Uline Quotes

Reading is an act of resistance in a landscape of distraction.... We regain the world by withdrawing from it just a little by stepping back from the noise.

Feelings, she learned, were hard to fight. She treasured his smiles and compliments and tried not to dwell on the fact that he gave this things to his friend Kel. His dreamy-eyed gazes, poems, and fits of passionate melancholy were for Uline. It was hard not to resent the older girl.

Reading (...) is an act of resistance in a landscape of distraction.

Reading is an act of contemplation, perhaps the only act in which we allow ourselves to merge with the consciousness of another human being. We possess the books we read, animating the waiting stillness of their language, but they possess us also, filling us with thoughts and observations, asking us to make them part of ourselves.

Think about it: when we read, we soul travel, in the sense that we join, or enter, the consciousness of another human. We empathize—we have to—because our experience is enlarged.

What does it mean, this notion of...reading? ...it returns us to a reckoning with time. In the midst of a book, we have no choice but to be patient, to take each thing in its moment, to let the narrative prevail. Even more, we are reminded of all we need to savor--this instant, this scene, this line. We regain the world by withdrawing from it just a little, by stepping back from the noise, the tumult, to discover our reflections in another mind. As we do, we join a broader conversation, by which we both transcend ourselves and are enlarged.

For new media reactionaries...the problem is technology, the endless distractions of the Internet, the breakdown of authority in an age of blogs and Twitter, the collapse of narrative in a hyper-linked, multi-networked world.

People still love browsing book stores, and there is an element of passion in collecting DVDs; however, it seems unlikely that the desire to collect boxes or a preference for physical artwork over thumbnails are strong enough forces to hold back the convenience (and, arguably, inevitability) of digital copies.

In the United States, however, we have lost the thread of logic in the stories that we tell.

Reading, after all, is an act of resistance in a landscape of distraction, a matter of engagement in a society that seems to want nothing more that for us to disengage.

It’s not a matter of the creature,” explained Master Ulin, passionately.  “It’s a matter of their enneagrammatic remains, and what pathways you wish to exploit for the work.  If an ordinant can transfer the pattern without the use of a benet, eschewing deracination of the living in favor of dissamuring from the enneagrammatic archive of the Grain with a suitably docimased bridewell, then both the ethical and practical issues of flagitation and paracletion are solved at once,” he stated, triumphantly. “I have no idea what he just said,” admitted Master Cormoran, drunkenly.  “But damn, he said it well!” “It’s

The implications of the shift to digital distribution in the games market is heightened due to an advantage not found with video—not only can distributors of product made for the major console platforms (Nintendo Wii, Microsoft Xbox, Sony PlayStation) eliminate inventory risk if games are downloaded via online networks such as Xbox Live Arcade, but game distributors also have the ability to update games with patches, new levels, and character add-ons.

From a reading researcher’s perspective or, surprisingly enough, from the perspective of a former president of the United States, the kind of “information” that Benjamin described does not represent knowledge. The journalist and writer David Ulin quoted a speech by Barack Obama to students at Hampton University in which he worried that for many of our young, information has become “a distraction, a diversion, a form of entertainment,20 rather than a tool of empowerment, rather than the means of emancipation.

Reading is an act of contemplation . . . an act of resistance in a landscape of distraction . . . it returns us to a reckoning with time.2 —David Ulin

As silly as it may sound, consumer market research regularly found the elimination of having to rewind as one of the most significant benefits of a DVD, which was statistically on par with the improved picture quality.

Reading is, by its nature, a strategy for displacement, for pulling back from the circumstances of the present and immersing in the textures of a different life.

Reading is an act of contemplation…an act of resistance in a landscape of distraction…it returns us to a reckoning with time. - David Ulin

We possess books we read, animating the waiting stillness of their language, but they possess us also, filling us with thoughts and observations, asking us to make them part of ourselves.

The seeds we sow now could reap us anguish and sorrow.

Facebook, with its flow of useless particularity, makes it impossible to forget, thus impossible to remember.

replaced by a detail posted on a Web page, which may be more accurate but is probably less true. Gone is the friend you knew from home. Gone is the sled and the lake and the winter. Gone are the stories that existed in the gap between imagining and knowing and, with them, the distance that turned the particular into the universal and the mundane into the romantic.

If we frame every situation in terms of right and wrong, we never have to wrestle with complexity; if we define the world in narrow bands of black and white, we don’t have to parse out endless shades of gray.

No, we are in the midst of a broken story, and we have lost the ability to parse its lines.

We live in an era when everyone wants to tell his or her story, but there is no real sense of what story means anymore.

This is how we interact now, by mouthing off, steering every conversation back to our agendas, skimming the surface of each subject looking for an opportunity to spew.

Pierce is referring to the collapse of collective narrative, which is what we are experiencing as a culture: left and right relying on their own news sources, Raw Story and the Daily Caller, MSNBC and Fox News. Not only that, but even the factions are factionalized, and have been since at least the 1960s. Purity, the rabid fervor of the true believer (the same for all extremists, left and right), versus pragmatism, competence.

The opinion that art should have nothing to do with politics is itself a political attitude,” George Orwell argued in his essay “Why I Write,

Now, I take it for granted that the real relationship is not with the writer but with the writing, that it’s on the page where we find the deepest sympathies

…the idea that belief alone is now enough, in certain quarters, to give something the weight of truth. The effect might not be equivalent, but the implications are: that by not asking questions, by reacting rather than thinking, we allow ourselves to be susceptible to all manner of lies. Here have the fallout from the detonation of the central narrative, the breakdown of a kind of collective dialogue, in which, in the name of some amorphous fantasy of identity or ideology, we succumb to the most reptilian of our fears.

Reading is a form of self-identification that works, paradoxically, by encouraging us to identify with others, an abstract process that changes us in the most concrete of ways.

We see it on blogs and in emails, on television talk shows, in public meetings and community forums; we are a culture that seems unable to concentrate, to pursue a line of thought or tolerate a conflicting point of view. … It’s different with a book, or any long-form piece of writing; these are slower, deeper, quieter. As readers, we are asked to slip inside the text, and if we can’t help but bring our personalities and perceptions to the process, the participation required leads to an inevitable empathy.

Beware the false promises associated with fortune and fame, they often disappoint and bring hardship and shame.

The weather is always changing and the tragedies of life come and go, but God never changes, His love is certain and constant, this I know.

Life is worth the living when you put God in the picture.

Life will be worth living when you include God in the picture.

Prayer provides shelter from the storms that come each day, it reaffirms our devotion for God in a special way" form God's Glorious Design-James Uline..