Tone Deaf Quotes

But I was not in the band, because I suffer from the kind of tone deafness that is generally associated with actual deafness

I'm not even tone deaf, that's the arse-mothering, fuck-nosed, bugger-sucking wank of the thing.

Swear to God, for someone so obsessed with music, she’s borderline tone deaf. But trying to describe how I felt watching her dance around and sing would be like trying to build a skyscraper with my bare hands. It made me want to marry her. Made me want to buy her a magic airplane and fly her away to a place where nothing bad could ever happen. Made me want to pour rubber cement all over my chest and then lay down on top of her so that we’d be stuck together, and so it would hurt like hell if we ever tried to tear ourselves apart.

Never presume to know a person based on the one dimensional window of the internet. A soul can’t be defined by critics, enemies or broken ties with family or friends. Neither can it be explained by posts or blogs that lack facial expressions, tone or insight into the person’s personality and intent. Until people “get that”, we will forever be a society that thinks Beautiful Mind was a spy movie and every stranger is really a friend on Facebook.

I’m not even tone deaf, that’s the arse-mothering, fuck-nosed, bugger-sucking wank of the thing. I’M NOT EVEN TONE FUCKING DEAF. I’m tone DUMB.

See, some people politely encourage their tone-deaf friends to sing. Some people even convince them to go on live television and audition for national competitions. But me? I am not that friend.

I appreciate a straightforward apology the way a tone-deaf person enjoys a fine piece of music.

I am fifty years old and I have never known what it is to love. I can write those words, know them to be true, but feel only the regret that a tone-deaf man must feel because he can't appreicate music, a regret less keen because it is for something never known, not for something lost.

Real data is messy. ...It's all very noisy out there. Very hard to spot the tune. Like a piano in the next room, it's playing your song, but unfortunately it's out of whack, some of the strings are missing, and the pianist is tone deaf and drunk- I mean, the noise! Impossible!

I am a book. Sheaves pressed from the pulp of oaks and pines a natural sawdust made dingy from purses, dusty from shelves. Steamy and anxious, abused and misused, kissed and cried over, smeared, yellowed, and torn, loved, hated, scorned. I am a book. I am a book that remembers, days when I stood proud in good company When the children came, I leapt into their arms, when the women came, they cradled me against their soft breasts, when the men came, they held me like a lover, and I smelled the sweet smell of cigars and brandy as we sat together in leather chairs, next to pool tables, on porch swings, in rocking chairs, my words hanging in the air like bright gems, dangling, then forgotten, I crumbled, dust to dust. I am a tale of woe and secrets, a book brand-new, sprung from the loins of ancient fathers clothed in tweed, born of mothers in lands of heather and coal soot. A family too close to see the blood on its hands, too dear to suffering, to poison, to cold steel and revenge, deaf to the screams of mortal wounding, amused at decay and torment, a family bred in the dankest swamp of human desires. I am a tale of woe and secrets, I am a mystery. I am intrigue, anxiety, fear, I tangle in the night with madmen, spend my days cloaked in black, hiding from myself, from dark angels, from the evil that lurks within and the evil we cannot lurk without. I am words of adventure, of faraway places where no one knows my tongue, of curious cultures in small, back alleys, mean streets, the crumbling house in each of us. I am primordial fear, the great unknown, I am life everlasting. I touch you and you shiver, I blow in your ear and you follow me, down foggy lanes, into places you've never seen, to see things no one should see, to be someone you could only hope to be. I ride the winds of imagination on a black-and-white horse, to find the truth inside of me, to cure the ills inside of you, to take one passenger at a time over that tall mountain, across that lonely plain to a place you've never been where the world stops for just one minute and everything is right. I am a mystery. -Rides a Black and White Horse

I Hear the sledges with the bells - Silver bells! What a world of merriment their melody foretells! How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle, In the icy air of night! While the stars that oversprinkle All the heavens, seem to twinkle With a crystalline delight; Keeping time, time, time, In a sort of Runic rhyme, To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells From the bells, bells, bells, bells, Bells, bells, bells - From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells. II Hear the mellow wedding bells - Golden bells! What a world of happiness their harmony foretells! Through the balmy air of night How they ring out their delight! - From the molten - golden notes, And all in tune, What a liquid ditty floats To the turtle - dove that listens, while she gloats On the moon! Oh, from out the sounding cells, What a gush of euphony voluminously wells! How it swells! How it dwells On the Future! - how it tells Of the rapture that impels To the swinging and the ringing Of the bells, bells, bells - Of the bells, bells, bells, bells, Bells, bells, bells - To the rhyming and the chiming of the bells! III Hear the loud alarum bells - Brazen bells! What a tale of terror, now, their turbulency tells! In the startled ear of night How they scream out their affright! Too much horrified to speak, They can only shriek, shriek, Out of tune, In a clamorous appealing to the mercy of the fire, In a mad expostulation with the deaf and frantic fire, Leaping higher, higher, higher, With a desperate desire, And a resolute endeavor Now - now to sit, or never, By the side of the pale - faced moon. Oh, the bells, bells, bells! What a tale their terror tells Of Despair! How they clang, and clash and roar! What a horror they outpour On the bosom of the palpitating air! Yet the ear, it fully knows, By the twanging, And the clanging, How the danger ebbs and flows; Yet the ear distinctly tells, In the jangling, And the wrangling, How the danger sinks and swells, By the sinking or the swelling in the anger of the bells - Of the bells - Of the bells, bells, bells, bells, Bells, bells, bells - In the clamor and the clanging of the bells! IV Hear the tolling of the bells - Iron bells! What a world of solemn thought their monody compels! In the silence of the night, How we shiver with affright At the melancholy menace of their tone! For every sound that floats From the rust within their throats Is a groan. And the people - ah, the people - They that dwell up in the steeple, All alone, And who, tolling, tolling, tolling, In that muffled monotone, Feel a glory in so rolling On the human heart a stone - They are neither man nor woman - They are neither brute nor human - They are Ghouls: - And their king it is who tolls: - And he rolls, rolls, rolls, Rolls A paean from the bells! And his merry bosom swells With the paean of the bells! And he dances, and he yells; Keeping time, time, time, In a sort of Runic rhyme, To the paean of the bells: - Of the bells: Keeping time, time, time In a sort of Runic rhyme, To the throbbing of the bells - Of the bells, bells, bells: - To the sobbing of the bells: - Keeping time, time, time, As he knells, knells, knells, In a happy Runic rhyme, To the rolling of the bells - Of the bells, bells, bells - To the tolling of the bells - Of the bells, bells, bells, bells, Bells, bells, bells, - To the moaning and the groaning of the bells.

. . . Do you want to share a black cab?’ Black cabs were an extravagance that Neve couldn’t afford, not this far away from payday, but that wasn’t the reason why she declined. ‘No, thank you. I’m perfectly all right with catching the tube.’ ‘OK, tube it is,’ Max agreed, because he was quite obviously emotionally tone deaf and couldn’t sense the huge ‘kindly bugger off’ vibes that Neve was sure she was emitting.

I’m going that way too. I live in Crouch End. Do you want to share a black cab?’ Black cabs were an extravagance that Neve couldn’t afford, not this far away from payday, but that wasn’t the reason why she declined. ‘No, thank you. I’m perfectly all right with catching the tube.’ ‘OK, tube it is,’ Max agreed, because he was quite obviously emotionally tone deaf and couldn’t sense the huge ‘kindly bugger off’ vibes that Neve was sure she was emitting. ‘You’re still mad at me, aren’t you?’ ‘You apologised, why would I still be mad at you?’ ‘One day we’ll laugh about this. When little Tommy asks how we met, I’ll say, “Well, son, I threw an ice cube at your mother, then slapped her arse, and we’ve been inseparable ever since.

I already know the words. I just need to learn the beat. This tone-deaf white girl will try to make music out of recovery.

Choose your words wisely with consideration for others & self because repetitive, meaningless words...leave people tone deaf.

I carefully read each letter myself. Some of them are serious in tone, discussing the meaning of life, invoking the supremacy of the soul, the mystery of every existence. And by a curious reversal, the people who focus most closely on these fundamental questions tend to be people I had known only superficially. Their small talk had masked hidden depths. Had I been blind and deaf, or does it take the harsh light of disaster to show a person’s true nature? Other

'I've been privileged to occasionally hear you sing in the shower and thought--what a voice. With a reasonable amount of training, it might actually be a voice I could listen to for more than a few minutes without getting a migraine.'

It is only by demanding the impossible of the piano that you can obtain from it all that is possible. For the psychologist this means that imagination and desire are ahead of the possible reality. A deaf Beethoven created for the piano sounds never heard before and thus predetermined the development of the piano for several decades to come. The composer's creative spirit imposes on the piano rules to which it gradually conforms. That is the history of the instrument's development. I don't know of any case where the reverse occurred.

But I appreciate a straightforward apology the way a tone-deaf person enjoys a fine piece of music. I can’t do it, but I can applaud it in others.

Good God! Think of listening to Wagner for a whole fortnight with a woman who takes about as much interest in music as a tone-deaf newt - that would be fun!

As she turned to the sofa, Bernard hissed in her ear. “You told him about Jack?” “He saw Jack. He isn's stupid.” “Thank you,” Wickenden murmured in tones of amusement. “Or deaf.

I'm not well read, but when I do read, I read well. I don't have the time to translate what I understand in the form of conversation. I had exhausted most conversation at age 9. I only feel with grunts, screams and tones and with hand gestures and my body. I'm deaf in spirit.

I have never fully unbosomed myself to any human being; I have never been encouraged to trust much in the sympathy of my fellow men. But we have all a chance of meeting with some pity, some tenderness, some charity, when we are dead: it is the living only who cannot be forgiven - the living only from whom men's indulgence and reverence are held off, like the rain by the hard east wind. While the heart beats, bruise it - it is your only opportunity; while the eye can still turn towards you with moist, timid entreaty, freeze it with an icy unanswering gaze; while the ear, that delicate messenger to the inmost sanctuary of the soul, can still take in the tones of kindness, put it off with hard civility, or sneering compliment, or envious affectation of indifference; while the creative brain can still throb with the sense of injustice, with the yearning for brotherly recognition - make haste - oppress it with your ill-considered judgements, your trivial comparisons, your careless misrepresentations. The heart will by and by be still - ubi saeoa indignatio ulterius cor lacerate nequit; the eye will cease to entreat; the ear will be deaf; the brain will have ceased from all wants as well as from all work. Then your charitable speeches may find vent; then you may remember and pity the toil and the struggle and the failure; then you may give due honour to the work achieved; then you may find extenuation for errors, and may consent to bury them ("The Lifted Veil")

We tell ourselves our beliefs are persecuted despite being overrepresented in government, and this is especially tone-deaf when compared to the actual persecution and marginalization of people of color, women, and immigrants.

I receive remarkable letters. They are opened for me, unfolded, and spread out before my eyes in a daily ritual that gives the arrival of the mail the character of a hushed and holy ceremony. I carefully read each letter myself. Some of them are serious in tone, discussing the meaning of life, invoking the supremacy of the soul, the mystery of every existence. And by a curious reversal, the people who focus most closely on these fundamental questions tend to be people I had known only superficially. Their small talk has masked hidden depths. Had I been blind and deaf, or does it take the harsh light of disaster to show a person's true nature? Other letters simply relate the small events that punctuate the passage of time: roses picked at dusk, the laziness of a rainy Sunday, a child crying himself to sleep. Capturing the moment, these small slices of life, these small gusts of happiness, move me more deeply than all the rest. A couple of lines or eight pages, a Middle Eastern stamp or a suburban postmark... I hoard all these letters like treasure. One day I hope to fasten them end to end in a half-mile streamer, to float in the wind like a banner raised to the glory of friendship. It will keep the vultures at bay.

I appreciate a straightforward apology the way a tone-deaf person enjoys a fine piece of music. I can’t do it, but I can applaud it in others.

Those who are entitled and tone deaf should be the last to give opinions on what they know nothing about.

Being Laura, I thought, was like being tone deaf: the music played and you heard something, but it wasn’t what everyone else heard.

From invisible girlhood, the Asian American woman will blossom into a fetish object. When she is at last visible—at last desired—she realizes much to her chagrin that this desire for her is treated like a perversion. This is most obvious in porn, where our murky desires are coldly isolated into categories in which white is the default and every other race is a sexual aberration. But the Asian woman is reminded every day that her attractiveness is a perversion, in instances ranging from skin-crawling Tinder messages (“I’d like to try my first Asian woman”) to microaggressions from white friends. I recall a white friend pointing out to me that Jewish men only dated Asian women because they wanted to find women who were the opposite of their pushy mothers. Implied in this tone-deaf complaint was her assumption that Asian women are docile and compliant. Well-meaning friends never failed to warn me, if a white guy was attracted to me, that he probably had an Asian fetish. The result: I distrusted my desirousness. My sexuality was a pathology. If anyone non-Asian liked me, there was something wrong with him.

I’m a tone-deaf siren, a wallflower at the mating dance. And I do wonder why men can’t want me for me. I’m smart, I don’t defer, and I didn’t put making babies number one on my list of priorities.

The modern world is highly secular in certain parts, and nowhere more than in the world of the educated elites. Such people are notoriously “tone deaf” and their natural habitat is “a world without windows,” as Weber and Berger have described them.

Close your eyes When clarity's gone and logic is done and love flees out the doorway, When kisses hurt and your heart is cursed and so carelessly cast away, When life's tumbling down, down, down, And nothing's there when you look up, Except the innocence you let life corrupt. Just close your eyes, Feel my hand in yours and know you're alive, Just close your eyes, Feel my lips on yours and know you'll survive, Oh, close your eyes, And in the darkness of the hour, Know that I'll be here forever, Forever yours, I'll never go.

A blanket could be used to say hello to a man who’s not only tone deaf, but also regular deaf. Just wave the blanket up and down, and be advised: If that blanket is red, he’s liable to charge you like a bull. I’d charge you too, if only I had your credit card information. 


Being human and investigating the affairs of the gods is an extreme version of being tone-deaf and talking about music, or having never served in the army and talking about warfare: we resemble amateurs trying to use arguments from probability based on opinions and conjecture to unearth the ideas of experts. Given

How do tyrants hold on to power for so long? For that matter, why is the tenure of successful democratic leaders so brief? How can countries with such misguided and corrupt economic policies survive for so long? Why are countries that are prone to natural disasters so often unprepared when they happen? And how can lands rich with natural resources at the same time support populations stricken with poverty? Equally, we may well wonder: Why are Wall Street executives so politically tone-deaf that they dole out billions in bonuses while plunging the global economy into recession? Why is the leadership of a corporation, on whose shoulders so much responsibility rests, decided by so few people? Why are failed CEOs retained and paid handsomely even as their company’s shareholders lose their shirts? In

She took a puff, put the cigarette in the ashtray and stared at it. Without looking up, she said, But do you believe in love, Mr Evans? She rolled the cigarette end around in the ash tray. Do you? Outside, he thought, beyond this mountain and its snow, there was a world of countless millions of people. He could see them in their cities, in the heat and the light. And he could see this house, so remote and isolated, so far away, and he had a feeling that it once must have seemed to her and Jack, if only for a short time, like the universe with the two of them at its centre. And for a moment he was at the King of Cornwall with Amy in the room they thought of as theirs—with the sea and the sun and the shadows, with the white paint flaking off the French doors and with their rusty lock, with the breezes late of an afternoon and of a night the sound of the waves breaking—and he remembered how that too had once seemed the centre of the universe. I don’t, she said. No, I don’t. It’s too small a word, don’t you think, Mr Evans? I have a friend in Fern Tree who teaches piano. Very musical, she is. I’m tone-deaf myself. But one day she was telling me how every room has a note. You just have to find it. She started warbling away, up and down. And suddenly one note came back to us, just bounced back off the walls and rose from the floor and filled the place with this perfect hum. This beautiful sound. Like you’ve thrown a plum and an orchard comes back at you. You wouldn’t believe it, Mr Evans. These two completely different things, a note and a room, finding each other. It sounded … right. Am I being ridiculous? Do you think that’s what we mean by love, Mr Evans? The note that comes back to you? That finds you even when you don’t want to be found? That one day you find someone, and everything they are comes back to you in a strange way that hums? That fits. That’s beautiful. I’m not explaining myself at all well, am I? she said. I’m not very good with words. But that’s what we were. Jack and me. We didn’t really know each other. I’m not sure if I liked everything about him. I suppose some things about me annoyed him. But I was that room and he was that note and now he’s gone. And everything is silent.

Am I better off living through death, Or dying an invisible ghost? Am I better off speaking in silence, Or screaming so loud no one will hear? I fake a smile, But it's killed by you, I fake a soul, But that dies, too. So I fake my life, What else can I do? Take me in, spit me out, And I scream and scream and shout, But you can't hear my pain, My blood's nothing but a worthless stain. I fake a smile, But it's killed by you. I fake a soul, But that dies, too. So I fake my life, What else can I do? And if one day I wake up gone, Maybe people will see through, But until then the lies will rule. And sometimes I think I'm better off dead, But then I realize I already am.

The five colors can make our eyes blind. The five tones can make our ears deaf. The five flavors can make our mouths numb.

Her sweet scent calms me, and I breathe in deeply, reminding myself that even if I don’t have her forever, I have her now.

And everything goes tone-deaf when it is born Deaf to the howls of the other side Blind to the sane of the dead and dying

They sit in their soundproof rooms and issue tone-deaf edicts and call themselves controlling the world. And one day they ask you to die for them.

When I was 10, a man who worked with my father called for him on the house phone. When I answered he said, ‘Oh, I must have the wrong number. How can a child that speaks like you have a dad that speaks with that ridiculous foreign mess?’ The mess was not that my father pronounces ‘hatred’ to sound like ‘hatriot’. Rather, that there is a whiteness that exists to be so tone-deaf it cannot make out our words, nor our lamp-fixtures, gods, nor our names –where all are as good as the dog-whistle without the Labrador.

That was how we spoke, my mother and I: in puns and games and rhymes. In, you might say, lyrics. This was our tragedy. We were language's magpies by nature, stealing whatever sounded bright and shiny. We were tinpan alleycats, but the gift of music had been withheld. We could not sing along, though we always knew the words. Still, defiantly, we roared our tuneless roars, we fell off the high notes and were trampled by the low ones. And if bitter ices were the consequence, well, there were worse fates in the world than that.

The tears are silent and hot as they stream down my face, and my chest doesn’t heave, even though I can feel my heart pounding away. It’s the type of crying that gives everything away: the kind that whispers I’m used to pain, to keeping it in, to never letting it out.

There’s something pure and infinite in you, that wants to come out of you, and can come out of no other person on the planet. That’s what you’ve got to share, and that’s as real and important as the fact that you’re alive. We were able… to somehow protect each other so we could feel that. The world at large, careerism, money, magazines, your parents, other kids, nothing is going to give you that message, necessarily. In fact, most things are going to lead you away from it, sadly, because humanity is really confused at the moment. But you wouldn’t exist if the universe didn’t need you. And any time I encounter something beautiful that came out of a human somewhere, that’s them, that’s their own soul. That’s just pure, whatever its physicality is, if the person can play piano, if they can’t play piano, if they’re tone deaf, whatever it is, if it’s pure, it hits you like a sledge-hammer. It fills up your own soul, it makes you want to cry, it makes you glad you’re alive, it lets you come out of you. And that’s what we need: we desperately need you.” -Julian Koster of Neutral Milk Hotel

I think tonight's the night I will hang Howard W. Campbell Jr., for crimes against himself... They say that a hanging man hears gorgeous music. Too bad that I, like my father, unlike my musical mother, am tone-deaf. All the same I hope the tune that I'm about to hear is not Bing Crosby's 'White Christmas

I don’t want to have sex with you, I don’t want to go to the club, I don’t want you walking next to me, asking me where I’m going, how I’m doing, in a tone that wraps around me and pulls my shoulders up into my ears, making me want to go deaf and disappear. The tire full of nails had burst, tinkling like rain down onto their car.

Abel, get away from him." "No, I—" Pacer took a step toward them. "Get up, now." He pointed a finger at the ground. "And come here." Abel opened and closed his mouth several times, paralyzed. "Pacer, we were just—" "I won't say it again, Abel." He hated to admit it, but Pacer's demanding tone had sent a flash of anticipation through his system. Half- wanting to keep going, to test the limits of Pacer's patience, Abel paused for just another second before standing up and walking over to Pacer. "You don't have to sound so scary," he said. Pacer snorted, grabbing hold of Abel's wrist. "Please. You should be happy I didn't just pull you over my knee." "Pacer!" Abel's eyes widening as he looked over at Eric. He was watching them avidly. "Pacer, don't be so rough. He and I were just chatting." "Are you deaf?" Pacer replied. "Why was he whispering in your ear?" Grinning, Eric shook his head. "My bad. Maybe I just wanted to see what all the fuss was about.” He stood up and walked over to them. "Abel, I just wanted you to know: I'm not a homophobe." Abel stared at him. "What?" Then, after a moment, he looked at Pacer, who was studiously observing the twig he had snapped on the ground. "I see.

Her gaze flicks back to my lips, and for a moment, I think she’s waiting for me to respond. But then she throws herself into my arms and kisses me. Finally. That’s the only word running through my head as I kiss her back. Maybe not the most romantic sentiment, but I can’t help it. All those times we’ve kissed, she’s felt so hesitant. Now she’s just as desperate as I am, and her lips are sweet and incredible.

But what about the other side? They are impoverished too—perhaps more seriously, because they are vainer about it. They still like to pretend that the traditional culture is the whole of ‘culture’, as though the natural order didn’t exist. As though the exploration of the natural order was of no interest either in its own value or its consequences. As though the scientific edifice of the physical world was not, in its intellectual depth, complexity and articulation, the most beautiful and wonderful collective work of the mind of man. Yet most non-scientists have no conception of that edifice at all. Even if they want to have it, they can’t. It is rather as though, over an immense range of intellectual experience, a whole group was tone deaf. Except that this tone-deafness doesn’t come by nature, but by training, or rather the absence of training.

As some tone-deaf person began to tell the story of Lazarus, the World Series was playing on a TV upstairs. A ball disappeared into the Bronx and a dead man came forth, and the story always ends there, optimistically , in the middle, with a miracle so high profile it becomes the catalyst for the Crucifixion, which is technically a fair exchange, man for man , though three days before his death Jesus visited Lazarus again and you have to wander what he said, if he looked at what Lazarus had done in the meantime and began to question what he was dying for.

What would you think if someone made this argument to a person of a different faith? “Sure, you believe in Judaism now — but when your plane is going down, then you’ll turn to your Lord and Savior Jesus Christ”? Would you think that was an appropriate thing to say? Or would you think it was religious bigotry, pure and simple? Regardless of what you personally believe about Jesus Christ and his ability to comfort people during plane crashes — would you think that was an appropriate thing to say? Or would you denounce it as insensitive and tone-deaf at best, callous and inhumane at worst?

As became clear to me and many others during his tone-deaf visit to Ireland in 2018 and during the 2019 aftershocks of scandal that culminated in the failed ‘Protection of Minors’ meeting in Rome, the pope from Argentina remains blind to what much of the world sees quite clearly. If, owing to his own limits as a Catholic priest, he is unable, finally, to begin a radical transformation of the anti-female, anti sex clerical culture that is brought ruin to thousands, the precious and prophetic world invitation of Pope Francis will be firmly met by history’s No! His tiny opening will be slammed shut.

I started to sing. Yes, sing. "I'm a Yankee Doodle Dandy. Yankee Doodle Do or die." I let go of Henry and Caroline and started marching, like I was the leader of a parade. "An old old something something la la la, born on the Fourth of July." So maybe I didn't know the words, exactly. Alex joined in. Astrid, too. All three of us marching like idiots. "You're my Yankee Doodle sweetheart, Yankee Doodle do or die." I led the three of us, making up the words somewhat and we walked in front of the gate, getting between the eyes of the little kids and the plywood, just trying to break the terror spell of the monster outside. Who now stared to yell, "YOU SINKING 'YANKEE DOODLE'? 'YANKEE DOODLE DANDY'? I'LL F--- KILL YOU!" Niko joined in and that guy, I am here to tell you, is entirely tone deaf. But the little kids kind of snapped to. We caught their attention. "Yankee Doodle went to town a riding on a pony. I am a Yankee Doodle guy." And the kids started marching and I led the parade, the saddest parade in the history of the world, away from the front of the store, away from the monster outside, and right to the stupid cookie and cracker aisle. We ate fudge-covered graham crackers for a good long while.

That we have separate and distinct mechanisms for appreciating the structural and the emotional aspects of music is brought home by the wide variety of responses (and even “dissociations”) that people have to music.146 There are many of us who lack some of the perceptual or cognitive abilities to appreciate music but nonetheless enjoy it hugely, and enthusiastically bawl out tunes, sometimes shockingly off-key, in a way that gives us great happiness (though it may make others squirm). There are others with an opposite balance: they may have a good ear, be finely sensitive to the formal nuances of music, but nevertheless do not care for it greatly or consider it a significant part of their lives. That one may be quite “musical” and yet almost indifferent to music, or almost tone-deaf yet passionately sensitive to music, is quite striking. While

Unlike the gold which needed nothing, and must be worshipped in close-locked solitude — which was hidden away from the daylight, was deaf to the song of birds, and started to no human tones — Eppie was a creature of endless claims and ever-growing desires, seeking and loving sunshine, and living sounds, and living movements; making trial of everything, with trust in new joy, and stirring the human kindness in all eyes that looked on her. The gold had kept his thoughts in an ever-repeated circle, leading to nothing beyond itself; but Eppie was an object compacted of changes and hopes that forced his thoughts onward, and carried them far away from their old eager pacing towards the same blank limit — carried them away to the new things that would come with the coming years, when Eppie would have learned to understand how her father Silas cared for her; and made him look for images of that time in the ties and charities that bound together the families of his neighbours.

Did you ever see such art?’ whispered Eliza, who was my nearest neighbour.  ‘Would you not say they were perfect strangers?’ ‘Almost; but what then?’ ‘What then; why, you can’t pretend to be ignorant?’ ‘Ignorant of what?’ demanded I, so sharply that she started and replied,— ‘Oh, hush! don’t speak so loud.’ ‘Well, tell me then,’ I answered in a lower tone, ‘what is it you mean?  I hate enigmas.’ ‘Well, you know, I don’t vouch for the truth of it—indeed, far from it—but haven’t you heard—?’ ‘I’ve heard nothing, except from you.’ ‘You must be wilfully deaf then, for anyone will tell you that; but I shall only anger you by repeating it, I see, so I had better hold my tongue.’ She closed her lips and folded her hands before her, with an air of injured meekness. ‘If you had wished not to anger me, you should have held your tongue from the beginning, or else spoken out plainly and honestly all you had to say.’ She turned aside her face, pulled out her handkerchief, rose, and went to the window, where she stood for some time, evidently dissolved in tears.  I was astounded, provoked, ashamed—not so much of my harshness as for her childish weakness.

Knowing one’s emotions. Self-awareness—recognizing a feeling as it happens—is the keystone of emotional intelligence. As we will see in Chapter 4, the ability to monitor feelings from moment to moment is crucial to psychological insight and self-understanding. An inability to notice our true feelings leaves us at their mercy. People with greater certainty about their feelings are better pilots of their lives, having a surer sense of how they really feel about personal decisions from whom to marry to what job to take. 2. Managing emotions. Handling feelings so they are appropriate is an ability that builds on self-awareness. Chapter 5 will examine the capacity to soothe oneself, to shake off rampant anxiety, gloom, or irritability—and the consequences of failure at this basic emotional skill. People who are poor in this ability are constantly battling feelings of distress, while those who excel in it can bounce back far more quickly from life’s setbacks and upsets. 3. Motivating oneself. As Chapter 6 will show, marshaling emotions in the service of a goal is essential for paying attention, for self-motivation and mastery, and for creativity. Emotional self-control—delaying gratification and stifling impulsiveness—underlies accomplishment of every sort. And being able to get into the “flow” state enables outstanding performance of all kinds. People who have this skill tend to be more highly productive and effective in whatever they undertake. 4. Recognizing emotions in others. Empathy, another ability that builds on emotional self-awareness, is the fundamental “people skill.” Chapter 7 will investigate the roots of empathy, the social cost of being emotionally tone-deaf, and the reason empathy kindles altruism. People who are empathic are more attuned to the subtle social signals that indicate what others need or want. This makes them better at callings such as the caring professions, teaching, sales, and management. 5. Handling relationships. The art of relationships is, in large part, skill in managing emotions in others. Chapter 8 looks at social competence and incompetence, and the specific skills involved. These are the abilities that undergird popularity, leadership, and interpersonal effectiveness. People who excel in these skills do well at anything that relies on interacting smoothly with others; they are social stars.

What is the matter with her?” Lillian asked Daisy, bewildered by her mother’s docile manner. It was nice not to have to scrap and spar with Mercedes, but at the same time, now was when Lillian would have expected Mercedes to mow her over like a charging horse brigade. Daisy shrugged and replied puckishly, “One can only assume that since you’ve done the opposite of everything she has advised, and you seem to have brought Lord Westcliff up to scratch, Mother has decided to leave the matter in your hands. I predict that she will turn a deaf ear and a blind eye to anything you do, so long as you manage to keep the earl’s interest.” “Then… if I steal away to Lord Westcliff’s room later this evening, she won’t object?” Daisy gave a low laugh. “She would probably help you to sneak up there, if you asked.” She gave Lillian an arch glance. “Just what are you going to do with Lord Westcliff, alone in his room?” Lillian felt herself flush. “Negotiate.” “Oh. Is that what you call it?” Biting back a smile, Lillian narrowed her eyes. “Don’t be saucy, or I won’t tell you the lurid details later.” “I don’t need to hear them from you,” Daisy said airily. “I’ve been reading the novels that Lady Olivia recommended… and now I daresay I know more than you and Annabelle put together.” Lillian couldn’t help laughing. “Dear, I’m not certain that those novels are entirely accurate in their depiction of men, or of… of that.” Daisy frowned. “In what way are they not accurate?” “Well, there’s not really any sort of… you know, lavender mist and the swooning, and all the flowery speeches.” Daisy regarded her with sincere disgruntlement. “Not even a little swooning?” “For heaven’s sake, you wouldn’t want to swoon, or you might miss something.” “Yes, I would. I should like to be fully conscious for the beginning, and then I should like to swoon through the rest of it.” Lillian regarded her with startled amusement. “Why?” “Because it sounds dreadfully uncomfortable. Not to mention revolting.” “It’s not.” “Not what? Uncomfortable, or revolting?” “Neither,” Lillian said in a matter-of-fact tone, though she was struggling not to laugh. “Truly, Daisy. I would tell you if it were otherwise. It’s lovely. It really is.” Her younger sister contemplated that, and glanced at her skeptically. “If you say so.

I have no musical talent. My clarinet sounded like an apoplectic yak. For the brief days I blew the trumpet, a hostile-sounding pig snorted along in jerky fits and starts with the rest of the irritated band. I never knew when a sound was actually going to come out of the horn and it always startled me when it did. My violin unleashed a trio of enraged, tone-deaf banshees, and I couldn’t blow the flute well enough to make any more sound than with my lower lip on a soda bottle. Something about the pucker eluded me. The drums turned my arms into a pretzel-prison from which there was no escape. I would have given the tambourine a try—I really think I might have excelled at the hip-bump—but sadly the instrument wasn’t offered at my school. I think that’s why I love my iPod so much. I have music in my soul and can’t get it out.

Why is it that we say we see something distinctive in these lives and not, say, in a politician hoping for our vote, or a lawyer doing her job, or even a soldier risking his life for the sake of his country? Because the scientists and philosophers are to this extent right, that people generally act on the basis of rational self-interest. Consciously or otherwise, we seek to hand on our genes to the next generation. Individually and as groups, tribes, nations and civilisations, we are engaged in a Darwinian struggle to survive. All this we know, and though the terminology may change from age to age, people have known it for a very long time indeed. But here and there we see acts, personalities, lives, that seem to come from somewhere else, that breathe a larger air. They chime with the story we read in chapter 1, about a God who creates in love, who has faith in us, who summons us to greatness and forgives us when, as from time to time we must, we fall, the God whose creativity consists in self-effacement, in making space for the otherness that is us. This has nothing whatsoever to do with the physical laws, Darwinian or otherwise, governing biology, and everything to do with the making of meaning out of the communion of souls linked in loyalty and love. Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin see such flowerings of the spirit as ‘spandrels’, decorative motifs that have nothing to do with the weight-bearing architecture of life.15 Like most people, I see them as the redemption of life from mere existence to the fellowship of the divine. As Isaiah Berlin said, there are people tone deaf to the spirit. There is no reason to expect everyone to believe in God or the soul or the music of the universe as it sings the improbability of its existence. God is the distant voice we hear and seek to amplify in our systems of meaning, each particular to a culture, a civilisation, a faith. God is the One within the many; the unity at the core of our diversity; the call that leads us to journey beyond the self and its strivings, to enter into otherness and be enlarged by it, to seek to be a vehicle through which blessing flows outwards to the world, to give thanks for the miracle of being and the radiance that shines wherever two lives touch in affirmation, forgiveness and love.

Eliza has one of the worst voices known to man. Swear to God, for someone so obsessed with music, she’s borderline tone deaf. But trying to describe how I felt watching her dance around and sing would be like trying to build a skyscraper with my bare hands. It made me want to marry her. Made me want to buy her a magic airplane and fly her away to a place where nothing bad could ever happen. Made me want to pour rubber cement all over my chest and then lay down on top of her so that we’d be stuck together, and so it would hurt like hell if we ever tried to tear ourselves apart.

I mentioned a television documentary Julie and I had watched at Gilly’s house and that Jill remarked on how his Park Street flat was filled with women’s cosmetics and perfume bottles in the bathroom. “What?” Michael exclaimed. Sometimes I thought the word was not a sign of deafness but of stalling. Jill had suggested Michael had quite a full love life before she met him. “Did she?” Michael asked mildly. “So what I want to know,” I said raising my voice, “did you get around or did you go out and get that stuff to impress her.” Julie tittered. “I don’t know where it came from,” he said in that sort of comic-evasive tone he was good at slipping into. Julie brought up Gilly’s comment on the draining board in Michael’s flat. “What’s that?” he asked. Julie suggested he had selective hearing and could even hear what others said quietly when he wanted to. “What’s that? Say it again,” he said, with a straight face.

Guy: 'Can't you take a cue off the music?' Me: 'Can't I'm afraid. I'm tone-deaf.' Bill: 'Well, when the singing stops. Even you must be able to tell the difference between singing and instrumental.' Me: 'Bill, we've worked together long enough for you to know I'm so tone-deaf I can't tell the difference between music and silence.' Chris: 'Look, I'll nudge you with my toe before I stab you.' Me: 'It's all right, Bill. Chris is going to nudge me with his toe before he stabs me.' Guy: 'A killer and a gentleman.

Tone-deaf to the mounting resentments of those who had not shared in the bounty of globalization, they missed the mood of discontent. The populist backlash caught them by surprise.

But instead, my father sat us down for an explanation of lesbianism.... ...I was mortified, and looked over at my girlfriend to see if this was all registering with her, but she was too busy daydreaming to notice the runaway train that was thundering thought the motel room. She hadn't spoken a single word to any of the adults so far on the trip, and even when she occasionally spoke to me, it was in such a eerily quiet tone that only a nine-year-old- girl or a dog could hear it. I'm pretty sure that Bob and Donna thought she was a deaf-mute, albeit one who could miraculously sense the vacuum seal breaking on a can of Pringles from a mile away. I was eager to let the whole thing go, when my friend asked casually, 'But what's munching the carpet got to do with anything?

Very true. Aspirational content is exactly the whole premise of S. But in times like this, showing too much of that can come across as tone-deaf. We want to produce content more attuned to the current climate without compromising on the luxury and glamour we’re known for.

In worrying about the practical aspects of the plan more than political considerations, I may have been tone-deaf.

Ten Rules for the Novelist: 1. The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator.   2. Fiction that isn’t an author’s personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn’t worth writing for anything but money.   3. Never use the word then as a conjunction—we have and for this purpose. Substituting then is the lazy or tone-deaf writer’s non-solution to the problem of too many ands on the page.   4. Write in third person unless a really distinctive first-person voice offers itself irresistibly.   5. When information becomes free and universally accessible, voluminous research for a novel is devalued along with it.   6. The most purely autobiographical fiction requires pure invention. Nobody ever wrote a more autobiographical story than The Metamorphosis.   7. You see more sitting still than chasing after.   8. It’s doubtful that anyone with an Internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.   9. Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting. 10. You have to love before you can be relentless.

David Vladeck, the head of the consumer protection bureau overseeing the investigation, said. “We were surprised that someone as sophisticated as Sheryl Sandberg could be as tone-deaf as she was.” Some had a less charitable interpretation. “Arrogance is her weakness, her blind spot. She believes there is no person she can’t charm or convince,” a former Facebook employee observed.

It was something in the tone of the madmen and their type of formation. They were a scratch company of barbarians and slaves and poor and unimportant people; but their formation was military; they moved together and were very absolute about who and what was really a part of their little system; and about what they said. However mildly, there was a ring like iron. Men used to many mythologies and moralities could make no analysis of the mystery, except the curious conjecture that they meant what they said. All attempts to make them see reason in the perfectly simple matter of the Emperor’s statue seemed to be spoken to deaf men. It was as if a new meteoric metal had fallen on the earth; it was a difference of substance to the touch. Those who touched their foundation fancied they had struck a rock. With a strange rapidity, like the changes of a dream, the proportions of things seemed to change in their presence. Before most men knew what had happened, these few men were palpably present. They were important enough to be ignored. People became suddenly silent about them and walked stiffly past them. We see a new scene, in which the world has drawn its skirts away from these men and women and they stand in the centre of a great space like lepers. The scene changes again and the great space where they stand is overhung on every side with a cloud of witnesses, interminable terraces full of faces looking down towards them intently; for strange things are happening to them. New tortures have been invented for the madmen who have brought good news. That sad and weary society seems almost to find a new energy in establishing its first religious persecution. Nobody yet knows very clearly why that level world has thus lost its balance about the people in its midst; but they stand unnaturally still while the arena and the world seem to revolve round them. And there shone on them in that dark hour a light that has never been darkened; a white fire clinging to that group like an unearthly phosphorescence, blazing its track through the twilights of history and confounding every effort to confound it with the mists of mythology and theory; that shaft of light or lightning by which the world itself has struck and isolated and crowned it; by which its own enemies have made it more illustrious and its own critics have made it more inexplicable; the halo of hatred around the Church of God.

I do not come from a family of singers. When we get together and warble "Happy Birthday" to one another over cake and candle, it doesn't sound as much like a song as it does a pack of jackals yapping over a fresh carcass. And in my case, it's nothing that you want to inflict on the innocent, or at least on people who haven't reported us to the city yet. Who is flat, off-key or tone deaf in the Notaro clan is all up in the air--it doesn't matter, and we can't tell, anyway.

many of us are tone deaf to the Supernatural, not tuned into any godly wavelength.

-What is deafness? -A defect in the ear, due to which the mind does not receive any information about sounds. -But sometimes the mind simply decides to ignore sounds despite receiving data. When it is engaged in something, for example, sleeping, our minds often receive sounds and decide to ignore them, just like that, even though there is no hearing impairment. Sight, touch, taste, smell, the mind can ignore its input if it so desires. He looked directly into his eyes, and advanced towards him a little, he said in a tone of ambiguity: But what if we already have this appropriate sense, Ruslan, but our minds interpret their data at will. Or decided to ignore it completely for some reason. And what is this sense? Let's agree to call it zero sense. The sense through which we can receive the data of the original color of the apple.

the original color of the apple -Ozcan: So, it is nothing. Imagine that we live in a world of matter, with no color, no taste, no smell, no touch, no sound. Our five senses cannot receive any information about it. So, we live in nothing, our minds decide what it is, and our need to communicate has created languages, terms, and common concepts. I may see and hear nothing but what you see and hear, but we have agreed on terms and concepts that unite us on them. Ozcan added: But nothing is still a thing, our five senses restrict us, perhaps if we had five additional senses to receive the data of this nothing, our minds would interpret it, and deal with it. We need additional senses to receive data that we do not know anything about. Ten senses, for example? Are they enough? What if the nature of this substance needs an extra sense yet? Well, a hundred senses? What if the right sense is not among them? In the end, we do not need a large number of senses, but rather the appropriate sense to receive the necessary data about this substance. The next question, Ruslan: What if we got this sense, and then our mind rejected the reality of matter for some reason? And decided not to interpret the data correctly? Or ignored it? As it often does with our five senses. -What is deafness? -A defect in the ear, due to which the mind does not receive any information about sounds. -But sometimes the mind simply decides to ignore sounds despite receiving data. When it is engaged in something, for example, sleeping, our minds often receive sounds and decide to ignore them, just like that, even though there is no hearing impairment. Sight, touch, taste, smell, the mind can ignore its input if it so desires. He looked directly into his eyes, and advanced towards him a little, he said in a tone of ambiguity: But what if we already have this appropriate sense, Ruslan, but our minds interpret their data at will. Or decided to ignore it completely for some reason. And what is this sense? Let’s agree to call it zero sense. The sense through which we can receive the data of the original color of the apple

Let’s talk about you. What do you think about? What do you want? What do you see around you?” “Why do you want to talk about that?” “Because, Kyle, I have been surrounded with all kinds of human beings-smart, stupid, pragmatic, dogmatic, generous, selfish, far-seeing, short-sighted, insightful, thoughtless, emotional, tone-deaf, passionate, detatched-but never anyone quite like you. I’m curious about you.” I thought about it. “A lot of people are curious about me. When I was little, the doctors ran all kinds of tests. Until Mom told them I’m not an experiment and they had to stop.” “I know you’re not. I looked up your medical records. Their diagnoses were more about explaining the way you are than understanding who you are.

At a conscious level, they wanted the best for John, but they were tone-deaf when it came to respecting and fostering his autonomy.

A person who has no talent for skating will probably not become the best skater even after practicing for months. A tone-deaf person won’t ever sing a perfect aria and get applause either. But with practice, you can at least stumble a step forward on the ice or manage to sing a measure of a song. That’s what practice can offer—miracles and also limitations.

Now slightly thicker than I had been recently, I rocked up to a venue in Germany and was greeted by one of the UK’s most respected wrestlers, Doug Williams. “No more abs?” he asked as if I weren’t a teenage girl with a complex. More tone-deaf than malicious. “No, Doug. I have a fucking eating disorder and was killing myself” was what I wanted to say. But instead, I just laughed and said, “Ha-ha, apparently not,” and then cried in the bathroom.

Thank god the three of them had hit retirement age just in time! Who’d want to teach at a university these days? Didn’t the students rat the professors out at the slightest verbal misstep? Weren’t the beleaguered profs routinely mobbed on social media—as Chrissy had been just before she left for daring to teach ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, that disgusting, incestuous Jacobean bloodbath with such a demeaning word in the title? How could she have been so tone-deaf? So anti-woman? Not a good look! “But I chose it as an example of misogyny,” Chrissy had wailed at the time. “You aren’t supposed to like it!

Weren’t the beleaguered profs routinely mobbed on social media—as Chrissy had been just before she left for daring to teach ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, that disgusting, incestuous Jacobean bloodbath with such a demeaning word in the title? How could she have been so tone-deaf? So anti-woman? Not a good look! “But I chose it as an example of misogyny,” Chrissy had wailed at the time. “You aren’t supposed to like it!

my favorite was when the schoolgirl didn’t complete her homework on time!” Owen was saying enthusiastically. “It was a great piece of filmmaking, because the professor had this dungeon...” “Hey, buddy,” Liam said, leaning forward. “Looks like there’s a gas station at that exit up ahead. Didn’t you say you were running low? How about we stop and fill up, and maybe grab a bite to eat?” “But I’m in the middle of my story!” Owen protested. “Don’t you want to hear what happens to the schoolgirl? Helen does! Don’t you, Helen?” “Get. Gas. Now.” My voice has never been more deadly serious. “Sheesh,” Owen says sadly, signaling and pulling over to exit. “Fine, Helen; if you insist. I’m disappointed in you. Liam is a spoilsport, but I would have thought that since you’re a writer, you would appreciate a good story.” “A good story?” I repeat incredulously. “Owen, nothing you’ve said in the past three hours has been anywhere close to a good story. Listening to you is making my ears hurt. I think they’re melting—your words are like acid being poured into my ear canals.” “Hey! That’s not nice,” Owen says in a grumpy tone. It sounds like he might be pouting. “It’s medically impossible to lose your hearing from listening to someone talk about the glorious art of pornography.” I grumble to myself unhappily. “It’s possible if I buy a popsicle at the gas station, eat the popsicle, and then use the popsicle stick to gouge my own ears out so that I can tolerate the rest of this trip!” Sighing, I lean to press my head against the glass of the car window. It is cold, and I use it like an ice pack to soothe my aching ear and temple. I really do feel like if I need to listen to one more ridiculous tale of sexual depravity for no particular reason, I’m going to lose my mind. I really wouldn’t care if they were good stories. “Seriously. I think I’m going deaf. It hurts.” “Well, that’s a bad problem to have when you’re in the car with two eye doctors!” Owen says cheerfully. “Jesus, man,” Liam says to his friend in dismay. “It’s been hours. You need to stop talking.

She’s probably wondering what just happened, but I’m too rattled to stop and explain things: The more I get to know her, the more I like her. And the more I like her, the more I want her to like me .

I groan and squeeze my eyes shut. I know what happens when people make an effort to care about others: they get taken advantage of, and then they get hurt. Ali is already bumming a ride with me, so I should draw the line there. There’s no need for me to do anything else for her. But I want to. I want to help her in every way possible, and that can only lead to trouble. Although, if the trouble came in a form as sweet as Ali, it might be worth it . . .

Cleopatra Calliope McNeil!' The shout came from the kitchen. 'What on earth have you been doing? There are egg yolks everywhere!' ... 'Calliope?' Ryan echoed. 'It means beautiful voice, if you must know.' Cleo shook her head. 'Shame I'm tone deaf. Sorry, Mum!' she called back. 'We needed the whites to... erm...' 'Bake meringues,' Ryan shouted. 'Meringues?' Cleo mouthed. 'Is that the best we can come up with?

INTRODUCTION AND CHAPTER ONE IN ONE PAGE The Four Villains of Decision Making 1. Danny Kahneman: “A remarkable aspect of your mental life is that you are rarely stumped.” • Should Shannon fire Clive? We form opinions effortlessly. 2. What’s in our spotlight = the most accessible information + our interpretation of that information. But that will rarely be all that we need to make a good decision. 3. Our decision “track record” isn’t great. Trusting our guts or conducting rigorous analysis won’t fix it. But a good process will. • Study: “Process mattered more than analysis—by a factor of six.” 4. We can defeat the four villains of decision making by learning to shift our spotlights. 5. Villain 1: Narrow framing (unduly limiting the options we consider)     •  HopeLab had five firms work simultaneously on stage 1; “Can I do this AND that?” 6. Villain 2: The confirmation bias (seeking out information that bolsters our beliefs) • The tone-deaf American Idol contestant … • Lovallo: “Confirmation bias is probably the single biggest problem in business.” 7. Villain 3: Short-term emotion (being swayed by emotions that will fade) • Intel’s Andy Grove got distance by asking, “What would our successors do?”     8. Villain 4: Overconfidence (having too much faith in our predictions) • “Four-piece groups with guitars, particularly, are finished.” 9. The pros-and-cons process won’t correct these problems. But the WRAP process will. • Joseph Priestley conquered all four villains. 10. To make better decisions, use the WRAP process: Widen Your Options. Reality-Test Your Assumptions. Attain Distance Before Deciding. Prepare to Be Wrong.

I can say this because she’s my girlfriend, even if, at the moment, she’s only my girlfriend in secret - Eliza has one of the worst voices known to man. Swear to God, for someone so obsessed with music, she’s borderline tone deaf. But trying to describe how I felt watching her dance around and sing would be like trying to build a skyscraper with my bare hands. It made me want to marry her. Made me want to buy her a magical airplane and fly her away to a place where nothing bad could ever happen. Made me want to pour rubber cement all over my chest and then lay down on top of her so that we’d be stuck together, and so it would hurt like hell if we ever tried to tear ourselves apart.

I have been like a mediocre concert pianist playing in front of a tone-deaf family, who applaud out of duty rather than for accomplishment.

composition in dissarythm, the new quarter-tone dance music in which chorded woodwinds provided background patterns for the mad melodies pounded on tuned tomtoms. Between each number and the next a frenetic announcer extolled the virtues of a product. Munching a sandwich, Roger listened appreciatively to the dissarhythm and managed not to hear the commercials. Most intelligent people of the nineties had developed a type of radio deafness which enabled them not to hear a human voice coming from a loudspeaker, although they could hear and enjoy the then-infrequent intervals of music between announcements. In an age when advertising competition was so keen that there was scarcely a bare wall or an unbillboarded lot within miles of a population center, discriminating people could retain normal outlooks on life only by carefully-cultivated partial blindness and partial deafness which enabled them to ignore the bulk of that concerted assault upon their senses. For that reason a good part of the newscast which followed the dissarhythm program went, as it were, into one of Roger’s ears and out the other before it occurred to him that he was not listening to a panegyric on patent breakfast foods. He thought he recognized the voice, and after a sentence or two he was sure that it was that of Milton Hale, the eminent physicist whose new theory on the principle of indeterminacy had recently occasioned so much scientific controversy. Apparently, Dr.

Such creatures were what they saw, because they now rigidly coded the neurons responsible for the sight. For humans too, the brain loses some of its unbounded intelligence whenever it perceives the universe across boundaries. That partial blindness remains inescapable without the ability to transcend. Impressions on our neurons are constantly being set for each of the senses, not just sight. Though we usually call the heavier impressions "stress," all impressions actually create some limitation. For illustrate: In the early 1980s, M.I.T. experts began studying how human hearing function. Hearing seems passive, but in fact every person listens quite selectively to the world and puts his own interpretation on the raw data that comes into his ears. (For example, a skilled singer hears pitch and harmony where a tone-deaf person hears noise.) One experiment involves people listening to fast, basic rhythms (1-2-3 and 1-2-3 and 1-2-3), and teaching them to hear the rhythm differently (1, 2, 3-and-l, 2, 3-and-l, 2). After the noises started to be interpreted distinctly, the participants indicated that the sounds became more vibrant and fresher. The experiment evidently had taught people to change their unseen limits somewhat. The really interesting result, however, was that when they went home these people found the colours seemed lighter, music sounded better, the taste of food immediately became more pleasant, and everyone around them seemed lovable. Just the slightest consciousness opening induced a change in reality. Meditation causes a bigger shift because it opens more channels of awareness and opens them to a deeper level. The shift does not separate us from the normal way we use our consciousness. Building borders will continue to be a fact of life. The twist provided by the rishis was to infuse this behavior with liberation, increasing it to a level which transcends the alienated ego's petty thoughts and desires. The ego typically has no choice but to actively waste life erecting one wall after another.

The tallest mountains generally get the most attention. Fourteen of the world’s peaks are more than 26,247 feet high. The region about 25,000 feet is known as a mountain’s “death zone,” an altitude the human body can only endure for a few days…when Tenzing Norgay reached the summit of Mount Everest in 1953, he reverenced the mountain as Chomolungma, the “Mother Goddess of the World.” By contrast, after finished the ascent, Edmund Hillary wisecracked to a member of the team, “well, we’ve knocked the bastard off.” Some folks seem tone-deaf to mystery.

I've heard love can overcome anything. I suppose that includes tone deafness.

Nothing happened on the journey to their hotel, where McGregor took station. He had nothing to report when Sean and I arrived to relieve him in the morning, and nothing untoward happened the following day, either. Unless you counted the excruciating politeness with which Sean and my father treated each other. It screeched at my nerves like a tone-deaf child with their first violin.

As devious as this plot was, it could never have succeeded to the degree that it did had Clinton not abetted it with such vigor. That summer, she failed to emerge as the overwhelming front-runner everyone had expected, weighed down by stories on Clinton Foundation “buckraking” and the revelation that she had kept a private e-mail server as secretary of state and destroyed much of her correspondence. She also refused to release transcripts of highly paid speeches she’d delivered to Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street firms. In August, e-mails surfaced showing that Bill Clinton, through the foundation, had sought State Department permission to accept speaking fees in repressive countries such as North Korea and the Republic of the Congo. A poll the same day found that the word voters associated most with his wife was “liar.” Clinton’s tone-deaf response to the steady drip of revelations only deepened their impact because

I have a friend in Fern Tree who teaches piano. Very musical, she is. I'm tone-deaf myself. But one day she was telling me how every room has a note. You just have to find it. She started warbling away, up and down. And suddenly one note came back to us, just bounced back off the walls and rose from the floor and filled the place with this perfect hum. This beautiful sound. Like you've thrown a plum and an orchard comes back at you. You wouldn't believe it, Mr Evans. These two completely different things, a note and a room, finding each other. It sounded...right. Am I being ridiculous? Do you think that's what we mean by love, Mr Evans? The note that comes back to you? That finds you even when you don't want to be found? That one day you find someone, and everything they are comes back to you in a strange way that hums? That fits. That's beautiful. I'm not explaining myself at all well, am I? she said. I'm not very good with words. But that's what we were. Jack and me. We didn't really know each other. I'm not sure if I liked everything about him. I suppose some things about me annoyed him. But I was that room and he was that note and now he's gone. And everything is silent.

Since I was a big reader, I might be able to accomplish something. I had no gift. That didn’t mean I must be a deprived person. Besides, why had the Enlightenment poured its seductive light all across the European continent right into the poor endangered households of Ukrainian Jews? Probably, my mother thought, so that a child, any child (even a tone-deaf one), could be given a chance despite genetic deficiency to become, in my mother’s embarrassed hopeful world, a whole person.

I used to think of you, when ye were small,” Jamie was saying to Bree, his voice very soft. “When I lived in the cave; I would imagine that I held ye in my arms, a wee babe. I would hold ye so, against my heart, and sing to ye there, watching the stars go by overhead.” “What would you sing?” Brianna’s voice was low, too, barely audible above the crackle of the fire. I could see her hand, resting on his shoulder. Her index finger touched a long, bright strand of his hair, tentatively stroking its softness. “Old songs. Lullabies I could remember, that my mother sang to me, the same that my sister Jenny would sing to her bairns.” She sighed, a long, slow sound. “Sing to me now, please, Da.” He hesitated, but then tilted his head toward hers and began to chant softly, an odd tuneless song in Gaelic. Jamie was tone-deaf; the song wavered oddly up and down, bearing no resemblance to music, but the rhythm of the words was a comfort to the ear. I caught most of the words; a fisher’s song, naming the fish of loch and sea, telling the child what he would bring home to her for food. A hunter’s song, naming birds and beasts of prey, feathers for beauty and furs for warmth, meat to last the winter. It was a father’s song—a soft litany of providence and protection. I

when Arnold Schoenberg replied to a student who had dreamed of composing a “soaring melody,” that the proper word, surely, was “snoring.” Such puns could be funny, cruel, and tone-deaf (in seven nations and twelve tones), comments of exasperation as often as they were attempts at endearment.

We usually hear what we want to hear and turn a deaf ear to everything else. But remember the package deal? If we don't listen to everything God has to say, we eventually won't hear anything He has to say. And we probably need to hear most what we want to hear least. But this I know for sure: His tone of voice is always loving. Sometimes it's tough love in the form of rebuke or discipline, but it's loving, nonetheless.

I've simply always lacked even the slightest religious impulse- when people talk about their faith, I can't connect with what they're talking about. This isn't a decision I came to, or a deep belief or principle; I'm just religion-deaf, the way tone-deaf people hear sounds and not music. I suppose my religion is reading.