Green Lantern Sinestro and his self-named corps. The balance of the spectrum and the essential light to destroying the Black Lanterns shines in the hands of the Green Lantern Corps. The glow of blue hope is on the verge of extinction, kept alive only by the undying faith of Saint Walker and a handful of others. And the violet throes of love empower the Star Sapphires, who attempt to convert all to their way of being. My tribe maintains the indigo light of compassion, which sadly remains elusive to most beings. Today, the darkness fights back again. It's begun an assault on the corps. Their homeworlds are under attack by the Black Lanterns.
Indigo-1, Geoff Johns (Blackest Night)
Beyond Red and Blue (The Sonnet) I don't wanna rule no one, Nor do I wanna prove them wrong. I don't wanna convert no one, Nor do I wanna sing the woke song. My work is with the whole humanity, No person must be left behind. Either I'll take them all forward, Or I'll perish while fixing the great divide. I don't fathom the red and blue, You can't make a rainbow with two colors. If you are really kind and conscientious, On its own bigotry disappears. We must rise above all party politika, Only then will we be the soul of America.
Abhijit Naskar (Generation Corazon: Nationalism is Terrorism)
Excerpted From Chapter Eighteen Pacific Coast Highway ends with a sharp right turn onto Sepulveda. Approaching that intersection, I saw several cars pulled to the shoulder of the road and two fresh, black skid marks leading straight to the edge of the beach beyond Sepulveda. Halfway between the road and the water, a big red Caddy convertible lay upside down on the sand. I parked and jogged to the wreckage. The windshield and the cloth top had collapsed, so the car was resting on its hood and trunk lid. A young man in swimming trunks and an older fellow in a suit were pulling at the driver's side door, trying to get it open. The twisted metal was resisting their efforts, but the door finally came loose just as I got there. Through the opening I could see Diana Dean sprawled across the shredded remains of her convertible top. From where I stood, she looked to be in about the same shape as her mangled red Caddy. Maybe worse.
H.P. Oliver (Revolver)
God wouldn’t have put two studly cowboys in a red convertible onto Highway 69 just when I’d needed them if it wasn’t meant to be, that’s how I saw it.
Juliette Jones (Wild Ride)
We each get a ramekin to taste. Tapping my spoon against the brittle caramel shell, I am rewarded with the satisfying crunch that distinguishes the great brûlée. Underneath, the slightly tart strawberries remain red, fresh, and firm, bursting with flavor enhanced by the sweet rum and cream. So simple and light and, yet, so rich. I could linger forever, but already we are on to the next lesson: almond-infused hot white chocolate over iced berries. How bizarre. "Very popular in England," D'Ours observes, a tad derisively. I find myself strangely mesmerized by the melting of white chocolate chunks into heavy cream, a slight almond fragrance emanating as the mixture swirls and warms in the double boiler. I've never been a fan of white chocolate. I've never seen the point of chocolate without, well, chocolate. But I have a feeling I'm about to be converted. The frowning Angela distributes bowls with red and blue frozen berries slightly thawed. From a little pot, she pours the hot white chocolate sauce over them and it thickens immediately, on contact. To top it off, she sprinkles on a few chopped almonds. "Bon appétit," she snaps, filling my glass of champagne. Okay, I may have just passed dying and stepped directly into heaven. This is, hands down, the most fabulous thing I've ever eaten. It should be illegal, it's so good. And the weird thing is, it doesn't even taste like white chocolate over frozen berries. It's sweet and perfumed and something else entirely. It's gooey.
Sarah Strohmeyer (Sweet Love)