“
The event happened on my birthday. I don’t remember the date, I only know it was my birthday because there was no cake or presents.
”
”
Jarod Kintz (This Book Has No Title)
“
I wouldn’t want the guests at my birthday party confusing my celebration with the Oscars. That’s why I’m having the awards ceremony after we eat cake and I open my presents.
”
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Jarod Kintz (This Book Title is Invisible)
“
Vulnerability is not a weakness, a passing indisposition, or something we can arrange to do without. Vulnerability is not a choice. Vulnerability is the underlying, ever-present, and abiding undercurrent of our natural state. To run from vulnerability is to run from the essence of our nature. The attempt to be invulnerable is the vain attempt to become something we are not, and most especially, to close off our understanding of the grief of others. More seriously, in refusing our vulnerability, we refuse the help needed at every turn of our existence and immobilize the essential title and conversational foundations of our identity.
”
”
David Whyte
“
I notice your absence. I notice your non presence and reflect on the time you were present, in the present, which is obviously in the past.
”
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Jarod Kintz (This Book Has No Title)
“
Victims recite problems. Leaders present solutions.
”
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Robin Sharma (The Leader Who Had No Title: A Modern Fable on Real Success in Business and in Life)
“
I'm a woman; in so many ways I've been programmed to please. I took the job and spent time hunkered over figures, budgets, charts, and fiscal-year projections. I tried, but I hated it.
"Working at a job you don't like is the same as going to prison every day," my father used to say. He was right. I felt imprisoned by an impressive title, travel, perks, and a good salary. On the inside, I was miserable and lonely, and I felt as if I was losing myself. I spent weekends working on reports no one read, and I gave presentations that I didn't care about. It made me feel like a sellout and, worse, a fraud.
Now set free, like any inmate I had to figure out what to do with the rest of my life.
”
”
Kathleen Flinn (The Sharper Your Knife, the Less You Cry: Love, Laughter, and Tears at the World's Most Famous Cooking School)
“
If I had kept a journal, I could go back through it and check up on what memory reports plausibly but not necessarily truly. But keeping a journal then would have been like making notes while going over Niagara Falls in a barrel. Eventless as our life was, it swept us along. Were we any less a Now Generation that the one that presently claims the title? I wonder. And it may be just as well that I have no diary to remember by. Henry James says somewhere that if you have to make notes on how a thing has struck you, it probably hasn't struck you.
”
”
Wallace Stegner (Crossing to Safety)
“
Fairness is an illusion. Neither effort nor intention holds title to the nature or form of either the present or the future. And if the sincere effort has no title, what interest can the bellow or the lamentation hold?" - Davigde. "The humans on Amadeen have a different way of saying it... Tough shit." - Yazi Ro
”
”
Barry B. Longyear
“
The Count was Prince Humperdink's only confidant. His last name was Rugen, but no one needed to use it - he was the only Count in the country, the title having been bestowed by the Prince as a birthday present some years before, the happening taking place, naturally, at one of the Countess' parties.
”
”
William Goldman (The Princess Bride)
“
In fact, I suspect that our only hope is disaster. Cruel tho' it is to say it, there has got to be a vast die-off in the human population -- likely including us and our families -- before the survivors find themselves in a world where a new and humble and 'religious' adaptation with nature is possible.
Disaster is not necessary; the better world could be achieved through reason and common sense and a sense of fellowship -- but most of the present human world is dead set against us. Thus I was forced to the disagreeable resolutions (not solutions) which I attempted to sketch out in the novel 'Good News.' The title is of course deliberately ambiguous.
”
”
Edward Abbey (Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast)
“
A 2010 paper published by Killingsworth and Gilbert titled “A wandering mind is an unhappy mind” found that the brain is ultimately spending as much time stewing over what is not happening as it is over what is happening.
”
”
Nick Trenton (Stop Overthinking: 23 Techniques to Relieve Stress, Stop Negative Spirals, Declutter Your Mind, and Focus on the Present (The Path to Calm Book 1))
“
While Elizabeth was fast to catch on to engineering concepts, Sunny was often out of his depth during engineering discussions. To hide it, he had a habit of repeating technical terms he heard others using. During a meeting with Arnav’s team, he latched onto the term “end effector,” which signifies the claws at the end of a robotic arm. Except Sunny didn’t hear “end effector,” he heard “endofactor.” For the rest of the meeting, he kept referring to the fictional endofactors. At their next meeting with Sunny two weeks later, Arnav’s team brought a PowerPoint presentation titled “Endofactors Update.” As Arnav flashed it on a screen with a projector, the five members of his team stole furtive glances at one another, nervous that Sunny might become wise to the prank. But he didn’t bat an eye and the meeting proceeded without incident. After he left the room, they burst out laughing.
”
”
John Carreyrou (Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup)
“
The whole course of things being thus entirely changed between us and the ancients, and the moderns wisely sensible of it, we of this age have discovered a shorter, and more prudent method, to become scholars and wits, without the fatigue of reading or of thinking. The most accomplished way of using books at present is two-fold: either first, to serve them as some men do lords, learn their titles exactly, and then brag of their acquaintance. Or secondly, which is indeed the choicer, the profounder, and politer method, to get a thorough insight into the index, by which the whole book is governed and turned, like fishes by the tail. For, to enter the palace of learning at the great gate, requires an expense of time and forms; therefore men of much haste and little ceremony are content to get in by the back door.
”
”
Jonathan Swift (A Tale of a Tub and Other Satires)
“
The first twenty years of the young person’s life are spent functioning as a subordinate element in an authority system, and upon leaving school, the male usually moves into either a civilian job or military service. On the job, he learns that although some discreetly expressed dissent is allowable, an underlying posture of submission is required for harmonious functioning with superiors. However much freedom of detail is allowed the individual, the situation is defined as one in which he is to do a job prescribed by someone else. While structures of authority are of necessity present in all societies, advanced or primitive, modern society has the added characteristic of teaching individuals to respond to impersonal authorities. Whereas submission to authority is probably no less for an Ashanti than for an American factory worker, the range of persons who constitute authorities for the native are all personally known to him, while the modern industrial world forces individuals to submit to impersonal authorities, so that responses are made to abstract rank, indicated by an insignia, uniform or title.
”
”
Stanley Milgram (Obedience to Authority)
“
When we speak of the sangha, we speak of the "arya sangha," which means the "exalted sangha". At the time of the Buddha this referred to the arhats and bodhisattvas, the disciples who studied under him and achieved various levels of realization through their practice. But now who is the arya sangha? It is all of us, all of the practitioners of the present time. The moment we take refuge, which is to begin on the path, we hold the title of "sangha". As such, you should understand that you are one of the Three Jewels. You shouldn't put the Three Jewels outside of yourselves; you should always think of yourselves as being one of the Three Jewels—and that includes your body, your speech, and your mind.
”
”
Dhomang Yangthang (The Union of Dzogchen and Mahamudra)
“
Your three components: body, breath, mind. Two are yours in trust; to the third alone you have clear title. If you can cut yourself—your mind—free of what other people do and say, of what you’ve said or done, of the things that you’re afraid will happen, the impositions of the body that contains you and the breath within, and what the whirling chaos sweeps in from outside, so that the mind is freed from fate, brought to clarity, and lives life on its own recognizance—doing what’s right, accepting what happens, and speaking the truth— If you can cut free of impressions that cling to the mind, free of the future and the past—can make yourself, as Empedocles says, “a sphere rejoicing in its perfect stillness,” and concentrate on living what can be lived (which means the present) . . . then you can spend the time you have left in tranquillity. And in kindness. And at peace with the spirit within you.
”
”
Marcus Aurelius (Meditations)
“
She was a liminal goddess who was present at all the boundaries and transitional moments in life. She was also an apotropaic (‘evil-averting’) protector and guide, as illustrated by some of the many titles she was given. Hekate’s triple form emphasised her power over the three realms, these being the heavens, sea and earth.
”
”
Sorita d'Este (Hekate Liminal Rites: A Study of the rituals, magic and symbols of the torch-bearing Triple Goddess of the Crossroads)
“
If I have been your friend, Morcerf, your present manner of speaking would almost lead me to forget that I ever bore that title.
”
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Alexandre Dumas (The Count of Monte Cristo (AmazonClassics Edition))
“
Obviously there is no love when there is no real respect, when you don’t respect another, whether he is your servant or your friend. Have you not noticed that you are not respectful, kindly, generous, to your servants, to people who are so-called “below” you ? You have respect for those above, for your boss, for the millionaire, for the man with a large house and a title, for the man who can give you a better position, a better job, from whom you can get something. But you kick those below you…
You can know love only when all these things have stopped, come to an end….How few of us are generous, forgiving, merciful! You are generous when it pays you, you are merciful when you can see something in return. When these things disappear, when these things don’t occupy your mind and when the things of the mind don’t fill your heart, then there is love; and love alone can transform the present madness and insanity in the world—not systems, not theories…
”
”
J. Krishnamurti (Relationships to Oneself, to Others, to the World)
“
During a meeting with Arnav’s team, he latched onto the term “end effector,” which signifies the claws at the end of a robotic arm. Except Sunny didn’t hear “end effector,” he heard “endofactor.” For the rest of the meeting, he kept referring to the fictional endofactors. At their next meeting with Sunny two weeks later, Arnav’s team brought a PowerPoint presentation titled “Endofactors Update.
”
”
John Carreyrou (Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup)
“
Boredom, resentment, and depression are all sentiments of disconnectedness. They present life to us as a broken connection. They give us a sense of not-belonging. In interpersonal relations, this disconnectedness is experienced as loneliness. When we are lonely we perceive ourselves as isolated individuals surrounded, perhaps, by many people, but not really part of any supporting or nurturing community.
”
”
Henri J.M. Nouwen (The Spiritual Life: Eight Essential Titles by Henri Nouwen)
“
was looked at askance, and that in the bearing of each member of the group there was a defiance of the general opinion. Roxholm sat on his horse somewhat apart from this group watching it, his kinsman and
”
”
Frances Hodgson Burnett (His Grace of Osmonde Being the Portions of That Nobleman's Life Omitted in the Relation of His Lady's Story Presented to the World of Fashion under the Title of A Lady of Quality)
“
He wore red, white, and blue, but he didn’t look patriotic—he looked like a sloppily wrapped birthday present. But it’s not his fault. I tried to wrap him as tight as I could without restricting movement.
”
”
Jarod Kintz (This Book Title is Invisible)
“
Every republic runs its greatest risk not so much from discontented soldiers as from discontented multi-millionaires. They are very rarely, if ever, content with a position of equality, and the larger the population which is said to be equal with them, the less content they are. Their natural desire is to be a class apart, and if they cannot have titles at home, they wish to be received as equals by titled people abroad. That is exactly our present position, and would be the end of the American dream. All past republics have been overthrown by rich men, or nobles, and we have plenty of Sons of the Revolution ready for the job, and plenty of successful soldiers deriding the Constitution, unrebuked by the Executive or by public opinion.
”
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Kory Stamper (Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries)
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it will destroy the authority of the present governors, and absolve the people from subjection to them, since they, having no better claim than others to that power, which is alone the fountain of all authority, can have no title to rule over them.
”
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John Locke (Two Treatises of Government and A Letter Concerning Toleration (Rethinking the Western Tradition))
“
crowning himself emperor, and doling out royal titles to family and friends—putting his brothers on the thrones of Holland and Spain and a trusted general on the throne of Sweden. (The descendants of a common French soldier still reign in Stockholm today.)
”
”
Fareed Zakaria (Age of Revolutions: Progress and Backlash from 1600 to the Present)
“
As the American author Jay Jennifer Matthews puts it in her excellently titled short book Radically Condensed Instructions for Being Just as You Are, ‘We cannot get anything out of life.14 There is no outside where we could take this thing to. There is no little pocket, situated outside of life, [to which we could] steal life’s provisions and squirrel them away. The life of this moment has no outside.’ Living more fully in the present may be simply a matter of finally realising that you never had any other option but to be here now. 9.
”
”
Oliver Burkeman (Four Thousand Weeks: Time and How to Use It)
“
A word as to the title. In the preface of my Human Knowledge I said that I was writing not only for professional philosophers, and that 'philosophy proper deals with matters of interest to the general educated public.' Reviewers took me to task, saying they found parts of the book difficult, and implying that my words were such as to mislead purchasers. I do not wish to expose myself again to this charge; I will therefore confess that there are several sentences in the present volume which some unusually stupid children of ten might find a little puzzling. On this ground I do not claim that the essays are popular; and if not popular, then 'unpopular.
”
”
Bertrand Russell (Unpopular Essays)
“
James O. Incandenza - A Filmography
The following listing is as complete as we can make it. Because the twelve years of Incadenza'a directorial activity also coincided with large shifts in film venue - from public art cinemas, to VCR-capable magnetic recordings, to InterLace TelEntertainment laser dissemination and reviewable storage disk laser cartridges - and because Incadenza's output itself comprises industrial, documentary, conceptual, advertorial, technical, parodic, dramatic non-commercial, nondramatic ('anti-confluential') noncommercial, nondramatic commercial, and dramatic commercial works, this filmmaker's career presents substantive archival challenges. These challenges are also compounded by the fact that, first, for conceptual reasons, Incadenza eschewed both L. of C. registration and formal dating until the advent of Subsidized Time, secondly, that his output increased steadily until during the last years of his life Incadenza often had several works in production at the same time, thirdly, that his production company was privately owned and underwent at least four different changes of corporate name, and lastly that certain of his high-conceptual projects' agendas required that they be titled and subjected to critique but never filmed, making their status as film subject to controversy.
”
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David Foster Wallace (Infinite Jest)
“
It is not what a lawyer tells me I MAY do, but what humanity, reason, and justice tell me I OUGHT to do. Is a politic act the worse for being a generous one? Is no concession proper but that which is made from your want of right to keep what you grant? Or does it lessen the grace or dignity of relaxing in the exercise of an odious claim because you have your evidence-room full of titles, and your magazines stuffed with arms to enforce them? What signify all those titles, and all those arms? Of what avail are they, when the reason of the thing tells me that the assertion of my title is the loss of my suit, and that I could do nothing but wound myself by the use of my own weapons?
”
”
Edmund Burke (THOUGHTS ON THE CAUSE OF THE PRESENT DISCONTENTS VOL 1 CL)
“
You seem disappointed that I am not more responsive to your interest in "spiritual direction". Actually, I am more than a little ambivalent about the term, particularly in the ways it is being used so loosely without any sense of knowledge of the church's traditions in these matters.
If by spiritual direction you mean entering into a friendship with another person in which an awareness and responsiveness to God's Spirit in the everydayness of your life is cultivated, fine. Then why call in an awkward term like "spiritual direction"? Why not just "friend"?
Spiritual direction strikes me as pretentious in these circumstances, as if there were some expertise that can be acquired more or less on its own and then dispensed on demand.
The other reason for my lack of enthusiasm is my well-founded fear of professionalism in any and all matters of the Christian life. Or maybe the right label for my fear is "functionalism". The moment an aspect of Christian living (human life, for that matter) is defined as a role, it is distorted, debased - and eventually destroyed. We are brothers and sisters with one another, friends and lovers, saints and sinners.
The irony here is that the rise of interest in spiritual direction almost certainly comes from the proliferation of role-defined activism in our culture. We are sick and tired of being slotted into a function and then manipulated with Scripture and prayer to do what someone has decided (often with the help of some psychological testing) that we should be doing to bring glory to some religious enterprise or other. And so when people begin to show up who are interested in us just as we are - our souls - we are ready to be paid attention to in this prayerful, listening, non-manipulative, nonfunctional way. Spiritual direction.
But then it begins to develop a culture and language and hierarchy all its own. It becomes first a special interest, and then a specialization. That is what seems to be happening in the circles you are frequenting. I seriously doubt that it is a healthy (holy) line to be pursuing.
Instead, why don't you look over the congregation on Sundays and pick someone who appears to be mature and congenial. Ask her or him if you can meet together every month or so - you feel the need to talk about your life in the company of someone who believes that Jesus is present and active in everything you are doing. Reassure the person that he or she doesn't have to say anything "wise". You only want them to be there for you to listen and be prayerful in the listening. After three or four such meetings, write to me what has transpired, and we'll discuss it further.
I've had a number of men and women who have served me in this way over the years - none carried the title "spiritual director", although that is what they have been. Some had never heard of such a term. When I moved to Canada a few years ago and had to leave a long-term relationship of this sort, I looked around for someone whom I could be with in this way. I picked a man whom I knew to be a person of integrity and prayer, with seasoned Christian wisdom in his bones. I anticipated that he would disqualify himself. So I pre-composed my rebuttal: "All I want you to do is two things: show up and shut up. Can you do that? Meet with me every six weeks or so, and just be there - an honest, prayerful presence with no responsibility to be anything other than what you have become in your obedient lifetime." And it worked. If that is what you mean by "spiritual director," okay. But I still prefer "friend".
You can see now from my comments that my gut feeling is that the most mature and reliable Christian guidance and understanding comes out of the most immediate and local of settings. The ordinary way. We have to break this cultural habit of sending out for an expert every time we feel we need some assistance. Wisdom is not a matter of expertise.
The peace of the Lord,
Eugene
”
”
Eugene H. Peterson (The Wisdom of Each Other (Growing Deeper))
“
The error of those who reason by precedents drawn from antiquity, respecting the rights of man, is that they do not go far enough into antiquity. They do not go the whole way. They stop in some of the intermediate stages of an hundred or a thousand years, and produce what was then done, as a rule for the present day. This is no authority at all. If we travel still farther into antiquity, we shall find a direct contrary opinion and practice prevailing; and if antiquity is to be authority, a thousand such authorities may be produced, successively contradicting each other; but if we proceed on, we shall at last come out right; we shall come to the time when man came from the hand of his Maker. What was he then? Man. Man was his high and only title, and a higher cannot be given him.
”
”
Thomas Paine (Rights of Man)
“
Meantime do you see me as still working on the book, still trying to answer such questions as: Is there any ultimate reality, external, conscious and ever-present etc. etc. that can be realised by any such means that may be acceptable to all creeds and religions and suitable to all climes and countries? Or do you find me between Mercy and Understanding, between Chesed and Binah (but still at Chesed)—my equilibrium, and equilibrium is all, precarious—balancing, teetering over the awful unbridgeable void, the all-but unretraceable path of God’s lightning back to God?...Though it is perhaps a good idea under the circumstances to pretend at least to be proceeding with one's great work on "Secret Knowledge," then one can always say when it never comes out that the title explains this deficiency.
”
”
Malcolm Lowry (Under the Volcano)
“
The hours I spent in this anachronistic, bibliophile, Anglophile retreat were in surreal contrast to the shrieking horror show that was being enacted in the rest of the city. I never felt this more acutely than when, having maneuvered the old boy down the spiral staircase for a rare out-of-doors lunch the next day—terrified of letting him slip and tumble—I got him back upstairs again. He invited me back for even more readings the following morning but I had to decline. I pleaded truthfully that I was booked on a plane for Chile. 'I am so sorry,' said this courteous old genius. 'But may I then offer you a gift in return for your company?' I naturally protested with all the energy of an English middle-class upbringing: couldn't hear of such a thing; pleasure and privilege all mine; no question of accepting any present. He stilled my burblings with an upraised finger. 'You will remember,' he said, 'the lines I will now speak. You will always remember them.' And he then recited the following:
What man has bent o'er his son's sleep, to brood
How that face shall watch his when cold it lies?
Or thought, as his own mother kissed his eyes,
Of what her kiss was when his father wooed?
The title (Sonnet XXIX of Dante Gabriel Rossetti)—'Inclusiveness'—may sound a trifle sickly but the enfolded thought recurred to me more than once after I became a father and Borges was quite right: I have never had to remind myself of the words. I was mumbling my thanks when he said, again with utter composure: 'While you are in Chile do you plan a call on General Pinochet?' I replied with what I hoped was equivalent aplomb that I had no such intention. 'A pity,' came the response. 'He is a true gentleman. He was recently kind enough to award me a literary prize.' It wasn't the ideal note on which to bid Borges farewell, but it was an excellent illustration of something else I was becoming used to noticing—that in contrast or corollary to what Colin MacCabe had said to me in Lisbon, sometimes it was also the right people who took the wrong line.
”
”
Christopher Hitchens (Hitch 22: A Memoir)
“
Thus, the person of experience and reflection writes history. Anyone who has not experienced life on a greater and higher level than everyone else will not know how to interpret the greatness and loftiness of the past. The utterance of the past is always an oracular pronouncement. You will understand it only as builders of the future and as people who know about the present. People now explain the extraordinarily deep and far-reaching effect of Delphi by the particular fact that the Delphic priests had precise knowledge about the past. It is appropriate now to understand that only the man who builds the future has a right to judge the past. In order to look ahead, set yourselves an important goal, and at the same time control that voluptuous analytical drive with which you now lay waste the present and render almost impossible all tranquility, all peaceful growth and maturing. Draw around yourself the fence of a large and extensive hope, an optimistic striving. Create in yourselves a picture to which the future is to correspond, and forget the myth that you are epigones. You have enough to plan and to invent when you imagine that future life for yourselves. But in considering history do not ask that she show you the 'How?' and the 'With what?' If, however, you live your life in the history of great men, then you will learn from history the highest command: to become mature and to flee away from that paralyzing and prohibiting upbringing of the age, which sees advantages for itself in not allowing you to become mature, in order to rule and exploit you, the immature. And when you ask after biographies, then do not ask for those with the refrain 'Mr. Soandso and His Age' but for those whose title page must read 'A Fighter Against His Age.' Fill your souls with Plutarch, and dare to believe in yourselves when you have faith in his heroes. With a hundred people raised in such an unmodern way, that is, people who have become mature and familiar with the heroic, one could permanently silence the entire noisy pseudo-education of this age.
”
”
Friedrich Nietzsche (Untimely Meditations)
“
The so-called cultural element of Western Europe and America,” averred Lenin, speaking of the elite, “are incapable of comprehending the present state of affairs and the actual balance of forces; these elements must be regarded as deaf-mutes [idiots] and treated accordingly.” These so-called useful idiots—the title of a bestselling book on the Cold War by Mona Charen9—were to be major components of the Communists’ campaigns.
”
”
Paul Kengor (Dupes: How America's Adversaries Have Manipulated Progressives for a Century)
“
A New Theory of Biology,” was the title of the paper which Mustapha Mond had just finished reading. He sat for some time, meditatively frowning, then picked up his pen and wrote across the title-page: “The author’s mathematical treatment of the conception of purpose is novel and highly ingenious, but heretical and, so far as the present social order is concerned, dangerous and potentially subversive. Not to be published.” He underlined the words. “The author will be kept under supervision. His transference to the Marine Biological Station of St. Helena may become necessary.” A pity, he thought, as he signed his name. It was a masterly piece of work. But once you began admitting explanations in terms of purpose—well, you didn’t know what the result might be. It was the sort of idea that might easily decondition the more unsettled minds among the higher castes—make them lose their faith in happiness as the Sovereign Good and take to believing, instead, that the goal was somewhere beyond, somewhere outside the present human sphere; that the purpose of life was not the maintenance of well-being, but some intensification and refining of consciousness, some enlargement of knowledge. Which was, the Controller reflected, quite possibly true. But not, in the present circumstance, admissible.
”
”
Aldous Huxley (Brave New World)
“
In 7.81 square miles of vaunted black community, the 850 square feet of Dum Dum Donuts was the only place in the "community" where one could experience the Latin root of the word, where a citizen could revel in common togetherness. So one rainy Sunday afternoon, not long after the tanks and media attention had left, my father ordered his usual. He sat at the table nearest the ATM and said aloud, to no one in particular, "Do you know that the average household net worth for whites is $113,149 per year, Hispanics $6,325, and black folks $5,677?"
"For real?"
"What's your source material, nigger?"
"The Pew Research Center."
Motherfuckers from Harvard to Harlem respect the Pew Research Center, and hearing this, the concerned patrons turned around in their squeaky plastic seats as best they could, given that donut shop swivel chairs swivel only six degrees in either direction. Pops politely asked the manager to dim the lights. I switched on the overhead projector, slid a transparency over the glass, and together we craned our necks toward the ceiling, where a bar graph titled "Income Disparity as Determined by Race" hovered overhead like some dark, damning, statistical cumulonimbus cloud threatening to rain on our collective parades.
"I was wondering what that li'l nigger was doing in a donut shop with a damn overhead projector.
”
”
Paul Beatty (The Sellout)
“
I have written about the “toxic church” I grew up in: a legalistic, angry, racist church in the South. I joke about being “in recovery” from that church, learning along the way that much presented as absolute truth was in fact wrong. As a result, when I began writing I saw myself as someone on the edge, more comfortable asking questions than proposing answers. My early book titles (Where Is God When It Hurts, Disappointment with God) betray what I struggled with and how I
”
”
Philip Yancey (Grace Notes: Daily Readings with Philip Yancey)
“
O Vanity Fair - Vanity Fair! This might have been, but for you, a cheery lass: - Peter Butt and Rose a happy man and wife, in a snug farm, with a hearty family; and an honest portion of pleasures, cares, hopes and struggles. But a title and a coach-and-four are toys more precious than happiness in Vanity Fair: and if Henry the Eight or Bluebeard were alive now, and wanted a tenth wife, do you suppose he could not get the prettiest girl that shall be presented this season?
”
”
William Makepeace Thackeray (Vanity Fair)
“
Those who enter into the possession of valuable estates, secured for them by the toil and struggles of ancestry, do not renounce their estates because they themselves were not consulted in the execution of the title deeds. These deeds of the Covenanters, and the heritage secured by them, were obtained through the noblest sacrifices. They were deeds presented before the Throne, and registered in the Court of heaven, and those who repudiate them incur the risk of an awful forfeiture.
”
”
Various (The Covenants And The Covenanters Covenants, Sermons, and Documents of the Covenanted Reformation)
“
We in the West regard the universe as a creation of God; like an invention or a product. After he created the universe, God set himself to oversee it and manage it. We see God as our boss. He created the universe, he is present in it, he manages every part of it, but he is still separate from it. It's like he installed video cameras all over the universe, so he can see everything that happens, and he can cause this or that to happen, but he is not a part of what happens. The Eastern view is very different. To the Hindu, for example, God didn't create the universe, but God became the universe. Then he forgot that he became the universe. Why would God do this? Basically, for entertainment. You create a universe, and that in itself is very exciting. But then what? Should you sit back and watch this universe of yours having all the fun? No, you should have all the fun yourself. To accomplish this, God transformed into the whole universe. God is the Universe, and everything in it. But the universe doesn't know that because that would ruin the suspense. The universe is God's great drama, and God is the stage, the actors, and the audience all at once. The title of this epic drama is "The Great Unknown Outcome." Throw in potent elements like passion, love, hate, good, evil, free will; and who knows what will happen? No one knows, and that is what keeps the universe interesting. But everyone will have a good time. And there is never really any danger, because everyone is really God, and God is really just playing around.
”
”
Warren Sharpe (Philosophy For The Serious Heretic: The Limitations of Belief and the Derivation of Natural Moral Principles)
“
As the traditional chapter titles put it, the Gita is brahmavidyayam yogashastra, a textbook on the supreme science of yoga. But yoga is a word with many meanings – as many, perhaps, as there are paths to Self-realization. What kind of yoga does the Gita teach? The common answer is that it presents three yogas or even four – the four main paths of Hindu mysticism. In jnana yoga, the yoga of knowledge, aspirants use their will and discrimination to disidentify themselves from the body, mind, and senses until they know they are nothing but the Self. The followers of bhakti yoga, the yoga of devotion, achieve the same goal by identifying themselves completely with the Lord in love; by and large, this is the path taken by most of the mystics of Christianity, Judaism, and Islam. In karma yoga, the yoga of selfless action, the aspirants dissolve their identification with body and mind by identifying with the whole of life, forgetting the finite self in the service of others. And the followers of raja yoga, the yoga of meditation, discipline the mind and senses until the mind-process is suspended in a healing stillness and they merge in the Self.
”
”
Krishna-Dwaipayana Vyasa (The Bhagavad Gita)
“
Miss Lucinda Throckmorton-Jones, former paid companion to several of the ton’s most successful debutantes of prior seasons, came to Havenhurst to fill the position of Elizabeth’s duenna. A woman of fifty with wiry gray hair she scraped back into a bun and the posture of a ramrod, she had a permanently pinched face, as if she smelled something disagreeable but was too well-bred to remark upon it. In addition to the duenna’s daunting physical appearance, Elizabeth observed shortly after their first meeting that Miss Throckmorton-Jones possessed an astonishing ability to sit serenely for hours without twitching so much as a finger.
Elizabeth refused to be put off by her stony demeanor and set about finding a way to thaw her. Teasingly, she called her “Lucy,” and when the casually affectionate nickname won a thunderous frown from the lady, Elizabeth tried to find a different means. She discovered it very soon: A few days after Lucinda came to live at Havenhurst the duenna discovered her curled up in a chair in Havenhurt’s huge library, engrossed in a book. “You enjoy reading?” Lucinda had said gruffly-and with surprise-as she noted the gold embossed title on the volume.
“Yes,” Elizabeth had assured her, smiling. “Do you?”
“Have you read Christopher Marlowe?”
“Yes, but I prefer Shakespeare.”
Thereafter it became their policy each night after supper to debate the merits of the individual books they’d read. Before long Elizabeth realized that she’d won the duenna’s reluctant respect. It was impossible to be certain she’d won Lucinda’s affection, for the only emotion the lady ever displayed was anger, and that only once, at a miscreant tradesman in the village. Even so, it was a display Elizabeth never forgot. Wielding her ever-present umbrella, Lucinda had advanced on the hapless man, backing him clear around his own shop, while from her lips in a icy voice poured the most amazing torrent of eloquent, biting fury Elizabeth had ever heard.
“My temper,” Lucinda had primly informed her-by way of apology, Elizabeth supposed-“is my only shortcoming.”
Privately, Elizabeth thought Lucy must bottle up all her emotions inside herself as she sat perfectly still on sofas and chairs, for years at a time, until it finally exploded like one of those mountains she’d read about that poured forth molten rock when the pressure finally reached a peak.
”
”
Judith McNaught (Almost Heaven (Sequels, #3))
“
The people who have been known as PR experts—and still go by that title—have now turned into a combina- tion of publishers, reporters, and editors.
We are publishers because we own media. We control the social media profiles and pages of our clients. We have their blogs and their websites.
We are reporters because we have to fill up all those media chan- nels with relevant content.
We are editors because that content has got to be created, designed, arranged, structured, and presented in the best way pos- sible so that it can be convincing, attention-grabbing, and—most important—efficient.
”
”
Maxim Behar (The Global PR Revolution: How Thought Leaders Succeed in the Transformed World of PR)
“
Un début dans la vie was serialised in the review La Législature in 1842 under the title Le Danger des mystifications. In 1845 it appeared under its present title in the second Furne edition of La Comédie humaine. Balzac wrote the novel during one of his many visits to the commune of L’Isle-Adam in Val-d’Oise, a few kilometres north of Paris. Un début dans la vie is based on a short-story by Balzac’s sister Laure Surville, which was later published in 1854 under the title Le Voyage en coucou (The Journey in a Rickety Carriage). Balzac retold the story, transforming it into a profound study of human vanity and its consequences.
”
”
Honoré de Balzac (Works of Honore de Balzac)
“
A VALEDICTION: OF THE BOOK I'll tell thee now (dear love) what thou shalt do To anger destiny, as she doth us; How I shall stay, though she eloign me thus, And how posterity shall know it too; How thine may out-endure Sibyl's glory, and obscure Her who from Pindar could allure, And her, through whose help Lucan is not lame, And her, whose book (they say) Homer did find, and name. Study our manuscripts, those myriads Of letters, which have past 'twixt thee and me; Thence write our annals, and in them will be To all whom love's subliming fire invades, Rule and example found; There the faith of any ground No schismatic will dare to wound, That sees, how Love this grace to us affords, To make, to keep, to use, to be these his records. This book, as long-lived as the elements, Or as the world's form, this all-graved tome In cypher writ, or new made idiom; We for Love's clergy only are instruments; When this book is made thus, Should again the ravenous Vandals and Goths invade us, Learning were safe; in this our universe, Schools might learn sciences, spheres music, angels verse. Here Love's divines—since all divinity Is love or wonder—may find all they seek, Whether abstract spiritual love they like, Their souls exhaled with what they do not see; Or, loth so to amuse Faith's infirmity, they choose Something which they may see and use; For, though mind be the heaven, where love doth sit, Beauty a convenient type may be to figure it. Here more than in their books may lawyers find, Both by what titles mistresses are ours, And how prerogative these states devours, Transferred from Love himself, to womankind; Who, though from heart and eyes, They exact great subsidies, Forsake him who on them relies; And for the cause, honour, or conscience give; Chimeras vain as they or their prerogative. Here statesmen, (or of them, they which can read) May of their occupation find the grounds; Love, and their art, alike it deadly wounds, If to consider what 'tis, one proceed. In both they do excel Who the present govern well, Whose weakness none doth, or dares tell; In this thy book, such will there something see, As in the Bible some can find out alchemy. Thus vent thy thoughts; abroad I'll study thee, As he removes far off, that great heights takes; How great love is, presence best trial makes, But absence tries how long this love will be; To take a latitude Sun, or stars, are fitliest viewed At their brightest, but to conclude Of longitudes, what other way have we, But to mark when and where the dark eclipses be?
”
”
John Donne (The Love Poems)
“
In an article titled "The Ex-Communists," she analyzed how these McCarthy loyalists had simply switched allegiances. Instead of demanding communism as they had earlier, they now called for unconditional loyalty and cooperation in denouncing others for the sake of freedom and democracy. They still had a cause, just a different one from before. The new cause, the right cause, she continued, had a totalitarian catch to it. By turning democracy "into a cause," something that would arrive in the future and to which the present must be devoted, the present became unfree. The idea of futurity destroyed the present moment.
How could one escape this destruction of the present by fear of the future....?
”
”
Marie Luise Knott (Unlearning with Hannah Arendt)
“
What have I done, Anna, to earn your use of my title?” “I cannot be sure we are private,” she said then blinked at her tactical error. “And I do not believe such familiarity wise.” “Ah.” He backed away, leaning on the desk, arms crossed. “Shall we discuss this change of heart on your part? You’ve been avoiding me since we got back to Town, and don’t think to tell me otherwise.” “You are no longer ill,” she said, raising her chin. “And you are capable of dressing yourself.” “Barely,” he said with a snort. “So tell me, how am I to court you if you won’t stay in the same room with me? How am I to persuade you to marry me if you maneuver always to have others present when I am about? You aren’t playing fair, Anna.” She
”
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Grace Burrowes (The Heir (Duke's Obsession, #1; Windham, #1))
“
Dr. King constantly warned us that we would not be able to build a truly liberatory movement without the “strength to love.” In his 1963 book of the same title, he wrote: We Negroes have long dreamed of freedom, but still we are confined in an oppressive prison of segregation and discrimination. Must we respond with bitterness and cynicism? Certainly not, for this will destroy and poison our personalities…. To guard ourselves from bitterness, we need the vision to see in this generation’s ordeals the opportunity to transfigure both ourselves and American society. Our present suffering and our nonviolent struggle to be free may well offer to Western civilization the kind of spiritual dynamic so desperately needed for survival.
”
”
Robin D.G. Kelley (Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination)
“
Demonic Possession: Fact or Fancy? it said, and as I read the title I distinctly heard the far-off sound of a nickel dropping. It would be very easy for an outside observer to shake his head and say, Yes, obviously, Dexter is a dull boy if he has never thought of that. But the truth is, I had not. Demon has so many negative connotations, doesn’t it? And as long as the Presence was present, there seemed no need to define it in those arcane terms. It was only now that it was gone that I required some explanation. And why not this one? It was a bit old-fashioned, but its very hoariness seemed to argue that there might be something to it, some connection that went back to the nonsense with Solomon and Moloch and all the way up to what was happening to me today.
”
”
Jeff Lindsay (Dexter in the Dark (Dexter, #3))
“
It might be useful here to say a word about Beckett, as a link between the two stages, and as illustrating the shift towards schism. He wrote for transition, an apocalyptic magazine (renovation out of decadence, a Joachite indication in the title), and has often shown a flair for apocalyptic variations, the funniest of which is the frustrated millennialism of the Lynch family in Watt, and the most telling, perhaps, the conclusion of Comment c'est. He is the perverse theologian of a world which has suffered a Fall, experienced an Incarnation which changes all relations of past, present, and future, but which will not be redeemed. Time is an endless transition from one condition of misery to another, 'a passion without form or stations,' to be ended by no parousia. It is a world crying out for forms and stations, and for apocalypse; all it gets is vain temporality, mad, multiform antithetical influx.
It would be wrong to think that the negatives of Beckett are a denial of the paradigm in favour of reality in all its poverty. In Proust, whom Beckett so admires, the order, the forms of the passion, all derive from the last book; they are positive. In Beckett, the signs of order and form are more or less continuously presented, but always with a sign of cancellation; they are resources not to be believed in, cheques which will bounce. Order, the Christian paradigm, he suggests, is no longer usable except as an irony; that is why the Rooneys collapse in laughter when they read on the Wayside Pulpit that the Lord will uphold all that fall.
But of course it is this order, however ironized, this continuously transmitted idea of order, that makes Beckett's point, and provides his books with the structural and linguistic features which enable us to make sense of them. In his progress he has presumed upon our familiarity with his habits of language and structure to make the relation between the occulted forms and the narrative surface more and more tenuous; in Comment c'est he mimes a virtually schismatic breakdown of this relation, and of his language. This is perfectly possible to reach a point along this line where nothing whatever is communicated, but of course Beckett has not reached it by a long way; and whatever preserves intelligibility is what prevents schism.
This is, I think, a point to be remembered whenever one considers extremely novel, avant-garde writing. Schism is meaningless without reference to some prior condition; the absolutely New is simply unintelligible, even as novelty. It may, of course, be asked: unintelligible to whom? --the inference being that a minority public, perhaps very small--members of a circle in a square world--do understand the terms in which the new thing speaks. And certainly the minority public is a recognized feature of modern literature, and certainly conditions are such that there may be many small minorities instead of one large one; and certainly this is in itself schismatic. The history of European literature, from the time the imagination's Latin first made an accommodation with the lingua franca, is in part the history of the education of a public--cultivated but not necessarily learned, as Auerbach says, made up of what he calls la cour et la ville. That this public should break up into specialized schools, and their language grow scholastic, would only be surprising if one thought that the existence of excellent mechanical means of communication implied excellent communications, and we know it does not, McLuhan's 'the medium is the message' notwithstanding. But it is still true that novelty of itself implies the existence of what is not novel, a past. The smaller the circle, and the more ambitious its schemes of renovation, the less useful, on the whole, its past will be. And the shorter. I will return to these points in a moment.
”
”
Frank Kermode (The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction)
“
Why in the world a book on Christ for Unitarian Universalists (UUs)? Less than 20 percent of us identify as Christians.1 But more than 70 percent of Americans identify as Christian, and we UUs are only 0.3 percent of America at best.2 So, primarily, this is a book to help us talk intelligently about Christ with our Christian friends. We Unitarian Universalists actually have had a lot to say about Christ over the years as well (that is, centuries, and perhaps even millennia), and we have generally done that in dialogue with mainstream Christians. But not much anymore. This book is meant to encourage us to do so again, not just by referencing our history, but also by speaking freshly as Unitarian Universalists in the twenty-first century.
Why in the world a book on Christ for Unitarian Universalists, when we virtually never use that title for the historical figure
of Jesus of Nazareth? Again, primarily because that’s how the rest of the world speaks. They refer to themselves and others who stand in the tradition of Jesus as Christ-ians, not Jesus-ians. Why? Because they tend to be less interested in the Jesus of history than in the Christ of their present faith. Jesus lives with them in their daily lives now as the Christ. Christ is an honorific title that technically means “the anointed one” of God. For most Christians, Jesus is the post-Easter Christ, the resurrected Christ, who is actually with them now in real time—who companions them and comforts them and challenges them in their daily lives—not just a prophet and teacher of first-century Israel.
”
”
Scotty McLennan (Christ For Unitarian Universalists)
“
Wendell and I would spend the next several months traveling his realm. Our realm. I must get used to that. I would take copious notes all the while, no doubt filling several of the ridiculous journals the bookbinders kept churning out, and stumbling across so many research questions it would take me ten lifetimes to tackle them all. And after that, who knows? I have my compendium of tales to finish--- I plan to gather stories as Wendell and I travel, adding them to the small hoard I've already collected. My presence is not required in the mortal world until October, when I will be delivering a presentation on several key findings in my map-book, which shall be published in a month's time. When the Berlin Academy of Folklorists sends you an invitation to their annual conference, you cannot say no.
”
”
Heather Fawcett (Emily Wilde's Compendium of Lost Tales (Emily Wilde, #3))
“
Mademoiselle de Verneuil began to study the young man from the vantage-ground of her position with coolness and dignity; at the bottom of her heart she admired his courage and tranquillity. Happy in discovering that the man she loved bore an ancient title (the distinctions of which please every woman), she also found pleasure in meeting him in their present situation, where, as champion of a cause ennobled by misfortune, he was fighting with all the faculties of a strong soul against a Republic that was constantly victorious. She rejoiced to see him brought face to face with danger, and still displaying the courage and bravery so powerful on a woman’s heart; again and again she put him to the test, obeying perhaps the instinct which induces a woman to play with her victim as a cat plays with a mouse.
”
”
Honoré de Balzac (Works of Honore de Balzac)
“
When Nietzsche made his famous definition of tragic pleasure he fixed his eyes, like all the other philosophers in like case, not on the Muse herself but on a single tragedian. His “reaffirmation of the will to live in the face of death, and the joy of its inexhaustibility when so reaffirmed” is not the tragedy of Sophocles nor the tragedy of Euripides, but it is the very essence of the tragedy of Æschylus. The strange power tragedy has to present suffering and death in such a way as to exalt and not depress is to be felt in Æschylus’ plays as in those of no other tragic poet. He was the first tragedian; tragedy was his creation, and he set upon it the stamp of his own spirit. It was a soldier-spirit. Æschylus was a Marathon-warrior, the title given to each of the little band who had beaten back the earlier tremendous Persian onslaught.
”
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Edith Hamilton (The Greek Way)
“
For my speaking gigs, the title of my presentation is always the same: 'The journey of a hero'. I learned from writer Joseph Campbell, that a hero is someone born into a world where they don’t fit in. They are then summoned on a call to an adventure that they are reluctant to take. What is the adventure? A revolutionary transformation of self. The final goal is to find the elixir. The magic potion that is the answer to unlocking HER. Then she comes "home" to this ordinary life transformed and shares her story of survival with others...
My journey was like a war movie, where at the end, the hero has been bruised and bloodied, traumatized from witnessing untold amounts of death and destruction, and so damaged that she cannot go back to being the same woman who went to war.
She may have even seen her death but was somehow resurrected. But to go on THAT journey, I had to be armed with the courage of a lioness...
Individuals on the journey eventually find themselves experiencing a baptism by fire. It's that moment when they are just about to lose their lives, and they, miraculously, courageously find the answer that gives their life meaning. And that meaning saves them.
In the words of Joseph Campbell, in "The Hero with a Thousand Faces", "The call to adventure signifies that destiny has summoned the hero. The hero, whether god or goddess, man or woman, the figure in a myth, or the dreamer in a dream, discovers and assimilates his opposites, his own unsuccessful self, either by swallowing it or being swallowed.
I still see my younger self so clearly from that fateful day in my therapist's office. She stands up, in tears, on a mound of snow. Pissed off, she shouts, "Bitch!!! I'm not going to be swallowed!
”
”
Viola Davis (Finding Me)
“
Gay men were at the forefront of that community of misfits, happy to have found in Garland a performer whose tragedy and resilience (like their own) went hand in hand. Those “boys in the tight trousers,” her “ever-present little bluebirds” 10 as Time magazine euphemistically referred to them at the time (William Goldman was not so kind, outright talking about the “flutter of fags” 11 that filled up Garland’s closing night at The Palace in 1967), were drawn to Garland precisely because she spoke their language. As queer theorist David M. Halperin notes in his cheekily titled book How to Be Gay, this had little to do with a synchronous identification: Garland “wasn’t a gay man,” he writes, “but in certain respects she could express gay desire, what gay men want, better than a gay man could. That is, she could actually convey something even gayer than gay identity itself.” 12
”
”
Manuel Betancourt (Judy at Carnegie Hall)
“
Markkula wrote his principles in a one-page paper titled “The Apple Marketing Philosophy” that stressed three points. The first was empathy, an intimate connection with the feelings of the customer: “We will truly understand their needs better than any other company.” The second was focus: “In order to do a good job of those things that we decide to do, we must eliminate all of the unimportant opportunities.” The third and equally important principle, awkwardly named, was impute. It emphasized that people form an opinion about a company or product based on the signals that it conveys. “People DO judge a book by its cover,” he wrote. “We may have the best product, the highest quality, the most useful software etc.; if we present them in a slipshod manner, they will be perceived as slipshod; if we present them in a creative, professional manner, we will impute the desired qualities.
”
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Walter Isaacson (Steve Jobs)
“
Life cannot offer many places finer to stand at eight-thirty on a summery weekday morning than Circular Quay in Sydney. To begin with, it presents one of the world’s great views. To the right, almost painfully brilliant in the sunshine, stands the famous Opera House with its jaunty, severely angular roof. To the left, the stupendous and noble Harbour Bridge. Across the water, shiny and beckoning, is Luna Park, a Coney Island–style amusement park with a maniacally grinning head for an entrance. (It’s been closed for many years, but some heroic soul keeps it spruce and gleaming.) Before you the spangly water is crowded with the harbor’s stout and old-fashioned ferries, looking for all the world as if they have been plucked from the pages of a 1940s children’s book with a title like Thomas the Tugboat, disgorging streams of tanned and lightly dressed office workers to fill the glass and concrete towers that loom behind.
”
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Bill Bryson (In a Sunburned Country)
“
In the fall of 2000 I started getting calls and emails from people asking me to erase their memories. Karim Nader, Glenn Schafe, and I had recently published a paper in the journal Nature with a rather technical title, “Fear Memories Require Protein Synthesis in the Lateral Amygdala for Reconsolidation after Retrieval.”3 In this study we conditioned rats with a tone and shock and then later presented them with the tone alone after a drug that blocks protein synthesis had been infused in the lateral amygdala (LA), a key area of the amygdala where the tone-shock association is stored. When tested the following day, or at any time afterward, the rats behaved as though they had never been conditioned. The procedure, in other words, seemed to erase the memory that the tone was a signal of danger. Toward the end of the short piece, we proposed that it might be possible to use a technique like this (but without having to inject a drug directly into the amygdala) to dampen traumatic memory in people with PTSD.
”
”
Joseph E. LeDoux (Anxious)
“
Untold numbers of readers of Black Elk Speaks and When the Tree Flowered have wished to understand more fully the relationship between Neihardt and Black Elk and the role that Neihardt played as Black Elk's amanuensis. They have also been curious to learn about Black Elk's life after the Wounded Knee massacre. How was it that a nineteenth-century Lakota mystic could live a full half of the twentieth century on the Pine Ridge Reservation in harmony with the encroaching white man's world?
The Sixth Grandfather is presented in order to help readers answer these questions. The title of the book is doubly appropriate. Black Elk, in his great vision, saw himself as the "sixth grandfather," the spirit of the earth, the power to nurture and make grow. Symbolically, Black Elk's teachings, transmitted through Neihardt, have had a marvelous generative power: they have grown and blossomed and become an inspiration for millions, Indians and non-Indians alike. Through Neihardt's writings, the sacred tree of Black Elk's vision has truly conic to bloom.
”
”
Raymond J. Demallie (The Sixth Grandfather: Black Elk's Teachings Given to John G. Neihardt)
“
The Golden Bough captured the imagination of many artists in the early twentieth century. Eliot, certainly, was immersed in it, discussing it familiarly in his graduate school papers and book reviews and constantly alluding to it in his art. The most straightforward advice he offers to readers of The Waste Land (given in the notes to the poem) is, in paraphrase, that any serious reader of the poem must take into consideration modern scholarship in myth and anthropology, especially Frazer Golden Bough and Jessie Weston From Ritual to Romance. The poet says that he is indebted to this scholarship for his title, his plan, his symbolism, and many of his references to ancient religion and society. His claim about the title, taken from the monomyth of Frazer and Weston, his claim about the symbolism, associated with the birth-death-rebirth cycles of the myths, and his claim about the miscellaneous undergirding references have been discussed by Grover Smith and other scholars. We wish to focus more on Eliot's claim about being indebted to Frazer for the plan of the poem. We believe it refers, at least in part, to Frazer's use of the comparative method and to his practice of assembling many perspectives and allowing these perspectives to make his point.
It must be noted at once that Eliot was quite selective in his admiration of Frazer. For example, he did not admire Frazer's positivism. Frazer put his faith in science and celebrated what he called the evolution from magic to religion to science. Nor did Eliot share Frazer's conclusions. In his 1913 paper on the interpretation of primitive ritual, he says that Frazer's interpretations of specific myths (the myth of the dying god is his example) are almost certainly mistaken. But Eliot did admire Frazer's erudition and his increasingly nontheoretical presentation of many angles of vision which in themselves tend to generate an overarching abstract primitive vision. In 1924, on the occasion of the publication of a condensed edition of The Golden Bough, Eliot wrote a review in which he lauded Frazer for having "extended the consciousness of the human mind into as dark a backward and abysm of time as has yet been explored." Eliot argues that Frazer's importance for artists is in his exemplary withdrawal from speculation, his adoption of the absence of interpretation as a positive modus operandi.
”
”
Jewel Spears Brooker (Reading the Waste Land: Modernism and the Limits of Interpretation)
“
Whatever their DNA contribution to the region, the Brahmins did bring
with them from India three crucial gifts that proved irresistible right across
the region: Sanskrit, the art of writing and the stories of the great Indian
epics.
No Indian import had a deeper or more long-lasting impact than the
deeds of the heroes of the Mahabharata and the Ramayana. From the fifth
century, right on through to the dance and shadow puppetry of the present
day, these would remain a major feature in the art and culture of South-east
Asia.26 In time, even the landscape of South-east Asia began to be renamed
under the influence of the great epics and the stories of their respective
heroes, the Pandava brothers and Lord Rama.
The earliest inscription in Khmer territories dating from the fifth century
records that a ruler in what is now Laos took the Indic name Devanika and
the grandiose Sanskrit title Maharajadhiraja, ‘King of Kings’. This
happened during a ceremony when the King installed an image of Shiva
under the lingam-shaped mountain that towered over his capital of
Champasak. There he consecrated a tank which he named Kurukshetra,
after the plain to the north of Delhi where the great battle of the
Mahabharata was fought
”
”
William Dalrymple (The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World)
“
was home plate, where Bill Mazeroski completed his electrifying home run while Umpire Bill Jackowski, broad back braced and arms spread, held off the mob long enough for Bill to make it legal. Pittsburgh’s steel mills couldn’t have made more noise than the crowd in this ancient park did when Mazeroski smashed Yankee Ralph Terry’s second pitch of the ninth inning. By the time the ball sailed over the ivy-covered brick wall, the rush from the stands had begun and these sudden madmen threatened to keep Maz from touching the plate with the run that beat the lordly Yankees, 10–9, for the title. Bear in mind that the story was written not at leisure but amid the din and distraction of a crowded press box in the immediate whooping aftermath of the game. Nor could a single thought or neat phrase (like “broad back braced and arms spread”) have been prepared in advance and casually dropped into the text. Since Mazeroski’s home run rudely upended a nation’s confident expectations of a victory by “the lordly Yankees,” every sportswriter present had to discard whatever he’d had in mind to say, even one batter earlier, and start afresh. Search as you will, you won’t find a better World Series game report on file anywhere, unless it was another
”
”
Bill Bryson (The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid)
“
Sometimes life could be astonishingly efficient in dispensing mortifications. In the space of a minute, she would be exposed before three male visitors to be both freakishly tall and an abominably poor sculptor. What would come next? Perhaps her father would invite the men to count her freckles, one by one. They’d be here until moonrise.
Suddenly, Bramwell was at her side.
“This?” he asked, touching a finger to the model’s edge.
She cringed, wishing she could deny it. “Yes, thank you.”
As he retrieved the model from the shelf, she stole glances at him out of the corner of her eye. She had to admit, the Rycliff title suited him. Give the man a mace and a chain mail vest, and she could easily have mistaken him for a medieval warrior, squeezed through some rocky gap in the centuries to emerge in modern day. From the sheer size of him, large and solid all over, to that squared jaw, shadowed with a day’s or more growth of whiskers. He moved with more power than grace, and he wore his dark hair long, tied back at his nape with a bit of leather cord. And the way he’d looked at her just before that kiss-as though he would devour her, and she would enjoy it-was straight from the Dark Ages.
As he presented the crumbling mess of sun-dried clay and pasted-on moss, Susanna fought the urge to blow dust off the thing. Evidently the maids couldn’t reach this shelf, either.
“Isn’t it clever?” Her father took the model from Bramwell’s hands and held it up. “Susanna made this when she was fifteen years old.”
“Fourteen,” she corrected, cursing herself a moment later. Because “fourteen” somehow made it better?
”
”
Tessa Dare (A Night to Surrender (Spindle Cove, #1))
“
Suppose, and the facts leave us quite free to suppose it, suppose that the latent sapiens in us succeeds in its urge to rationalize life, suppose we do satisfy our dogmatic demand for freedom, equality, universal abundance, lives of achievement, hope and cooperation throughout this still largely unexplored and undeveloped planet, and find ourselves all the better for having done so. It can be done. It may be done. Suppose it done. Surely that in itself will be good living.
“But,” says that dead end; that human blight, Mr. Chamble Pewter, making his point with a squeak in his voice and tears of controversial bitterness in his eyes, “What is the good of it? Will there be any finality in your success?” he asks.
None whatever, is the answer. Why should there be? Yet a vista of innumerable happy generations, an abundance of life at present inconceivable, and at the end, not extinction necessarily, not immortality, but complete uncertainty, is surely sufficient prospect for the present. We are not yet Homo sapiens, but when at last our intermingled and selected offspring, carrying on the life that is now in us, when they, who are indeed ourselves, our heredity of body, thought and will, reassembled and enhanced, have established their claim to that title — can we doubt that they will be facing things at present unimaginable, weighing pros and cons altogether beyond our scope? They will see far and wide in an ever-growing light while we see as in a glass darkly. Things yet unimaginable. They may be good by our current orientation of things; they may be evil. Why should they not be in the nature of our good and much more than our good —“beyond good and evil?
”
”
H.G. Wells (You Can't Be Too Careful)
“
To sum up: history is written by the experienced and superior man. He who has not experienced greater and more exalted things than others will not know how to interpret the great and exalted things of the past.When the past speaks it always speaks as an oracle: only if you are an architect of the future and know the present will you understand it. The extraordinary degree and extent of the influence exercised by Delphi is nowadays explained principally by the fact that the Delphic priests had an exact knowledge of the past; now it would be right to say that only he who constructs the future has a right to judge the past. If you look ahead and set yourself a great goal, you at the same time restrain that rank analytical impulse which makes the present into a desert and all tranquillity, all peaceful growth and maturing almost impossible. Draw about yourself the fence of a great and comprehensive hope, of a hope-filled striving. Form within yourself an image to which the future shall correspond, and forget the superstition that you are epigones. You will have enough to ponder and to invent when you reflect on the life of the future; but do not ask of history that it should show you the How? and the Wherewith? to this life. If, on the other hand, you acquire a living knowledge of the history of great men, you will learn from it a supreme commandment: to become mature and to flee from that paralyzing upbringing of the present age which sees its advantage in preventing your growth so as to rule and exploit you to the full while you are still immature. And if you want biographies, do not desire those which bear the legend ‘Herr So-and-So and his age’, but those upon whose title-page there would stand ‘a fighter against his age’.
”
”
Friedrich Nietzsche (Untimely Meditations)
“
expected that it would go on to have such a long and varied life. I started with a very simple image of two boys sitting on either side of a fence, talking to each other, and was immediately interested in the journey that would bring them there, the conversations they would have, and the necessary end that I felt their story would reach. Ten years later, the novel not only changed my life but introduced me to people whom I had never expected to encounter. In my travels, I’ve been fortunate to meet survivors of the many death camps that were built around Europe during the early 1940s and to hear their stories firsthand, as well as descendants of the murdered, who have been generous enough to share their memories and grief with me. It’s been a privilege to be present for such moments and to take part in such emotive conversations. There are two things that interest me above all others in young people’s literature, and I’ve returned to them several times in subsequent books: the manner in which war affects and destroys the experience of childhood, which is supposed to be a happy and carefree period, and what it means for a child to be thrust into an adult situation far ahead of time. The heroes of my novels are, like Bruno, always optimistic, resourceful, and a little naïve, and they don’t want an adult to solve their problems for them, even when they’re not always capable of solving them themselves. They’re growing up surrounded by confusion and trying to make sense of it all. Sometimes they succeed and sometimes the chaos overwhelms them. But they’re never defeated. I will always be grateful to those millions of readers who allowed The Boy in the Striped Pajamas into their lives, those who have been moved by the story and, indeed, those who have taken issue with aspects of it and been vocal in their antipathy. After all, the great joy of literature, as opposed to politics or religion, is that it embraces differing opinions, it encourages debate, it allows us to have heated conversations with our closest friends and dearest loved ones. And through it all, no one gets hurt, no one gets taken away from their homes, and no one gets killed. Contents Cover Title Page Copyright Dedication Acknowledgements Introduction
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John Boyne (The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas)
“
That the life of Man is but a dream has been sensed by many a one, and I too am never free of the feeling. When I consider the restrictions that are placed on the active, inquiring energies of Man; when I see that all our efforts have no other result than to satisfy needs which in turn serve no purpose but to prolong our wretched existence, and then see that all our reassurance concerning the particular questions we probe is no more than dreamy resignation, since all we are doing is to paint our prison walls with colourful figures and bright views – all of this, Wilhelm, leaves me silent. I withdraw into myself, and discover a world, albeit a notional world of dark desire rather than one of actuality and vital strength. And everything swims before my senses, and I go my way in the world wearing the smile of the dreamer.
All our learned teachers and educators are agreed that children do not know why they want what they want; but no one is willing to believe that adults too, like children, wander about this earth in a daze and, like children, do not know where they come from or where they are going, act as rarely as they do according to genuine motives, and are as thoroughly governed as they are by biscuits and cake and the rod. And yet it seems palpably clear to me.
I gladly confess, since I know the reply you would want to make, that they are the happiest who, like children, live for the present moment, drag their dolls around and dress and undress them, and watchfully steal by the drawer where Mama has locked away the cake, and, when at last they get their hands on what they want, devour it with their cheeks crammed full and cry, ‘More!’ – They are happy creatures. And those others, who give pompous titles to their beggarly pursuits and even to their passions, and chalk them up as vast enterprises for the good and well-being of mankind, they too are happy. – It is all very well for those who can be like that! But he who humbly perceives where it is all leading, who sees how prettily the happy man makes an Eden of his garden, and how even the unhappy man goes willingly on his weary way, panting beneath his burden, and that all are equally interested in seeing the light of the sun for one minute more – he indeed will be silent, and will create a world from within for himself, and be happy because he is a man. And then, confined as he may be, he none the less still preserves in his heart the sweet sensation of freedom, and the knowledge he can quit this prison whenever he wishes.
”
”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (The Sorrows of Young Werther)
“
Article VI No State, without the consent of the United States in Congress assembled, shall send any embassy to, or receive any embassy from, or enter into any conference, agreement, alliance or treaty with any King, Prince or State; nor shall any person holding any office of profit or trust under the United States, or any of them, accept any present, emolument, office or title of any kind whatever from any King, Prince or foreign State; nor shall the United States in Congress assembled, or any of them, grant any title of nobility. No two or more States shall enter into any treaty, confederation or alliance whatever between them, without the consent of the United States in Congress assembled, specifying accurately the purposes for which the same is to be entered into, and how long it shall continue. No State shall lay any imposts or duties, which may interfere with any stipulations in treaties, entered into by the United States in Congress assembled, with any King, Prince or State, in pursuance of any treaties already proposed by Congress, to the courts of France and Spain. No vessel of war shall be kept up in time of peace by any State, except such number only, as shall be deemed necessary by the United States in Congress assembled, for the defense of such State, or its trade; nor shall any body of forces be kept up by any State in time of peace, except such number only, as in the judgement of the United States in Congress assembled, shall be deemed requisite to garrison the forts necessary for the defense of such State; but every State shall always keep up a well-regulated and disciplined militia, sufficiently armed and accoutered, and shall provide and constantly have ready for use, in public stores, a due number of filed pieces and tents, and a proper quantity of arms, ammunition and camp equipage. No State shall engage in any war without the consent of the United States in Congress assembled, unless such State be actually invaded by enemies, or shall have received certain advice of a resolution being formed by some nation of Indians to invade such State, and the danger is so imminent as not to admit of a delay till the United States in Congress assembled can be consulted; nor shall any State grant commissions to any ships or vessels of war, nor letters of marque or reprisal, except it be after a declaration of war by the United States in Congress assembled, and then only against the Kingdom or State and the subjects thereof, against which war has been so declared, and under such regulations as shall be established by the United States in Congress assembled, unless such State be infested by pirates, in which case vessels of war may be fitted out for that occasion, and kept so long as the danger shall continue, or until the United States in Congress assembled shall determine otherwise.
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Benjamin Franklin (The Articles of Confederation)
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I have come, my lovely,” Roddy said with his usual sardonic grin as he swept her a deep bow, “in answer to your urgent summons-and, I might add,-“ he continued, “before I presented myself at the Willingtons’, exactly as your message instructed.” At 5’10”, Roddy Carstairs was a slender man of athletic build with thinning brown hair and light blue eyes. In fact, his only distinguishing characteristics were his fastidiously tailored clothes, a much-envied ability to tie a neckcloth into magnificently intricate folds that never drooped, and an acid wit that accepted no boundaries when he chose a human target. “Did you hear about Kensington?”
“Who?” Alex said absently, trying to think of the best means to persuade him to do what she needed done.
“The new Marquess of Kensington, once known as Mr. Ian Thornton, persona non grata. Amazing, is it not, what wealth and title will do?” he continued, studying Alex’s tense face as he continued, “Two years ago we wouldn’t have let him past the front door. Six months ago word got out that he’s worth a fortune, and we started inviting him to our parties. Tonight he’s the heir to a dukedom, and we’ll be coveting invitations to his parties. We are”-Roddy grinned-“when you consider matters from this point of view, a rather sickening and fickle lot.”
In spite of herself, Alexandra laughed. “Oh, Roddy,” she said, pressing a kiss on his cheek. “You always make me laugh, even when I’m in the most dreadful coil, which I am now. You could make things so very much better-if you would.”
Roddy helped himself to a pinch of snuff, lifted his arrogant brows, and waited, his look both suspicious and intrigued. “I am, of course, your most obedient servant,” he drawled with a little mocking bow.
Despite that claim, Alexandra knew better. While other men might be feared for their tempers or their skill with rapier and pistol, Roddy Carstairs was feared for his cutting barbs and razor tongue. And, while one could not carry a rapier or a pistol into a ball, Roddy could do his damage there unimpeded. Even sophisticated matrons lived in fear of being on the wrong side of him. Alex knew exactly how deadly he could be-and how helpful, for he had made her life a living hell when she came to London the first time. Later he had done a complete turnabout, and it had been Roddy who had forced the ton to accept her. He had done it not out of friendship or guilt; he had done it because he’d decided it would be amusing to test his power by building a reputation for a change, instead of shredding it.
“There is a young woman whose name I’ll reveal in a moment,” Alex began cautiously, “to whom you could be of great service. You could, in fact, rescue her as you did me long ago, Roddy, if only you would.”
“Once was enough,” he mocked. “I could hardly hold my head up for shame when I thought of my unprecedented gallantry.”
“She’s incredibly beautiful,” Alex said.
A mild spark of interest showed in Roddy’s eyes, but nothing stronger. While other men might be affected by feminine beauty, Roddy generally took pleasure in pointing out one’s faults for the glee of it. He enjoyed flustering women and never hesitated to do it. But when he decided to be kind he was the most loyal of friends.
”
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Judith McNaught (Almost Heaven (Sequels, #3))
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Doremus Jessup, so inconspicuous an observer, watching Senator Windrip from so humble a Boeotia, could not explain his power of bewitching large audiences. The Senator was vulgar, almost illiterate, a public liar easily detected, and in his "ideas" almost idiotic, while his celebrated piety was that of a traveling salesman for church furniture, and his yet more celebrated humor the sly cynicism of a country store.
Certainly there was nothing exhilarating in the actual words of his speeches, nor anything convincing in his philosophy. His political platforms were only wings of a windmill. Seven years before his present credo—derived from Lee Sarason, Hitler, Gottfried Feder, Rocco, and probably the revue Of Thee I Sing—little Buzz, back home, had advocated nothing more revolutionary than better beef stew in the county poor-farms, and plenty of graft for loyal machine politicians, with jobs for their brothers-in-law, nephews, law partners, and creditors.
Doremus had never heard Windrip during one of his orgasms of oratory, but he had been told by political reporters that under the spell you thought Windrip was Plato, but that on the way home you could not remember anything he had said.
There were two things, they told Doremus, that distinguished this prairie Demosthenes. He was an actor of genius. There was no more overwhelming actor on the stage, in the motion pictures, nor even in the pulpit. He would whirl arms, bang tables, glare from mad eyes, vomit Biblical wrath from a gaping mouth; but he would also coo like a nursing mother, beseech like an aching lover, and in between tricks would coldly and almost contemptuously jab his crowds with figures and facts—figures and facts that were inescapable even when, as often happened, they were entirely incorrect.
But below this surface stagecraft was his uncommon natural ability to be authentically excited by and with his audience, and they by and with him. He could dramatize his assertion that he was neither a Nazi nor a Fascist but a Democrat—a homespun Jeffersonian-Lincolnian-Clevelandian-Wilsonian Democrat—and (sans scenery and costume) make you see him veritably defending the Capitol against barbarian hordes, the while he innocently presented as his own warm-hearted Democratic inventions, every anti-libertarian, anti-Semitic madness of Europe.
Aside from his dramatic glory, Buzz Windrip was a Professional Common Man.
Oh, he was common enough. He had every prejudice and aspiration of every American Common Man. He believed in the desirability and therefore the sanctity of thick buckwheat cakes with adulterated maple syrup, in rubber trays for the ice cubes in his electric refrigerator, in the especial nobility of dogs, all dogs, in the oracles of S. Parkes Cadman, in being chummy with all waitresses at all junction lunch rooms, and in Henry Ford (when he became President, he exulted, maybe he could get Mr. Ford to come to supper at the White House), and the superiority of anyone who possessed a million dollars. He regarded spats, walking sticks, caviar, titles, tea-drinking, poetry not daily syndicated in newspapers and all foreigners, possibly excepting the British, as degenerate.
But he was the Common Man twenty-times-magnified by his oratory, so that while the other Commoners could understand his every purpose, which was exactly the same as their own, they saw him towering among them, and they raised hands to him in worship.
”
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Sinclair Lewis (It Can't Happen Here)
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Taking hold of the ladder, she began to climb, stopping when she got to eye level with him. That, however, turned out to be a mistake, because the moment her eyes met his, she forgot everything—even the lines she’d just committed to memory—because nothing else mattered to her except . . . him. “You wrote a scene with a strong heroine in it, and one where the hero gets dangled by his feet.” “I did.” “Why?” “Because I couldn’t figure out a better way to let you know I love you, the real you, without dangling from my feet and letting you cut me down.” Lucetta’s eyes immediately took to turning a little misty. “You . . . love me?” “I do, but before we continue this, I have to admit that hanging upside down is far less pleasant than I imagined, so if you’d be so kind, I really do need you to get me down from here.” Realizing he was completely serious, but also realizing if she cut him down he’d go plummeting to the hard floor and most likely suffer a horrible injury—which certainly wouldn’t have the night turning out well at all—Lucetta looked to the side of the stage and caught Mr. Skukman’s eye. As he, along with a good number of backstage hands, walked across the boards, whispers began circulating around the theater, growing louder after Bram got released and rose to his feet. Smiling ever so charmingly at the audience, he presented them with a small bow right before he took center stage. “Ladies and gentlemen, I must beg your indulgence for just a few more minutes because you see . . . I am . . . Mr. Grimstone.” The whispers ceased immediately. Bram smiled. “I’m Mr. Grimstone, alias Mr. Bram Haverstein, and I’ve come here tonight, with all of you as my witnesses, to proclaim my love for Miss Lucetta Plum, and . . .” He dropped to one knee. “Ask her to do me the very great honor of becoming my wife.” He reached out and took hold of Lucetta’s hand. “Miss Lucetta Plum, I am completely and irrevocably in love with you, and just so we’re clear, I’m in love with the real you, not the person you turn into when you take to the stage. I love the idea that you’re completely oblivious to your unusual beauty, can outrun a goat, and . . . you fascinate me as no one ever has. I’m asking you, in front of all of these people who will probably never buy another one of my books again if you turn me down . . .” He stopped talking and turned his head to the audience. “And just to remind everyone, I will have another novel releasing soon, although I haven’t decided on a title just yet, something about a strong-willed lady, no doubt, or . . .” “You’re getting distracted,” Lucetta interrupted. Bram immediately returned his gaze to hers. “Quite right, but . . . I’ve lost my train of thought.” “You were just about to the part where you were going to ask her to marry you,” a voice called out, a voice that sounded remarkably like Abigail’s. “Thank you, Grandmother,” he called back. “You’re welcome, darling. And just to remind you, I’m not getting any younger, so you might want to hurry this proposal business along.” Grinning, Bram shook his head, brought Lucetta’s fingers to his lips, and then sobered as he held her gaze. “I love you, Lucetta, more than I ever imagined I could, and I would be so incredibly honored if you’d agree to be my wife.” For a second, Lucetta was unable to answer him because her heart had taken to rising in her throat, but after drawing in a deep breath, she managed to nod, ignoring the tears that had filled her eyes and were blurring her vision. “I would be honored to become your wife, especially since—I’m not sure when this happened, but—I’m in love with you as well.” Bram’s hold on her hand tightened for just a second, and then he was sliding a ring on her finger she hadn’t even realized he’d been holding. Before she could take even a second to admire what felt like an enormous rock on her hand, he was standing instead of kneeling, looking intently into her eyes, before he pulled her into his arms and kissed her. The
”
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Jen Turano (Playing the Part (A Class of Their Own, #3))
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Akimov had to wage exhausting battles with the censors over each poster. As he later recalled, "No one banned posters in general, but almost each poster specifically was banned. The excuses were quite subtle: 'Does not express the play's idea,' 'insufficiently optimistic,' 'the text is not visible from a distance,' 'the title is too aggressively presented,' and the favorite, which fit any occasion, 'isn't there some formalism here?'" For one play, Akimov drew Moscow at night; the authorities perceived it as an attempt by a Leningrader to undermine Moscow's international reputation as a sunny city and consequently termed it a "crude political error.
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Solomon Volkov (St. Petersburg: A Cultural History)
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Reflection does not coincide with what is constituted but grasps only the essence of it...it does not take the place of inten tional life in an act of pure production but only reproduces the outline of it. Husserl always presents the "return to absolute consciousness" as a title for a multitude of operations which are learned, gradually effected, and never completed. We are never wholly one with constitutive genesis; we barely manage to accompany it for short segments. What is it then which responds to our reconstitution from (if these
words have a meaning ) the other side of things? From our own side, there is nothing but convergent but discontinuous intentions, moments of clarity. We constitute constituting consciousness by dint of rare and difficult efforts. It is the presumptive or alleged subject of our attempts. The author, Valery said, is the instantaneous thinker of works which were slow and laborious—and this thinker is nowhere. As the author is for VaIery the impostor of the writer, constituting consciousness is the philosopher's professional impostor. In any case, for Husserl it is the artifact the teleology of intentional life ends up at—and not the Spinozist attribute of Thought.
Originally a project to gain intellectual possession of the world, constitution becomes increasingly, as Husserl's thought matures, a means of unveiling a back side of things that we have not constituted.
This senseless effort to submit everything to the proprieties of "consciousness" (to the limpid play of its attitudes, intentions, and impositions of meaning) was necessary—the picture of a well-behaved World
left to us by classical philosophy had to be pushed to the limit--in order to reveal all that was left over: these beings beneath our idealizations and objectifications which secretly nourish them and in which we have difficulty recognizing noema...
Willy-nilly, against his plans and according to his essential audacity, Husserl awakens a wild-flowering world and mind. Things are no longer there simply according to their projective appearances and the requirements of the panorama, as in Renaissance perspective; but on the contrary upright, insistent, flaying our glance with their edges, each thing claiming an absolute presence which is not compossible with the absolute presence of other things, and which they nevertheless have all together by virtue of a configurational meaning which is in no way indicated by its 'theoretical meaning.
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Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Signs)
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in 2004, the National Intelligence Council, a research organization in the U.S. intelligence community, had published a report titled Mapping the Global Future, which presented scenarios for the year 2020. One of the scenarios imagined was a pandemic in 2020. It was eerily prophetic, even as to the year: It is only a matter of time before a new pandemic appears, such as the 1918–1919 influenza virus that killed an estimated twenty million worldwide. Such a pandemic in megacities of the developing world . . . would be devastating and could spread rapidly throughout the world.
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Daniel Yergin (The New Map: Energy, Climate, and the Clash of Nations)
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We can judge our success at work in many ways. Usually we judge it by how much money we make, what title we have, and how much others recognize our achievements. But if you can go to work each day as a bodhisattva, if your presence at work brings you and others joy, then you have a successful work life. You have succeeded in the present moment, the only moment that exists.
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Thich Nhat Hanh (The Art of Power: A Zen Master's Guide to Redefining Power, Achieving True Freedom and Discovering Lasting Happiness in a Stressful World)
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It took me a couple of years after I woke up in that cold sweat to figure out what flag I was going to plant, and then how to do something with it. Using the process in Step 1, I found the things that I wanted to be known for and the work that I was passionate about. And then I started telling my story all the time to anyone who would actually listen. For me, this story was around Lean UX because of who I was at the time. I created a pitch based on design for designers, by designers, to change the way that they were working. And I honed that voice and that tone and that dialogue by telling the story over and over and over again using blog posts and articles and eventually in-person talks. The first talk I ever gave as a part of my new professional trajectory was on August 12, 2010. I told the story about how we solved the problem of integrating UX into Agile at TheLadders. And then the timeline started to accelerate from there. A month later, on September 24, I gave my first talk about Lean UX and it was in Paris. I was communicating about this topic publicly, and people were saying, “Hey, come give us a talk about it.” And I was writing about the topic in any publication that would actually listen to this kind of thing. I kept speaking and writing and making presentations, and as I got my ideas out into the world and put them into play in any way I could, on March 7, 2011, I finally hit the jackpot. This was three years after I had my 35th-birthday epiphany and the pressure was on—I knew I had just two years left before I was going to become obsolete, an also-ran. I hit the jackpot when I managed to get an article published in Smashing magazine. At the time, Smashing had a million readers online, and so the scale of my conversation was growing and growing because I was becoming known as the guy who had some answers to this question. That was a massive break for me because the article provided me with a global audience for the first time. Obviously, anything you publish on the internet is global and distributed, but the bottom line is that, if the platform you choose or that chooses you has a built-in audience, you stand a much bigger chance. Smashing magazine had an audience. The article, titled “Lean UX: Getting Out of the Deliverables Business” became very successful, and that’s where I planted my flag—providing solutions to the Agile and design problem with a real-world tested solution nicely packaged and labeled as Lean UX.
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Jeff Gothelf (Forever Employable: How to Stop Looking for Work and Let Your Next Job Find You)
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I say you are reading to slow.
You need to read at least 93.5 mph.
According to United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization.
Around 2.2 million new titles are published worldwide each year.
If a book is in average 250 pages.
Or 3 cm.
That is 66 km of books every year.
Or just 180 meters of books every day.
If you can spend 4h/day to read you just need to read 45 meters of books an hour or 1500 bph (Books Per Hour).
You are probably reading at 0.025-0.1 books per hour.
But if you practice, you might have a chance?
If each book contains 250 pages.
And each page is on average 20 cm tall.
And you can spend 4h on average each day reading.
That means you have to read text at a speed of 187.5 km/h to keep up. However that is probably a bit too fast, since there is usually some white space on each page of a book so lets round it down to 150km/h.
According to Stephen Hawking
“if you stacked the new books being published next to each other, at the present rate of production you would have to move at ninety miles an hour just to keep up with the end of the line.”
90mph equals 144.841 km/h.
I say, Stephen Hawking was a bit too generous.
I calculated the reading speed needed on my own and came to the same approximately the same conclusion as Hawking.
Yes I know. Great minds think a like, but since I think my calculation was a bit better. It must mean I'm a bit smarter than him, right?
Not that I would want to flatter myself, just a little bit smarter is enough.
Now I just need to study physics so I can solve how we may travel back in time to keep up reading all the books or make an alternative world with less authors so we can keep up reading.
If you like me, think this situation is unacceptable.
You too may sign my petition to forbid anyone from writing more than one book of 250 pages in their entire life for the next 2000-10.000 years.
So we can catch up with reading all those books.
You will have to excuse me but I tried to set my goal of reading 2.3 million books next year here on goodreads. But it only allowed to set the counter to 99 thousand so unfortunately it will have to wait until they fix this.
I suspect the limit is there by intent. Since if everyone read all the books published each year and a few millions more, goodreads would not be needed. Their business model is based on you not reading 150kmbookpages/h.
I have contacted customer support, unfortunately they did not take my suggestion seriously, if you could please help me and also email them then hopefully they will come to their senses and fix this once they see there is a demand. (Don't do this, it's just a joke.)
In the meantime I will just go back to reading 10-20 books a year.
”
”
myself and Stephen Hawking?
“
For several decades, New Testament commentators have emphasized how vital it is to read Mark’s Gospel with an awareness of its political undertones and the first-century context in which Mark wrote. Neither Jesus’s Galilean audience nor Mark’s Roman or Syrian audience can be understood apart from their social realities of empire and imperial power.5 Against this backdrop, Mark presents Jesus as a prophet in the vein of Moses and Elijah, leading a peaceful but powerful revolution in Israel’s village communities against those who dominated over them, both in Jerusalem and in Rome. The political message in Mark is subtle but effective. It begins when the narrator introduces the story, “The beginning of the good news (euangelion) of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.” Normally, it was Rome that heralded the good news or gospel of Caesar, and Roman citizens were supposed to revere their emperor as a divine man or a “son of a god.”6 Mark, though, announces the good news of the Messiah (Christ) and boldly identifies not Caesar but Jesus with the title “Son of God.” This sets the tone for the rest of his story. Mark then spends the first section of his Gospel portraying Jesus’s ministry as one that works against the worldly powers of domination—spiritual, physical, social, and political—and brings healing and inspiration to those who are oppressed.
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Jennifer Garcia Bashaw (Scapegoats: The Gospel through the Eyes of Victims)
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Section 13-2921 - Harassment; classification; definition A. A person commits harassment if, with intent to harass or with knowledge that the person is harassing another person, the person:
1. Anonymously or otherwise contacts, communicates or causes a communication with another person by verbal, electronic, mechanical, telegraphic, telephonic or written means in a manner that harasses.
2. Continues to follow another person in or about a public place for no legitimate purpose after being asked to desist.
3. Repeatedly commits an act or acts that harass another person.
4. Surveils or causes another person to surveil a person for no legitimate purpose.
5. On more than one occasion makes a false report to a law enforcement, credit or social service agency.
6. Interferes with the delivery of any public or regulated utility to a person. B. A person commits harassment against a public officer or employee if the person, with intent to harass, files a nonconsensual lien against any public officer or employee that is not accompanied by an order or a judgment from a court of competent jurisdiction authorizing the filing of the lien or is not issued by a governmental entity or political subdivision or agency pursuant to its statutory authority, a validly licensed utility or water delivery company, a mechanics' lien claimant or an entity created under covenants, conditions, restrictions or declarations affecting real property. C. Harassment under subsection A is a class 1 misdemeanor. Harassment under subsection B is a class 5 felony. D. This section does not apply to an otherwise lawful demonstration, assembly or picketing. E. For the purposes of this section, "harassment" means conduct that is directed at a specific person and that would cause a reasonable person to be seriously alarmed, annoyed or harassed and the conduct in fact seriously alarms, annoys or harasses the person. A.R.S. § 13-2921 Section 13-2921.01 - Aggravated harassment; classification; definition A. A person commits aggravated harassment if the person commits harassment as provided in section 13-2921 and any of the following applies:
1. A court has issued an order of protection or an injunction against harassment against the person and in favor of the victim of harassment and the order or injunction has been served and is still valid.
2. The person has previously been convicted of an offense included in section 13-3601. B. The victim of any previous offense shall be the same as in the present offense. C. A person who violates subsection A, paragraph 1 of this section is guilty of a class 6 felony. A person who commits a second or subsequent violation of subsection A, paragraph 1 of this section is guilty of a class 5 felony. A person who violates subsection A, paragraph 2 of this section is guilty of a class 5 felony. D. For the purposes of this section, "convicted" means a person who was convicted of an offense included in section 13-3601 or who was adjudicated delinquent for conduct that would constitute a historical prior felony conviction if the juvenile had been tried as an adult for an offense included in section 13-3601. A.R.S. § 13-2921.01
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Arizona Legislature (ARIZONA REVISED STATUTES TITLE 13 CRIMINAL CODE 2022 EDITION: WEST HARTFORD LEGAL PUBLISHING)
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THE ABHIDHARMA IS NOT A SCHOOL AS SUCH, but rather a body of literature. Not all the early schools had such a body of literature, but when they did they incorporated it into the canon. In essence it is an ordering and explanation of the key terms and categories of analysis that appear in the sūtras. The prefix abhi- means ‘above’ or ‘for the sake of, with regard to’, so the title is usually understood to mean ‘that which is above the Dharma’ or ‘the higher or special teaching’. However, it could also be construed as meaning ‘for the sake of the Dharma’ or ‘the ancillary to the Dharma’. The Abhidharma was regarded as special in the sense that it presents the Dharma in a pure, theoretical framework, rather than in a historical context, as do the sūtras – though whether this is an advantage could be disputed. It is regarded as a ‘higher’ Dharma because it is thought to be offering an explanation of these terms superior to that offered by the sūtras themselves.
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Andrew Skilton (Concise History of Buddhism)
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The pedestal is no part of the statue. Measure him without his stilts; let him lay aside his wealth and his titles; let him present himself in his undershirt. Is his body healthy, active, and able to perform its functions? What sort of soul does he have? Is it beautiful and capable, and fortunate enough to have all of its parts intact? Is the soul rich in what is its own or rich in what it has borrowed? Has luck had nothing to do with it? Can it face the drawing of swords without flinching? Is it indifferent between a death by the expiration of breath or the slitting of the throat? Is it calm, unflustered, and content? This is what we must see; that is how the great differences between us should be judged.
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Ward Farnsworth (The Practicing Stoic: A Philosophical User's Manual)
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Socialism...represents in one sense a decisive break with the present. History has to be broken and remade -- not because socialists arbitrarily prefer revolution to reform, being bloodthirsty beasts deaf to the voice of moderation, but because of the depth of the sickness that has to be cured. I say 'history,' but in fact Marx is reluctant to dignify everything that has happened so far with that title. For him, all we have known so far is 'prehistory' -- which is to say, one variation after another on human oppression and exploitation. The only truly historic act would be to break from this dreary narrative into history proper. As a socialist, you have to be prepared to spell out in some detail how this would be achieved, and what institutions it would involve.
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Terry Eagleton (Why Marx Was Right)
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Yet in all the various presentations of Jesus' significance, "God" holds the overarching and crucial place. "God" is certainly not thrust into the background or sidelined. Indeed, as I indicated in an earlier chapter, Jesus' significance is typically expressed with reference to "God," and all the christological titles and claims of the NT really boil down to the one claim that Jesus is truly the unique expression and agent of "God.
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Larry W. Hurtado (God in New Testament Theology (Library of Biblical Theology))
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Finding Water On Mars As An April Fool’s Prank. Every April Fool’s Day, which is the first day of every April, we all try our hardest to prank and pun each other. All this is done for fun and laughter. According to “Universe Today,” not even big science hotshots like NASA are above a few harmless pranks. Never was this more obvious than in 2005, when NASA pranked the world about finding water on Mars. On March 31, 2005, a teaser was posted on NASA’s Astronomy Picture of the Day website. It was titled “Water on Mars!” with a presentation to follow the next day, on April 1. This left people ecstatic. This was an incredible find for the human race. If there was water on Mars, then that meant there could have been life on Mars at one stage. Science was about to make a huge leap forward. The next day, April 1, 2005, NASA posted their presentation of water on Mars, and it left the whole world either in tears or crying from laughter. Their presentation was a picture of a glass of water standing on top of two Mars chocolate bars. It was water on Mars, but not the kind that everyone was hoping for.
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Larry Baz (The Eye-Opening Facts: The Crazy and Amazing Stories Behind the World’s Most Interesting Facts)
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SoundsTrue.com you will find a wealth of free resources to support your journey, including exclusive weekly audio interviews, free downloads, interactive learning tools, and other special savings on all our titles.
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Jon Kabat-Zinn (Mindfulness for Beginners: Reclaiming the Present Moment—and Your Life)
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The prefix abhi- means ‘above’ or ‘for the sake of, with regard to’, so the title is usually understood to mean ‘that which is above the Dharma’ or ‘the higher or special teaching’. However, it could also be construed as meaning ‘for the sake of the Dharma’ or ‘the ancillary to the Dharma’. The Abhidharma was regarded as special in the sense that it presents the Dharma in a pure, theoretical framework, rather than in a historical context, as do the sūtras – though whether this is an advantage could be disputed. It is regarded as a ‘higher’ Dharma because it is thought to be offering an explanation of these terms superior to that offered by the sūtras themselves.
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Andrew Skilton (Concise History of Buddhism)
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The organization presented here, however, works for many student research projects. Keep in mind that advisors, committee members, and potentially external reviewers will evaluate the final proposal on clarity, content, and whether specified guidelines are met. The following is the content and organization I recommend: 1. A cover page, which contains the title, your name, committee member names, and the date 2. An introduction to the problem describing the general scope of the project and why it is important 3. A literature review synthesizing prior research and describing the theoretical framework of your research 4. Specific objectives or research questions and hypotheses (when appropriate) your proposal addresses 5. A detailed description of your research methods, including data collection and analytical approaches 6. Project significance and implications 7. An annotated time line for the anticipated completion of the research 8. An alphabetized list of references 9. Appendix (optional)
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Elizabeth A. Wentz (How to Design, Write, and Present a Successful Dissertation Proposal)
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Volunteer Services
Title: Improving Worker Administrations: A Statistical surveying Approach
Presentation:
Volunteer Services assume a vital part in supporting networks, non-benefit associations, and different causes around the world. In any case, to actually use volunteer assets, it's basic to grasp market elements, patterns, and inclinations. Statistical surveying gives priceless bits of knowledge to upgrading volunteer projects, improving commitment, and augmenting influence. In this complete examination, we dive into the domain of volunteer administrations, investigating market patterns, challenges, and imaginative procedures for development.
Understanding the Worker Administrations Market:
The worker administrations market incorporates a wide cluster of areas, including social administrations, ecological preservation, medical care, instruction, and fiasco help. As indicated by late examinations, the worldwide volunteerism rate has been consistently expanding, mirroring a developing consciousness of social obligation and local area inclusion. In any case, notwithstanding this vertical pattern, certain difficulties persevere, preventing the maximum capacity of Volunteer Services.
Key Difficulties in Volunteer Administrations:
Enrollment and Maintenance: One of the essential difficulties looked by associations is the enlistment and maintenance of workers. With occupied plans and contending responsibilities, people frequently battle to commit time to chipping in. Additionally, holding volunteers over the long haul requires supported commitment and significant encounters.
Ability Coordinating: Compelling usage of volunteer abilities is fundamental for augmenting influence. Nonetheless, numerous associations battle to coordinate workers with jobs that line up with their
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Volunteer Services
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As a man, being a husband and father is not just a title, but a responsibility to lead with love, care, and dedication. Don't be lazy, embrace your role and be present, for your family's strength depends on your active involvement and guidance.
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Shaila Touchton
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Title: market research in India : A Profound Jump into AMT Statistical surveying
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All in all, AMT Statistical surveying arises as a believed accomplice for organizations trying to open the immense capability of the market research in india . Through its far reaching research procedures, limited bits of knowledge, and obligation to greatness, AMT engages clients to explore the intricacies of the Indian market scene with certainty and lucidity. As India forges ahead with its direction of financial development and change, AMT stands prepared to direct organizations towards progress in this unique and lively market.
By saddling the force of AMT Statistical surveying, organizations can graph a course towards feasible development and thriving in one of the world's most encouraging business sectors.
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market research in India
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It is conventionally believed that it was the poet Rabindranath Tagore who first called Gandhi ‘Mahatma’. But the ascription is incorrect. As early as 1910, Gandhi’s friend Pranjivan Mehta referred to him as a ‘Mahatma’ in a letter he wrote to Gopal Krishna Gokhale.
Mehta’s was a private declaration. The first public occasion on which the title may have been used was in the Kathiawari town of Gondal, which Gandhi and Kasturba visited shortly after their return to India. On 27 January 1915, the citizens of Gondal organized a reception for the Gandhis, to mark their return to the homeland and to honour their work in South Africa. At this reception, a locally respected priest named Jivram Kalidas Shastri presented Gandhi with a scroll which referred to him as a ‘Mahatma’.
By the time of the Rowlatt satyagraha of 1919, the honorific ‘Mahatma’ was being widely used by Gandhi’s admirers across India. And sometimes misused. In January 1921, the bearer of the title was told that a brand of ‘Mahatma Gandhi Cigarettes’ was being marketed and sold. Gandhi was appalled, for in his view smoking was an ‘expensive vice’ which ‘fouls the breath, discolours the teeth and sometimes even causes cancer’. Through the columns of Young India, he urged the errant firm to withdraw the labels bearing his name from the market.
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Ramachandra Guha (Gandhi 1915-1948: The Years That Changed the World)
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the true idea intended to be embodied in the title—les États Unis, or los Estados Unidos—the States united. It was without any change of title—still as "United States"—without any sacrifice of individuality—without any compromise of sovereignty—that the same parties entered into a new and amended compact with one another under the present Constitution
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Jefferson Davis (The Rise and Fall of the Confederate Government)
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Buddho A mantra, associated with the Mahayana or Vajrayana Buddhism and a significant part of the history of Theravada. Repeating the name of Buddha or other Pali phrases is known to help the individual cultivate loving kindness. ‘Buddho’ comes to mean His title, not His rank. You call upon the holy teacher to offer you peace, harmony between yourself and the universe, harmony between the sensual and the spiritual world, by repeating the mantra. Until you continue, sit comfortably on the ground and take a few deep breaths. Then breathe in, say a long' bud-,' breathe out, hold'-dho.' At the conclusion of your practice, the mantra will give you clarity and brightness. • Lumen de Lumine Lumen De Lumine is luminous song. It helps you to feel open towards the world. The person will be engulfed in light. When darkness overpowers your life, Lumen De Lumine removes your aura and fills you with glow and light. You'll be more relaxed and uplifted. This is the ideal balance of power and harmony. The mantra will give you the faith that you're free from negative energies. Just like the light, you'll feel strong, untouchable, and invincible. Anyone can touch Lumen De Lumine. You don't have to close yourself with this chant in mind. Think of your loved one bringing positive energy and feelings to them. • Sat, Chit, Ananda Often known as Satchitananda, a Sanskrit composite word composed of the three verbs' sat,'' cit' and' ananda.' Sat means ' life, being present, being alive, living, being real, being good, being right, being normal, intelligent, being truthful.' Chit means' see, feel, perceive, understand, accept, think about something, shape a thought, be conscious, remember, consider' Ananda means ‘joy, love, satisfaction, enjoyment, happiness, pure elation’.
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Adrian Satyam (Energy Healing: 6 in 1: Medicine for Body, Mind and Spirit. An extraordinary guide to Chakra and Quantum Healing, Kundalini and Third Eye Awakening, Reiki and Meditation and Mindfulness.)
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Then the glow became brighter: a holographic golden sickle with a few sheaves of wheat, rotating just above Meg McCaffrey. A boy in the crowd gasped. “She’s a communist!” A girl who’d been sitting at Cabin Four’s table gave him a disgusted sneer. “No, Damien, that’s my mom’s symbol.” Her face went slack as the truth sank in. “Uh, which means…it’s her mom’s symbol.” My head spun. I did not want this knowledge. I did not want to serve a demigod with Meg’s parentage. But now I understood the crescents on Meg’s rings. They were not moons; they were sickle blades. As the only Olympian present, I felt I should make her title official. “My friend is no longer unclaimed,” I announced. The other demigods knelt in respect, some more reluctantly than others. “Ladies and gentlemen,” I said, my voice as bitter as Chiron’s tea, “please give it up for Meg McCaffrey, daughter of Demeter.
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Rick Riordan (The Hidden Oracle (The Trials of Apollo, #1))
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I can feel how large, how essential this moment is as it's happening: that is what I have come to love about being an adult, to the extent that I can claim that title: that one knows more about how good things are, how much they matter, as they' happening, that knowledge isn't necessarily more. When I was younger, I missed so much, failing to fully present, only recognizing the quality of particul moments and gifts after the fact. Perhaps that's one thing that 'grown-up' is: to realize in the present the magnitude grace of what we're being offered.
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Mark Doty (Heaven's Coast: A Memoir)
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It’s in vain to recall the past, unless it works some influence upon the present.” Charles Dickens, David Copperfield Contents Cover Title Page Dedication Epigraph 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17
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Barbara Kingsolver (Demon Copperhead)
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When I go out into the street and look people in the eye, I understand how the system works on society. Human beings have abandoned without realizing what is truly essential in this life, and they have done so because there are many titles to be harvested waiting in the dens of inclusive indoctrination, many jobs that demand that doctrine, many tributes and debts to silence Caesar, in this frivolous and superficial holographic recreation of life, love is similar to a colic, none of them believe that feeling "butterflies in the stomach" is an experience we are part of when we are in the first stage of falling in love. So, all that once was, no longer will be, and depersonalizing the human race is a great job of social engineering that the ancient shapers of humanity did very well in times past and present. But we cannot cross the bridge or break the gap or make a quantum leap through consciousness if we do not unite! If we cannot connect our hearts with our brains and send a signal across the skies to the farthest reaches of this planet, we will be lost forever! So do you realize what I am talking about? Do you understand why to this world you are just a number that adds up with your work and subtracts with your old age? Do you understand why it is necessary to regain that power before it is too late? The new generations are being subjected to a large-scale social experiment, the days will come when the men and women of the future will be replaced by a thing similar to artificial intelligence and will no longer need feelings, much less organs. So... When I go out on the street and look people in the eye, that's when I understand how the system works on society. From the book The Game of Life
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Marcos Orowitz (THE LORD OF TALES: The masterpiece of deceit)