“
What if the meaning of life on earth is not eternal progress toward some unspecified goal—the engineering and production of more and more powerful technologies, the development of more and more complex and abstruse cultural forms? What if these things just rise and recede naturally, like tides, while the meaning of life remains the same always—just to live and be with other people?
”
”
Sally Rooney (Beautiful World, Where Are You)
“
How will you know the difficulties of being human, if you are always flying off to blue perfection? Where will you plant your grief seeds? Workers need ground to scrape and hoe, not the sky of unspecified desire.
”
”
Jalal ad-Din Muhammad ar-Rumi
“
I can't wait to get out of the house. I can't wait to get out of here. I've been telling myself this all week. The 'getting out of here' part is unspecified, though. Maybe I simply want to get away from life
”
”
Candace Bushnell (The Carrie Diaries (The Carrie Diaries, #1))
“
There is a German word, Sehnsucht, which has no English equivalent; it means 'the longing for something'. It has Romantic and mystical connotations; C.S. Lewis defined it as the 'inconsolable longing' in the human heart for 'we know not what'. It seems rather German to be able to specify the unspecifiable. The longing for something - or, in our case, for someone.
”
”
Julian Barnes (Levels of Life)
“
They say that's what happens when you fall in love. You want to tell people things. You especially want to tell them sad things. Hidden sad things from the past. Something like: I was abandoned at a sweetshop in an unspecified European country.
”
”
Nina LaCour (The Disenchantments)
“
And when she’s alone again, as truly alone in the world as she’s always felt herself to be, she looks at herself in a bamboo-framed mirror. Beautiful face, aglow with the taste of carnal pleasure, disdainful and avid … and above all an indefinable look in which can be sensed unspecified danger, sensuality triumphant and a sort of intoxicating vulgarity. She likes what she sees … around her drifts a great brunette fragrance, scent of happy brunette, in which the idea of others dissolves.
”
”
Louis Aragon (Irene's Cunt)
“
Right before you head out running, it can be hard to remember exactly why you're doing it. You often have to override a nagging sense of futility, lacing up your shoes, telling yourslef that no matter how unlikely it seems right now, after you finish you will be glad you went. It's only afterward that it makes sense, although even then it's hard to rationalize why. You just feel right. After a run, you feel at one with the world, as though some unspecified, innate need has been fulfilled.
”
”
Adharanand Finn (Running with the Kenyans: Passion, Adventure, and the Secrets of the Fastest People on Earth)
“
Maybe someone who went round skinning and killing people (order as yet unspecified) was not concerned with making the universe a better place. Just a thought. Zero.
”
”
Genevieve Cogman (The Invisible Library (The Invisible Library, #1))
“
When you live with someone who dislikes you in a mostly unspecified way, you begin to dislike yourself too, especially if you are someone, like me, whose self esteem, at least regarding my personality, has never been high. A different person, a stronger person, would not have allowed her sense of self to be blown away like grains of sand in the brisk winds of Perth.
”
”
Liane Moriarty (Here One Moment)
“
Our Narcissistic Mother told us a Big Lie. She told it subliminally if not in actual words. And The Big Lie was this: If we tried hard enough we could win her approval and her love. If we were good enough, or wise enough, or beautiful enough, or that-magical-unspecified-ingredient enough. In other words, if we achieved perfection, she would love us.
”
”
Danu Morrigan (You're Not Crazy—It's Your Mother! Understanding and Healing for Daughters of Narcissistic Mothers)
“
It's perhaps significant that God declares His completed Creation "very good" and that Adam is an afterthought, his goodness unspecified.
”
”
Peter Manseau (Killing the Buddha: A Heretic's Bible)
“
I think we should all live as if we are dying too – because we are, make no mistake. We should live as if we’re dying at some unspecified but possibly quite soon time. We can’t expect every day to be happy, and there’ll always be sickness and heartache and sadness, but we should never put up with a sad or a boring or a depressing day, just for the sake of it. None of us have time for that, whether we have a hundred days left or a hundred thousand.
”
”
Eva Woods (How to be Happy)
“
unspecified.” I was amused. “So you have the proverbial horse thief in your
”
”
Diana Gabaldon (Outlander (Outlander, #1))
“
One way to express the answer is that it might happen by 'chance'. But 'chance' is just a word expressing ignorance. It means 'determined by some as yet unknown, or unspecified, means'.
”
”
Richard Dawkins (The Selfish Gene)
“
The novel was set in an unspecified near future, because setting a novel in the present in a time of unprecedented technological and social dislocation seemed to me shortsighted.... To write a book set in the present, circa 2013, is to write about the distant past.
”
”
Gary Shteyngart
“
Mr. Darcy was the perfect example of a man used to being eminently in control, and then within seconds of meeting Elizabeth Bennet, finding himself so at the mercy of his passion for her that he starts doing the very things he condemns and prohibits in everyone else. Terrified by his human vulnerability, Darcy proceeds to do everything to push Lizzie away except accuse her of some unspecified crime and having her carted off.
”
”
Natalie Jenner (The Jane Austen Society (Jane Austen Society #1))
“
I am looking at him, I am witnessing a unique physiological phenomenon: John Shade perceiving and transforming the world, taking it in and taking it apart, re-combining its elements in the very process of storing them up so as to produce at some unspecified date an organic miracle, a fusion of image and music, a line of verse.
”
”
Vladimir Nabokov
“
There was no action she could take against the men of undeined thought, of unnamed motives, of unstated purposes, of unspecified morality. There was nothing she could say to them - nothing would be heard or answered. What were the weapons, she thought, in a realm where reason was not a weapon any longer? It was a realm she could not enter.
”
”
Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged)
“
I have ever had the conviction, resistant to all rational considerations, that at some unspecified future moment the continuous rehearsal which is my life, with its so many misreadings, is slips and fluffs, will be done with and that the real drama for which I have ever and with earnestness been preparing will at last begin. It is a common delusion... Yet I anticipate an apotheosis of some kind, some grand climacteric. I am not speaking here of a posthumous transfiguration. I do not entertain the possibility of an afterlife, or any deity capable of offering it. Given the world that he created, it would be an impiety against God to believe in him.
”
”
John Banville (The Sea)
“
Only when one speaks hypothetically does technology achieve neutrality: “It could be used for good or it could be used for evil.” Such unspecified references to how it could be used overlook the reality of how it actually and regularly is used. The truth is, technology is “neutral” only when conceived in the abstract, divorced from the social context in which it develops. But since it actually develops only in a social context and since its application is always purposive, then we must ask, Cui bono? Who benefits? And at whose expense?
”
”
Michael Parenti (Contrary Notions: The Michael Parenti Reader)
“
Modernity is the condition a society reaches when life is no longer conceived as cyclical. In a premodern society, where the purpose of life is understood to be the reproduction of the customs and practices of the group, and where people are expected to follow the life path their parents followed, the ends of life are given at the beginning of life. People know what their life's task is, and they know when it has been completed. In modern societies, the reproduction of the custom is no longer understood to be one of the chief purposes of existence, and the ends of life are not thought to be given; they are thought to be discovered or created. Individuals are not expected to follow the life path of their parents, and the future of the society is not thought to be dictated entirely by its past. Modern societies do not simply repeat and extend themselves; they change in unforeseeable directions, and the individual's contributions to these changes is unspecifiable in advance. To devote oneself to the business of preserving and reproducing the culture of one's group is to risk one of the most terrible fates in modern societies, obsolescence.
”
”
Louis Menand (The Metaphysical Club : A Story of Ideas in America)
“
An up-front enemy is rare now and is actually a blessing. People hardly ever attack you openly anymore, showing their intentions, their desire to destroy you; instead they are political and indirect. Although the world is more competitive than ever, outward aggression is discouraged, so people have learned to go underground, to attack unpredictably and craftily. Many use friendship as a way to mask aggressive desires: they come close to you to do more harm. (A friend knows best how to hurt you.) Or, without actually being friends, they offer assistance and alliance: they may seem supportive, but in the end they’re advancing their own interests at your expense. Then there are those who master moral warfare, playing the victim, making you feel guilty for something unspecified you’ve done. The battlefield is full of these warriors, slippery, evasive, and clever.
”
”
Robert Greene (The 33 Strategies Of War (The Modern Machiavellian Robert Greene Book 1))
“
Summarized, the letter explained that he was all against the banks but all for the bankers-except the Jewish bankers who were to be driven out of finance entirely; that he had thoroughly tested (but unspecified) plans to make all wages very high and the prices of everything produced by these same highly paid workers very low; that he was 100 per cent for Labor, but 100 per cent against all strikes; and that he was in favor of the United States so arming itself, so preparing to produce its own coffee, sugar, perfumes, tweeds, and nickel instead of importing them, that it could defy the World...and maybe, if that World was so impertinent as to defy American in turn, Buzz hinted, he might have to take it over and run it properly.
”
”
Sinclair Lewis (It Can't Happen Here)
“
They wind up at the kind of Italian restaurant that offers a trough-size bowl of spaghetti and meatballs and a giant basket of bread for a grand total of a dollar fifty.
“Meals come with either a glass of red wine of unspecified variety,” Mark says, studying the menu, “or a bowl of ice cream. Wine or ice cream. In what universe is that a reasonable choice? It’s like – football or a haircut. Trombones or a spoon.”
“You could get both for an extra seventy-five cents,” Eddie suggests.
“That’s not the point. I don’t want either. It’s that the binary of wine and ice cream shouldn’t exist.
”
”
Cat Sebastian (You Should Be So Lucky)
“
Money was spiritual indemnity against some unspecifiable future loss. It existed in purest form in his mind, my money, a reinforcing source of meditation.
”
”
Don DeLillo (Players)
“
He was missing Ivy Maggs. He did not know that there was any such person and he did not remember her as we know remembering, but there was an unspecified lack in his experience.
”
”
C.S. Lewis (That Hideous Strength)
“
My native tense is future conditional, a low simmer of unspecified worry being the usual condition.
”
”
Michael Pollan (Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation)
“
A substitute of temptation is unspecified desire of mankind to the aim of success
”
”
Mansur Almia
“
AAAAAACK UNSPECIFIED CATASTROPHE EVERYTHING IS TERR — ooh, I do need a snack right now,
”
”
Tui T. Sutherland (Dragonslayer (Wings of Fire: Legends))
“
Polanyi writes that there exists unspecifiable and unarticulated knowledge among scientists that is not susceptible to language and usually is dismissed in philosophy of science.
”
”
Michael Polanyi (Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post-Critical Philosophy)
“
systematic approach to knowledge building is more productive than an arbitrary skills approach with unspecified topics.31
”
”
E.D. Hirsch Jr. (Why Knowledge Matters: Rescuing Our Children from Failed Educational Theories)
“
Bland reflected that the local verdict seemed to be the comfortable and probably agelong one of attributing every tragic occurrence to unspecified foreigners.
”
”
Agatha Christie (Dead Man's Folly (Hercule Poirot, #35))
“
To hire someone willing to undertake an unspecified task, likely involving violence.
”
”
William Gibson (The Peripheral (Jackpot #1))
“
the United States government will not tolerate any disrespect for the holy Koran.” What form our government’s intolerance will take remains unspecified. I await a knock on the door.
”
”
Sam Harris (The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason)
“
is not the impact of his freewill upon nature which I see (as I thought) but the irresistible growth, through him, of nature’s own blind unspecified doctrines of variation and torment.
”
”
Lawrence Durrell (Justine (The Alexandria Quartet, #1))
“
Anyhow, I had found something out about an unknown privation, and I realized how a general love or craving, before it is explicit or before it sees its object, manifests itself as boredom or some other kind of suffering. And what did I think of myself in relation to the great occasions, the more sizable being of these books? Why, I saw them, first of all. So suppose I wasn't created to read a great declaration, or to boss a palatinate, or send off a message to Avignon, and so on, I could see, so there nevertheless was a share for me in all that had happened. How much of a share? Why, I knew there were things that would never, because they could never, come of my reading. But this knowledge was not so different from the remote but ever-present death that sits in the corner of the loving bedroom; though it doesn't budge from the corner, you wouldn't stop your loving. Then neither would I stop my reading. I sat and read. I had no eye, ear, or interest for anything else--that is, for usual, second-order, oatmeal, mere-phenomenal, snarled-shoelace-carfare-laundry-ticket plainness, unspecified dismalness, unknown captivities; the life of despair-harness or the life of organization-habits which is meant to supplant accidents with calm abiding. Well, now, who can really expect the daily facts to go, toil or prisons to go, oatmeal and laundry tickets and the rest, and insist that all moments be raised to the greatest importance, demand that everyone breathe the pointy, star-furnished air at its highest difficulty, abolish all brick, vaultlike rooms, all dreariness, and live like prophets or gods? Why, everybody knows this triumphant life can only be periodic. So there's a schism about it, some saying only this triumphant life is real and others that only the daily facts are. For me there was no debate, and I made speed into the former.
”
”
Saul Bellow (The Adventures of Augie March)
“
[T]he most elaborate code of [law]... would still have left unspecified a hundred ways in which wreckers of Communism could have sidetracked it without ever having to face the essential questions: are you pulling your weight in the social boat? are you giving more trouble than you are worth? have you earned the privilege of living in a civilized community? That is why the Russians were forced to set up an Inquisition or Star Chamber, called at first the Cheka and now the Gay Pay Oo (Ogpu), to go into these questions and "liquidate" persons who could not answer them satisfactorily.
”
”
George Bernard Shaw
“
It was the strangest sort of fear. Unspecified. Like walking in the woods at night, not knowing exactly what you should be afraid of, and the fear all the more potent precisely because of its mystery.
”
”
Blake Crouch (Pines (Wayward Pines, #1))
“
One of those who canceled citing illness was Lady Cosmo Duff-Gordon, a fashion designer who had survived the sinking of the Titanic. Another designer, Philip Mangone, canceled for unspecified reasons. Years later he would find himself aboard the airship Hindenburg, on its fatal last flight; he survived, albeit badly burned. Otherwise, the Lusitania was heavily booked, especially in the lesser classes.
”
”
Erik Larson (Dead Wake: The Last Crossing of the Lusitania)
“
Whenever I find myself somehow fooled into doing one of these talks, it’s on the grounds that some confused soul thinks that I will talk about the digital world and the future. What always happens is that I rant for an unspecified length of time about obscure history and fringe beliefs. So you need to understand that you are now trapped in this room with me and I’ve already been paid. This is my cunning plan.
”
”
Warren Ellis (CUNNING PLANS: Talks By Warren Ellis)
“
This would be the worst birthday of his life. Vladimir's best friend Baobab was down in Florida covering his rent, doing unspeakable things with unmentionable people. Mother, roused by the meager achievements of Vladimir's first quarter-century, was officially on the warpath. And, in possibly the worst development yet, 1993 was the Year of the Girlfriend. A downcast, heavyset American girlfriend whose bright orange hair was strewn across his Alphabet City hovel as if cadre of Angora rabbits had visited. A girlfriend whose sickly-sweet incense and musky perfume coated Vladimir's unwashed skin, perhaps to remind him of what he could expect on this, the night of his birthday: Sex. Every week, once a week, they had to have sex, as both he and this large pale woman, this Challah, perceived that without weekly sex their relationship would fold up according to some unspecified law of relationships.
”
”
Gary Shteyngart (The Russian Debutante's Handbook)
“
Moreover, it is not just that the early documents are silent about so much of Jesus that came to be recorded in the gospels, but that they view him in a substantially different way -- as a basically supernatural personage only obscurely on Earth as a man at some unspecified period in the past, 'emptied' then of all his supernatural attributes (Phil.2:7), and certainly not a worker of prodigious miracles which made him famous throughout 'all Syria' (Mt.4:24). I have argued that there is good reason to believe that the Jesus of Paul was constructed largely from musing and reflecting on a supernatural 'Wisdom' figure, amply documented in the earlier Jewish literature, who sought an abode on Earth, but was there rejected, rather than from information concerning a recently deceased historical individual. The influence of the Wisdom literature is undeniable; only assessment of what it amounted to still divides opinion.
”
”
George Albert Wells
“
Except that now, for having accused Ravi of an unspecified crime he hadn't committed, I was as good as dead. In years subsequent, when he was in the mood to terrorize me, he would whisper to me, "Just wait till we're alone. You're the next goat!
”
”
Yann Martel (Life of Pi)
“
What if the meaning of life on earth is not eternal progress toward some unspecified goal [...] ?
What if these things just rise and recede naturally, like tides, while the meaning of life remains the same as always - just to live and be with other people?
”
”
Sally Rooney (Beautiful World, Where Are You)
“
Our rich and complex international networks of production and distribution have come to an end before, but here we are, you and I, and here is humanity. What if the meaning of life on earth is not eternal progress toward some unspecified goal - the engineering and production of more and more powerful technologies, the development of more and more complex and abstruse cultural forms? What if these things just rise and recede naturally, like tides, while the meaning of life remains the same always - just to live and be with other people?
”
”
Sally Rooney (Beautiful World, Where Are You)
“
It is not that I am a genius or exceptionally gifted, not by any means. Quite the contrary. What Happened (I shall try to explain it) is that every mind is shaped by its own experiences and memories and knowledge, and what makes it unique is the grand total and extremely personal nature of the collection of all the data that have made it what it is. Each person possesses a mind with powers that are, whether great or small, always unique, powers that belong to them alone. This renders them capable of carrying out a feat, whether grandiose or banal, that only they could have carried out. In this case, all others had failed because they had counted on the simple quantitative progression of intelligence and ingenuity, when what was required was an unspecified quantity, but of the appropriate quality, of both. My own intelligence is quite minimal, a fact that I have ascertained at great cost to myself. It has been just barely adequate to keep me afloat in the tempestuous waters of life. Yet, its quality is unique; not because I decided it would be, but rather because that is how it must be.
”
”
César Aira
“
She’d hoped he’d be her forever guy. She was so tired of starting over with a new man every couple years, only to be abandoned for unspecified reasons. When bad things happened over and over, it was a sign. God was telling you to change. Your attitude, your hair, your address.
”
”
Tia Williams (Seven Days in June)
“
I am looking at him, I am
witnessing a unique physiological phenomenon: John Shade perceiving and
transforming the world, taking it in and taking it apart, recombining its elements in
the very process of storing them up so as to produce at some unspecified date an
organic miracle, a fusion of image and music, a line of verse.
”
”
Vladimir Nabokov (Pale Fire)
“
I am looking at him, I am witnessing a unique physiological phenomenon: John Shade perceiving and transforming the world, taking it in and taking it apart, recombining its elements in the very process of storing them up so as to produce at some unspecified date an organic miracle, a fusion of image and music, a line of verse.
”
”
Vladimir Nabokov (Pale Fire)
“
The notion of freedom could make even peace and order seem oppressive, generate the suspicion of some hidden purpose, some vast deceit, some unspecified crime being perpetrated beyond human ken. That was a generous way of looking at it; the alternative was to acknowledge that humans were intrinsically conflicted, cursed with acquisitive addictions of the spirit.
”
”
Steven Erikson (Toll the Hounds (Malazan Book of the Fallen, #8))
“
What if the meaning of life on earth is not eternal progress toward some unspecified goal - the engineering and production of more and more powerful technologies, the development of more complex and abstruse cultural forms? What if things just rise and recede naturally, like tides, while the meaning of life remains the same always - just to live and be with other people?
”
”
Sally Rooney (Conversations with Friends)
“
New Achievement! You’re the reason why daddy drinks! You have, for an unspecified reason, raised the ire of the System AI. You have corrected the issue, and everything is back to normal. The acceleration action has been suspended. This time. Good boy. Reward: You’ve received a Gold Makeup Sex is the Best Sex box. You’re not going to break me. Fuck you all. I will break you.
”
”
Matt Dinniman (The Gate of the Feral Gods (Dungeon Crawler Carl, #4))
“
What is your probability of winning twice the New Jersey lottery? One in 17 trillion. Yet it happened to Evelyn Adams, whom the reader might guess should feel particularly chosen by destiny. Using the method we developed above, Harvard’s Percy Diaconis and Frederick Mosteller estimated at 30 to 1 the probability that someone, somewhere, in a totally unspecified way, gets so lucky!
”
”
Fooled By Randomness Nassim Taleb
“
Diary entry, summer 1973. It may be there in a distracted glance out of an open window or in the split second of an absent look when you speak to her, or in the guarded inflections of her voice as she replies, or in the subtle chemistry of touch or smell or the taste of her skin in your mouth, or in some unspecified sixth sense that you can’t name, but when love is over, its signals are louder than disclosure, if only you are willing and open enough to acknowledge them. But of course we shake off these feelings as if they were mere irritations, as if they were unimportant and uninvited guests at a feast. “Not now,” you say, fobbing them off with shallow excuses and feigning more urgent business elsewhere. But they linger long after the party, and skulk in a corner where they plot and fester and return to ask their impertinent questions in the still of night, when she’s sleeping and wearing her child’s face. When she looks so beautiful and vulnerable with her mouth slightly open, and her hair a mess on the pillow, but as you reach to touch her, she turns unconsciously away toward the window, and then the questions start again, and you can’t sleep….
”
”
Sting (Broken Music: A Memoir)
“
What if the meaning of life on earth is not eternal progress toward some unspecified goal - the engineering and production of more and more powerful technologies, the development of more and more complex and abstruse cultural forms? What if these things just rise and recede naturally, like tides, while the meaning of life remains the same always -- just to live and be with other people?
”
”
Sally Rooney (Beautiful World, Where Are You)
“
He can be made to take a positive pleasure in the perception that the two sides of his life are inconsistent. This is done by exploiting his vanity. He can be taught to enjoy kneeling beside the grocer on Sunday just because he remembers that the grocer could not possibly understand the urbane and mocking world which he inhabited on Saturday evening; and contrariwise, to enjoy the bawdy and blasphemy over the coffee with these admirable friends all the more because he is aware of a ‘deeper’, ‘spiritual’ world within him which they cannot understand. You see the idea—the worldly friends touch him on one side and the grocer on the other, and he is the complete, balanced, complex man who sees round them all. Thus, while being permanently treacherous to at least two sets of people, he will feel, instead of shame, a continual undercurrent of self-satisfaction. Finally, if all else fails, you can persuade him, in defiance of conscience, to continue the new acquaintance on the ground that he is, in some unspecified way, doing these people ‘good’ by the mere fact of drinking their cocktails and laughing at their jokes, and that to cease to do so would be ‘priggish’, ‘intolerant’, and (of course) ‘Puritanical’. Meanwhile
”
”
C.S. Lewis (The Screwtape Letters)
“
Amanda Werner and several other beautiful, elegant, conically breasted foreign ladies, from unspecified vaguely defined countries, plus a few bucolic co-called humorists, comprised Buster's perpetual core of repeats. Women like Amanda Werner never made movies, never appeared in plays; they lived out their queer, beautiful lives as guests on Buster's unending show, appearing, Isidore had once calculated, as much as seventy hours a week.
”
”
Philip K. Dick
“
There are other tricks: the use of generalities like "the man in the street" and the editorial "we" to establish a rapport of disapproval with the reader and at the same time to create a mental lacuna under cover of an insubstantial and unspecified "we." And the technique of the misunderstood word: pack a review with obscure words that send the reader to a dictionary. Soon the reader will feel a vague, slightly queasy revulsion for whatever is under discussion.
”
”
William S. Burroughs (The Western Lands (The Red Night Trilogy, #3))
“
[The Edfu Building Texts in Egypt] take us back to a very remote period called the 'Early Primeval Age of the Gods'--and these gods, it transpires, were not originally Egyptian, but lived on a sacred island, the 'Homeland of the Primeval Ones,' and in the midst of a great ocean. Then, at some unspecified time in the past, an immense cataclysm shook the earth and a flood poured over this island, where 'the earliest mansions of the gods' had been founded, destroying it utterly, submerging all its holy places, and killing most of its divine inhabitants. Some survived, however, and we are told that this remnant set sail in their ships (for the texts leave us in no doubt that these 'gods' of the early primeval age were navigators) to 'wander' the world. Their purpose in doing so was nothing less than to re-create and revive the essence of their lost homeland, to bring about, in short: 'The resurrection of the former world of the gods ... The re-creation of a destroyed world.'
[...]
The takeaway is that the texts invite us to consider the possibility that the survivors of a lost civilization, thought of as 'gods' but manifestly human, set about 'wandering' the world in the aftermath of an extinction-level global cataclysm. By happenstance it was primarily hunter-gatherer populations, the peoples of the mountains, jungles, and deserts--'the unlettered and the uncultured,' as Plato so eloquently put it in his account of the end of Atlantis--who had been 'spared the scourge of the deluge.' Settling among them, the wanderers entertained the desperate hope that their high civilization could be restarted, or that at least something of its knowledge, wisdom, and spiritual ideas could be passed on so that mankind in the post-cataclysmic world would not be compelled to 'begin again like children, in complete ignorance of what happened in early times.
”
”
Graham Hancock (America Before: The Key to Earth's Lost Civilization)
“
I think this kind of relationship is only possible when you are young enough to fully inhabit your body. When you are older there is more separation between yourself and your physicality. Your body lets you down, it creaks and cracks and aches, it often feels unfamiliar, but back then my body was me, and his body was him, and if our bodies loved each other, that was enough. Although, of course, it wasn’t. He was never cruel. Perhaps if his feelings had been articulated more specifically, I would have understood sooner the fundamental truth: This man simply does not like me. When you live with someone who dislikes you in a mostly unspecified way, you begin to dislike yourself too, especially if you are someone, like me, whose self-esteem, at least regarding my personality, has never been high. A different person, a stronger person, would not have allowed her sense of self to be blown away like grains of sand in the brisk winds of Perth.
”
”
Liane Moriarty (Here One Moment)
“
The sergeant was just noting that she was a very handsome woman, from somewhere in the eastern Mediterranean he would guess, when his eyes unexpectedly burst into flames. This distressed him, and he staggered around, blood-red fire erupting from the sockets, while he explained the degree of agony he was enduring and how much he would appreciate assistance of an unspecified form from those present. Then his head caught fire and his conversation became very scream orientated.
”
”
Jonathan L. Howard (The Brothers Cabal (Johannes Cabal, #4))
“
Summarized, the letter explained that he was all against the banks but all for the bankers—except the Jewish bankers, who were to be driven out of finance entirely; that he had thoroughly tested (but unspecified) plans to make all wages very high and the prices of everything produced by these same highly paid workers very low; that he was 100 per cent for Labor, but 100 per cent against all strikes; and that he was in favor of the United States so arming itself, so preparing to produce its own coffee, sugar, perfumes,
”
”
Sinclair Lewis (It Can't Happen Here)
“
There are various magazines and newspapers that I sometimes buy, but reading them usually gives me an unspecified sense of guilt. A feeling that there’s something I haven’t done, something I’ve forgotten, that I’m not up to the demands of the task, that in some essential way I’m lagging behind the rest. The newspapers may very well be right. But when one takes a careful look at the people passing in the street, one might assume that many others have the same problem too, and haven’t done what they should with their lives either.
”
”
Olga Tokarczuk (Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead)
“
This became apparent when it emerged that Alex Acosta, then-serving as Secretary of Labor in the Trump administration, had disclosed to the Trump transition team that he had previously signed off on Epstein’s “sweetheart deal” because Epstein “had belonged to intelligence.” Acosta, then serving as US attorney for Southern Florida, had also been told by unspecified figures at the time that he needed to give Epstein a lenient sentence because of his links to “intelligence.” When Acosta was later asked if Epstein was indeed an intelligence asset in 2019, Acosta chose to neither confirm nor deny the claim.
”
”
Whitney Alyse (One Nation Under Blackmail - Vol. 1: The Sordid Union Between Intelligence and Crime that Gave Rise to Jeffrey Epstein, VOL.1)
“
That’s why when you read an announcement by a corporation executive or a business proprietor that the average pay of the people who work in his establishment is so much, the figure may mean something and it may not. If the average is a median, you can learn something significant from it: Half the employees make more than that; half make less. But if it is a mean (and believe me it may be that if its nature is unspecified) you may be getting nothing more revealing than the average of one $45,000 income—the proprietor’s—and the salaries of a crew of underpaid workers. “Average annual pay of $5,700” may conceal both the $2,000 salaries and the owner’s profits taken in the form of a whopping salary.
”
”
Darrell Huff (How to Lie with Statistics)
“
This arm devoid of a hand was for me a great mystery, almost as puzzling as Jesus. I wanted to know how the hand had come off (perhaps she had taken it off herself) and where it was now, and especially whether my own hand could ever come off like that; but I never asked, I must have been afraid of the answers. Going down the steps, I try to remember what the rest of her was like, her face, but I can see only the potent candies, inaccessible in their glass reliquary, and the arm, miraculous in an unspecified way like the toes of saints or the cut-off pieces of early martyrs, the eyes on the plate, the severed breasts, the heart with letters on it shining like a light bulb through the trim hole painted in the chest, art history.
”
”
Margaret Atwood (Surfacing)
“
The cumulative results of the brain’s chemical effects are not well understood. In the 1989 edition of the standard Comprehensive Textbook of Psychiatry, for example, one finds this helpful formula: a depression score is equivalent to the level of 3-methoxy-4-hydroxyphenylglycol (a compound found in the urine of all people and not apparently affected by depression); minus the level of 3-methoxy-4-hydroxymandelic acid; plus the level of norepinephrine; minus the level of normetanephrine plus the level of metanepherine, the sum of those divided by the level of 3-methoxy-4-hydroxymandelic acid; plus an unspecified conversion variable; or, as CTP puts it: “D-type score = C1 (MHPG) - C2 (VMA) + C3 (NE) - C4 (NMN + MN)/VMA + C0.” The score should come out between one for unipolar and zero for bipolar patients, so if you come up with something else—you’re doing it wrong.
”
”
Andrew Solomon (The Noonday Demon)
“
For every one member of the elite, thousands more were illiterate and impoverished subsistence farmers. After the ‘collapse of civilisation’, many of them moved elsewhere, and some may have died, but for the most part their lives probably did not change much. They went on growing crops. Those people were your ancestors and mine—not the palace-dwellers, but the peasants. Our rich and complex international networks of production and distribution have come to an end before, but here we are, you and I, and here is humanity. What if the meaning of life on earth is not eternal progress toward some unspecified goal—the engineering and production of more and more powerful technologies, the development of more and more complex and abstruse cultural forms? What if these things just rise and recede naturally, like tides, while the meaning of life remains the same always—just to live and be with other people?
”
”
Sally Rooney (Beautiful World, Where Are You)
“
What are these evolutionary changes? At the simplest level, the development of exceptionally sophisticated resistance mechanisms in all the bacterial populations of the world. In response to the impact of not me on the bacterial me, bacteria have begun generating tremendously sophisticated behavioral and physical responses. Bacteria have literally begun rearranging their genomes. As those genomes shift, their physical structures alter, sometimes considerably. It has been two and a half billion years since anything approaching this degree of change has occurred in the bacterial populations of Earth. But this kind of response is inevitable in any self-organized system; as Francisco Varela et al. observe, a biological network will reconfigure itself to an unspecified environment in such a way that it both maintains its ongoing dynamics and displays a behaviour that reveals a degree of inductive learning about environmental regularities.5
”
”
Stephen Harrod Buhner (Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm: Beyond the Doors of Perception into the Dreaming of Earth)
“
The Constitutional Convention quickly agreed to the proposal of Governor Edmund Randolph of Virginia for a national government of three branches: legislative, executive, and judicial. Randolph’s resolution “that a national Judiciary be established” passed unanimously. Debating and defining the powers of Congress in Article I and of the president in Article II consumed much of the delegates’ attention and energy. Central provisions of Article III were the product of compromise and, in its fewer than five hundred words, the article left important questions unresolved. Lacking agreement on a role for lower courts, for example, the delegates simply left it to Congress to decide how to structure them. The number of justices remained unspecified. Article III itself makes no reference to the office of chief justice, to whom the Constitution (in Article I) assigns only one specific duty, that of presiding over a Senate trial in a presidential impeachment.
”
”
Linda Greenhouse (The U.S. Supreme Court: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions))
“
The three main mediaeval points of view regarding universals are designated by historians as realism, conceptualism, and nominalism. Essentially these same three doctrines reappear in twentieth-century surveys of the philosophy of mathematics under the new names logicism, intuitionism, and formalism.
Realism, as the word is used in connection with the mediaeval controversy over universals, is the Platonic doctrine that universals or abstract entities have being independently of the mind; the mind may discover them but cannot create them. Logicism, represented by Frege, Russell, Whitehead, Church, and Carnap, condones the use of bound variables to refer to abstract entities known and unknown, specifiable and unspecifiable, indiscriminately.
Conceptualism holds that there are universals but they are mind-made. Intuitionism, espoused in modern times in one form or another by Poincaré, Brouwer, Weyl, and others, countenances the use of bound variables to refer to abstract entities only when those entities are capable of being cooked up individually from ingredients specified in advance. As Fraenkel has put it, logicism holds that classes are discovered while intuitionism holds that they are invented—a fair statement indeed of the old opposition between realism and conceptualism. This opposition is no mere quibble; it makes an essential difference in the amount of classical mathematics to which one is willing to subscribe. Logicists, or realists, are able on their assumptions to get Cantor’s ascending orders of infinity; intuitionists are compelled to stop with the lowest order of infinity, and, as an indirect consequence, to abandon even some of the classical laws of real numbers. The modern controversy between logicism and intuitionism arose, in fact, from disagreements over infinity.
Formalism, associated with the name of Hilbert, echoes intuitionism in deploring the logicist’s unbridled recourse to universals. But formalism also finds intuitionism unsatisfactory. This could happen for either of two opposite reasons. The formalist might, like the logicist, object to the crippling of classical mathematics; or he might, like the nominalists of old, object to admitting abstract entities at all, even in the restrained sense of mind-made entities. The upshot is the same: the formalist keeps classical mathematics as a play of insignificant notations. This play of notations can still be of utility—whatever utility it has already shown itself to have as a crutch for physicists and technologists. But utility need not imply significance, in any literal linguistic sense. Nor need the marked success of mathematicians in spinning out theorems, and in finding objective bases for agreement with one another’s results, imply significance. For an adequate basis for agreement among mathematicians can be found simply in the rules which govern the manipulation of the notations—these syntactical rules being, unlike the notations themselves, quite significant and intelligible.
”
”
Willard Van Orman Quine
“
he was all against the banks but all for the bankers—except the Jewish bankers, who were to be driven out of finance entirely; that he had thoroughly tested (but unspecified) plans to make all wages very high and the prices of everything produced by these same highly paid workers very low; that he was 100 per cent for Labor, but 100 per cent against all strikes; and that he was in favor of the United States so arming itself, so preparing to produce its own coffee, sugar, perfumes, tweeds, and nickel instead of importing them, that it could defy the World. . .and maybe, if that World was so impertinent as to defy America in turn, Buzz hinted, he might have to take it over and run it properly. Each moment the brassy importunities of the radio seemed to Doremus the more offensive, while the hillside slept in the heavy summer night, and he thought about the mazurka of the fireflies, the rhythm of crickets like the rhythm of the revolving earth itself, the voluptuous breezes that bore away the stink of cigars and sweat and whisky breaths and mint chewing-gum that seemed to come to them from the convention over the sound waves, along with the oratory.
”
”
Sinclair Lewis (It Can't Happen Here)
“
What ensued was a game of Coyote and Roadrunner that dragged on for more than a decade. Sixty letters went back and forth among Beaumont, St. Martin, and various contacts at the American Fur Company who had located St. Martin and tried to broker a return. It was a seller’s market with a fevered buyer. With each new round of communications—St. Martin holding out for more or making excuses, though always politely and with “love to your family”—Beaumont raised his offer: $250 a year, with an additional $50 to relocate the wife and five children (“his live stock,” as Beaumont at one point refers to them). Perhaps a government pension and a piece of land? His final plan was to offer St. Martin $500 a year if he’d leave his family behind, at which point Beaumont planned to unfurl some unspecified trickery: “When I get him alone again into my keeping I will take good care to control him as I please.” But St. Martin—beep, beep!—eluded his grasp. In the end, Beaumont died first. When a colleague, years later, set out to bag the fabled stomach for study and museum display, St. Martin’s survivors sent a cable that must have given pause to the telegraph operator: “Don’t come for autopsy, will be killed.
”
”
Mary Roach (Gulp: Adventures on the Alimentary Canal)
“
Former member of CSICOP Marcello Truzzi summed up the history of laboratory parapsychology: As proponents of anomalies produce stronger evidence, critics have sometimes moved the goal posts further away. . . . To convince scientists of what had merely been supported by widespread but weak anecdotal evidence, parapsychologists moved psychical research into the laboratory. When experimental results were presented, designs were criticized. When protocols were improved, a “fraud proof” or “critical experiment” was demanded. When those were put forward, replications were demanded. When those were produced, critics argued that new forms of error might be the cause (such as the “file drawer” error that could result from unpublished negative studies). When meta-analyses were presented to counter that issue, these were discounted as controversial, and ESP was reduced to being some present but unspecified “error some place” in the form of what Ray Hyman called the “dirty test tube argument” (claiming dirt was in the tube making the seeming psi result a mere artifact). And in one instance, when the scoffer found no counter-explanations, he described the result as a “mere anomaly” not to be taken seriously so just belonging on a puzzle page. The goal posts have now been moved into a zone where some critics hold unfalsifiable positions.30
”
”
Chris Carter (Science and Psychic Phenomena: The Fall of the House of Skeptics)
“
As a child, Callum never sympathized much with storybook villains, who were always clinging to some sort of broad, unspecified drive. It wasn’t the depravity that unnerved him, but the desperation of it all; the need, the compulsion, which always destroyed them in the end. That was the distasteful thing about villains, really. Not the manner in which they went about their business, which was certainly gruesome and morally corrupt, but the fact that they desired things so intensely.
The heroes were always reluctant, always pushed into their roles, martyring themselves. Callum didn’t like that, either, but at least it made sense. Villains were far too proactive. Must they participate in the drudgery of it all for some interminable cause? Taking over the world was a mostly nonsensical agenda. Have control of these puppets, with their empty heads and their pitchforked mobs? Why? Wanting anything—beauty, love, omnipotence, absolution—was the natural flaw in being human, but the choice to waste away for anything made the whole indigestible. A waste.
Simple choices were what registered to Callum as most honestly, the truest truths: fairy-tale peasants need money for dying child, accepts whatever consequence follow. The rest of the story—about rewards of choosing good or the ill-fated outcomes of desperation and vice—we’re always too lofty, a pretty but undeniable lie. Cosmic justice wasn’t real. Betrayal was all too common. For better or worse, people did not get what they deserved.
”
”
Olivie Blake (The Atlas Six (The Atlas, #1))
“
I am going to kill you.” These six words may have triggered more high-stakes predictions than any other sentence ever spoken. They have certainly caused a great deal of fear and anxiety. But why? Perhaps we believe only a deranged and dangerous person would even think of harming us, but that just isn’t so. Plenty of people have thought of harming you: the driver of the car behind you who felt you were going too slowly, the person waiting to use the pay-phone you were chatting on, the person you fired, the person you walked out on—they have all hosted a fleeting violent idea. Though thoughts of harming you may be terrible, they are also inevitable. The thought is not the problem; the expression of the thought is what causes us anxiety, and most of the time that’s the whole idea. Understanding this will help reduce unwarranted fear. That someone would intrude on our peace of mind, that they would speak words so difficult to take back, that they would exploit our fear, that they would care so little about us, that they would raise the stakes so high, that they would stoop so low—all of this alarms us, and by design. Threatening words are dispatched like soldiers under strict orders: Cause anxiety that cannot be ignored. Surprisingly, their deployment isn’t entirely bad news. It’s bad, of course, that someone threatens violence, but the threat means that at least for now, he has considered violence and decided against doing it. The threat means that at least for now (and usually forever), he favors words that alarm over actions that harm. For an instrument of communication used so frequently, the threat is little understood, until you think about it. The parent who threatens punishment, the lawyer who threatens unspecified “further action,” the head of state who threatens war, the ex-husband who threatens murder, the child who threatens to make a scene—all are using words with the exact same intent: to cause uncertainty. Our social world relies on our investing some threats with credibility while discounting others. Our belief that they really will tow the car if we leave it here encourages us to look for a parking space unencumbered by that particular threat. The disbelief that our joking spouse will really kill us if we are late to dinner allows us to stay in the marriage. Threats, you see, are not the issue—context is the issue.
”
”
Gavin de Becker (The Gift of Fear: Survival Signals That Protect Us from Violence)
“
As a child, Callum never sympathized much with storybook villains, who were always clinging to some sort of broad, unspecified drive. It wasn’t the depravity that unnerved him, but the desperation of it all; the need, the compulsion, which always destroyed them in the end. That was the distasteful thing about villains, really. Not the manner in which they went about their business, which was certainly gruesome and morally corrupt, but the fact that they desired things so intensely.
The heroes were always reluctant, always pushed into their roles, martyring themselves. Callum didn’t like that, either, but at least it made sense. Villains were far too proactive. Must they participate in the drudgery of it all for some interminable cause? Taking over the world was a mostly nonsensical agenda. Have control of these puppets, with their empty heads and their pitchforked mobs? Why? Wanting anything—beauty, love, omnipotence, absolution—was the natural flaw in being human, but the choice to waste away for anything made the whole indigestible. A waste.
Simple choices were what registered to Callum as most honestly, the truest truths: fairy-tale peasants need money for dying child, accepts whatever consequence follow. The rest of the story—about rewards of choosing good or the ill-fated outcomes of desperation and vice—we’re always too lofty, a pretty but undeniable lie. Cosmic justice wasn’t real. Betrayal was all too common. For better or worse, people did not get what they deserved.
Callum had always tended toward the assassins in the stories, the dutiful soldiers, those driven by personal reaction rather than on some larger moral cause. Perhaps it was a small role to serve on the whole, but at least it was rational, comprehensible beyond fatalistic. Take the huntsman who failed to kill Snow White, for example. An assassin acting on his own internal compass. Whether humanity as a whole won or lost as a result of his choice? Unimportant. He didn’t raise an army, didn’t fight for good, didn’t interfere much with the queen’s other evils. It wasn’t the whole world at stake; it was never about destiny. Callum admired that, the ability to take a moral stance and hold it. It was only about whether the huntsman could live with his decision—because however miserable or dull or uninspired, life was the only thing that mattered in the end.
The truest truths: Mortal lifetimes were short, inconsequential. Convictions were death sentences. Money couldn’t buy happiness, but nothing could buy happiness, so at least money could buy everything else. In terms of finding satisfaction, all a person was capable of controlling was himself.
”
”
Olivie Blake (The Atlas Six (The Atlas, #1))
“
Maybe tangled will be a spectacular rump. maybe i will adore it: it could happen. But one thing is for sure: tangled will not be rapunzel. And thats too bad , because rapunzel is an specially layered and relevant fairytale, less about the love between a man and a woman than the misguided attempts of a mother trying to protect her daughter from (what she perceives ) as the worlds evils. The tale, you may recall, begins with a mother-to-bes yearning for the taste of rapunzel, a salad green she spies growing in the garden of the sorceress who happens to live next door. The womans craving becomes so intense , she tells her husband that if he doesn't fetch her some, she and their unborn baby will die.
So he steals into the baby's yard, wraps his hands around a plant, and, just as he pulls... she appears in a fury. The two eventually strike a bargain: the mans wife can have as much of the plant as she wants- if she turns over her baby to the witch upon its birth. `i will take care for it like a mother,` the sorceress croons (as if that makes it all right).
Then again , who would you rather have as a mom: the woman who would do anything for you or the one who would swap you in a New York minute for a bowl of lettuce?
Rapunzel grows up, her hair grows down, and when she is twelve-note that age-Old Mother Gothel , as she calls the witch. leads her into the woods, locking her in a high tower which offers no escape and no entry except by scaling the girls flowing tresses. One day, a prince passes by and , on overhearing Rapunzel singing, falls immediately in love (that makes Rapunzel the inverse of Ariel- she is loved sight unseen because of her voice) . He shinnies up her hair to say hello and , depending on the version you read, they have a chaste little chat or get busy conceiving twins.
Either way, when their tryst is discovered, Old Mother Gothel cries, `you wicked child! i thought i had separated you from the world, and yet you deceived me!` There you have it : the Grimm`s warning to parents , centuries before psychologists would come along with their studies and measurements, against undue restriction . Interestingly the prince cant save Rapuzel from her foster mothers wrath. When he sees the witch at the top of the now-severed braids, he jumps back in surprise and is blinded by the bramble that breaks his fall.
He wanders the countryside for an unspecified time, living on roots and berries, until he accidentally stumbles upon his love. She weeps into his sightless eyes, restoring his vision , and - voila!- they rescue each other . `Rapunzel` then, wins the prize for the most egalitarian romance, but that its not its only distinction: it is the only well-known tale in which the villain is neither maimed nor killed. No red-hot shoes are welded to the witch`s feet . Her eyes are not pecked out. Her limbs are not lashed to four horses who speed off in different directions. She is not burned at the stake. Why such leniency? perhaps because she is not, in the end, really evil- she simply loves too much. What mother has not, from time to time, felt the urge to protect her daughter by locking her in a tower? Who among us doesn't have a tiny bit of trouble letting our children go? if the hazel branch is the mother i aspire to be, then Old Mother Gothel is my cautionary tale: she reminds us that our role is not to keep the world at bay but to prepare our daughters so they can thrive within it.
That involves staying close but not crowding them, standing firm in one`s values while remaining flexible. The path to womanhood is strewn with enchantment , but it also rifle with thickets and thorns and a big bad culture that threatens to consume them even as they consume it. The good news is the choices we make for our toodles can influence how they navigate it as teens. I`m not saying that we can, or will, do everything `right,` only that there is power-magic-in awareness.
”
”
Peggy Orenstein (Cinderella Ate My Daughter: Dispatches from the Frontlines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture)
“
Adult infallibility, which seems to me to be an oxymoron, is a regrettable condition, a type of regression, a hardening of the arteries around the heart of ignorance. It frequently manifests itself in an irrational irascibility that is directed at an unspecified “they,” who upon examination turn out to be politicians, professionals, or scientists who have challenged our comfortable assumptions about the world.
”
”
Kathleen Norris (Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith)
“
The year 1700 was a symbolic beginning of the drama in both Britain and America. Although merchants and sailors had long been involved in the trade, this was the year of the first recorded slaving voyage from Rhode Island, which would be the center of the American slave trade, and from Liverpool, which would be its British center and, by the end of the century, the center of the entire Atlantic trade. At the end of May 1700, the Eliza, Captain John Dunn, set sail from Liverpool for an unspecified destination in Africa and again to Barbados, where he delivered 180 slaves. In August, Nicholas Hilgrove captained the Thomas and John on a voyage from Newport, Rhode Island, to an unspecified destination in Africa and then to Barbados, where he and his sailors unloaded from their small vessel 71 captives. Hundreds of slavers would follow from these ports and from others in the coming century.10
”
”
Marcus Rediker (The Slave Ship: A Human History)
“
For many years, Blanche worried that it was fear which sometimes made her reluctant to meet white people's eyes, particularly on days when she had the loneliest or the unspecified blues. She'd come to understand that her desire was to avoid pain, a pain so old, so deep, its memory was carried not in her mind, but in her bones. Some days she simply didn't want to look into the eyes of people likely raised to hate, disdain, or fear anyone who looked like her. It was not always useful to be in touch with race memory. The thought of her losses sometimes sucked the joy from her life for days at a time.
”
”
Barbara Neely (Blanche on the Lam (Blanche White, #1))
“
Demand originates with the state. Without state spending, the value of the currency is unspecified and there is no aggregate demand. Only subsequent to state spending can the currency obtain absolute value and non-government spending take place.
”
”
Warren Mosler (Modern Monetary Theory: Key Insights, Leading Thinkers (The Gower Initiative for Modern Money Studies))
“
figured Harry Styles would notice me at the back of one of his concerts and whisk me to an unspecified European city to do adorably artsy date activities before we eventually made love, by candlelight, on a bed of rose petals
”
”
Annie Crown (Night Shift (Daydreamers, #1))
“
By heterosexuals the life after death is imagined as a world of light, where there is no parting. If there is a heaven for homosexuals, which doesn't seem very likely, it will be very poorly lit and full of people they can feel pretty confident they will never have to meet again. It is only partly because they are ashamed of themselves and wish to remain unrecognized that this environment seems so desirable. The chief reason is that it makes possible contacts of astounding physical intimacy without the intervention of personality. To either partner, the other is a phallus garlanded with fantasies, chiefly of masculinity. The homosexual world is a world of spinsters. Most homosexuals over the age of twenty-five will play, on the physical level, an active, passive or unspecified role with the same or a different partner from night to night or even from hour to hour, but emotionally they search perpetually for a real man who desires passionately (as opposed to making do with) another man. This being, if he exists, is so rare that one might as well enter a monastery on reaching puberty. The less drastic alternative is to live a real sex life in a dream world. This can best be done in the dark with strangers.
”
”
Quentin Crisp (The Naked Civil Servant)
“
I’d succumbed to the vague and mysterious invitations of friends to accompany them to unspecified places, for unknown purposes. You come, people said with smiling urgency, never feeling the need to tell me where we were going, or why. You come now! I’d resisted it a few times, at first, but I soon learned that those obscure, unplanned journeys were invariably worthwhile, frequently interesting and enjoyable, and quite often important.
”
”
Gregory David Roberts (Shantaram)
“
The mystics of both schools, who preach the creed of sacrifice, are germs that attack you through a single sore: your fear of relying on your mind. They tell you that they possess a means of knowledge higher than the mind, a mode of consciousness superior to reason—like a special pull with some bureaucrat of the universe who gives them secret tips withheld from others. The mystics of spirit declare that they possess an extra sense you lack: this special sixth sense consists of contradicting the whole of the knowledge of your five. The mystics of muscle do not bother to assert any claim to extrasensory perception: they merely declare that your senses are not valid, and that their wisdom consists of perceiving your blindness by some manner of unspecified means. Both kinds demand that you invalidate your own consciousness and surrender yourself into their power. They offer you, as proof of their superior knowledge, the fact that they assert the opposite of everything you know, and as proof of their superior ability to deal with existence, the fact that they lead you to misery, self-sacrifice, starvation, destruction.
”
”
Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged)
“
The fact is that she is addicted to Nate’s version of her. Sometimes, when he touches her, she feels not naked but clothed, in some long unspecified garment that spreads around her like a shimmering cloud. She’s realized with something close to panic that the picture he’s devised of her is untrue. He expects her to be serene, a refuge; he expects her to be kind. He really thinks she is, underneath, and that if he can dig into her far enough this is what he’ll unearth. He ought to be able to tell by now that she isn’t like that at all. Nevertheless she wants to be; she wants to be this beautiful phantom, this boneless wraith he’s conjured up. Sometimes she really does want it.
”
”
Margaret Atwood (Life Before Man)
“
Cancer from smoking seems more likely than cancer without a cause attached to it—an unspecified cause means no cause at all.
”
”
Nassim Nicholas Taleb (The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (Incerto, #2))
“
Deep [Space] Travel is a serious business. Name one risk and how you plan to deal with the emotional repercussions of that."
"Well..." Matter tapped a finer against their lip in an exaggerated manner. "We could all be eaten by Space Whales! [...] I've had a run in with the beasts before, they suck all the marrow out of your bones and this is why my medi-file-- which is what you keep glancing at on that datapad-- labels me as having an unspecified chronic condition."
Dr Brruuh TeaYaBin's voice came out flat. "You have chronic pain because a galactic whale at your bone marrow?
”
”
Will Soulsby-McCreath (Unlicensed Delivery (Inter-Planetary Alliance Novels))
“
There are various magazines and newspapers that I sometimes buy, but reading them usually gives me an unspecified sense of guilt. A feeling that there’s something I haven’t done, something I’ve forgotten, that I’m not up to the demands of the task, that in some essential way I’m lagging behind the rest.
”
”
Olga Tokarczuk (Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead)
“
think the only way to avoid talking about your own loss is to do the project: focus on other people’s situations instead.’ Rachel sighed again. She couldn’t deny there was a certain logic to this. ‘And what about you?’ she asked. ‘I mean, asking to switch assignments won’t do you any favours in terms of your position here. This is a huge account and we both know you can bring it in – it would cement your celebrity status for good.’ Jack ignored her sarcasm. ‘I’m good at what I do. There’ll be plenty more chances for me to get this agency coveted, lucrative clients.’ Rachel pulled her hand out of his and crossed her arms. He was infuriatingly confident. ‘On the other hand …’ Jack said, ‘if we go ahead with Lighthouse, I’ll be with you, supporting you – and I’ll know the truth. And at least it sounds as if the content side of things won’t require too much soul-searching. It seems pretty clear Olivia Mason already knows what’s best when it comes to writing material for her new website.’ ‘True.’ Rachel stood up straighter and pulled her shoulders back a little. Jack was right: refusing to work on this account was guaranteed to raise questions about her past, not to mention her emotional stability. What kind of person was still this churned up about a bereavement – even a close one – after almost sixteen years? A loss they never breathed a word about, even to good friends? She decided to put those questions away for examination at some future, unspecified time. Then there was the risk that she’d mark herself out as difficult or unprofessional by refusing to do the work she’d been given. All things considered, it might be better to put her head down and get on with this. It would be a difficult few weeks, but ploughing on was probably preferable to publicly dredging up past pain. ‘Okay,’ Rachel said, subdued but certain. ‘Okay?’ ‘Yeah. I don’t think I have much choice here, do I? Sticking with the account seems like the lesser of two evils.’ ‘It’s going to be fine,’ Jack said bracingly. ‘And it’ll be over within a few weeks, just like the BHGH pitch. Once we get this done, we’ll be on to the next big thing – other people will be manning the account – and we never have to talk about any of this again if you don’t want to.’ Rachel nodded. Jack reached for her hand again, squeezing it and then letting go as they turned to walk back into the building. ‘Will you be all right?’ he asked as she headed towards the ladies. ‘I think so,’ she said. ‘And … I’m sorry I had a go at
”
”
Laura Starkey (Rachel Ryan's Resolutions)
“
Maybe you are at home, at night. Assume you are alone. It is dark and late. An unexpected noise startles you, and you freeze. That is the first transmutation: unknown noise (a pattern) to frozen position. Then your heart rate rises, in preparation for (unspecified) action.3 That is the second transmutation. You are preparing to move. Next, your imagination populates the darkness with whatever might be making the noise.4 That is the third transmutation, part of a complete and practical sequence: embodied responses (freezing and heart-rate increase) and then imagistic, imaginative representation. The latter is part of exploration, which you might extend by overcoming your terror and the freezing associated with it (assuming nothing else too unexpected happens) and investigating the locale, once a part of your friendly house, from where the noise appeared to emanate. You have now engaged in active exploration—a precursor to direct perception (hopefully nothing too dramatic); then to explicit knowledge of the source; and then back to routine and complacent peace, if the noise proves to be nothing of significance.
”
”
Jordan B. Peterson (Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life)
“
I try to see him through the eyes of one of the newer VPs, or a Facebook friend who thinks he should be in jail for unspecified crimes. I know he’s wealthy to a degree I can’t even conceptualize. I know his company runs on fear and superhuman expectations. I know he’s the architect of practices that have harmed a lot of people and that he has done almost nothing with his unfathomable wealth to mitigate that harm. And yet I’ve been here too long to see him as the planet-owning villain or ominous cartoon character the world at large does. He’s just the guy who runs this company and has made some decisions I support and an increasingly large number that I don’t.
”
”
Kristi Coulter (Exit Interview: The Life and Death of My Ambitious Career)
“
In Project Beta,29 researcher and author Greg Bishop told this weird story of how Valdez and a businessman named Paul Bennewitz were fed disinformation by an officer with the US Air Force’s Office of Special Investigations named Richard Doty. Doty is a notorious (but oddly likeable) villain in ufology; he has since claimed in retirement that he was under orders to lie to Valdez and Bennewitz to distract them from secret unspecified US Air Force projects that Doty was ordered to misidentify as extra-terrestrial. Intriguing then to read in the Ed Mitchell archive documents that what might have fuelled Valdez’s willingness to believe Doty’s disinformation was the statements of multiple local witnesses, who verified that there was indeed highly unusual UAP activity happening around Dulce. All this was detailed in the confidential document written by Colm Kelleher in 1997.30 It suggests perhaps that the now-discredited conspiracy theory with which Bennewitz and Valdez later went public had its origins in what were in fact well-corroborated witness sightings. It was the US Air Force itself that made the implausible extrapolation of this evidence to include dubious allegations of underground alien bases at Dulce. The debunking of the Valdez/Bennewitz conspiracy theory ensured that any claims of strange UAP activity around Dulce were treated with extreme scepticism by all mainstream media. Of course, this was exactly what any agency wanting to hide something in the mountains of New Mexico likely hoped would happen. If the government was testing some new technology in the hills around Dulce, few people would believe it after the discredited Dulce underground UFO base stories. After reading the NIDS’ files, it became clear Bigelow’s investigators suspected the government was up to something in the Dulce hills.
”
”
Ross Coulthart (In Plain Sight)
“
newspapers that I sometimes buy, but reading them usually gives me an unspecified sense of guilt. A feeling that there’s something I haven’t done, something I’ve forgotten, that I’m not up to the demands of the task, that in some essential way I’m lagging behind the rest. The newspapers may very well be right. But when one takes a careful look at the people passing in the street, one might assume that many others have the same problem too, and haven’t done what they should with their lives either.
”
”
Olga Tokarczuk (Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead)
“
because literally any time is sooner than later except ‘later,’ which is not only vague and unspecified but isn’t even a quantifiable time.
”
”
Bentley Little (DMV)
“
You have no idea what he’s done for me, all the—” “What he’s done for you?” “Yes.” “Does he remind you of those things often?” I couldn’t deny this. His eyes narrowed. “So it sounds more like he did those things for him, in hopes of locking you into some sort of contract with unspecified terms.
”
”
S.M. Gaither (Flame and Sparrow (Flame and Sparrow Duology Book 1))
“
The dead in the tale have not found rest for a variety of reasons—lack of penance, unfulfilled vows, misdeeds that must be set right, will provisions that have not been respected by their heirs, a message to deliver28—and they come from purgatory, hell, or some unspecified third region located on the earth, which reflects folk beliefs in which the otherworld was thought to be the tomb, the mound, or a hollow mountain.
”
”
Claude Lecouteux (Phantom Armies of the Night: The Wild Hunt and the Ghostly Processions of the Undead)
“
In my experience, any class or assembly restricted to girls was going to be in some way degrading, like the one where we'd been convened to receive the information that from now on our bodies would be producing poisons that would need to be discharged on a monthly basis, through an unspecified orifice. The restriction of the typing requirement to girls suggested some sort of connection between our festering genitals and the need to serve in a clerical-type occupation, perhaps as a punishment.
”
”
Barbara Ehrenreich (Living with a Wild God: A Nonbeliever's Search for the Truth about Everything)
“
The Creator’s example of rest is a reason for His not recording the end of the seventh day. The first six days were concluded by the cycle of evening and morning, but the ending of the seventh day is not recorded. For Adam and Eve the seventh day ended as had the previous six days; the cessation of the day, however, is left unspecified to picture the eternal rest that God would provide for His people.
”
”
Christopher John Donato (Perspectives on the Sabbath)