Transporter Best Quotes

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You may have noticed that the books you really love are bound together by a secret thread. You know very well what is the common quality that makes you love them, though you cannot put it into words: but most of your friends do not see it at all, and often wonder why, liking this, you should also like that. Again, you have stood before some landscape, which seems to embody what you have been looking for all your life; and then turned to the friend at your side who appears to be seeing what you saw -- but at the first words a gulf yawns between you, and you realise that this landscape means something totally different to him, that he is pursuing an alien vision and cares nothing for the ineffable suggestion by which you are transported. Even in your hobbies, has there not always been some secret attraction which the others are curiously ignorant of -- something, not to be identified with, but always on the verge of breaking through, the smell of cut wood in the workshop or the clap-clap of water against the boat's side? Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it. All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it -- tantalising glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest -- if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself -- you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say "Here at last is the thing I was made for". We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the thing we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work. While we are, this is. If we lose this, we lose all.
C.S. Lewis (The Problem of Pain)
There will be other lives. There will be other lives for nervous boys with sweaty palms, for bittersweet fumblings in the backseats of cars, for caps and gowns in royal blue and crimson, for mothers clasping pretty pearl necklaces around daughters' unlined necks, for your full name read aloud in an auditorium, for brand-new suitcases transporting you to strange new people in strange new lands. And there will be other lives for unpaid debts, for one-night stands, for Prague and Paris, for painful shoes with pointy toes, for indecision and revisions. And there will be other lives for fathers walking daughters down aisles. And there will be other lives for sweet babies with skin like milk. And there will be other lives for a man you don't recognize, for a face in a mirror that is no longer yours, for the funerals of intimates, for shrinking, for teeth that fall out, for hair on your chin, for forgetting everything. Everything. Oh, there are so many lives. How we wish we could live them concurrently instead of one by one by one. We could select the best pieces of each, stringing them together like a strand of pearls. But that's not how it works. A human's life is a beautiful mess.
Gabrielle Zevin (Elsewhere)
Vehicles are one of the best modes of transportation. Relationships are one of the best vehicles of transformation.
Kate McGahan
Surprised by joy—impatient as the Wind I turned to share the transport—Oh! with whom But thee, deep buried in the silent tomb, That spot which no vicissitude can find? Love, faithful love, recalled thee to my mind— But how could I forget thee? Through what power, Even for the least division of an hour, Have I been so beguiled as to be blind To my most grievous loss!—That thought's return Was the worst pang that sorrow ever bore, Save one, one only, when I stood forlorn, Knowing my heart's best treasure was no more; That neither present time, nor years unborn Could to my sight that heavenly face restore.
William Wordsworth (The Works of William Wordsworth)
Of all the places I have walked into, libraries must be the most magical. Have you ever opened the cover of a book and wondered what you would find inside? Where you would go? Whom you would meet? A story has the power to send you back in time or into the future, to transport you to other lands and kingdoms. I’ve met ogres, talking rabbits, and some of my best friends in the pages of books. Librarians might just have the best jobs ever. With each library card they hand out, they offer a ticket to strange and marvelous worlds. Open a book and, like Reading Beauty, you might fall under a spell—the magic of a deep read. But chances are, unlike the Sleeping Beauty of the original fairy tale, you will never want the spell to be broken.
Kimberly Long Cockroft (Reading Beauty)
We’re going to stop this preposterous obsession with economic growth at the cost of all else. Great economic success doesn’t produce national happiness. It produces Republicans and Switzerland. So we’re going to concentrate on just being lovely and pleasant and civilized. We’re going to have the best schools and hospitals, the most comfortable public transportation, the liveliest arts, the most useful and well-stocked libraries, the grandest parks, the cleanest streets, the most enlightened social policies. In short, we’re going to be like Sweden, but with less herring and better jokes.
Bill Bryson (The Road to Little Dribbling: More Notes from a Small Island)
...the best poems were like little vessels that carry messages that can’t be transported in any other way; miniature worlds like tiny paintings or Faberge eggs.
Jonathan Hull (Losing Julia)
Travel is transition, and at its best it is a journey from home, a setting forth. I hated parachuting into a place. I needed to be able to link one place to another. One of the problems I had with travel in general was the ease and speed with which a person could be transported from the familiar to the strange, the moon shot whereby the New York office worker, say, is insinuated overnight into the middle of Africa to gape at gorillas. That was just a way of feeling foreign. The other way, going slowly, crossing national frontiers, scuttling past razor wire with my bag and my passport, was the best way of being reminded that there was a relationship between Here and There, and that a travel narrative was the story of There and Back.
Paul Theroux (Dark Star Safari: Overland from Cairo to Cape Town)
You could choose to live in either America or Denmark. In high-tax Denmark, your disposable income after taxes and transfers would be around $15,000 lower than in the States. But in return for your higher tax bill, you would get universal health care (one with better outcomes than in the US), free education right up through the best graduate schools, worker retraining programs on which the state spends seventeen times more as a percentage of GDP than what is spent in America, as well as high-quality infrastructure, mass transit, and many beautiful public parks and other spaces. Danes also enjoy some 550 more hours of leisure time a year than Americans do. If the choice were put this way—you can take the extra $15,000 but have to work longer hours, take fewer vacation days, and fend for yourself on health care, education, retraining, and transport—I think most Americans would choose the Danish model.
Fareed Zakaria (Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World)
To describe heaven it is not necessary to transport the materials of earth there. One must leave earth & its materials where they are, so as to beautify life with its ideal. To address Elohim familiarly is an unseemly buffoonery. The best way of showing him gratitude is not by yelling in his ears that he is mighty, that he created the world, that we are wormlets compared to his greatness. He knows it better than we. Men may excuse themselves of informing him of that. The best way of showing him gratitude is to console humanity, to restore all to it, take it by the hand & treat it like a brother. This is more genuine.
Comte de Lautréamont (Maldoror and the Complete Works)
A book can become your best companion in times of crisis. Not only do you learn in the journey of your pages, but rediscover yourself, with your virtues and defects ... often makes you question everything, even life itself. The books are fantastic, as they not only transport you to other places and the awakening of sensations, curiosity, laughter, hilarity, sadness, etc. Other times, it can give you a quiet space in truculent moments, and lead you to a level of peace, acceptance, healthy optimism, that I will never tire of recommending it. Never stop reading, there are no excuses ... there are always some minutes in any place, at any time and a huge universe for all tastes !!!
Elizabeth Hay
An average teenager today, if he or she could time-travel back to 1950, would have had an IQ of 118. If the teenager went back to 1910, he or she would have had an IQ of 130, besting 98 percent of his or her contemporaries. Yes, you read that right: if we take the Flynn Effect at face value, a typical person today is smarter than 98 percent of the people in the good old days of 1910. To state it in an even more jarring way, a typical person of 1910, if time-transported forward to the present, would have a mean IQ of 70, which is at the border of mental retardation. With the Raven’s Progressive Matrices, a test that is sometimes considered the purest measure of general intelligence, the rise is even steeper. An ordinary person of 1910 would have an IQ of 50 today, which is smack in the middle of mentally retarded territory, between “moderate” and “mild” retardation.
Steven Pinker (The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined)
Familiarity breeds indifference. We have seen too much pure, bright color at Woolworth’s to find it intrinsically transporting. And here we may note that, by its amazing capacity to give us too much of the best things, modern technology has tended to devaluate the traditional vision-inducing materials.
Aldous Huxley (The Doors of Perception/Heaven and Hell)
The Beautiful Path is not a place outside of yourself, but rather a place you carry within you everywhere you go.
Bryant McGill (Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life)
As a child, books were my transport.
Pam Allyn (What to Read When: The Books and Stories to Read with Your Child--and All the Best Times to Read Them)
Success is a journey. The best form of transport is Happiness.
Roy Smoothe (Success Lessons From Cool Entreprenuers)
Sometimes the best mode of transportation is a leap of faith.
M. Elaine Moore
Transportation at its best facilitates the efficient flow of resources, the efficient movement of people, and the efficient utilization of time. Thats why we do what we do at Mayflower-Plymouth. It’t just about cars and bicycles. Its about efficiency. Its about the improvement of the human experience. And ultimately its about the evolution of our planetary civilization.
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
On vacation you can be anyone you want Like a good book or an incredible outfit, being on vacation transports you into another version of yourself.
In your day-to-day life, maybe you can’t even bob your head to the radio without being embarrassed, but on the right twinkly-light-strung patio, with the right steel drum band, you’ll find yourself whirling and twirling with the best of them. On vacation, your hair changes. The water is different, maybe the shampoo. Maybe you don’t bother to wash your hair at all, or brush it, because the salty ocean water curls it up in a way you love. You think, Maybe I could do this at home too. Maybe I could be this person who doesn’t brush her hair, who doesn’t mind being sweaty or having sand in all her crevices. On vacation, you strike up conversations with strangers, and forget that there are any stakes. If it turns out impossibly awkward, who cares? You’ll never see them again!
Emily Henry (People We Meet on Vacation)
If a misfortune has already occurred, it is best not to worry about it, so we do not add fuel to the problem. Don't ally yourself with past events by lingering on them and exaggerating them. Let the past take care of itself, and transport yourself to the present while taking whatever measures are necessary to ensure that such a misfortune never occurs again, now or in the future.
Dalai Lama XIV (Dalai Lama's Little Book of Inner Peace: The Essential Life and Teachings)
greatest public school system in the world. We have invested fabulous sums for fine buildings, we have provided convenient transportation for children living in the rural districts, so they may attend the best schools, but there is one astounding weakness to this marvelous system — it is free! One of the strange things about human beings is that they value only that which has a price.
Napoleon Hill (Think and Grow Rich)
Despite the initial reliance of commerce on routes created through military conquest, it soon became obvious that whereas armies moved quickest by horse across land, massive quantities of goods moved best by water. Mongols expanded and lengthened the Grand Canal that already connected the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers to transport grain and other agricultural products farther and more efficiently into the northern districts.
Jack Weatherford (Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World)
When you're thinking about where is the best place to start a business, there's a lot to consider - It's about culture, it's about physical infrastructure, it's about how educated the people are, it's about the housing, it's about the natural ecosystem, it's about the regulatory and legal frameworks, it's about the local transportation system and the efficiency of all the other systems that are there. But location matters.
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
I was extremely curious about the alternatives to the kind of life I had been leading, and my friends and I exchanged rumors and scraps of information we dug from official publications. I was struck less by the West's technological developments and high living standards than by the absence of political witch-hunts, the lack of consuming suspicion, the dignity of the individual, and the incredible amount of liberty. To me, the ultimate proof of freedom in the West was that there seemed to be so many people there attacking the West and praising China. Almost every other day the front page of Reference, the newspaper which carded foreign press items, would feature some eulogy of Mao and the Cultural Revolution. At first I was angered by these, but they soon made me see how tolerant another society could be. I realized that this was the kind of society I wanted to live in: where people were allowed to hold different, even outrageous views. I began to see that it was the very tolerance of oppositions, of protesters, that kept the West progressing. Still, I could not help being irritated by some observations. Once I read an article by a Westerner who came to China to see some old friends, university professors, who told him cheerfully how they had enjoyed being denounced and sent to the back end of beyond, and how much they had relished being reformed. The author concluded that Mao had indeed made the Chinese into 'new people' who would regard what was misery to a Westerner as pleasure. I was aghast. Did he not know that repression was at its worst when there was no complaint? A hundred times more so when the victim actually presented a smiling face? Could he not see to what a pathetic condition these professors had been reduced, and what horror must have been involved to degrade them so? I did not realize that the acting that the Chinese were putting on was something to which Westerners were unaccustomed, and which they could not always decode. I did not appreciate either that information about China was not easily available, or was largely misunderstood, in the West, and that people with no experience of a regime like China's could take its propaganda and rhetoric at face value. As a result, I assumed that these eulogies were dishonest. My friends and I would joke that they had been bought by our government's 'hospitality." When foreigners were allowed into certain restricted places in China following Nixon's visit, wherever they went the authorities immediately cordoned off enclaves even within these enclaves. The best transport facilities, shops, restaurants, guest houses and scenic spots were reserved for them, with signs reading "For Foreign Guests Only." Mao-tai, the most sought-after liquor, was totally unavailable to ordinary Chinese, but freely available to foreigners. The best food was saved for foreigners. The newspapers proudly reported that Henry Kissinger had said his waistline had expanded as a result of the many twelve-course banquets he enjoyed during his visits to China. This was at a time when in Sichuan, "Heaven's Granary," our meat ration was half a pound per month, and the streets of Chengdu were full of homeless peasants who had fled there from famine in the north, and were living as beggars. There was great resentment among the population about how the foreigners were treated like lords. My friends and I began saying among ourselves: "Why do we attack the Kuomintang for allowing signs saying "No Chinese or Dogs" aren't we doing the same? Getting hold of information became an obsession. I benefited enormously from my ability to read English, as although the university library had been looted during the Cultural Revolution, most of the books it had lost had been in Chinese. Its extensive English-language collection had been turned upside down, but was still largely intact.
Jung Chang (Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China)
That is the best scent in the world, better than any perfume, any flower. It’s the smell of lives lived, the weight of words …’ ‘Well, I guess I never quite thought of books that way before.’ Sure, they could transport you to another place, be there for you when no one else was, but I hadn’t quite pictured secondhand books as having lived their own important lives, being ferried from one person to the next, imparting a little magic along the way.
Rebecca Raisin (Rosie's Travelling Tea Shop (The Travelling Shops #1))
The beauty of good writing is that it transports the reader inside another person’s experience in some other physical place and culture and, at its best, evokes a palpable feeling of being in a specific moment in time and space.
Jason Wilson (The Best American Travel Writing 2021 (The Best American Series))
Why this should be so is hard to say; one might be tempted to believe that it was based on some ancient convention that originally had a practical purpose, such as a cellar being cold and therefore best suited for storing corpses, and that this principle had been retained in our era of refrigerators and cold-storage rooms, had it not been for the notion that transporting bodies upward in buildings seems contrary to the laws of nature, as though height and death are mutually incompatible.
Karl Ove Knausgård (Min kamp 1 (Min kamp, #1))
I emphasise it now; I had little-to-nothing in common with other people. Their values I did not comprehend, their ideals were to me a living horror. Call it ostentatious but I even sought to provide tangible proof of my withdrawal from the world. I posted a sign in the entrance to the building wherein I dwelt; a sign that indicated I had no wish to be disturbed by anyone, for any purpose whatsoever. As these convictions took hold of me and, as I denied, nay even repudiated, the hold that the current society of men possesses over its ranks, as I retreated into a hermitage of the imagination, disentangling my own concerns from those paramount to the age in which I happened to be born, an age with no claim to be more enlightened, significant or progressive than any other, I tried to make a stand for the spirit. Tyranny, in this land, I was told, was dead. But I contend that the replacement of one form of tyranny with another is still tyranny. The secret police now operate not via the use of brute force in dark underground cells; they operate instead by a process of open brainwashing that is impossible to avoid altogether. The torture cells are not secret; they are everywhere, and so ubiquitous that they are no longer seen for what they are. One may abandon television; one may abandon all forms of broadcast media, even the Internet, but the advertising hoardings in every street, on vehicles, inside transport centres, are still there. And they contain the same messages. Only the very rich can avoid their clutches utterly. Those who have obtained sufficient wealth may choose their own surroundings, free from the propaganda of a decayed futurity. And yet, and yet, in order to obtain such a position of freedom it is first necessary to have served the ideals of the tyranny slavishly, thereby validating it. ("The Tower")
Mark Samuels (Best New Horror 23 (The Mammoth Book of Best New Horror, #23))
Another gene/environment interaction pertains to depression, a disease involving serotonin abnormalities.33 A gene called 5HTT codes for a transporter that removes serotonin from the synapse; having a particular 5HTT variant increases the risk of depression … but only when coupled with childhood trauma.fn23 What’s the effect of 5HTT variant on depression risk? It depends on childhood trauma exposure. What’s the effect of childhood trauma exposure on depression risk? It depends on 5HTT variant (plus loads of other genes, but you get the point).
Robert M. Sapolsky (Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst)
Of all modes of transport, the train is perhaps the best aid to thought. The views have none of the potential monotony of those on a ship or a plane, moving quickly enough for us not to get exasperated but slowly enough to allow us to identify objects. They offer us brief, inspiring glimpses into private domains, letting us see a woman at the precise moment when she takes a cup from a shelf in her kitchen, then carrying us on to a patio where a man is sleeping and then to a park where a child is catching a ball thrown by a figure we cannot see.
Alain de Botton (The Art of Travel)
We are dealing, then, with an absurdity that is not a quirk or an accident, but is fundamental to our character as people. The split between what we think and what we do is profound. It is not just possible, it is altogether to be expected, that our society would produce conservationists who invest in strip-mining companies, just as it must inevitably produce asthmatic executives whose industries pollute the air and vice-presidents of pesticide corporations whose children are dying of cancer. And these people will tell you that this is the way the "real world" works. The will pride themselves on their sacrifices for "our standard of living." They will call themselves "practical men" and "hardheaded realists." And they will have their justifications in abundance from intellectuals, college professors, clergymen, politicians. The viciousness of a mentality that can look complacently upon disease as "part of the cost" would be obvious to any child. But this is the "realism" of millions of modern adults. There is no use pretending that the contradiction between what we think or say and what we do is a limited phenomenon. There is no group of the extra-intelligent or extra-concerned or extra-virtuous that is exempt. I cannot think of any American whom I know or have heard of, who is not contributing in some way to destruction. The reason is simple: to live undestructively in an economy that is overwhelmingly destructive would require of any one of us, or of any small group of us, a great deal more work than we have yet been able to do. How could we divorce ourselves completely and yet responsibly from the technologies and powers that are destroying our planet? The answer is not yet thinkable, and it will not be thinkable for some time -- even though there are now groups and families and persons everywhere in the country who have begun the labor of thinking it. And so we are by no means divided, or readily divisible, into environmental saints and sinners. But there are legitimate distinctions that need to be made. These are distinctions of degree and of consciousness. Some people are less destructive than others, and some are more conscious of their destructiveness than others. For some, their involvement in pollution, soil depletion, strip-mining, deforestation, industrial and commercial waste is simply a "practical" compromise, a necessary "reality," the price of modern comfort and convenience. For others, this list of involvements is an agenda for thought and work that will produce remedies. People who thus set their lives against destruction have necessarily confronted in themselves the absurdity that they have recognized in their society. They have first observed the tendency of modern organizations to perform in opposition to their stated purposes. They have seen governments that exploit and oppress the people they are sworn to serve and protect, medical procedures that produce ill health, schools that preserve ignorance, methods of transportation that, as Ivan Illich says, have 'created more distances than they... bridge.' And they have seen that these public absurdities are, and can be, no more than the aggregate result of private absurdities; the corruption of community has its source in the corruption of character. This realization has become the typical moral crisis of our time. Once our personal connection to what is wrong becomes clear, then we have to choose: we can go on as before, recognizing our dishonesty and living with it the best we can, or we can begin the effort to change the way we think and live.
Wendell Berry (The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture)
If you really want to be right (or at least improve the odds of being right), you have to start by acknowledging your fallibility, deliberately seeking out your mistakes, and figuring out what caused you to make them. This truth has long been recognized in domains where being right is not just a zingy little ego boost but a matter of real urgency: in transportation, industrial design, food and drug safety, nuclear energy, and so forth. When they are at their best, such domains have a productive obsession with error. They try to imagine every possible reason a mistake could occur, they prevent as many of them as possible, and they conduct exhaustive postmortems on the ones that slip through. By embracing error as inevitable, these industries are better able to anticipate mistakes, prevent them, and respond appropriately when those prevention efforts fail.
Kathryn Schulz (Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error)
It is very good, Wisehammer, it's very well written, but it's too-too-political. It will be considered provocative." "You don't want me to say it." "Not tonight. We have many people against us." "I could tone it down. I could omit 'We left our country for our country's good.'" "That's the best line.
Timberlake Wertenbaker
So Lucille pressed the button, and a panel slid open in the wall, and the transporter came through, and sure enough here was the bare butt of the client waiting to be whipped. For reasons best known to himself he had kept his shoes and socks on, so he was wearing well-polished black loafers and black silk socks.
Helen DeWitt (Lightning Rods)
Another inventor, J. B. McComber, representing the Chicago-Tower Spiral-Spring Ascension and Toboggan Transportation Company, proposed a tower with a height of 8,947 feet, nearly nine times the height of the Eiffel Tower, with a base one thousand feet in diameter sunk two thousand feet into the earth. Elevated rails would lead from the top of the tower all the way to New York, Boston, Baltimore, and other cities. Visitors ready to conclude their visit to the fair and daring enough to ride elevators to the top would then toboggan all the way back home. “As the cost of the tower and its slides is of secondary importance,” McComber noted, “I do not mention it here, but will furnish figures upon application.” A third proposal demanded even more courage from visitors. This inventor, who gave his initials as R. T. E., envisioned a tower four thousand feet tall from which he proposed to hang a two-thousand-foot cable of “best rubber.” Attached at the bottom end of this cable would be a car seating two hundred people. The car and its passengers would be shoved off a platform and fall without restraint to the end of the cable, where the car would snap back upward and continue bouncing until it came to a stop. The engineer urged that as a precaution the ground “be covered with eight feet of feather bedding.
Erik Larson (The Devil in the White City)
But Mandelbrot continued to feel oppressed by France’s purist mathematical establishment. “I saw no compatibility between a university position in France and my still-burning wild ambition,” he writes. So, spurred by the return to power in 1958 of Charles de Gaulle (for whom Mandelbrot seems to have had a special loathing), he accepted the offer of a summer job at IBM in Yorktown Heights, north of New York City. There he found his scientific home. As a large and somewhat bureaucratic corporation, IBM would hardly seem a suitable playground for a self-styled maverick. The late 1950s, though, were the beginning of a golden age of pure research at IBM. “We can easily afford a few great scientists doing their own thing,” the director of research told Mandelbrot on his arrival. Best of all, he could use IBM’s computers to make geometric pictures. Programming back then was a laborious business that involved transporting punch cards from one facility to another in the backs of station wagons.
Jim Holt (When Einstein Walked with Gödel: Excursions to the Edge of Thought)
The best thing that can happen to me when I'm writing fiction is to lose sight of the fact that I'm writing at all. It's as though I enter into a kind of trance. I know I'm writing, but I don't THINK about it. I just let my fingers type--it's as though the feeling comes out directly through them, bypassing the brain altogether. When that happens, I feel completely transported. There is nothing else like this feeling, very little else is more important to me. That intimacy I feel between myself and my work is what makes me feel at home on the earth. I am basically a shy person, basically a loner and an outsider; and I have been all my life. But when I achieve the kind of connection I can through writing, I feel I'm sitting in the lap of God.
Elizabeth Berg (Escaping into the Open: The Art of Writing True)
The built environment is shaped not only by private sector development pratices, but also by the honored and fascinating field of planning. Planners in towns, counties, regional and state government, consulting firms and in economic development agencies translate ideas about human settlements into concrete designs. They can be generalists or specialize in transportation, urban centers, rural land use, economic development and more. At its best, the planning profession aims to mediate tensions between people, social groups, and the natural environment by creating an orderly process for determining common values, shared priorities and elegant principles for transcending conflicts. Therefore planners may find themselves caught in some of the most challenging political crossfire to be found. But they also have the opportunity to educate many sectors and communities.
Melissa Everett (Making A Living While Making A Difference)
Fitness means different things to different people. To exercise scientists, it means cardiorespiratory fitness, a parameter that can be measured in the laboratory by way of a test called maximal oxygen uptake or “VO2max” (the “V” stands for “volume”). It is also called aerobic fitness, and it refers to the capacity of your body to transport and utilize oxygen. Scientists have found that it’s one of the best predictors of overall health.
Martin Gibala (The One-Minute Workout: Science Shows a Way to Get Fit That's Smarter, Faster, Shorter)
Films and television let us experience other lives vicariously, or perhaps voyeuristically, as we watch those lives play out. But in a novel, we can become those characters, we can identify from the inside with someone whose life is radically different from our own. Best of all, when it’s over … we get to be ourselves again, changed slightly or profoundly by the experience, possessed of new insights perhaps, but recognizably us once more.
Thomas C. Foster (How to Read Novels Like a Professor: A Jaunty Exploration of the World's Favorite Literary Form)
Do you have to follow the king's instructions?" Brystal asked. "Surely he wouldn't notice if you recruited one or two extra students along the way." "Unfortunately, it's best if I do,"Madame Weatherberry said. "I've been down this road many times before. If we want acceptance in this world, then we must be very careful about how we seek acceptance. No one is going to respect us if we cut corners or cause problems. I could have snapped my fingers and transported all the girls out of the facility, but it would only have caused people to resent us more. Hatred is like fire, and no one can extinguish fire by giving it fuel. "I wish hatred was fire," Brystal said. "People like the Edgars and the Justices deserve to be burned for how they treat people." "Without question," Madame Weatherberry said. "However, we cannot let vengeance motivate us and distract us from doing what's right. It may seem like justice, but revenge is a double-edged sword - the longer you hold it, the deeper you cut yourself.
Chris Colfer (A Tale of Magic... (A Tale of Magic, #1))
The Best Meal of my Life, at Al Forno New Malden I have been to a fair amount of restaurants in my life, including some fantastic restaurants in Italy. And I can honestly say, that one of my best restaurant experiences ever was at Al Forno, New Malden. We loved everything about the evening - the staff were fantastic, the food was delicious, I felt like we had been magically transported to Italy, and the owner was amazing! I can honestly Al Forno is my new favourite restaurant - and I cannot wait to go back again!
kallip
I’ve sat at the piano for hours already, looking for lyrics and melodies, but everything sounds the same and I feel as uninspired as ever. Does it mean I’m finished? A more sobering thought: if I’m finished, would I miss it? But the truth is, I’ve been here before. Many times. We all have. So how do we find the faith to press on? Remember. Remember, Hebrew children, who you once were in Egypt. Remember the altars set up along the way to remind yourselves that you made the journey and God rescued you from sword and famine, from chariots and pestilence, that once you were there, but now you are here. It happened. Our memories are fallible, residing in that most complex and mysterious organ in the human body (and therefore the known universe), capable of being suppressed, manipulated, altered, but also profoundly powerful and able to transport a person to a place fifty years ago all because of a whiff of your grandfather’s cologne or an old book or the salty air. As often as you do this, do it in remembrance of me. Remember with every sip of wine that we shared this meal, you and I. Remember. So I look at the last album, the last book, and am forced to admit that I didn’t know anymore then than I do now. Every song is an Ebenezer stone, evidence of God’s faithfulness. I just need to remember. Trust is crucial. So is self-forgetfulness and risk and a measure of audacity. And now that I think about it, there’s also wonder, insight, familiarity with Scripture, passion, a good night’s sleep, breakfast (preferably an egg sandwich), an encouraging voice, diligence, patience. I need silence. Privacy. Time—that’s what I need: more time. But first I need a vacation, because I’ve been really grinding away at this other stuff and my mental cache is full. A deadline would be great. I work best with deadlines, and maybe some bills piling up. Some new guitar strings would help, and a nice candle. And that’s all I need, in the words of Steve Martin’s The Jerk. This is the truth: all I really need is a guitar, some paper, and discipline. If only I would apply myself.
Andrew Peterson (Adorning the Dark: Thoughts on Community, Calling, and the Mystery of Making)
The best available apples-to-apples comparison of inflation-adjusted earnings shows what the typical fully employed man earned back in the 1970s and what that same fully employed man earns today. The picture isn’t pretty. As the GDP has doubled and almost doubled again, as corporations have piled up record profits, as the country has gotten wealthier, and as the number of billionaires has exploded, the average man working full-time today earns about what the average man earned back in 1970. Nearly half a century has gone by, and the guy right in the middle of the pack is making about what his granddad did. The second punch that’s landed on families is expenses. If costs had stayed the same over the past few decades, families would be okay—or, at least, they would be in about the same position as they were thirty-five years ago. Not advancing but not falling behind, either. But that didn’t happen. Total costs are up, way up. True, families have cut back on some kinds of expenses. Today, the average family spends less on food (including eating out), less on clothing, less on appliances, and less on furniture than a comparable family did back in 1971. In other words, families have been pretty careful about their day-to-day spending, but it hasn’t saved them. The problem is that the other expenses—the big, fixed expenses—have shot through the roof and blown apart the family budget. Adjusted for inflation, families today spend more on transportation, more on housing, and more on health insurance. And for all those families with small children and no one at home during the day, the cost of childcare has doubled, doubled again, and doubled once more. Families have pinched pennies on groceries and clothing, but these big, recurring expenses have blown them right over a financial cliff.
Elizabeth Warren (This Fight Is Our Fight: The Battle to Save America's Middle Class)
respiratory system encompasses the nose, throat, and lungs. Some of the oils that help the respiratory system include eucalyptus, myrrh, fennel, sandalwood, thyme, cypress, bergamot, and sage. · The digestive system is responsible for breaking down food and includes the stomach, liver, intestines, and gallbladder. Oils used for this include dandelion, marshmallow, meadow sweet, and chamomile. · The circulatory system is responsible for transporting blood and oxygen throughout the body. Oils used for this include lemon, lavender, peppermint, fennel, thyme, juniper, and white birch.  · The endocrine system includes the thyroid glands, the pancreas, and the hormone glands. Essential oils used are sweet marjoram, clary sage, fennel, jasmine, rose, lemon, and juniper. · The immune system is responsible for fighting against diseases including everything from a cold to malaria.   ·  The nervous system transmits nerve impulses throughout the body. These cells are vitally important to the function of the human body. Oils used for the nervous system include clove, basil, ylang ylang, lavender, chamomile, bergamot, and sweet marjoram. · The brain is responsible for the functions of almost every organ system throughout the body. The essential oils used for the brain include lavender, chamomile, basil, lemon, peppermint, and ginger.
ARAV Books (Essential Oil Magic For Quick Healing: 50+ Beginners Recipes,The Best reference a-z guide and Aromatherapy Books on Healing, for Stress Free Young Living, Boosting Energy,(Therapeutic essential oils))
I would like to see a government that said: "We're going to stop this preposterous obsession with economic growth at the expense of all else. Great economic success doesn't produce national happiness. It produces Republicans and Switzerland. So we're going to concentrate on being lovely and pleasant and civilized. We're going to have the best schools and hospitals, the most comfortable public transportation, the liveliest arts, the most useful and well-stocked libraries, the cleanest streets, the most enlightened social policies. In short, we're going to be like Sweden, but with less herring and better jokes." Wouldn't that be delightful? But of course it will never happen.
Bill Bryson
To eat responsibly is to understand and enact, so far as one can, this complex relationship. What can one do? Here is a list, probably not definitive: 1. Participate in food production to the extent that you can. If you have a yard or even just a porch box or a pot in a sunny window, grow something to eat in it. Make a little compost of your kitchen scraps and use it for fertilizer. Only by growing some food for yourself can you become acquainted with the beautiful energy cycle that revolves from soil to seed to flower to fruit to food to offal to decay, and around again. You will be fully responsible for any food that you grow for yourself, and you will know all about it. You will appreciate it fully, having known it all its life. 2. Prepare your own food. This means reviving in your own mind and life the arts of kitchen and household. This should enable you to eat more cheaply, and it will give you a measure of “quality control”: You will have some reliable knowledge of what has been added to the food you eat. 3. Learn the origins of the food you buy, and buy the food that is produced closest to your home. The idea that every locality should be, as much as possible, the source of its own food makes several kinds of sense. The locally produced food supply is the most secure, the freshest, and the easiest for local consumers to know about and to influence. 4. Whenever possible, deal directly with a local farmer, gardener, or orchardist. All the reasons listed for the previous suggestion apply here. In addition, by such dealing you eliminate the whole pack of merchants, transporters, processors, packagers, and advertisers who thrive at the expense of both producers and consumers. 5. Learn, in self-defense, as much as you can of the economy and technology of industrial food production. What is added to food that is not food, and what do you pay for these additions? 6. Learn what is involved in the best farming and gardening. 7. Learn as much as you can, by direct observation and experience if possible, of the life histories of the food species. The
Wendell Berry (Bringing it to the Table: Writings on Farming and Food)
Emotion is the trace of an activated archetypal pattern. Emotion is the repository of the archaic landscape within each individual. Emotion is the labile, volatile, energetic force linking chaos and order in the psyche. Riding on emotion, a person can go back in time and visit a primordial landscape, untouched by cultural influences. Transported by emotion we make all the stops along the full continuum of our psychological vista. At one end of the continuum we are best by overwhelming primitive rage or terror or longing. At the other end, we experience a calm peace or the satisfaction of everyday accomplishment. The palpable difference in each of these locations is the quality of the emotion.
Betty De Shong Meador (Inanna, Lady of Largest Heart: Poems of the Sumerian High Priestess Enheduanna)
drugs that decrease “serotonergic tone” (i.e., decreasing serotonin levels or sensitivity to serotonin) increase impulsive aggression; raising the tone does the opposite. This generates some simple predictions—all of the following should be associated with impulsive aggression, as they will produce low serotonin signaling: a. Low-activity variants of the gene for tryptophan hydroxylase (TH), which makes serotonin b. High-activity variants of the gene for monoamine oxidase-A (MAO-A), which degrades serotonin c. High-activity variants of the gene for the serotonin transporter (5HTT), which removes serotonin from the synapse d. Variants of genes for serotonin receptors that are less sensitive to serotonin
Robert M. Sapolsky (Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst)
As it baked, the blessed casserole smelled just like it did when I was a child, which was likely the last time I’d eaten it. I marveled that the scent of a specific dish could remain in one’s consciousness for over two decades. Except for the dark brown hair and the crumbling marriage, I’d officially become my mother. Marlboro Man, happy to have something warm to eat, declared it the best thing he’d ever eaten. I looked at the mess in the kitchen and felt like moving. Marlboro Man and I watched movies that night. Our TV satellite hadn’t been hooked up yet, so he’d transported his movie collection and VCR from his old house. And I didn’t have to get up and drive home when they were over, because I already was home.
Ree Drummond (The Pioneer Woman: Black Heels to Tractor Wheels)
That a president is inevitably put forward and elected by the forces of established wealth and power means usually that he will be indentured by the time he reaches office. But in fact he is the freest of men if he will have the courage to think so and, at least theoretically, could be so transported by the millions of people who have endorsed his candidacy as to want to do the best for them. He might come to solemn appreciation of the vote we cast, in all our multicolored and multigendered millions, as an act of trust, fingers crossed, a kind of prayer. Not that it’s worked out that way. In 1968 Richard Nixon rebounded from his defeat at the hands of Jack Kennedy, and there he was again, his head sunk between the hunched shoulders of his three-button suit and his arms raised in victory, the exacted revenge of the pod people. That someone so rigid and lacking in honor or moral distinction of any kind, someone so stiff with crippling hatreds, so spiritually dysfunctional, out of touch with everything in life that is joyful and fervently beautiful and blessed, with no discernible reverence in him for human life, and certainly with never a hope of wisdom, but living only by pure politics, as if it were some colorless blood substitute in his veins—that this being could lurchingly stumble up from his own wretched career and use history and the two-party system to elect himself president is, I suppose, a gloriously perverse justification of our democratic form of government.
E.L. Doctorow (Jack London, Hemingway, and the Constitution:: Selected Essays, 1977-1992)
Make a List (or lists) • Make a list of all the things that you can look at and think: Why did we even bother to move that the last time? Now will be your last and best chance to give or throw away unwanted items until your next move (5-7 years on average). Give unwanted clothes, furniture, kitchen items, etc. to a charity that allows you to use your donation as a tax write-off. Yard sales are another option. • Make a list (and/or get one online) of household hazardous materials. These are common items in your home that are not or might not be safe to transport: flammables like propane tanks (even empty ones), gasoline or kerosene, aerosols or compressed gases (hair spray, spray paint), cleaning fluids in plastic containers (bleach, ammonia) and pesticides (bug spray) and herbicides (weed killer) and caustics like lye or pool acid. There is more likely to be damage caused by leakage of cleaning fluids-- like bleach--than there is by damage caused by a violent explosion or fire in your truck. The problem lies in the fact that any leaking fluid is going to drip its way to the floor and spread out--even in the short time span of your move and more so if you are going up and down hills. Aerosols can explode in the summer heat as can propane BBQ tanks. Gasoline from lawnmowers and pesticide vapors expand in the heat and can permeate everything in the truck. Plastic containers that have been opened can expand and contract with a change in temperature and altitude and crack.
Jerry G. West (The Self-Mover's Bible: A Comprehensive Illustrated Guide to DIY Moving Written by Professional Furniture Mover Jerry G. West)
May I tell you what I would like to see? I would like to see a government that said: “We’re going to stop this preposterous obsession with economic growth at the cost of all else. Great economic success doesn’t produce national happiness. It produces Republicans and Switzerland. So we’re going to concentrate on just being lovely and pleasant and civilized. We’re going to have the best schools and hospitals, the most comfortable public transportation, the liveliest arts, the most useful and well-stocked libraries, the grandest parks, the cleanest streets, the most enlightened social policies. In short, we’re going to be like Sweden, but with less herring and better jokes.” Wouldn’t that be delightful? But of course it will never happen. —
Bill Bryson (The Road to Little Dribbling: More Notes from a Small Island)
When the National Transportation Safety Board analyzed its database of major flight accidents, it found that 73 percent occurred on a flight crew’s first day working together. Like surgeries and putts, the best flight is one in which everything goes according to routines long understood and optimized by everyone involved, with no surprises. When the path is unclear—a game of Martian tennis—those same routines no longer suffice. “Some tools work fantastically in certain situations, advancing technology in smaller but important ways, and those tools are well known and well practiced,” Andy Ouderkirk told me. “Those same tools will also pull you away from a breakthrough innovation. In fact, they’ll turn a breakthrough innovation into an incremental one.
David Epstein (Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World)
I daydreamed about BEING Anne. Traipsing through nineteenth-century meadows, reciting Romantic poetry (Keats was my fave, because he died with such gruesome panache.) One day, I started creating my own original scenarios of Anne doing her plucky orphan thing. But I didn’t want to deal with the annoying stuff from old-timey days, like sexism and polio, so I moved up the timeline and transported her into modern life as a free-spirited teen heiress. I’d imagine Anne flying to Hong Kong on her private jet, or spying on Communists while she performed gymnastics for the US Olympic Team. Or simple things, like attending a new high school where she’d enter a classroom wearing designer jeans and everyone would gasp at how pretty she was. “Her hair is so long and red. Can I be her best friend immediately?
Felicia Day (You're Never Weird on the Internet (Almost))
The day before alcohol prohibition was introduced, the most popular drink in the United States was beer, but as soon as alcohol was banned, hard liquor soared from 40 percent of all drinks that were sold to 90 percent. People responded to a change in the law by shifting from a milder drink to a stronger drink. This seems puzzling. Why would a change in the law change people’s tastes in alcohol? It turns out it didn’t change their tastes. It changed something else: the range of drinks that were offered to them. The reason is surprisingly simple. One of the best analysts of the drug war, the writer Mike Gray, explains it in his book Drug Crazy. When you are smuggling a substance into a country, and transporting it in secret, “you have to put the maximum bang in the smallest possible package,” he writes.
Johann Hari (Chasing the Scream: The First and Last Days of the War on Drugs)
Because I came to see That I should never have been a first-rate potter. I didn't have it in me. It's strange, isn't it, That a man should have a consuming passion To do something for which he lacks the capacity? Could a man be said to have a vocation To be a second-rate potter? To be, at best, A competent copier, possessed by the craving To create, when one is wholly uncreative? I don't think so. For I came to see, That I had always known, at the secret moments, That I didn't have it in me. There are occasions When I am transported- a different person, Transfigured in the vision of some marvellous creation, And I feel what the man must have felt when he made it. But nothing I made ever gave me that contentment- That state of utter exhaustion and peace Which comes in dying to give something life...
T.S. Eliot
I find a preacher of the Gospel profaning the beautiful and prophetic ejaculation, commonly called “Nunc dimittis,” made on the first presentation of our Saviour in the temple, and applying it, with an inhuman and unnatural rapture, to the most horrid, atrocious, and afflicting spectacle that perhaps ever was exhibited to the pity and indignation of mankind. This “leading in triumph,” a thing in its best form unmanly and irreligious, which fills our preacher with such unhallowed transports, must shock, I believe, the moral taste of every well-born mind. Several English were the stupefied and indignant spectators of that triumph. It was (unless we have been strangely deceived) a spectacle more resembling a procession of American savages entering into Onondaga after some of their murders called victories,
Edmund Burke (Collected Works of Edmund Burke)
And since a property of all good arts is to draw the mind of man away from the vices and direct it to better things, these arts can do that more plentifully, over and above the unbelievable pleasure of mind [which they furnish]. For who, after applying himself to things which he sees established in the best order and directed by divine ruling, would not through diligent contemplation of them and through a certain habituation be awakened to that which is best and would not wonder at the Artificer of all things, in Whom is all happiness and every good? For the divine Psalmist surely did not say gratuitously that he took pleasure in the workings of God and rejoiced in the works of His hands, unless by means of these things as by some sort of vehicle we are transported to the contemplation of the highest Good.
Nicholas Copernicus (On The Revolutions of Heavenly Spheres (On the Shoulders of Giants))
Roosevelt wouldn't interfere even when he found out that Moses was discouraging Negroes from using many of his state parks. Underlying Moses' strikingly strict policing for cleanliness in his parks was, Frances Perkins realized with "shock," deep distaste for the public that was using them. "He doesn't love the people," she was to say. "It used to shock me because he was doing all these things for the welfare of the people... He'd denounce the common people terribly. To him they were lousy, dirty people, throwing bottles all over Jones Beach. 'I'll get them! I'll teach them!' ... He loves the public, but not as people. The public is just The Public. It's a great amorphous mass to him; it needs to be bathed, it needs to be aired, it needs recreation, but not for personal reasons -- just to make it a better public." Now he began taking measures to limit use of his parks. He had restricted the use of state parks by poor and lower-middle-class families in the first place, by limiting access to the parks by rapid transit; he had vetoed the Long Island Rail Road's proposed construction of a branch spur to Jones Beach for this reason. Now he began to limit access by buses; he instructed Shapiro to build the bridges across his new parkways low -- too low for buses to pass. Bus trips therefore had to be made on local roads, making the trips discouragingly long and arduous. For Negroes, whom he considered inherently "dirty," there were further measures. Buses needed permits to enter state parks; buses chartered by Negro groups found it very difficult to obtain permits, particularly to Moses' beloved Jones Beach; most were shunted to parks many miles further out on Long Island. And even in these parks, buses carrying Negro groups were shunted to the furthest reaches of the parking areas. And Negroes were discouraged from using "white" beach areas -- the best beaches -- by a system Shapiro calls "flagging"; the handful of Negro lifeguards [...] were all stationed at distant, least developed beaches. Moses was convinced that Negroes did not like cold water; the temperature at the pool at Jones Beach was deliberately icy to keep Negroes out. When Negro civic groups from the hot New York City slums began to complain about this treatment, Roosevelt ordered an investigation and an aide confirmed that "Bob Moses is seeking to discourage large Negro parties from picnicking at Jones Beach, attempting to divert them to some other of the state parks." Roosevelt gingerly raised the matter with Moses, who denied the charge violently -- and the Governor never raised the matter again.
Robert A. Caro (The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York)
That’s the thing. The people you’re controlling don’t have a voice in how you control them. As long as everyone’s on the same page, things may be great, but when there’s a question, you win. Right?” “There has to be a way to come to a final decision.” “No, there doesn’t. Every time someone starts talking about final anythings in politics, that means the atrocities are warming up. Humanity has done amazing things by just muddling through, arguing and complaining and fighting and negotiating. It’s messy and undignified, but it’s when we’re at our best, because everyone gets to have a voice in it. Even if everyone else is trying to shout it down. Whenever there’s just one voice that matters, something terrible comes out of it.” “And yet, I understand from Ms. Fisk that the Transport Union was condemning whole colonies that didn’t follow its rule.” “Right?” Holden said. “And so I disobeyed that order and I quit working for them. I was all set to go retire in Sol system. Can you do that?” “Can I do what?” “If you are given an immoral order, can you resign and walk away? Because everything I’ve seen about how you’re running this place tells me that isn’t an option for you.” Singh crossed his arms. He had the sense that the interrogation was getting away from him. “The high consul is a very wise, very thoughtful man,” he said. “I have perfect faith that—” “No. Stop. ‘Perfect faith’ really tells me everything I need to know,” Holden said. “You think this is a gentle, bloodless conquest, don’t you?” “It is, to the degree that you allow it to be.” “I was there for the war Duarte started to cover his tracks. I was there for the starving years afterward. Your empire’s hands look a lot cleaner when you get to dictate where history begins and what parts of it don’t count.
James S.A. Corey (Persepolis Rising (The Expanse, #7))
The implications are stunning. An average teenager today, if he or she could time-travel back to 1950, would have had an IQ of 118. If the teenager went back to 1910, he or she would have had an IQ of 130, besting 98 percent of his or her contemporaries. Yes, you read that right: if we take the Flynn Effect at face value, a typical person today is smarter than 98 percent of the people in the good old days of 1910. To state it in an even more jarring way, a typical person of 1910, if time-transported forward to the present, would have a mean IQ of 70, which is at the border of mental retardation. With the Raven’s Progressive Matrices, a test that is sometimes considered the purest measure of general intelligence, the rise is even steeper. An ordinary person of 1910 would have an IQ of 50 today, which is smack in the middle of mentally retarded territory, between “moderate” and “mild” retardation.233
Steven Pinker (The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined)
All I can offer is this (without a single remembrance or image, or even incoherent wisp of correspondence), even so I knew, in those eradicated moments, and I know still: That there, there outside the gates of any physical state or world we may inhabit, something is—which, being so unlike, so beautiful and radiant and eternal—can never be transported into living life, not even by a word. Brighter than fires, more soft than fur, better than the best—nameless, non-communicable, absolute. And, without a bookmark in our hearts or brains to enable us to find it while here, yet there—there it nevertheless is, and will be ever. There is nothing to fear or to regret. There is no end. Only always a Beginning—that not even the most lucid scripture, or most transcendent art (even that of the Scarlet Lily, Cremisia Ranaldi) can recreate. We touch upon it, yes, I believe we do, in our greatest poets (which is why, if only as a ghost, she could undo the door). In the best of love or joy, that too—but all of this is a shadow. The shadow of the Nothing which is Everything.
Tanith Lee (Redder Than Blood)
In his discussion of Trika Yoga Abhinavagupta begins with the most advanced approach, and then presents successively easier methods one by one in descending order. This is another example of his particular approach to yoga. His intention is to make the best and the quickest method of yoga immediately available to all aspirants. If they succeed at the highest level, they need not go through the long chain of lower stages. However, if certain aspirants feel that they cannot handle the most advanced path successfully, then they are free to move along a more structured path and to choose any of the methods that accommodate their psychophysical capacity. The important point is that spiritual students should not assume that they are not fit for the most advanced method. Why should people resort to riding on a bullock cart when an airplane is at their disposal? If, however, they are unable to handle the superior vehicle successfully, they can choose some other more appropriate form of transportation. — B. N. Pandit, Specific Principles of Kashmir Shaivism (3rd ed., 2008), p. 94–95.
Balajinnatha Pandita (Specific Principles of Kashmir Saivism [Hardcover] [Apr 01, 1998] Paṇḍita, BalajinnaÌ"tha)
Transportation from One Place to Another Once whilst Sheikh Abdul Qadir Jilani (r.a) was delivering one of his spiritually enlightening lectures, a person by the name of Abul Mu’aali was present in this gathering. He was seated directly in front of the great Saint. During the course of the lecture, Abul Mu’aali found that he needed to answer the call of nature (relieve himself). He tried to suppress this need because he found it disrespectful to leave the gathering of al-Ghawth al-A’zam (r.a) He controlled the urge to the best of his ability, but when he could not do so any longer, he decided to leave. As he was about to stand, he saw the great Ghawth (r.a) walking down the first stair of the pulpit (Mimbar) onto the second stair. As the Saint came to the second stair, Abul Mu’aali saw an image of the great Saint on the mimbar. Sheikh Abdul Qadir Jilani (r.a) came down to him and threw his shawl over him. As this happened, Abul Mu’aali found that he was no longer in the gathering, but rather in a valley with beautiful lush vegetation. It was beautified even more by a stream, which flowed through it. He immediately answered the call of nature, performed Wudhu and then prayed two Rakaats Salaah. As he completed the Salaah, Sheikh Abdul Qadir Jilani (r.a) pulled the shawl off him. When Abul Mu’aali looked, he found to his amazement that he was still in the gathering of the great Saint (r.a) and he had not even missed one word of the lecture of the great Saint. However, much later Abul Mu’aali discovered that he did not have his set of keys with him. He then remembered that when he was transported to the valley by Sheikh Abdul Qadir Jilani (r.a), he had hung his key ring on the branch of a tree beside the stream. Abul Mu’aali states that some time after this incident, he had the opportunity to go on a business expedition. During this journey, Abul Mu’aali reached a valley and rested there. He then noticed that the valley was the exact same place where the great Saint had transported him during his lecture. When he went beside the tree, he found that his missing keys were still hanging on the branch of the tree. Subhan-Allah! The business trip took fourteen days to complete. This miracle of al-Ghawth al-A’zam (r.a) shows that not only did he transport Abul Mu’aali spiritually, but also physically.
Hazrat Shaykh Sayyid Abdul Kadir Jilani
Clark Air base in Angeles City is a hub of commerce. The streets teem with industrious Filipinos hustling to make a living. Rusty cars and trucks clog narrow streets and honk their horns with abandon. Jeepneys ferry passengers around town for only a few pesos and serve as public transportation. The jeepney is the official vehicle of the Philippines. Jeepneys are long, open-sided jeeps and have bench seats for passengers. The best jeepneys are very ornate, their hoods festooned with a multitude of fancy chrome horses and ornaments, multihued streamers, and hand-operated rubber-bulb horns. Safety standards are third-world-relaxed in the PI, and jeepney drivers casually smoke cigarettes while they sit with plastic containers of gasoline nestled between their feet. The clear plastic jugs have a tube that connects to the engine and serves as the jeepney’s improvised gas tank, making it easier for the driver to monitor and conserve fuel. Jeepneys are not the only transportation available. Small, sidecar-equipped motorcycles called tricycles, also serve as cheap taxis, crowding the streets near popular establishments. The alleys are lined with side-by-side food stalls, and street vendors occupy every corner.
William F. Sine (Guardian Angel: Life and Death Adventures with Pararescue, the World's Most Powerful Commando Rescue Force)
I suggest you stand slowly and walk out with my men,” Zrakovi said, tapping a napkin against his lying, two-faced mouth and putting a twenty on the table to cover the drinks. “If you make a scene, innocent humans will be injured. I have a Blue Congress cleanup team in place, however, so if you want to fight in public and damage a few humans, knock yourself out. It will only add to your list of crimes.” I stood slowly, gritting my teeth when Squirrel Chin patted me down while feeling me up and making it look like a romantic moment. He’d been so busy feeling the naughty bits that he missed both Charlie, sitting in my bag next to my foot, and the dagger attached to my inner forearm. Idiot. Alex would never have been so sloppy. If Alex had patted me down, he’d have found not only the weapons but also the portable magic kit. From the corner of my eye, I saw a tourist taking mobile phone shots of us. He’d no doubt email them to all his friends back home with stories of those crazy New Orleanians and their public displays of affection. I considered pretending to faint, but I was too badly outnumbered for it to work. Like my friend Jean Lafitte, whose help I could use about now, I didn’t want to try something unless it had a reasonable chance at succeeding. I also didn’t want to pull Charlie out and risk humans getting hurt. “Walk out the door onto Chartres and turn straight toward the cathedral.” Zrakovi pulled his jacket aside enough for me to see a shoulder holster. I hadn’t even known the man could hold a gun, although for all I knew about guns it could be a water pistol. The walk to the cathedral transport was three very long city blocks. My best escape opportunity would be near Jackson Square. When the muscular goons tried to turn me left toward the cathedral, I’d try to break and run right toward the river, where I could get lost among the wharves and docks long enough to draw and power a transport. Of course in order to run, I’d have to get away from the clinch of Dreadlocks and Squirrel Chin. Charlie could take care of that. I slipped the messenger bag over my head slowly, and not even Zrakovi noticed the stick of wood protruding from the top by a couple of inches. Not to be redundant, but . . . idiots. None of us spoke as we proceeded down Chartres Street, where, to our south, the clouds continued to build. The wind had grown stronger and drier. The hurricane was sucking all the humidity out of the air, all the better to gain intensity. I hoped Zrakovi, a Bostonian, would enjoy his first storm. I hoped a live oak landed on his head.
Suzanne Johnson (Belle Chasse (Sentinels of New Orleans #5))
Congress displayed contempt for the city's residents, yet it retained a fondness for buildings and parks. In 1900, the centennial of the federal government's move to Washington, many congressmen expressed frustration that the proud nation did not have a capital to rival London, Paris, and Berlin. The following year, Senator James McMillan of Michigan, chairman of the Senate District Committee, recruited architects Daniel Burnham and Charles McKim, landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted Jr., and sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens to propose a park system. The team, thereafter known as the McMillan Commission, emerged with a bold proposal in the City Beautiful tradition, based on the White City of Chicago's 1893 Columbian Exposition. Their plan reaffirmed L'Enfant's avenues as the best guide for the city's growth and emphasized the majesty of government by calling for symmetrical compositions of horizontal, neoclassical buildings of marble and white granite sitting amid wide lawns and reflecting pools. Eventually, the plan resulted in the remaking of the Mall as an open lawn, the construction of the Lincoln Memorial and Memorial Bridge across the Potomac, and the building of Burnham's Union Station. Commissioned in 1903, when the state of the art in automobiles and airplanes was represented by the curved-dash Olds and the Wright Flyer, the station served as a vast and gorgeous granite monument to rail transportation.
Zachary M. Schrag (The Great Society Subway: A History of the Washington Metro (Creating the North American Landscape))
If the hunger for paradise is wired into your heart (and it is), either you will realize that this present life has been designed as a preparation for the paradise to come, or you will do your best and work your hardest to turn the present moment into the paradise it will never be. You and I live in a broken world that right now will not be the paradise we seek. You and I are flawed people, living with flawed people, and collectively we have no ability whatsoever to deliver paradise to one another. Every place you go and every created thing you handle has been damaged by the fall. This simply is not and won’t be the paradise you seek. For all who have placed their trust in the Savior, paradise is a secure reality. The paradise for which your heart longs is coming, but you will not experience it right here, right now. No, God has chosen to keep you in this broken world in order to use its brokenness to prepare you for what is to come. The brokenness you live in the middle of, and the difficulties you face there, are not in the way of God’s good plan for you; they are an important ingredient in it. Right now, God is not so much working to change your surroundings but to change you so that you are ready for the new surroundings he has planned and purchased for you in his grace. Simply said, either you are waiting by faith for the paradise to come, or you are working with your hands to build paradise in the here and now. Looking for paradise in the here and now is another ingredient of the money madness inside many of us and has overtaken the culture around us. We frenetically spend on material things, physical experiences, and new locations in the search of a piece of paradise. Our hearts long for the freedom from external difficulty and internal emptiness that we so often feel. We instinctively know that there must be more, that this can’t be it. Deep within us we feel like we’re missing something. So in our eternity amnesia we don’t lift up our eyes to look afar and consider the glories that are coming. No, we open our wallets and look around at what may have the potential to give us the paradise we are seeking. And because nothing can deliver it, we spend from thing to thing to thing, hoping that the next thing will deliver. But we don’t end up with paradise. We end up with houses that are bigger and more luxurious than we need, cars that are more identity markers than means of transportation, a pile of possessions, many of which lie unused, amassed debt, and wallets that are empty. But the paradise that we’ve spent to get has eluded us. Sure, budgets are helpful, but only if they are a piece of handling our money with eternity in view. When it comes to money, the PMP that lives inside us and that has captured our culture just cannot work. It will cause you to spend too much, it will tempt you to spend unwisely, and for all of your investment, it will leave you empty in the end.
Paul David Tripp (Sex and Money: Pleasures That Leave You Empty and Grace That Satisfies)
Let’s see what “multifactorial” means in a practical sense. Consider someone with frequent depression who is visiting a friend today, pouring her heart out about her problems. How much could you have predicted the global depression and today’s behavior by knowing about her biology? Suppose “knowing about her biology” consisted only of knowing what version of the serotonin transporter gene she has. How much predictive power does that give you? As we saw in chapter 8, not much—say, 10 percent. What if “knowing about her biology” consists of knowing the status of that gene plus knowing if one of her parents died when she was a child? More, maybe 25 percent. How knowing her serotonin transporter gene status + childhood adversity status + whether she is living alone in poverty? Maybe up to 40 percent. Add knowledge of the average level of glucocorticoids in her bloodstream today. Maybe a bit more. Toss in knowing if she’s living in an individualist or a collectivist culture. Some more predictability.fn11 Know if she is menstruating (which typically exacerbates symptoms in seriously depressed women, making it more likely that they’ll be socially withdrawn rather than reaching out to someone). Some more predictability. Maybe even above the 50 percent mark by now. Add enough factors, many of which, possibly most of which, have not yet been discovered, and eventually your multifactorial biological knowledge will give you the same predictive power as in the fractured-bone scenario. Not different amounts of biological causation; different types of causation.
Robert M. Sapolsky (Behave: The Biology of Humans at Our Best and Worst)
I also gained a deeper appreciation of what it must have been like for my mother to be in a foreign country unable to speak the language (in her case, unable to read or write any language). As I walked around by myself, however, it was obvious that based on my body language people perceived me as American but at the same time different enough from other Americans that they felt free to come up and ask me all kinds of personal questions about where I came from, what kind of work I did, whether I was married, how many people there were in my family. Back in the 1930s when I asked personal questions like these of a Chinese student at Bryn Mawr, she reprimanded me for being too personal. I’m not sure whether that was because she came from a higher social class or because the revolution has opened things up. I answered their questions as best as I could in my limited Chinese. The ingenuity and energy of the Chinese reminded me of my father, for example, the way that they used bicycles, often transformed into tricycles, for transporting all kinds of things: little children (sometimes in a sidecar), bricks and concrete, beds and furniture. I was amazed at the number of entrepreneurs lining the sidewalks with little sewing machines ready to alter or make a garment, barbers with stools and scissors, knife sharpeners, shoe repairmen, vendors selling food and other kinds of merchandise from carts. Everywhere I went I saw women knitting, as they waited for a bus or walked along the street, as if they couldn’t waste a minute. I had never seen such an industrious people. It was unlike anything that I had witnessed in England, France, the West Indies, Africa, or the United States.
Grace Lee Boggs (Living for Change: An Autobiography)
The Rockefeller Foundation was established in 1913 to maintain the control of the family’s oil empire. Today this foundation is the most important shareholder of Exxon with 4.3 million shares. Additionally, the foundation has two million shares in Standard Oil of California and 300.000 shares in Mobil Oil. Other smaller foundations belonging to the Rockefellers have three million shares in Exxon, and 400.000 shares in Standard Oil of Ohio. The total asset of this group of Rockefeller companies, amount to more than fifty billion dollars.[20] For a researcher who concentrates on the Rockefeller family, it won’t be difficult to prove that this immensely rich family has played an important role in the American politics of the twentieth century. The drift and decisions of American politics lead directly back to the Rockefeller family. The Rockefellers immigrated to America from Spain. The best-known member of this family was the influential industrialist, banker John Davidson Rockefeller. He asserted himself as the richest man of his time. Before going into oil transport, he was a wholesaler of narcotic drugs.[21] With an unbridled energy, he set up the Standard Oil Trust, which now possesses ninety percent of the oil refineries in the United States.[22] John Davidson Rockefeller also bought the Pocantico Hills territory in New York, which is the domicile of over a 100 families with the name Rockefeller. David Rockefeller, an absolute genius in the field of finances, has been managing Chase Manhattan Bank, the most important bank in the world, since 1945. The power of this bank is great enough to bring about or destroy governments, to start or end wars, and ruin companies or let them flourish worldwide, ultimately exerting great influence on the entire human race.
Robin de Ruiter (Worldwide Evil and Misery - The Legacy of the 13 Satanic Bloodlines)
Slavery has a special interaction with the normal structures of being a human being. So a human being is sort of a generalist creature with a capacity to have its software re-worked for different habitats. The reason that human beings are able to exploit every terrestrial habitat where plants grow is that they don't all have the software program that's the same, right? You can have a software program for hunting in the Calihari, you can have one for terracing the Andes to grow potatoes, you can have any one of a number of software programs. Well, slavery took the software program that Africans who were brought into the slave trade had, and it did its best to erase that program – and to render that program non-functional. It rendered it non-functional by combining people from different places who didn't even necessarily speak a language so there was not one culture available. And it sort of forces the bootstrapping of a new culture, which was composed of various things but of course it was, you know, prohibition against teaching slaves to read and things like that, and so there was a systematic breaking of the original culture that Africans had during the New World, and a substituting of a version that was not a much of a threat to the slave-holding population, right? And at the point that slavery comes to an end, it is not as if, frankly, even, you know, we didn't even have the tools to talk about these things in responsible terms. There wasn't enough known about how the mind works and what its relationship is to the body and all...so, the thing that makes the black population and the Indian population different, I would argue, is the systematic hobbling of the on-board, the inherited, evolved culture in the case of Indians by transporting them to reservations and by putting them in schools that disrupt the passage of normal culture and in the case of Africans, it was breaking apart of families, keeping people from being in contact with others they had the right language to talk to and all...so in any case, that carries through to the present: it creates a situation where there has not been access to the materials to fully update software.
Bret Weinstein
Rebellion's demand is unity; historical revolution's demand is totality. The former starts from a negative supported by an affirmative, the latter from absolute negation and is condemned to every aspect of slavery in order to fabricate an affirmative that is dismissed until the end of time. One is creative, the other nihilist. The first is dedicated to creation so as to exist more and more completely; the second is forced to produce results in order to negate more and more completely. The historical revolution is always obliged to act in the hope, which is invariably disappointed, of one day really existing. Even unanimous consent will not suffice to create its existence. "Obey," said Frederick the Great to his subjects; but when he died, his words were: "I am tired of ruling slaves." To escape this absurd destiny, the revolution is and will be condemned to renounce, not only its own principles, but nihilism as well as purely historical values in order to rediscover the creative source of rebellion. Revolution, in order to be creative, cannot do without either a moral or metaphysical rule to balance the insanity of history. Undoubtedly, it has nothing but scorn for the formal and mystifying morality to be found in bourgeois society. But its folly has been to extend this scorn to every moral demand. At the very sources of its inspiration and in its most profound transports is to be found a rule that is not formal but that nevertheless can serve as a guide. Rebellion, in fact, says— and will say more and more explicitly— that revolution must try to act, not in order to come into existence at some future date in the eyes of a world reduced to acquiescence, but in terms of the obscure existence that is already made manifest in the act of insurrection. This rule is neither formal nor subject to history, it is what can be best described by examining it in its pure state—in artistic creation. Before doing so, let us only note that to the "I rebel, therefore we exist" and the "We are alone" of metaphysical rebellion, rebellion at grips with history adds that instead of killing and dying in order to produce the being that we are not, we have to live and let live in order to create what we are.
Albert Camus (The Rebel)
The Outer Cape is famous for a dazzling quality of light that is like no other place on Earth. Some of the magic has to do with the land being surrounded by water, but it’s also because that far north of the equator, the sunlight enters the atmosphere at a low angle. Both factors combine to leave everything it bathes both softer and more defined. For centuries writers, poets, and fine artists have been trying to capture its essence. Some have succeeded, but most have only sketched its truth. That’s no reflection of their talent, because no matter how beautiful the words or stunning the painting, Provincetown’s light has to be experienced. The light is one thing, but there is also the way everything smells. Those people lucky enough to have experienced the Cape at its best—and most would agree it’s sometime in the late days of summer when everything has finally been toasted by the sun—know that simply walking on the beach through the tall seagrass and rose hip bushes to the ocean, the air redolent with life, is almost as good as it gets. If in that moment someone was asked to choose between being able to see or smell, they would linger over their decision, realizing the temptation to forsake sight for even one breath of Cape Cod in August. Those aromas are as lush as any rain forest, as sweet as any rose garden, as distinct as any memory the body holds. Anyone who spent a week in summer camp on the Cape can be transported back to that spare cabin in the woods with a single waft of a pine forest on a rainy day. Winter alters the Cape, but it doesn’t entirely rob it of magic. Gone are the soft, warm scents of suntan oil and sand, replaced by a crisp, almost cruel cold. And while the seagrass and rose hips bend toward the ground and seagulls turn their backs to a bitter wind, the pine trees thrive through the long, dark months of winter, remaining tall over the hibernation at their feet. While their sap may drain into the roots and soil until the first warmth of spring, their needles remain fragrant through the coldest month, the harshest storm. And on any particular winter day on the Outer Cape, if one is blessed enough to take a walk in the woods on a clear, cold, windless day, they will realize the air and ocean and trees all talk the same language and declare We are alive. Even in the depths of winter: we are alive. It
Liza Rodman (The Babysitter: My Summers with a Serial Killer)
Tell me,” Zachary said softly, “what kind of man would ask his best friend to marry his wife after he died? And what kind of man would inspire two seemingly sensible people to agree to such a damned stupid plan?” The man's gray eyes surveyed him in a measuring stare. “A better man than you or I will ever be.” Zachary couldn't stop himself from sneering. “It seems that Lady Holland's paragon of a husband wants to control her from the grave.” “He was trying to protect her,” Ravenhill said without apparent heat, “from men like you.” The bastard's calmness infuriated Zachary. Ravenhill was so damned confident, as if he had already won a competition that Zachary hadn't even known about until it was over. “You think she'll go through with it, don't you?” Zachary muttered resentfully. “You think she'll sacrifice the rest of her life simply because George Taylor asked it of her.” “Yes, that's what I think,” came Ravenhill's cool reply. “And if you knew her better, you'd have no doubt of it.” Why? Zachary wanted to ask, but he couldn't bring himself to voice the painful question. Why was it a foregone conclusion that she would go through with her promise? Had she loved George Taylor so much that he could influence her even in death? Or was it simply a matter of honor? Could her sense of duty and moral obligation really impel her to marry a man she didn't love? “I warn you,” Ravenhill said softly, “if you hurt or distress Lady Holland in any way, you'll answer to me.” “All this concern for her welfare is touching. A few years late in coming, isn't it?” The comment seemed to rattle Ravenhill's composure. Zachary felt a stab of triumph as he saw the man flush slightly. “I've made mistakes,” Ravenhill acknowledged curtly. “I have as many faults as the next man, and I found the prospect of filling George Taylor's shoes damned intimidating. Anyone would.” “Then what made you come back?” Zachary muttered, wishing there were some way to forcibly transport the man back across the Channel. “The thought that Lady Holland and her daughter might need me in some way.” “They don't. They have me.” The lines had been drawn. They might as well have been generals of opposing armies, facing each other across a battlefield. Ravenhill's thin, aristocratic mouth curved in a contemptuous smile. “You're that last thing they need,” he said. “I suspect even you know that.
Lisa Kleypas (Where Dreams Begin)
Davy, ever the daring one, bought a jumbo peppermint milk shake and got fifty cents back. He talked me out of getting plain vanilla. “You can get plain vanilla anytime!” he said. “Try…” He scanned the chalkboard that listed all the flavors. “Try peanut butter!” I did. I have never been sorry, because it was the best milk shake I ever tasted, like a melted and frozen Reese’s cup. And then it happened. We were walking across the parking lot, under the burning sun, with our shakes freezing our hands in the big white paper cups that had Spinnin’ Wheel in red across the sides. A sound began: music, first from a few car radios and then others as teenaged fingers turned the dial to that station. The volume dials were cranked up, and the music flooded out from the tinny speakers into the bright summer air. In a few seconds the same song was being played from every radio on the lot, and as it played, some of the car engines started and revved up and young laughter flew like sparks. I stopped. Just couldn’t walk anymore. That music was unlike anything I’d ever heard: guys’ voices, intertwining, breaking apart, merging again in fantastic, otherworldly harmony. The voices soared up and up like happy birds, and underneath the harmony was a driving drumbeat and a twanging, gritty guitar that made cold chills skitter up and down my sunburned back. “What’s that, Davy?” I said. “What’s that song?” …Round…round…get around…wha wha wha-oooooo… “What’s that song?” I asked him, close to panic that I might never know. “Haven’t you heard that yet? All the high-school guys are singin’ it.” …Gettin’ bugged drivin’ up and down the same ol’ strip…I gotta find a new place where the kids are hip… “What’s the name of it?” I demanded, standing at the center of ecstasy. “It’s on the radio all the time. It’s called—” Right then the high-school kids in the lot started singing along with the music, some of them rocking their cars back and forth, and I stood with a peanut butter milk shake in my hand and the sun on my face and the clean chlorine smell of the swimming pool coming to me from across the street. “—by the Beach Boys,” Davy Ray finished. “What?” “The Beach Boys. That’s who’s singin’ it.” “Man!” I said. “That sounds…that sounds…” What would describe it? What word in the English language would speak of youth and hope and freedom and desire, of sweet wanderlust and burning blood? What word describes the brotherhood of buddies, and the feeling that as long as the music plays, you are part of that tough, rambling breed who will inherit the earth? “Cool,” Davy Ray supplied. It would have to do. …Yeah the bad guys know us and they leave us alone…I get arounnnnddddd… I was amazed. I was transported. Those soaring voices lifted me off the hot pavement, and I flew with them to a land unknown. I had never been to the beach before. I’d never seen the ocean, except for pictures in magazines and on TV and movies. The Beach Boys. Those harmonies thrilled my soul, and for a moment I wore a letter jacket and owned a red hotrod and had beautiful blondes begging for my attention and I got around.
Robert McCammon (Boy's Life)
There are five areas where India has core competencies for integrated action: (1) Agriculture and food processing (2) Reliable and quality electric power, surface transport and infrastructure for all parts of the country (3) Education and healthcare (4) Information and communication technology (5) Strategic sectors
A.P.J. Abdul Kalam (The Righteous Life: The Very Best of A.P.J. Abdul Kalam)
Anything acquired without effort, and without cost is generally unappreciated, often discredited; perhaps this is why we get so little from our marvelous opportunity in public schools. The SELF-DISCIPLINE one receives from a definite programme of specialized study makes up to some extent, for the wasted opportunity when knowledge was available without cost. Correspondence schools are highly organized business institutions. Their tuition fees are so low that they are forced to insist upon prompt payments. Being asked to pay, whether the student makes good grades or poor, has the effect of causing one to follow through with the course when he would otherwise drop it. The correspondence schools have not stressed this point sufficiently, for the truth is that their collection departments constitute the very finest sort of training on DECISION, PROMPTNESS, ACTION and THE HABIT OF FINISHING THAT WHICH ONE BEGINS. I learned this from experience, more than twenty-five years ago. I enrolled for a home study course in Advertising. After completing eight or ten lessons I stopped studying, but the school did not stop sending me bills. Moreover, it insisted upon payment, whether I kept up my studies or not. I decided that if I had to pay for the course (which I had legally obligated myself to do), I should complete the lessons and get my money's worth. I felt, at the time, that the collection system of the school was somewhat too well organized, but I learned later in life that it was a valuable part of my training for which no charge had been made. Being forced to pay, I went ahead and completed the course. Later in life I discovered that the efficient collection system of that school had been worth much in the form of money earned, because of the training in advertising I had so reluctantly taken. We have in this country what is said to be the greatest public school system in the world. We have invested fabulous sums for fine buildings, we have provided convenient transportation for children living in the rural districts, so they may attend the best schools, but there is one astounding weakness to this marvelous system-IT IS FREE! One of the strange things about human beings is that they value only that which has a price. The free schools of America, and the free public libraries, do not impress people because they are free. This is the
Napoleon Hill (Think and Grow Rich [Illustrated & Annotated])
After a great deal of culinary soul-searching I picked the almond apricot pound cake with Amaretto, a black chocolate espresso cake with a burnt-orange frosting, and the beloved sweet potato cake with rum-soaked raisins. I could either make it in a Bundt pan with a spiked glaze or I could make it in three layers with a cream-cheese frosting. In the end I settled on the latter because I knew my cream cheese was one of my greatest strengths (the secret being to substitute fiori di Sicilia for the vanilla). It made me slightly crazy to think of leaving out the lemon cake with lemon-curd frosting- everyone died over that cake- but the frosting was very wet and the layers had a tendency to slide when transported. I loved the little lime-soaked coconut cakes but so many people took issue with coconut. A genoise was perfect for showing off, but if I wasn't there to serve it myself, I couldn't trust that it would be completely understood and I didn't think there would be any point in sending a container of syrup on the side with written instructions. And what about the sticky toffee pudding with its stewed dates and caramel sauce? That was as much a cake as anything else if you were willing to expand your boundaries little. I wasn't sure about the chocolate. It was my best chocolate cake but I didn't absolutely love chocolate. Still, I knew other people did. I felt I needed an almond cake and this one worked in the apricots, but I wasn't so sure about not having a frosting. Would it seem too plain? And the sweet potato cake, I had to have that. That was the cake from which everything had started. I had to make a commitment. I had to bake.
Jeanne Ray (Eat Cake)
Norwegian fjords As amazing as it might sound, you can travel the Norwegian coast, viewing astounding scenery, all on public transport – it simply takes planning. By flying into Bergen – an airport bus will take you downtown – you can start a journey that will take you as far as the Arctic Circle. Trains, ferries and buses connect most Norwegian towns and villages. In fact, Norway has one of the best public transport systems in the world. It will take preparation, and it won’t be cheap, although there are bus, train and ferry passes on offer to tourists – usually for packages of five days or ten. Norwegians are polite and some may consider the natives to be a little cold, but they will never harass you or overwhelm you with questions. You will be able to dine alone without a curious stare in your direction. Downside: The ferries can face some wild weather, stick to land transport if you are likely to suffer from seasickness. To read: Norway is famous for its Nordic Noir brand of crime fiction. King here is Jo Nesbo but other great Norwegian crime writers are Anne Holt and Karin Fossum.
Dee Maldon (The Solo Travel Guide: Just Do It)
answer these three questions: 1.​Images: Can you picture the scene in your mind’s eye? What you’re looking for is text capable of transporting you inside the story so that you can see it vividly in your own imagination. If the book is illustrated, notice if the images capture you and whether or not you want to look at them just a bit longer than necessary. 2.​Vocabulary: Do the word choices seem rich and varied? Avoid books with overly simplified or dumbed-down language. The best read-alouds contain a wide range of words—the kind of words you want to speak out loud. 3.​Curiosity: Are you interested in finding out what happens next? The book probably won’t be worth reading if you answer this question with a “no.
Sarah Mackenzie (The Read-Aloud Family: Making Meaningful and Lasting Connections with Your Kids)
Were you spying on someone?” Darren asks, finally sitting in the chair next to me and pointing at the open compact on the table. “What? Oh, no.” I laugh, snapping it shut and pulling it and the journal closer to me. “It’s nothing.” “You’re awfully secretive with your diary.” He says the word diary with a childish tone to it, as if the cover of mine has a picture of Hello Kitty emblazoned on it. “What are you hiding?” He reaches for it but I’m faster. “It’s just this project for my friend,” I say, hoping he’ll leave it at that yet knowing he has the power to make me say anything he wants. He stares at me and waves his hand for me to continue. “My best friend, Morgan, gave this to me at the airport when she dropped me off. She had me write a list of goals for the summer, and she also cooked up assignments for me to do.” He raises an eyebrow. “She added schoolwork to your schoolwork?” I laugh his joke away. “It’s sweet. They’re just silly things mostly, like writing a haiku, getting on a vessel of the public transportation system and getting off at a random stop to explore--which is the one I was working on when I saw you the second time, by the way.” “I guess I should thank this Morgan girl.” “But I didn’t even talk to you then. It was just a wave and POOF. Gone.” “Even so. It was a memorable wave.
Kristin Rae (Wish You Were Italian (If Only . . . #2))
Pain slammed into my entire body as I remembered another little boy who’d hugged like this…with everything he was. I felt tears sting the backs of my eyes as I was transported to the past and I automatically dropped my mouth to kiss the boy’s head like I always did, but reality hit me hard when there was no lush dark hair to greet me and there was no whispered “Meu melhor...” My best... I
Sloane Kennedy (Atonement (The Protectors, #6))
This is how we progress as humans. We went from horseless carriages to self-driving, self-organizing transport in a hundred and fifty years. We went from powered flight to putting a man on the moon in sixty years. We’ve always progressed in leaps and bounds. It is our ability, no, our duty, to do what is efficient, and to do what is best, to evolve not just our vehicles and our cities and our homes, but also the social structures that hold us back
Yudhanjaya Wijeratne (Numbercaste)
Thousands of years ago, it was only kings, pharaohs, and emperors who had the ability to solve large-scale problems. Hundreds of years ago, this power expanded to the industrialists who built our transportation systems and financial institutions. But today, the ability to solve such problems has been thoroughly democratized. Right now, and for the first time ever, a passionate and committed individual has access to the technology, minds, and capital required to take on any challenge. Even better, that individual has good reason to take on such challenges. As we will soon see, the world’s biggest problems are now the world’s biggest business opportunities. This means, for exponential entrepreneurs, finding a significant challenge is a meaningful road to wealth. Ultimately, as I teach at Singularity University (much more on this later), the best way to become a billionaire is to solve a billion-person problem.
Peter H. Diamandis (Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth and Impact the World (Exponential Technology Series))
Craig Says…”The best formula for figuring out a driver gratuity when hiring a coach on two one way transfers would be $1-2 per person in each direction.
Craig Speck (The Ultimate Common Sense Ground Transportation Guide For Churches and Schools: How To Learn Not To Crash and Burn)
Louisiana Express Delivery is your local New Orleans courier service and delivery service. Since 1998, we've been providing the best courier and delivery services New Orleans has to offer. For years, we have been specializing in a medical courier service our customers can rely on. We have experienced drivers trained in the proper handling and transportation of packages to ensure safe transport to their destination. When using us, you can expect on-time deliveries, each and every time.
Louisiana Express Delivery
The best-equipped infantry divisions, numbering 17,700 men, were provided with between 500 and 600 trucks, 390 cars and a similar number of motorcycles. But for the bulk of its transport the German army relied on horses.39 As compared to a wartime complement of 120,000 trucks, mainly drafted from private business, Fromm allowed for 630,700 horses, one animal for every four men in the active field army.
Adam Tooze (The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy)
Finns are rightly proud of the strong foundations of their society. Famously high tax rates mean the nation is well equipped to look after its citizenry with some of the world’s best health care and education. Despite the high excise on alcohol, Finns appreciate the reliable public transport and world-class universities, libraries and other infrastructure these same taxes afford. Like much of the world, the country is holding its breath as ageing baby boomers retire and it attempts to maintain high pensions.
Lonely Planet Finland
There are nineteen such wedding chapels in Las Vegas, intensely competitive, each offering better, faster, and, by implication, more sincere services than the next: Our Photos Best Anywhere, Your Wedding on A Phonograph Record, Candlelight with Your Ceremony, Honeymoon Accommodations, Free Transportation from Your Motel to Courthouse to Chapel and Return to Motel, Religious or Civil Ceremonies, Dressing Rooms, Flowers, Rings, Announcements, Witnesses Available, and Ample Parking. All of these services, like most others in Las Vegas (sauna baths, payroll-check cashing, chinchilla coats for sale or rent) are offered twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, presumably on the premise that marriage, like craps, is a game to be played when the table seems hot.
Joan Didion (Slouching Towards Bethlehem: Essays)
Rebecca Gleeson (an everyday schoolgirl on her way to school on the Monday morning eight o’clock train.) The Kingdom of Nought is a time tale legacy: accompanying her on the train Rebecca’s arch nemeses Rona Chadwick, the school bully. Rebecca a fan of poetry and fairy tales. “Tales of kindness and friendship.” She would say to herself. Rebecca was a reader of wonderful books that have a cult following. Unknown to Rebecca far away at the start of the universe dark and evil forces start to unbalance the natural order of day and night, good and evil. Weird things begin to happen as both Rebecca and Rona are transported back in time to The Kingdom of Nought to reinstate the benevolent balance within the kingdom. The adventure for the schoolgirls starts out strange and gets stranger, in the best way possible. Their meeting with the witch Sycorax is as creepy and evocative as you’d hope. The story combines mathematical realism with fantasy, blurring the edges in a way that high-lights that place where stories and real life convene, where magic contains truth. As you open the book and turn the pages you enter a strange place out-side time with amazing creatures and spectacular landscapes. An extremely addictive story that will take you to a magical place with a most unusual conclusion.
M.J. O'Farrell (The Kingdom of Nought)
We should limit how much beef we eat, because the amount of water, fossil fuel, and grain it takes to procure one pound of beef is nearly unimaginable. We should recycle. And precycle—buy things that have as little packaging as possible. We should do our best to walk and take public transportation and offset our fuel by giving generously to those who are helping plant trees around the world through organizations such as the Eden Project. But perhaps the most important thing we can do immediately to positively impact the health of the planet is to begin to take a Sabbath. If we work six days a week, it very well may be that we can limit one-seventh of our carbon footprint because we are not commuting on that day.
A.J. Swoboda (Subversive Sabbath: The Surprising Power of Rest in a Nonstop World)
Q: What can ordinary people with busy lives and not a lot of political access do to address this stuff? You can try to address it in your own life. You can try to set up your life so you have to drive as little as possible. In so doing, you vote with your feet and your wallet. When more people bike, walk and use public transit, there is greater pressure on elected officials and government agencies to improve these modes of transportation. It thus increases the profitability of public transit and makes cities more desirable places to live. It also helps reduce your carbon footprint and reduces the amount of money going to automobile manufacturers, oil companies and highway agencies. In a globally connected capitalist world, cities and countries are competing for highly skilled labor—programmers, engineers, scientists, etc. To some degree, these people can live anywhere they want. So San Francisco or my current city in Minnesota aren’t just competing with other U.S. cities but are competing with cities in Europe for the best and brightest talent. Polls and statistics show that more and more skilled people want to live in cities that are walkable, bikeable and have good public transit. Also our population is aging and realizing that they don’t want to be trapped in automobile-oriented retirement communities in Florida or the southwest USA. They also want improved walkability and transit. Finally, there’s been an explosion of obesity in the USA with resulting increases in healthcare costs. Many factors contribute to this but increased amounts of driving and a lack of daily exercise are major factors. City, state and business leaders in the US are increasingly aware of all this. It is part of Gil Peñalosa’s “8-80” message (the former parks commissioner of Bogotá, Colombia) and many other leaders. (2015 interview with Microcosm Publishing)
Andy Singer
There is an enormous amount that we still don’t understand—because, as always, what we don’t know is vastly greater than what we know. But we are learning. Perhaps in a curious way, transporting ourselves back to our natural reality, which for Price has its roots in pragmatism and in a respect for what we have learned about reality thanks to scientific rationalism, ends up bringing us closer to the intuitions of Nietzsche, which along a different route have led to the excesses of postmodernism: before being a rational animal, man is a vital animal—“It is our needs that interpret the world . . . Every instinct has its thirst for dominion.” True, but our reason also emerges from this magma, and emerges as our most effective weapon. Price’s book argues with strength and rigor for a humble and complete naturalism: we are natural creatures in a natural world, and these terms give us the best conceptual framework for understanding both ourselves and the world. We are part of this tremendous and incredibly rich nature about which we still understand little, albeit enough to know that it is sufficiently complex to have given rise to all that we are, including our ethics, our capacity for knowledge, our sense of beauty and our ability to experience emotions. Outside of this there is nothing. For a theoretical physicist such as myself, for an astronomer accustomed to thinking about the endless expanse of more than a hundred billion galaxies, each one consisting of more than a hundred billion stars, each one with its garland of planets, on one of which we dwell for a brief and fugitive moment, like specks of infinitesimal dust lost in the endlessness of the cosmos, this seems no more than obvious. Every anthropocentrism pales into insignificance in the face of this immensity. This is naturalism. Emptiness Is Empty: Nāgārjuna December 8, 2017 We rarely come across a book with the capacity to influence our way of thinking.
Carlo Rovelli (There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness: And Other Thoughts on Physics, Philosophy and the World)
Lottie's cake is last. This one is layered three deep, impressive for a moist, snacking-style cake, which normally couldn't be stacked. The bottom layers are bound together by a thick cream cheese icing, while the top is coated with a thick streusel crumble held in place by a circle of decorative piping. "It's a layered blueberry buckle," Lottie says, looking at Betsy hopefully. "Now that is another unconventional choice from you," Betsy says, eyeing the streusel topping, an odd choice for a layer cake. A buckle is a humble sort of cake--- old-fashioned in its simplicity--- that she hasn't seen around in years. Nowadays most prefer a thick layer of icing, buttercream they can decorate, or the scraped edge of a naked cake. Something meant to impress on a table or in a photograph rather than just be eaten at a family dinner or on a picnic. Secretly it's kind of a relief to see such a normal person's cake given its due. "The decoration is lacking," Betsy tells her flatly, though the completely bare sides show an even sprinkling of blueberries, which is impressive. It can be difficult to keep berries from falling to the bottom of a cake, but these are evenly distributed throughout. The knife glides into the cake, which has a springy sort of give to it. She cleaves a slice away, leaving a small avalanche of streusel crumbs in its wake. The cake inside is plump and golden, studded with juicy blueberries. Betsy can tell before she even takes a bite that it has been cooked to perfection. The flavors hit her tongue and bring on a wave of nostalgia so strong that she has to steady herself against the table. It is heavenly, the sweet and sour of the blueberries wrapped in the soft vanilla-y cake. She is instantly transported back in time, back to her childhood. It is unquestionably the best cake of the bunch, simple and satisfying, the kind that if you were to bake it at home would leave you wanting more, taking secret trips to the kitchen to cut another slice.
Jessa Maxwell (The Golden Spoon)
I read dad’s sign and knew that I had achieved my goal, and Joe had been transported through time. Maybe to yesterday?
Katrina Kahler (Ooops! (I Shrunk My Best Friend! #1))
worried that Obed would not be able to keep as close an eye on Merab as Sarah had done. He was gone most of the day, working with his father and brother. What would Merab do, left to her own devices? Sarah sat quietly while the others ate. Taleh thought Sarah would be glad they were going. Instead, the old woman acted as though she was sorry they were leaving. Surely that could not be. Having uninvited guests thrust upon one for a month, extra food to prepare, the constant bustle and lack of privacy, who would miss that? But there were tears in Sarah’s eyes. The meal was, if anything, noisier and more jovial than usual. Obed and Javan discussed work, and houses, and the best, most efficient way to transport their belongings. Merab said little, but she paid close attention to her husband, which relieved Taleh. Merab’s sulks often were about him, when he was not around. It would
Mary Ellen Boyd (Temper the Wind (Days of the Judges #1))
But just across the U.S. border, up in the tar sands of Alberta, there is another equally horrific image. A gaping pit, an abyss on its way to becoming the size of Florida, exists where Imperial Oil -- the largest company in the world -- is using the wild Athabasca River to pressure-wash underground sand formations that they gouge up like honeycombs, using huge amounts of energy and clean fresh water to steam the oil from those sands. Native people in the area are dying from drastically abnormal incidences of rare cancers, and Imperial Oil is seeking to transport more giant mining equipment -- on trucks over two hundred feet long and three stories high-- up the Snake River to Lewiston, Idaho, along the same route where the Nez Perce tribe rescued Lewis and Clark and directed them to the Pacific, shortly before the U.S. betrayed the Nez Perce and chased them toward Canada before killing them. (Rick Bass)
Melvin McLeod (editor)
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Mauritius Tour Package From Bangalore