Thrilled To Death Quotes

Faster, Faster, until the thrill of speed overcomes the fear of death.

I'm not bitter. Why should I be bitter? I'm thrilled to death with life.

Do you know how pale & wanton thrillful comes death on a strange hour unannounced, unplanned for like a scaring over-friendly guest you've brought to bed Death makes angels of us all & gives us wings where we had shoulders smooth as raven's claws

No,” said the doctor. “It’s something I’ve never seen before. Something I don’t think anyone has seen before.”  

We theorize that if these disruptions continue to happen, eventually the separate realities will begin to compete with our primary reality for dominance, and there will end up being no safe reality to live in.

I must admit that if there was ever going to be a woman to take my mind and heart off of Annette, it would have been Aideen.

Jane,' she said, climbing down from the chair. 'Remember last year when I built that model wind tower for you and you wrote those poems for me?' And you said you'd never switch homework assignments with me again.' For good reason. My teacher had a hard time believing I wrote Tra-la the joy of tulips blooming, Ha-ha the thrill of bumblebees zooming. I'm alive and I dance, I'm alive though death is always looming. When I finally convinced her that I had, she asked me if I needed to talk to the school counselor.

The doorways into hell are mostly inside the mind.

If we really saw war, what war does to young minds and bodies, it would be impossible to embrace the myth of war. If we had to stand over the mangled corpses of schoolchildren killed in Afghanistan and listen to the wails of their parents, we would not be able to repeat clichés we use to justify war. This is why war is carefully sanitized. This is why we are given war's perverse and dark thrill but are spared from seeing war's consequences. The mythic visions of war keep it heroic and entertaining… The wounded, the crippled, and the dead are, in this great charade, swiftly carted offstage. They are war's refuse. We do not see them. We do not hear them. They are doomed, like wandering spirits, to float around the edges of our consciousness, ignored, even reviled. The message they tell is too painful for us to hear. We prefer to celebrate ourselves and our nation by imbibing the myths of glory, honor, patriotism, and heroism, words that in combat become empty and meaningless.

HELPED are those who are content to be themselves; they will never lack mystery in their lives and the joys of self-discovery will be constant. HELPED are those who love the entire cosmos rather than their own tiny country, city, or farm, for to them will be shown the unbroken web of life and the meaning of infinity. HELPED are those who live in quietness, knowing neither brand name nor fad; they shall live every day as if in eternity, and each moment shall be as full as it is long. HELPED are those who love others unsplit off from their faults; to them will be given clarity of vision. HELPED are those who create anything at all, for they shall relive the thrill of their own conception, and realize an partnership in the creation of the Universe that keeps them responsible and cheerful. HELPED are those who love the Earth, their mother, and who willingly suffer that she may not die; in their grief over her pain they will weep rivers of blood, and in their joy in her lively response to love, they will converse with the trees. HELPED are those whose ever act is a prayer for harmony in the Universe, for they are the restorers of balance to our planet. To them will be given the insight that every good act done anywhere in the cosmos welcomes the life of an animal or a child. HELPED are those who risk themselves for others' sakes; to them will be given increasing opportunities for ever greater risks. Theirs will be a vision of the word in which no one's gift is despised or lost. HELPED are those who strive to give up their anger; their reward will be that in any confrontation their first thoughts will never be of violence or of war. HELPED are those whose every act is a prayer for peace; on them depends the future of the world. HELPED are those who forgive; their reward shall be forgiveness of every evil done to them. It will be in their power, therefore, to envision the new Earth. HELPED are those who are shown the existence of the Creator's magic in the Universe; they shall experience delight and astonishment without ceasing. HELPED are those who laugh with a pure heart; theirs will be the company of the jolly righteous. HELPED are those who love all the colors of all the human beings, as they love all the colors of the animals and plants; none of their children, nor any of their ancestors, nor any parts of themselves, shall be hidden from them. HELPED are those who love the lesbian, the gay, and the straight, as they love the sun, the moon, and the stars. None of their children, nor any of their ancestors, nor any parts of themselves, shall be hidden from them. HELPED are those who love the broken and the whole; none of their children, nor any of their ancestors, nor any parts of themselves, shall be hidden from them. HELPED are those who do not join mobs; theirs shall be the understanding that to attack in anger is to murder in confusion. HELPED are those who find the courage to do at least one small thing each day to help the existence of another--plant, animal, river, or human being. They shall be joined by a multitude of the timid. HELPED are those who lose their fear of death; theirs is the power to envision the future in a blade of grass. HELPED are those who love and actively support the diversity of life; they shall be secure in their differences. HELPED are those who KNOW.

Three weeks hadn't changed Cop Central. The coffee was still poisonous, the noise abominable, and the view out of her stingy window was still miserable. She was thrilled to be back.

Hold on a minute." She leaned out the window, shouted at the messenger who'd nearly sideswiped her vehicle with his jet-board. "Police property, asshole. If I had time I'd hunt you down and use that board to beat your balls black." "Darling Eve, you know how that kind of talk thrills and excites me. How can I keep my mind off sex now?

I did it," I gasp, still reeling from the thrill and the fear. "I really-" Quince's mouth is on mine in an instant. His arms around my waist, mine around his neck. It's the fear, i know it's the fear. And the bond. And the adrenaline. That whole i-was-this-close-to-death-and-really-really-really-glad-to-be-alive emotional response. Anxiety and relief and joy swirl between us until i can't tell which are his and which are mine. I can't not be kissing him right now. The urgency in his kiss tells me he feels the same.

Anya looked upon Nin admirably. Having him as a partner-in-crime—if only on this one occasion, which she hoped would only be the start of something more—was more revitalizing than the cheap thrills of a cookie-cutter shallow, superficial romance, where the top priority was how beautiful a person was on the outside.

Death is a fascinating thing. The human mind continually returns and returns to death, to mortality, immortality, damnation, salvation. Some fear death, some seek it, but it is in our human nature to wonder at the limits of human life, at least. When you are sick like this you begin to wonder too much. Death is at your shoulder, death is your shadow, your scent, your waking and dreaming companion. You cannot help, when sleep begins to touch your eyes, but to wonder: What if? What if? And in that question, there is a longing, too much like the longing of a young girl in love. The sickness occupies your every thought, breath like a lover at your ear; the sickness stands at your shoulder in the mirror, absorbed with your body, each inch of skin and flesh, and you let it work you over, touch you with rough hands that thrill. Nothing will ever be so close to you again. You will never find a lover so careful, so attentive, so unconditionally present and concerned only with you. Some of us use the body to convey the things for which we cannot find words. Some of us decide to take a shortcut, decide the world is too much or too little, death is so easy, so smiling, so simple; and death is dramatic, a final fuck-you to the world.

At that moment I had a thrilling sharp intuition. I knew it as if I held it in my hands: In the gloom of death that surrounded the two of us, we were just at the point of approaching and negotiating a gentle curve. If we bypassed it, we would split off into different directions. In that case, we would forever remain just friends.

A Second Childhood.” When all my days are ending And I have no song to sing, I think that I shall not be too old To stare at everything; As I stared once at a nursery door Or a tall tree and a swing. Wherein God’s ponderous mercy hangs On all my sins and me, Because He does not take away The terror from the tree And stones still shine along the road That are and cannot be. Men grow too old for love, my love, Men grow too old for wine, But I shall not grow too old to see Unearthly daylight shine, Changing my chamber’s dust to snow Till I doubt if it be mine. Behold, the crowning mercies melt, The first surprises stay; And in my dross is dropped a gift For which I dare not pray: That a man grow used to grief and joy But not to night and day. Men grow too old for love, my love, Men grow too old for lies; But I shall not grow too old to see Enormous night arise, A cloud that is larger than the world And a monster made of eyes. Nor am I worthy to unloose The latchet of my shoe; Or shake the dust from off my feet Or the staff that bears me through On ground that is too good to last, Too solid to be true. Men grow too old to woo, my love, Men grow too old to wed; But I shall not grow too old to see Hung crazily overhead Incredible rafters when I wake And I find that I am not dead. A thrill of thunder in my hair: Though blackening clouds be plain, Still I am stung and startled By the first drop of the rain: Romance and pride and passion pass And these are what remain. Strange crawling carpets of the grass, Wide windows of the sky; So in this perilous grace of God With all my sins go I: And things grow new though I grow old, Though I grow old and die.

You Just scared me half to death," I said. "You should be thrilled you're halfway there.

You see, we black cats are the only thing between you and certain death.

It's a bit like the feeling I get when I'm standing on a cliff or high building, looking down at a suicidal drop. I start thinking about what would happen if I stepped off, the rush of the fall, the shattering collision, the quiet emptiness of death. Part of me wants to experience the thrill of complete surrender...

The streets transform every ordinary day into a series of trick questions, and every incorrect answer risks a beat-down, a shooting, or a pregnancy. No one survives unscathed. And yet the heat that springs from the constant danger, from a lifestyle of near-death experience, is thrilling.

Let the thrill go—let it die away—go on through that period of death into the quieter interest and happiness that follow—and you will find you are living in a world of new thrills all the time.

There are people who look forward to spending their sunset years in the sunshine; it is my own retirement dream to await my death indoors, dragging strangers up dusty staircases while coughing up one of the most thrilling phrases in the English language: "It was on this spot..." My fantasy is to one day become a docent.

Rich people don’t have to have a life-and-death relationship with the truth and its questions; they can ignore the truth and still thrive materially. I am not surprised many of them understand literature only as an ornament. Life is an ornament to them, relationships are ornaments, their 'work' is but a flimsy, pretty ornament meant to momentarily thrill and capture attention.

Experienced hunters do not choose their prey by how easily it is caught; they want the thrill of the chase, a life-and-death struggle—the fiercer the better.

Such a long time since I’ve had to bring someone back from the brink of death...

This kind of love can be thrilling and overwhelming and sometimes a hell of a lot of fun, but it is not the only “real” kind of love, nor is it always a good basis for an ongoing relationship. Yet as George Bernard Shaw famously remarked, “When two people are under the influence of the most violent, most insane, most delusive, and most transient of passions, they are required to swear that they will remain in that excited, abnormal, and exhausting condition continuously until death do them part.

I insert the bevel and draw back the plunger. I know that the syringe contains more than sodium chloride-that even as the toxic contents fill my fathers veins, he is sharing with me his final gift: the horror and thrill of saving lives.

Have not many of us, in the weary way of life, felt, in some hours, how far easier it were to die than to live? The martyr, when faced even by a death of bodily anguish and horror, finds in the very terror of his doom a strong stimulant and tonic. There is a vivid excitement, a thrill and fervor, which may carry through any crisis of suffering that is the birth-hour of eternal glory and rest. But to live, to wear on, day after day, of mean, bitter, low, harassing servitude, every nerve dampened and depressed, every power of feeling gradually smothered, this long and wasting heart-martyrdom, this slow, daily bleeding away of the inward life, drop by drop, hour after hour, this is the true searching test of what there may be in man or woman.

Very well, let's see. I'm very sympathetic about your having left Raffin. I think you're brave to have defied Randa as you did with that Ellis fellow; I don't know if I could've gone through with it. I think you have more energy than anyone I've ever encountered, though I wonder if you aren't a bit hard on your horse. I find myself wondering why you haven't wanted to marry Giddon, and if it's because you've intended to marry Raffin, and if so, whether you're even more unhappy to have left him than I realized. I'm very pleased you've come with me. I'd like to see you defend yourself for real, fight someone to the death, for it would be a thrilling sight. I think my mother would take to you. My brothers, of course, would worship you. I think you're the most quarrelsome person I've ever met. And I really do worry about your horse.

The complete stillness of my energy is something I have never felt before. I am full of light. I am confused. A strange mix of guilt and wonder swims inside me. The thought of ruling Kenettra with Enzo at my side - Enzo, who had saved me from certain death, who brought my powers out with a mere touch of his hand on my back, whose own fire awakened my ambitions - thrills me. So why am I here, this close to a boy who is not my prince? Why am I reacting in this way to his touch?

If she even so much as smiled at him, he would be thrilled to death. This was no mere figure of speech: having never gotten much exercise, Majime had little faith in his cardiovascular system and was not sure that his heart could withstand the impact of a Kaguya smile.

Spite, financial gain, thrills, emotional satisfaction. Murder always offered a reward. Why else would it remain so popular?

Once upon a time, there was a bird. He was adorned with two perfect wings and with glossy, colorful, marvelous feathers. One day, a woman saw this bird and fell in love with him. She invited the bird to fly with her, and the two travelled across the sky in perfect harmony. She admired and venerated and celebrated that bird. But then she thought: He might want to visit far-off mountains! And she was afraid, afraid that she would never feel the same way about any other bird. And she thought: “I’m going to set a trap. The next time the bird appears, he will never leave again.” The bird, who was also in love, returned the following day, fell into the trap and was put in a cage. She looked at the bird every day. There he was, the object of her passion, and she showed him to her friends, who said: “Now you have everything you could possibly want.” However, a strange transformation began to take place: now that she had the bird and no longer needed to woo him, she began to lose interest. The bird, unable to fly and express the true meaning of his life, began to waste away and his feathers to lose their gloss; he grew ugly; and the woman no longer paid him any attention, except by feeding him and cleaning out his cage. One day, the bird died. The woman felt terribly sad and spent all her time thinking about him. But she did not remember the cage, she thought only of the day when she had seen him for the first time, flying contentedly amongst the clouds. If she had looked more deeply into herself, she would have realized that what had thrilled her about the bird was his freedom, the energy of his wings in motion, not his physical body. Without the bird, her life too lost all meaning, and Death came knocking at her door. “Why have you come?” she asked Death. “So that you can fly once more with him across the sky,” Death replied. “If you had allowed him to come and go, you would have loved and admired him ever more; alas, you now need me in order to find him again.

The reason God commands us to love Him with all our heart is not because He is an egomaniac! It is because He knows that anything we love more than Him will betray us. Eventually, we lose it by its death . . . or ours.

She needs a constant thrill to keep boredom at bay; not even one moment of quiet can be permitted during which the burning loneliness of her childhood experience might be felt, for she fears that feeling more than death. She will continue in her flight unless she learns that the awareness of old feelings is not deadly but liberating.

It is simply no good trying to keep any thrill: that is the very worst thing you can do. Let the thrill go—let it die away—go on through that period of death into the quieter interest and happiness that follow—and you will find you are living in a world of new thrills all the time. But if you decide to make thrills your regular diet and try to prolong them artificially, they will all get weaker and weaker, and fewer and fewer, and you will be a bored, disillusioned old man for the rest of your life.

Unfortunately they failed to appreciate the best part of you, preferring to lose themselves in the labyrinth of your grosser illusions. Didn't I show our well-behaved audience an angelized version of you? And you saw their reaction. They were bored and just sat in their seats like a bunch of stiffs. Of course, what can you expect? They wanted the death stuff, the pain stuff. All that flashy junk. They wanted cartwheels of agonized passion; somersaults into fires of doom; nosedives, if you will, into the frenzied pageant of vulnerable flesh. They wanted a tangible thrill. ("Drink To Me Only With Labyrinthine Eyes")

I’ve always felt there’s something genetically instilled and inbred in Californians—that California is a place of death, a place people are drawn to because they don’t realize deep down they’re actually afraid of what they want. It’s new, and they’re escaping their histories while at the same time moving headlong toward their own extinctions. Desire and death are all mixed up with the thrill and the risk of the unknown. It’s a variation of what Freud called the “death instinct.

Kaldar almost never stops and thinks about the consequences of his actions. Something is fun or not fun, and my brother’s fun often lands him in interesting places such as jails or castles belonging to California robber barons. Where other people see certain death, my brother sees an opportunity for a hilarious, thrilling adventure. But when I got the tattoo, Kaldar warned me that marrying her was a bad idea.

No, there's going to be no even tenor with me. The more uneven it is the happier I shall be. And when my time comes to die, I'll be able to die happy, for I will have done and seen and heard and experienced all the joy, pain, thrills — every emotion that any human ever had — and I'll be especially happy if I am spared a stupid, common death in bed.

To see an almost certain horrible death--you know how crowds all sit at the edge of their seats, /praying/ subconsciously for a spectacular accident--and then to be whisked away from it so suddenly--brought to the edge of tragedy, and then to have their better natures win out, showing them how much nicer they always /knew/ they were--that was the supreme thrill.

There’s something about a book you find by accident, a book no one else seems to have heard of, a book that thrills and then becomes a part of you, when it’s one you so easily might never have read at all—it seems like it found you.

We read the pagan sacred books with profit and delight. With myth and fable we are ever charmed, and find a pleasure in the endless repetition of the beautiful, poetic, and absurd. We find, in all these records of the past, philosophies and dreams, and efforts stained with tears, of great and tender souls who tried to pierce the mystery of life and death, to answer the eternal questions of the Whence and Whither, and vainly sought to make, with bits of shattered glass, a mirror that would, in very truth, reflect the face and form of Nature's perfect self. These myths were born of hopes, and fears, and tears, and smiles, and they were touched and colored by all there is of joy and grief between the rosy dawn of birth, and death's sad night. They clothed even the stars with passion, and gave to gods the faults and frailties of the sons of men. In them, the winds and waves were music, and all the lakes, and streams, and springs,—the mountains, woods and perfumed dells were haunted by a thousand fairy forms. They thrilled the veins of Spring with tremulous desire; made tawny Summer's billowed breast the throne and home of love; filled Autumns arms with sun-kissed grapes, and gathered sheaves; and pictured Winter as a weak old king who felt, like Lear upon his withered face, Cordelia's tears. These myths, though false, are beautiful, and have for many ages and in countless ways, enriched the heart and kindled thought. But if the world were taught that all these things are true and all inspired of God, and that eternal punishment will be the lot of him who dares deny or doubt, the sweetest myth of all the Fable World would lose its beauty, and become a scorned and hateful thing to every brave and thoughtful man.

I found I was able to relieve people not only of pain but of fear. It's strange how many people suffer from it. I don't mean fear of closed spaces and fear of heights, but fear of death and, what's worse, fear of life. Often they're people who seem in the best of health, prosperous, without any worry, and yet they're tortured by it. I've sometimes thought it was the most besetting humour of men, and I asked myself at one time if it was due to some deep animal instinct that man has inherited from that primeval something that first felt the thrill of life.

Die in one universe and yet in another go on without a hitch. If this were true, the person who understood it would have conquered death. Would be invulnerable. Would be the Superman. There's a dizzying thrill in a philosophy that can only be tested by suicide -- and then never proven, only tested again by another attempt. And the person embarked on that series of tests, treading that trail of lives as if from boulder to boulder across the river of time -- no, out into the burning ocean of eternity -- what a mutant! Some new genesis, like a pale, poisonous daisy.

It's difficult to spend time in any carnival or amusement park and not realize that a repressed fear of death may be the one emotion that is constant in the human heart even if, most of the time, it is confined to the unconscious as we go about our business. Thrill rides offer us a chance to acknowledge our ever-present dread, to release the tension that arises from repression of it, and to subtly delude ourselves with the illusion of invulnerability that surviving the Big Drop can provide.

For The Fallen" With proud thanksgiving, a mother for her children,  England mourns for her dead across the sea.  Flesh of her flesh they were, spirit of her spirit,  Fallen in the cause of the free.  Solemn the drums thrill;  Death august and royal  Sings sorrow up into immortal spheres,  There is music in the midst of desolation  And a glory that shines upon our tears.  They went with songs to the battle, they were young,  Straight of limb, true of eye, steady and aglow.  They were staunch to the end against odds uncounted;  They fell with their faces to the foe.  They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:  Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.  At the going down of the sun and in the morning  We will remember them.  They mingle not with their laughing comrades again;  They sit no more at familiar tables of home;  They have no lot in our labour of the day-time; They sleep beyond England's foam.  But where our desires are and our hopes profound,  Felt as a well-spring that is hidden from sight,  To the innermost heart of their own land they are known  As the stars are known to the Night;  As the stars that shall be bright when we are dust,  Moving in marches upon the heavenly plain;  As the stars that are starry in the time of our darkness,  To the end, to the end, they remain. 

there was genuine pity in her face, but also a kind of glee, the sort you see sometimes when teens are interviewed about the tragic death of a friend. The sadness is there, and it's real, but there's an underlying thrill at the drama of it all, the realness of it all.

Countless souls are starving to death around the world, yet you keep wasting heaps of money on alcohol, cigarettes and cheap thrills - how can you be so nonchalant, my friend!

Champagne for my wife,” he said without taking his eyes off her. He drew her chair back himself. “Let me introduce you to Natalie and Sam Derrick.” “So this is Eve! I’m just thrilled to meet you.” Natalie flashed a mile-wide grin, even as her gaze tracked over Eve’s clothes. “Glad you could join us.” Sam held out a hand the size of a rump roast, pumped Eve’s twice. “Roarke’s told us it’s hard for you to get away from work.” “I just can’t think how you investigate murders .” Eve glanced back at Natalie. “First I need a body.” She felt Roarke’s hand pat her thigh twice.

I was now getting quite possibly the first zombie piggy back ride. I wasn’t thrilled with having my knees next to her mouth, but after one failed attempt with her thick arms to wave me away she completely forgot about me as she stood back up, my added weight not hampering or hindering her in the least.

Richmond's Mrs. William McFarland. "Let us remember that we belong to that sex which was last at the cross, first at the grave…Let us go now, hand in hand, to the graves of our country’s sons, and as we go let our energies be aroused and our hearts be thrilled by this thought: It is the least thing we can do for our soldiers.

Ay, but to die, and go we know not where; To lie in cold obstruction and to rot; This sensible warm motion to become A kneaded clod; and the delighted spirit To bathe in fiery floods, or to reside In thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice; To be imprison'd in the viewless winds, And blown with restless violence round about The pendent world; or to be worse than worst Of those that lawless and incertain thought Imagine howling: 'tis too horrible! The weariest and most loathed worldly life That age, ache, penury and imprisonment Can lay on nature is a paradise To what we fear of death.

showed him some of the gruesome crime-scene photos we worked with every day. I let him experience recordings made by killers while they were torturing their victims. I made him listen to one of two teenage girls in Los Angeles being tortured to death in the back of a van by two thrill-seeking killers who had recently been let out of prison. Glenn wept as his listened to the tapes. He said to me, “I had no idea there were people out there who could do anything like this.” An intelligent, compassionate father with two girls of his own, Glenn said that after seeing and hearing what he did in my office, he could no longer oppose the death penalty: “The experience in Quantico changed my mind about that for all time.

We know that we are going to die, in fact it is the only thing we know of what is in store for us. All the rest is mere guesswork, and most of the time we guess wrong. Like children in the trackless forest we grope our way through our lives in blissful ignorance of what is going to happen to us from one day to another, what hardships we may have to face, what more or less thrilling adventures we may encounter before the great adventure, the most thrilling of all, the Adventure of Death.

There was death at the beginning as there would be death again at its end. Though whether it was some fleeting shadow of this that passed across the girl’s dreams and woke her on that least likely of mornings she would never know. All she knew, when she opened her eyes, was that the world was somehow altered. The red glow of her alarm showed it was yet a half hour till the time she had set it to wake her and she lay quite still, not lifting her head, trying to configure the change. It was dark but not as dark as it should be. Across the bedroom, she could clearly make out the dull glint of her riding trophies on cluttered shelves and above them the looming faces of rock stars she had once thought she should care about. She listened. The silence that filled the house was different too, expectant, like the pause between the intake of breath and the uttering of words. Soon there would be the muted roar of the furnace coming alive in the basement and the old farmhouse floorboards would start their ritual creaking complaint. She slipped out from the bedclothes and went to the window. There was snow. The first fall of winter. And from the laterals of the fence up by the pond she could tell there must be almost a foot of it. With no deflecting wind, it was perfect and driftless, heaped in comical proportion on the branches of the six small cherry trees her father had planted last year. A single star shone in a wedge of deep blue above the woods. The girl looked down and saw a lace of frost had formed on the lower part of the window and she placed a finger on it, melting a small hole. She shivered, not from the cold, but from the thrill that this transformed world was for the moment entirely hers. And she turned and hurried to get dressed.

[Love] feels . . .” I paused, turning the highlighter in my hand, “like an awakening of senses you never knew you had, and once they’re awakened, you’re never the same. The way you see the world is altered. Instead of riding down a road on your bike and thinking how the wind feels good on your face, you think, ‘This is how it feels when he kisses my cheek.’ You play a piece on the piano, and instead of imagining a crowd applauding, you only see him, sitting in the chair next to the piano, smiling at you. You catch the scent of sage in the air and think, ‘This is how he smells.’ But it’s also kind of like being on a mousetrap ride. Exhilarating and terrifying all at the same time. You smile and laugh and feel a thrill inside of you, all the while wondering in the back of your mind if the car will come off the track at the next turn, or if your harness will come open and you will be tossed to the ground to your death.

But if you cross me again Akil, so-help-me, I’ll find a way to kill you this time.” His eyes lit up at the prospect, as though he’d accepted a challenge I didn’t even know I’d laid down. “I’d expect nothing less.” Demons; only they can get a cheap thrill from a death threat.

I had thought myself lost, had touched the very bottom of despair; and then, when the spirit of renunciation had filled me, I had known peace. I know now what I was not conscious of at the time—that in such an hour a man feels that he has finally found himself and has become his own friend. An essential inner need has been satisfied, and against that satisfaction, that self-fulfilment, no external power can prevail. Bonnafous, I imagine, he who spent: his life racing before the wind, was acquainted with this serenity of spirit. Guillaumet, too, in his snows. Never shall I forget that, lying buried to the chin in sand, strangled slowly to death by thirst, my heart was infinitely warm beneath the desert stars. What can men do to make known to themselves this sense of deliverance? Everything about mankind is paradox. He who strives and conquers grows soft. The magnanimous man grown rich becomes mean. The creative artist for whom everything is made easy nods. Every doctrine swears that it can breed men, but none can tell us in advance what sort of men it will breed. Men are not cattle to be fattened for market. In the scales of life an indigent Newton weighs more than a parcel of prosperous nonentities. All of us have had the experience of a sudden joy that came when nothing in the world had forewarned us of its coming—a joy so thrilling that if it was born of misery we remembered even the misery with tenderness.

Yes. Right. You should probably, um..." She had no idea what he should do. Kiss her, she thought. Isn't that what people did after they survived thrilling, near-death experiences together? She was sure it wasn't an appropriate suggestion, but this close, it was all she could think about.

Come, Paul!" she reiterated, her eye grazing me with its hard ray like a steel stylet. She pushed against her kinsman. I thought he receded; I thought he would go. Pierced deeper than I could endure, made now to feel what defied suppression, I cried - "My heart will break!" What I felt seemed literal heart-break; but the seal of another fountain yielded under the strain: one breath from M. Paul, the whisper, "Trust me!" lifted a load, opened an outlet. With many a deep sob, with thrilling, with icy shiver, with strong trembling, and yet with relief - I wept. "Leave her to me; it is a crisis: I will give her a cordial, and it will pass," said the calm Madame Beck. To be left to her and her cordial seemed to me something like being left to the poisoner and her bowl. When M. Paul answered deeply, harshly, and briefly - "Laissez-moi!" in the grim sound I felt a music strange, strong, but life-giving. "Laissez-moi!" he repeated, his nostrils opening, and his facial muscles all quivering as he spoke. "But this will never do," said Madame, with sternness. More sternly rejoined her kinsman - "Sortez d'ici!" "I will send for Père Silas: on the spot I will send for him," she threatened pertinaciously. "Femme!" cried the Professor, not now in his deep tones, but in his highest and most excited key, "Femme! sortez à l'instant!" He was roused, and I loved him in his wrath with a passion beyond what I had yet felt. "What you do is wrong," pursued Madame; "it is an act characteristic of men of your unreliable, imaginative temperament; a step impulsive, injudicious, inconsistent - a proceeding vexatious, and not estimable in the view of persons of steadier and more resolute character." "You know not what I have of steady and resolute in me," said he, "but you shall see; the event shall teach you. Modeste," he continued less fiercely, "be gentle, be pitying, be a woman; look at this poor face, and relent. You know I am your friend, and the friend of your friends; in spite of your taunts, you well and deeply know I may be trusted. Of sacrificing myself I made no difficulty but my heart is pained by what I see; it must have and give solace. Leave me!" This time, in the "leave me" there was an intonation so bitter and so imperative, I wondered that even Madame Beck herself could for one moment delay obedience; but she stood firm; she gazed upon him dauntless; she met his eye, forbidding and fixed as stone. She was opening her lips to retort; I saw over all M. Paul's face a quick rising light and fire; I can hardly tell how he managed the movement; it did not seem violent; it kept the form of courtesy; he gave his hand; it scarce touched her I thought; she ran, she whirled from the room; she was gone, and the door shut, in one second. The flash of passion was all over very soon. He smiled as he told me to wipe my eyes; he waited quietly till I was calm, dropping from time to time a stilling, solacing word. Ere long I sat beside him once more myself - re-assured, not desperate, nor yet desolate; not friendless, not hopeless, not sick of life, and seeking death. "It made you very sad then to lose your friend?" said he. "It kills me to be forgotten, Monsieur," I said.

Joining a gang is like sky diving without a parachute. Oh, at first it’s all fun, as you take on gravity in a thrilling and exhilarating free fall towards earth. The truth is, anything that is risky and dangerous always starts out as fun. But the odds are always stacked in gravity’s favor, for you will eventually come face to face with the earth, and mother earth always wins those battles. The same thing can be said about being in a gang.

I’m so sorry, she’d said, you’re so brave, and there was genuine pity in her face, but also a kind of glee, the sort you see sometimes when teens are interviewed about the tragic death of a friend. The sadness is there, and it’s real, but there’s an underlying thrill at the drama of it all, the

Re-entry taught me a new sort of fear that was slow and dull rather than quick and thrilling...the hardest part of reentry to a humdrum life was not recovering from the bad stuff. It was missing the good times, the friendship, intensity, fear, sense of purpose, the sheer exotic escapism of it all.

Her brown eyes, wise and warm and undeniably perceptive, focused on his. For one split moment he had the bizarre thought that she somehow knew everything about him, from the moment of his birth to his certainty of his own death. It seemed, in that second, with her face tipped up toward his and her lips slightly parted, that she, more than anyone else who would ever walk this earth, truly knew him. It was thrilling. But more than that, it was terrifying.

What does it feel like?" "It feels like..." I begin hesitantly, "...falling from the sky." As I suspected, confusion registers on Kaelen's face. "Thrilling and terrifying at the same time," I add. Kaelen ponders for a while. "Falling from the sky equals death." I bite my lip to keep from laughing. "Only if there's a ground underneath you," I counter. "There is." I shrug. “But what if there wasn't? What if you simply fell forever? Never knowing if there was a ground beneath you or not." "It's not possible," Kaelen rationalizes. "Unless you were falling in a vacuum." I smile. "So maybe that's what love is. Falling in a vacuum.

Heaven opened then, indeed. The flash sprang from east, west, north, south, and was a perfect dance of death. The forms of skeletons appeared in the air, shaped with blue fire for bones-- dancing, leaping, striding, and mingling in unparalleled confusion. With these were intertwined snakes of green, rising and falling, and behind these was a broad mass of lesser light. From every part of the tumbling sky came a shout. ... Gabriel was almost blinded, and he could feel Bathsheba's warm arm tremble in his hand-- a sensation new and thrilling. But love, life, everything human, seemed small and trifling beside the spectacle of an infuriated universe.

How to recognize a medical serial killer: • majority of cases take place in a hospital setting • attention-seeking behavior • odd behavior after a patient death or seeming “happy” • disciplinary record • thrill seeker • tendency to predict when a patient will die • frequently moving hospitals • insulin poisoning the most common method

In a flash Buck knew it. The time had come. It was to the death. As they circled about, snarling, ears laid back, keenly watchful for the advantage, the scene came to Buck with a sense of familiarity. He seemed to remember it all,—the white woods, and earth, and moonlight, and the thrill of battle. Over the whiteness and silence brooded a ghostly calm. There was not the faintest whisper of air—nothing moved, not a leaf quivered, the visible breaths of the dogs rising slowly and lingering in the frosty air. They

But I love it up here. There is a certain allure to this place, some dark, shameful part of me that thrills at the beauty of death and decay.” Walking arm in arm with the Countess, I understood what she meant. The notion of finding death and decay beautiful should have sounded ridiculous and morbid, yet it resonated with me with a sort of romance of its own.

Death was alluring, seductive, and Celia longed to die in the thrill of it over and over again.

The other wives and I talked together one night about the possibility of becoming widows. What would we do? God gave us peace of heart, and confidence that whatever might happen, His Word would hold. We knew that 'when He Putteth forth His sheep, He goeth before them.' God's leading was unmistakable up to this point. Each of us knew when we married our husbands that there would never be any question about who came first -- God and His work held held first place in each life. It was the condition of true discipleship; it became devastatingly meaningful now. It was a time for soul-searching, a time for counting the possible cost. Was it the thrill of adventure that drew our husbands on? No. Their letters and journals make it abundantly clear that these men did not go out as some men go out to shoot a lion or climb a mountain. Their compulsion was from a different source. Each had made a personal transaction with God, recognising that he belonged to God, first of all by creation, and secondly by redemption through the death of His Son, Jesus Christ. This double claim on his life settled once and for all the question of allegiance. It was not a matter of striving to follow the example of a great Teacher. To conform to the perfect life of Jesus was impossible for a human being. To these men, Jesus Christ was God, and had actually taken upon Himself human form, in order that He might die, and, by His death, provide not only escape from the punishment which their sin merited, but also a new kind of life, eternal both in length and in quality. This meant simply that Christ was to be obeyed, and more than that, that. He would provide the power to obey

Gangsters live for the action. The closer to death, the nearer to the heated coil of the moment, the more alive they feel. Most would rather succumb to a barrage of bullets from a roomful of sworn enemies than to the debilitation of old age, dying the death of the feeble. A gangster becomes as addicted to the thrill of the battle and the potential to die in the midst of it as he does to he more attractive lures in his path. In his world, the potential for death exists every day. The better gangsters don't shy away from such a dreaded possibility but rather find comfort in its proximity.

...in other spheres of Victorian Society the appeal of a young woman dressed in black from head to toe was acknowledged. In Victorian popular culture, widows had two manifestations: the battleaxe and the man-eater, preying upon husbands and bachelors alike. Even today, an attractive, dark-haired person dressed in all black has vampiric connotations, as the novelist Alison Lurie has noted, 'so archetypally terrifying and thrilling, that any black-haired, pale-complexioned man or woman who appears clad in all black formal clothes projects a destructive eroticism, sometimes without concious intention.

The real monsters are born, not made. They are the ones who watch behind friendly faces. The ones who come for the innocent trying to steal everything they have, be it their most treasured possessions, their honour or their lives. Not because they must, not because their very existence relies on it but simply because there is a thrill in it for them. To watch a man pierced by wrath and greed die a lonely death, to watch a woman pierced by lust and anger whimper away in fear. It thrills them to watch man burn and bleed. Real monsters love to turn the sound of beautiful life into many a terrified scream.

As she waited for the applause to subside, she thought of the statistic that said people feared public speaking more than they feared death. She loved it. She enjoyed all of the concatenated moments of presenting in front of a listening audience—teaching, performing, telling a story, teeing up a heated debate. She also loved the adrenaline rush. The bigger the stakes, the more sophisticated or hostile the audience, the more the whole experience thrilled her.

Now a married woman at the age of 25, Sharon was much more than a “scatterbrain.” Like most people her age, she was very interested in politics and was a big fan of Bobby Kennedy. On the evening of June 3, 1968, during what proved to be his final fundraising tour, she attended a dinner in his honor at the home of director John Frankenheimer. That evening, she had the thrill of getting to speak to Kennedy and his wife, Ethel, just two days before he was assassinated.

Are you really going to give it up? The feeling of the sea, the dark, drunken feeling that unearthly rolling always brings? The thrill of saying goodbye? The sweet tears you weep for your song? Are you going to give up the life which has detached you from the world, kept you remote, impelled you toward the pinnacle of manliness? The secret yearning for death. The glory beyond and the death beyond. Everything was "beyond," wrong or right, had always been "beyond." Are you going to give that up?

The Bird of Time O Bird of Time on your fruitful bough What are the songs you sing? ... Songs of the glory and gladness of life, Of poignant sorrow and passionate strife, And the lilting joy of the spring; Of hope that sows for the years unborn, And faith that dreams of a tarrying morn, The fragrant peace of the twilight's breath, And the mystic silence that men call death. O Bird of Time, say where did you learn The changing measures you sing? ... In blowing forests and breaking tides, In the happy laughter of new-made brides, And the nests of the new-born spring; In the dawn that thrills to a mother's prayer, And the night that shelters a heart's despair, In the sigh of pity, the sob of hate, And the pride of a soul that has conquered fate.

Merger Evers/John F. Kennedy/Malcolm X/Martin Luther King/Robert Kennedy/Che Guevara/Patrice Lamumba/George Jackson/Cynthia Wesley/Addie Mae Collins/Denise McNair/Carole Robertson/Viola Liuzzo It was a decade marked by death. Violent and inevitable. Funerals became engraved on the brain, intensifying the ephemeral nature of life. For many in the South it was a decade reminiscent of earlier times, when oak trees sighed over their burdens in the wind; Spanish moss draggled blood to the ground; amen corners creaked with grief; and the thrill of being able, once again, to endure unendurable loss produced so profound an ecstasy in mourners that they strutted, without noticing their feet, along the thin backs of benches: their piercing shouts of anguish and joy never interrupted by an inglorious fall. They shared rituals for the dead to be remembered.

a place people are drawn to because they don’t realize deep down they’re actually afraid of what they want. It’s new, and they’re escaping their histories while at the same time moving headlong toward their own extinctions. Desire and death are all mixed up with the thrill and the risk of the unknown.

Her hands were splayed against the wet tile, her body pulsing. Water rained over them, hot and needle sharp, as he felt the orgasm tear through her. A kind of purging, he thought. She was still gasping when he spun her around and closed his mouth greedily over her breast. She was helpless against what he brought to her. Each time, every time, helpless, staggered. And grateful. She dived her fingers into his hair, twisting, tangling them in that thick wet silk while those good, strong tugs of desire in her belly followed the restless hunger of his mouth on her. His hands, slick, skilled, strong, raced over her, took her to the edge and over. Where he wanted her, where he needed her — shuddering, moaning his name, swamped in her own pleasure. The nails biting viciously into his back thrilled him, the frenzied race of her heart against his incited him. More. All. Now, was all he could think as they savaged each other’s mouths. “I want you.” His breath was heaving as he gripped her hips. “Always. Ever. Mine.” His eyes were a wild and burning blue. She could see nothing else. It should have been too much, this desperate, endless need for him. Yet somehow it was never, never enough. “Mine.” She dragged his mouth back to hers, and when he drove into her, met him beat for urgent beat.

He had thought of childhood as something intimate and pure, inside his home, his family. Instead of that, in Deborah's school he had been disturbed and thrilled by the presence all around him of something wild, barbaric, dark, compounded of the city streets, of surging crowds, of rushing feet, of turmoil, filth, disease and death, of poverty and vice and crime.

He wondered how Nathan felt about the killing. Granted that Richard had struck Bobby with the chisel, nevertheless, he asked, how had Nathan felt about the boy’s death? It didn’t concern him, Nathan replied. He had no moral beliefs and religion meant nothing to him: he was an atheist. Whatever served an individual’s purpose—that was the best guide to conduct. In

Now Van Ness claimed already to have died, more than once, in various other universes. Who can refute that? Is there any proof otherwise? Imagine a slight revision in Nietzsche’s myth of eternal return: not that at history’s end all matter collapses back to the center, Big-Bangs, and starts again identically; but that it starts again with one infinitesimal difference in the action of a single molecule— every time, and an endless number of times. When you die, your consciousness blanks out, but it resumes eons later, when the history of molecules has been revised enough to preclude your death due to those particular circumstances: the bullet hits your brain in this world, but in a later one merely tickles your earlobe. You die in one universe and yet in another go on without a hitch. You don’t mark the intervening ages—subjectively you experience nothing other than almost having died. But in fact you’ve edged into another kingdom, ruled by another king, engaging other potentialities. If this were true, the person who understood it would have conquered death. Would be invulnerable. Would be the Superman. There’s a dizzying thrill in a philosophy that can only be tested by suicide— and then never proven, only tested again by another attempt. And the person embarked on that series of tests, treading that trail of lives as if from boulder to boulder across the river of time— no, out into the burning ocean of eternity— what a mutant! Some new genesis, like a pale, poisonous daisy.

For one split moment, he had the bizarre thought that she somehow knew everything about him, every last detail from the moment of his birth to his certainty of his own death. It seemed, in that second, with her face tipped up toward his and her lips slightly parted, that she, more than anyone else who would ever walk this earth, truly knew him. It was thrilling. But more than that, it was terrifying.

Children do not only have an innate hope; they are hope. And more than that: they are our future. As Kahlil Gibran writes, they are like "living arrows sent forth" into infinity, and their souls "dwell in the house of tomorrow..." They carry their hope with them to a future we can't see. Children come to us fresh from the divine source, from what I call "Mama," from life itself, and they lead us to the same: to the God-force within creation. That is why none of us - no matter our race, creed, religion, or politics - can look at a child and not feel joy. We look at them, and something thrills us to the depth of our hearts. They are living miracles, and when we see them we know that there is a God, that life itself is a miracle. Children show us, with their innocence and clarity, the very face of God in human form.

Oh, Beauty, passing beauty Oh, Beauty, passing beauty! sweetest Sweet! How canst thou let me waste my youth in sighs? I only ask to sit beside thy feet. Thou knowest I dare not look into thine eyes, Might I but kiss thy hand! I dare not fold My arms about thee ­ scarcely dare to speak. And nothing seems to me so wild and bold, As with one kiss to touch thy blessed cheek. Methinks if I should kiss thee, no control Within the thrilling brain could keep afloat The subtle spirit. Even while I spoke, The bare word KISS hath made my inner soul To tremble like a lutestring, ere the note Hath melted in the silence that it broke. But were I loved, as I desire to be, What is there in the great sphere of the earth, And range of evil between death and birth, That I should fear ­ if I were loved by thee? All the inner, all the outer world of pain Clear Love would pierce and cleave, if thou wert mine, As I have heard that, somewhere in the main, Fresh water-springs come up through bitter brine. 'Twere joy, not fear, clasped hand in hand with thee, To wait for death ­ mute ­ careless of all ills, Apart upon a mountain, though the surge Of some new deluge from a thousand hills Flung leagues of roaring foam into the gorge Below us, as far on as eye could see.

I have just reread The Age of Innocence. Poor Countess Olenska, so much more alive than everyone in New York. She was better than Newland Archer, to whom she couldn’t give herself because she was married. It didn’t matter to society that she had been wronged by her husband. They felt her life was over. Thanks to the modern age of divorce, my life is not. I am coming to see that as a blessing and not something to be ashamed of. I am starting to think that my life is a good thing to have. I do not believe that there were more happy marriages before divorce became socially acceptable, that people tried harder, got through their rough times, and were better off. I believe that more people suffered. Divorce is in the machine now, like love and birth and death. Its possibility informs us, even when it goes untouched. And if we fail at marriage, we are lucky we don’t have to fail with the force of our whole life. I would like there to be an eighth sacrament: the sacrament of divorce. Like Communion, it is a slim white wafer on the tongue. Like confession, it is forgiveness. Forgiveness is important not so much because we’ve done wrong as because we feel we need to be forgiven. Family, friends, God, whoever loves us forgives us, takes us in again. They are thrilled by our life, our possibilities, our second chances. They weep with gladness that we did not have to die.

LECHLADE, GLOUCESTERSHIRE. (Composed September, 1815. Published with “Alastor”, 1816.) The wind has swept from the wide atmosphere Each vapour that obscured the sunset’s ray; And pallid Evening twines its beaming hair In duskier braids around the languid eyes of Day: Silence and Twilight, unbeloved of men,    5 Creep hand in hand from yon obscurest glen. They breathe their spells towards the departing day, Encompassing the earth, air, stars, and sea; Light, sound, and motion own the potent sway, Responding to the charm with its own mystery.    10 The winds are still, or the dry church-tower grass Knows not their gentle motions as they pass. Thou too, aereal Pile! whose pinnacles Point from one shrine like pyramids of fire, Obeyest in silence their sweet solemn spells,    15 Clothing in hues of heaven thy dim and distant spire, Around whose lessening and invisible height Gather among the stars the clouds of night. The dead are sleeping in their sepulchres: And, mouldering as they sleep, a thrilling sound,    20 Half sense, half thought, among the darkness stirs, Breathed from their wormy beds all living things around, And mingling with the still night and mute sky Its awful hush is felt inaudibly. Thus solemnized and softened, death is mild    25 And terrorless as this serenest night: Here could I hope, like some inquiring child Sporting on graves, that death did hide from human sight Sweet secrets, or beside its breathless sleep That loveliest dreams perpetual watch did keep.    30

Girls, I was dead and down in the Underworld, a shade, a shadow of my former self, nowhen. It was a place where language stopped, a black full stop, a black hole Where the words had to come to an end. And end they did there, last words, famous or not. It suited me down to the ground. So imagine me there, unavailable, out of this world, then picture my face in that place of Eternal Repose, in the one place you’d think a girl would be safe from the kind of a man who follows her round writing poems, hovers about while she reads them, calls her His Muse, and once sulked for a night and a day because she remarked on his weakness for abstract nouns. Just picture my face when I heard - Ye Gods - a familiar knock-knock at Death’s door. Him. Big O. Larger than life. With his lyre and a poem to pitch, with me as the prize. Things were different back then. For the men, verse-wise, Big O was the boy. Legendary. The blurb on the back of his books claimed that animals, aardvark to zebra, flocked to his side when he sang, fish leapt in their shoals at the sound of his voice, even the mute, sullen stones at his feet wept wee, silver tears. Bollocks. (I’d done all the typing myself, I should know.) And given my time all over again, rest assured that I’d rather speak for myself than be Dearest, Beloved, Dark Lady, White Goddess etc., etc. In fact girls, I’d rather be dead. But the Gods are like publishers, usually male, and what you doubtless know of my tale is the deal. Orpheus strutted his stuff. The bloodless ghosts were in tears. Sisyphus sat on his rock for the first time in years. Tantalus was permitted a couple of beers. The woman in question could scarcely believe her ears. Like it or not, I must follow him back to our life - Eurydice, Orpheus’ wife - to be trapped in his images, metaphors, similes, octaves and sextets, quatrains and couplets, elegies, limericks, villanelles, histories, myths… He’d been told that he mustn’t look back or turn round, but walk steadily upwards, myself right behind him, out of the Underworld into the upper air that for me was the past. He’d been warned that one look would lose me for ever and ever. So we walked, we walked. Nobody talked. Girls, forget what you’ve read. It happened like this - I did everything in my power to make him look back. What did I have to do, I said, to make him see we were through? I was dead. Deceased. I was Resting in Peace. Passé. Late. Past my sell-by date… I stretched out my hand to touch him once on the back of the neck. Please let me stay. But already the light had saddened from purple to grey. It was an uphill schlep from death to life and with every step I willed him to turn. I was thinking of filching the poem out of his cloak, when inspiration finally struck. I stopped, thrilled. He was a yard in front. My voice shook when I spoke - Orpheus, your poem’s a masterpiece. I’d love to hear it again… He was smiling modestly, when he turned, when he turned and he looked at me. What else? I noticed he hadn’t shaved. I waved once and was gone. The dead are so talented. The living walk by the edge of a vast lake near, the wise, drowned silence of the dead.

What rending pains were close at hand! Death! and what a death! worse than any other that is to be named! Water, be it cold or warm, that which buoys up blue icefields, or which bathes tropical coasts with currents of balmy bliss, is yet a gentle conqueror, kisses as it kills, and draws you down gently through darkening fathoms to its heart. Death at the sword is the festival of trumpet and bugle and banner, with glory ringing out around you and distant hearts thrilling through yours. No gnawing disease can bring such hideous end as this; for that is a fiend bred of your own flesh, and this — is it a fiend, this living lump of appetites? What dread comes with the thought of perishing in flames! but fire, let it leap and hiss never so hotly, is something too remote, too alien, to inspire us with such loathly horror as a wild beast; if it have a life, that life is too utterly beyond our comprehension. Fire is not half ourselves; as it devours, arouses neither hatred nor disgust; is not to be known by the strength of our lower natures let loose; does not drip our blood into our faces with foaming chaps, nor mouth nor slaver above us with vitality. Let us be ended by fire, and we are ashes, for the winds to bear, the leaves to cover; let us be ended by wild beasts, and the base, cursed thing howls with us forever through the forest.

Oppenheimer, haunted by his leading role in the first use of atomic weapons, understood only one aspect of prudence. His longing not to do evil himself blinded him to the need to ward off the evil of others. This painfully knotted man hoped with one swipe of his moral sword to rid himself of the impossible tangle and to be clear and simple for once in his life. But being Oppenheimer could never be as easy as that. For Oppenheimer embodied two of the highest human types, the theoretical man described by Aristotle as god-like for living in the mind, among changeless truths, and the paragon of Machiavellian virtue, god-like in commanding the power of life and death over other men. No theoretical man before Oppenheimer had known such lordly power. In certain high moments he approached that Aristotelian theoretical purity which lives for the joys of knowing the world, whatever it might prove to be; in another light he thrilled at that Machiavellian power and its attendant renown; in contrary moods he reviled himself for the suffering he brought into the world, and ached to renounce his distinction and to be merely another man among men. Perhaps no theoretical man can be equal to such a burden: to feel knowledge as power when one’s mind reshapes the world irrevocably, to see the light of truth as the agent of some dark majesty, is not grace but ordeal. Oppenheimer’s agony tore him open from top to bottom.

Have you ever listened to a song from a long time ago; from your past; a song that was filled with so many memories tied to it, that you felt it so deeply- that it made you cry? And did you listen to it again, intentionally, for a second time? So you could travel back in time through that song; back when everything seemed so much simpler, basic, carefree? Those are the songs that are the soundtracks of our lives… the ones that bring back childhood memories, deep feelings, snapshots of our lives (or short videos), best friends, first loves, first heartbreaks… births, deaths. Our lives are like the record albums that we used to play just a few years ago; just yesterday. We played some of the songs over and over again- to the point of which we can sing along with every word as we play it. Other songs seem somewhat unfamiliar, as we rarely go back to listen to them; we skip over them or we barely listen to the start of it before we turn off the record player. But just like on a record album and just like in our memories, you can't cut a song out off an album... just like you can't cut out a memory. The songs and memories remain there, side by side; the good ones, the bad ones, the ones that thrill us and the ones that hurt. Those are the songs that our lives are composed of. Those are the songs that we chase back, back into our our own memories in our private and personal musical time machines.

He ought to be up there, guarding the pass, or at least striving in some way to keep his country. His. The thought never failed to thrill him. It was worth death. Worth almost anything to become again the person he had been before the Herran War. Yet here he was, gambling the frail odds of success. Looking for a plant. He imagined Cheat’s reaction if he could see him now, scouring the ground for a wrinkle of faded green. There would be mockery, which Arin could shrug off, and rage, which Arin could withstand--even understand. But he couldn’t bear what he saw in his mind. Cheat’s eyes cutting to Kestrel. Targeting her, stoking his hatred with one more reason. And the more Arin tried to shield her, the more Cheat’s dislike grew. Arin’s hands clenched in the cold. He blew on them, tucked his fingers under his arms, and began to walk. He should let her go. Let her slip into the countryside, to the isolated farmlands that had no idea of the revolution. If so, what then? Kestrel would alert her father. She’d find a way. Then the full force of the empire’s military would fall on the peninsula, when Arin doubted that the Herrani could deal even with the battalion that would come through the pass in less than two days. If he let Kestrel go, it was the same as murdering his people. Arin nudged a rock with his boot and wanted to kick it. He didn’t. He walked. Thoughts chipped at his sanity, proposing solutions only to reveal problems, taunting him with the certainty that he would lose everything he sought to keep. Until he found it. Arin found the herb threading up through a patch of dirt. It was a pitiful amount, and withered, but he tore it from the ground with a fierce hope.

Do you ever feel that same need? Your life is so very different from my own. The grandness of the world, the real world, the whole world, is a known thing for you. And you have no need of dispatches because you have seen so much of the American galaxy and its inhabitants—their homes, their hobbies—up close. I don’t know what it means to grow up with a black president, social networks, omnipresent media, and black women everywhere in their natural hair. What I know is that when they loosed the killer of Michael Brown, you said, “I’ve got to go.” And that cut me because, for all our differing worlds, at your age my feeling was exactly the same. And I recall that even then I had not yet begun to imagine the perils that tangle us. You still believe the injustice was Michael Brown. You have not yet grappled with your own myths and narratives and discovered the plunder everywhere around us. Before I could discover, before I could escape, I had to survive, and this could only mean a clash with the streets, by which I mean not just physical blocks, nor simply the people packed into them, but the array of lethal puzzles and strange perils that seem to rise up from the asphalt itself. The streets transform every ordinary day into a series of trick questions, and every incorrect answer risks a beat-down, a shooting, or a pregnancy. No one survives unscathed. And yet the heat that springs from the constant danger, from a lifestyle of near-death experience, is thrilling. This is what the rappers mean when they pronounce themselves addicted to “the streets” or in love with “the game.” I imagine they feel something akin to parachutists, rock climbers, BASE jumpers, and others who choose to live on the edge. Of course we chose nothing. And I have never believed the brothers who claim to “run,” much less “own,” the city. We did not design the streets. We do not fund them. We do not preserve them. But I was there, nevertheless, charged like all the others with the protection of my body. The crews, the young men who’d transmuted their fear into rage, were the greatest danger. The crews walked the blocks of their neighborhood, loud and rude, because it was only through their loud rudeness that they might feel any sense of security and power. They would break your jaw, stomp your face, and shoot you down to feel that power, to revel in the might of their own bodies.

Thou grievest where no grief should be! thou speak'st Words lacking wisdom! for the wise in heart Mourn not for those that live, nor those that die. Nor I, nor thou, nor any one of these, Ever was not, nor ever will not be, For ever and for ever afterwards. All, that doth live, lives always! To man's frame As there come infancy and youth and age, So come there raisings-up and layings-down Of other and of other life-abodes, Which the wise know, and fear not. This that irks—Thy sense-life, thrilling to the elements—Bringing thee heat and cold, sorrows and joys, 'Tis brief and mutable! Bear with it, Prince! As the wise bear. The soul which is not moved, The soul that with a strong and constant calm Takes sorrow and takes joy indifferently, Lives in the life undying! That which is Can never cease to be; that which is not Will not exist. To see this truth of both Is theirs who part essence from accident, Substance from shadow. Indestructible, Learn thou! the Life is, spreading life through all; It cannot anywhere, by any means, Be anywise diminished, stayed, or changed. But for these fleeting frames which it informs With spirit deathless, endless, infinite, They perish. Let them perish, Prince! and fight! He who shall say, "Lo! I have slain a man!" He who shall think, "Lo! I am slain!" those both Know naught! Life cannot slay. Life is not slain! Never the spirit was born; the spirit shall cease to be never; Never was time it was not; End and Beginning are dreams! Birthless and deathless and changeless remaineth the spirit for ever; Death hath not touched it at all, dead though the house of it seems! Who knoweth it exhaustless, self-sustained, Immortal, indestructible,—shall such Say, "I have killed a man, or caused to kill?" Nay, but as when one layeth His worn-out robes away, And taking new ones, sayeth, "These will I wear to-day!" So putteth by the spirit Lightly its garb of flesh, And passeth to inherit A residence afresh. I say to thee weapons reach not the Life; Flame burns it not, waters cannot o'erwhelm, Nor dry winds wither it. Impenetrable, Unentered, unassailed, unharmed, untouched, Immortal, all-arriving, stable, sure, Invisible, ineffable, by word And thought uncompassed, ever all itself, Thus is the Soul declared! How wilt thou, then,—Knowing it so,—grieve when thou shouldst not grieve? How, if thou hearest that the man new-dead Is, like the man new-born, still living man—One same, existent Spirit—wilt thou weep? The end of birth is death; the end of death Is birth: this is ordained! and mournest thou, Chief of the stalwart arm! for what befalls Which could not otherwise befall? The birth Of living things comes unperceived; the death Comes unperceived; between them, beings perceive: What is there sorrowful herein, dear Prince?

Almost immediately after jazz musicians arrived in Paris, they began to gather in two of the city’s most important creative neighborhoods: Montmartre and Montparnasse, respectively the Right and Left Bank haunts of artists, intellectuals, poets, and musicians since the late nineteenth century. Performing in these high-profile and popular entertainment districts could give an advantage to jazz musicians because Parisians and tourists already knew to go there when they wanted to spend a night out on the town. As hubs of artistic imagination and experimentation, Montmartre and Montparnasse therefore attracted the kinds of audiences that might appreciate the new and thrilling sounds of jazz. For many listeners, these locations leant the music something of their own exciting aura, and the early success of jazz in Paris probably had at least as much to do with musicians playing there as did other factors. In spite of their similarities, however, by the 1920s these neighborhoods were on two very different paths, each representing competing visions of what France could become after the war. And the reactions to jazz in each place became important markers of the difference between the two areas and visions. Montmartre was legendary as the late-nineteenth-century capital of “bohemian Paris,” where French artists had gathered and cabaret songs had filled the air. In its heyday, Montmartre was one of the centers of popular entertainment, and its artists prided themselves on flying in the face of respectable middle-class values. But by the 1920s, Montmartre represented an established artistic tradition, not the challenge to bourgeois life that it had been at the fin de siècle. Entertainment culture was rapidly changing both in substance and style in the postwar era, and a desire for new sounds, including foreign music and exotic art, was quickly replacing the love for the cabarets’ French chansons. Jazz was not entirely to blame for such changes, of course. Commercial pressures, especially the rapidly growing tourist trade, eroded the popularity of old Montmartre cabarets, which were not always able to compete with the newer music halls and dance halls. Yet jazz bore much of the criticism from those who saw the changes in Montmartre as the death of French popular entertainment. Montparnasse, on the other hand, was the face of a modern Paris. It was the international crossroads where an ever changing mixture of people celebrated, rather than lamented, cosmopolitanism and exoticism in all its forms, especially in jazz bands. These different attitudes within the entertainment districts and their institutions reflected the impact of the broader trends at work in Paris—the influx of foreign populations, for example, or the advent of cars and electricity on city streets as indicators of modern technology—and the possible consequences for French culture. Jazz was at the confluence of these trends, and it became a convenient symbol for the struggle they represented.

The Marquis de V... - whose falsetto voice and little watery eyes I have always detested - was saying to me with a wicked smile: 'Then again, the master gymnast might break his neck at any moment. What he is doing now is very dangerous, my dear, and the pleasure you take in his performance is the little frisson that danger affords you. Wouldn't it be thrilling, if his sweaty hand failed to grip the bar? The velocity acquired by his rotation about the bar would break his spine quite cleanly, and perhaps a little of the cervical matter might spurt out as far as this! It would be most sensational, and you would have a rare emotion to add to the field of your experience - for you collect emotions, don't you? What a pretty stew of terrors that man in tights stirs up in us! 'Admit that you almost wish that he will fall! Me too. Many others in the auditorium are in the same state of attention and anguish. That is the horrible instinct of a crowd confronted with a spectacle which awakens in it the ideas of lust and death. Those two agreeable companions always travel together! Take it from me that at the very same moment - see, the man is now holding on to the bar by his fingertips alone - at the very same moment, a good number of the women in these boxes are ardently lusting after that man, not so much for his beauty as for the danger he courts.' The voice subtly changed its tone, suddenly becoming more interested. 'You have singularly pale eyes this evening, my dear Freneuse. You ought to give up bromides and take valerian instead. You have a charming and curious soul, but you must take command of its changes. You are too ardently and too obviously covetous, this evening, of the death - or at least the fall - of that man.' I did not reply. The Marquis de V... was quite right. The madness of murder had taken hold of me again; the spectacle had me in its hallucinatory grip. Straitened by a penetrating and delirious anguish, I yearned for that man to fall. There are appalling depths of cruelty within me.