“
Overwhelmed, she surrendered to impending motherhood, terrorized by fears and doubts, reflecting about her own mother whom she saw as an agent of trauma transferal and as the ever-expanding root in a vicious female circle.
”
”
Laura Gentile (Within Paravent Walls)
“
Most of us had been involved for many years in Palestine solidarity work, but we were all thoroughly shocked to discover that the repression associated with Israeli settler colonialism was so evident and so blatant. The Israeli military made no attempt to conceal or even
mitigate the character of the violence they inflicted on the Palestinian people.
Gun-carrying military men and women—many extremely young—were everywhere. The wall, the concrete, the razor wire everywhere conveyed the impression that we were in prison. Before Palestinians are even arrested, they are already in prison. One misstep and one can be arrested and hauled off to prison;
one can be transferred from an open-air prison to a closed prison.
”
”
Angela Y. Davis (Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine and the Foundations of a Movement)
“
Stone houses, terrace walls, city walls, streets. Plant any rose and you hit four or five big ones. All the Etruscan sarcophagi with likenesses of the dead carved on top in realistic, living poses must have come out of the most natural transference into death they could imagine. After lifetimes of dealing with stone, why not, in death, turn into it?
”
”
Frances Mayes (Under the Tuscan Sun)
“
By early 2009 the risks and losses associated with more than a trillion dollars’ worth of bad investments were transferred from big Wall Street firms to the U.S. taxpayer.
”
”
Michael Lewis (The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine)
“
Big snake appears on Fifth Avenue. . . . Ladies screamed and ran in all directions this morning at eleven thirty when a big snake crawled out of a crack in the masonry of the retaining wall of the reservoir at Fifth Avenue and Fortysecond Street and started to cross the sidewalk. . . . ” “Some fish story. . . . ” “That aint nothin,” said an old man. “When I was a boy we used to go snipeshootin on Brooklyn Flats.
”
”
John Dos Passos (Manhattan Transfer: A Novel)
“
Three days after the liberation of Buchenwald, I became very ill; some sort of poisoning. I was transferred to a hospital and spent two weeks between life and death.
One day when I was able to get up, I decided to look at myself in the mirror on the opposite wall. I had not seen myself since the ghetto.
From the depths of the mirror, a corpse was contemplating me. The look in his eyes as he gazed at me has never left me.
”
”
Elie Wiesel (The Night Trilogy: Night, Dawn, The Accident)
“
Seemingly unperturbed by the lack of a beneficial owner’s name on such a large transfer—a glaring red flag—Wells Fargo let it through, just a tiny drop in the pool of trillions of dollars that U.S. correspondent banks process every day.
”
”
Bradley Hope (Billion Dollar Whale: The Man Who Fooled Wall Street, Hollywood, and the World)
“
I always start my class with a coloring assignment using crayons to color three pages from a variety of coloring pages pinned to the wall. Pick 3. Color them densely, trying to get as much of the crayon on the paper as possible. Students find it frustrating because crayons are surprisingly hard to work with, but they usually have some fun doing it. Until...when the finished pages were pinned to the wall, all of the pages were colored just the way I assigned— but all the joy was gone. Something went wrong.
What was it?
This: I told them to color hard in order to do it right. And go straight to using force— thinking I was showing them a short-cut—— this took away the way of coloring they would have found on their own. By telling them just how to do it, I took the playing-around away, the gradual figuring out that brings something alive to this activity, makes it worth-while, and is transferable to other activities.
I realize now the best results came when I gave no instructions except, “spend time on this assignment.” That was 3 years ago. Why did it take me so long to figure this out?
”
”
Lynda Barry (Syllabus: Notes from an Accidental Professor)
“
When we think of an institution, we can usually see it as embodied in a building: the Vatican, the Pentagon, the Sorbonne, the Treasury, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the Kremlin, the Supreme Court. What we cannot see, until we become close students of the institution, are the ways in which power is maintained and transferred behind the walls and beneath the domes, the invisible understandings which guarantee that it shall reside in certain hands but not in others, that information shall be transmitted to this one but not to that one, the hidden collusions and connections with other institutions of which it is supposedly independent. When we think of the institution of motherhood, no symbolic architecture comes to mind, no visible embodiment of authority, power, or of potential or actual violence. Motherhood calls to mind the home, and we like to believe that the home is a private place. Perhaps we imagine row upon row of backyards, behind suburban or tenement houses, in each of which a woman hangs out the wash, or runs to pick up a tear-streaked two-year-old; or thousands of kitchens, in each of which children are being fed and sent off to school. Or we think of the house of our childhood, the woman who mothered us, or of ourselves. We do not think of the laws which determine how we got to these places, the penalties imposed on those of us who have tried to live our lives according to a different plan, the art which depicts us in an unnatural serenity or resignation, the medical establishment which has robbed so many women of the act of giving birth, the experts—almost all male—who have told us how, as mothers, we should behave and feel. We do not think of the Marxist intellectuals arguing as to whether we produce “surplus value” in a day of washing clothes, cooking food, and caring for children, or the psychoanalysts who are certain that the work of motherhood suits us by nature. We do not think of the power stolen from us and the power withheld from us, in the name of the institution of motherhood.
”
”
Adrienne Rich (Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution)
“
You may well ask: when the bubble finally burst, why did we not let the bankers crash and burn? Why weren't they held accountable for their absurd debts? For two reasons.
First because the payment system - the simple means of transferring money from one account to another and on which every transaction relies - is monopolised by the very same bankers who were making the bets. Imagine having gifted your arteries and veins to a gambler. The moment he loses big at the casino, he can blackmail you for anything you have simply by threatening to cut off your circulation.
Second, because the financiers' gambles contained deep inside the title deeds to the houses of the majority. A full-scale financial market collapse could therefore lead to mass homelessness and a complete breakdown in the social contract.
Don't be surprised that the high and mighty financiers of Wall Street would bother financialising the modest homes of poor people. Having borrowed as much as they could off banks and rich clients in order to place their crazy bets, they craved more since the more they bet, the more they made.
So they created more debt from scratch to use as raw materials for more bets. How? By lending to impecunious blue collar worker who dreamed of the security of one day owning their own home.
What if these little people could not actually afford their mortgage in the medium term? In contrast to bankers of old, the Jills and the Jacks who actually leant them the money did not care if the repayments were made because they never intended to collect. Instead, having granted the mortgage, they put it into their computerised grinder, chopped it up literally into tiny pieces of debt and repackaged them into one of their labyrinthine derivatives which they would then sell at a profit.
By the time the poor homeowner had defaulted and their home was repossessed, the financier who granted the loan in the first place had long since moved on.
”
”
Yanis Varoufakis (Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism)
“
Then she dove into the morning cleaning.
There weren't many rooms in the tower, which made it easy, but she liked to be thorough. Sweep, mop, polish. The garderobe and her mirror got sparkly from scrubbing with a bit of vinegar (a trick she learned from Book #14: Useful Recipes for Master Servants). She transferred a day dress that was soaking in a soapy bucket to a clean water bucket, scrubbing out the bit of lingonberry juice stain from breakfast on Monday.
7:00: Personal ablutions. She washed her face and nails and applied cream to her cuticles and everywhere on her face but the T-zone, which was, despite her fairy-tale beauty, just a tad prone to breaking out.
8:00: Reading. She (re)read Book #26, Sidereus Nuncius by Galileo. More a pamphlet than a book, but it counted.
8:30: Art! Lacking a proper canvas (or piece of wall space) she chose to spend her painting time decorating the mop handle. It might not be dry enough to actually use the next day, but that was all right. Birthday weeks meant the occasional break from routine-- that was part of the fun!
”
”
Liz Braswell (What Once Was Mine)
“
The enemy of my soul didn't want me painting that day. To create meant that I would look a little bit like my Creator. To overcome the terrifying angst of the blank canvas meant I would forever have more compassion for other artists. You better believe as I placed the first blue and gray strokes onto the white emptiness before me, the "not good enough" statement was pulsing through my head in almost deafening tones...
This parlaying lie is one of his favorite tactics to keep you disillusioned by disappointments. Walls go up, emotions run high, we get guarded, defensive, demotivated, and paralyzed by the endless ways we feel doomed to fail. This is when we quit. This is when we settle for the ease of facebook.... This is when we get a job to simply make money instead of pursuing our calling to make a difference. This is when we put the paintbrush down and don't even try.
So there I was. Standing before my painted blue boat, making a choice of which voice to listen to.
I'm convinced God was smiling. Pleased. Asking me to find delight in what is right. Wanting me to have compassion for myself by focusing on that part of my painting that expressed something beautiful. To just be eager to give that beauty to whoever dared to look at my boat. To create to love others. Not to beg them for validation.
But the enemy was perverting all that. Perfection mocked my boat. The bow was too high, the details too elementary, the reflection on the water too abrupt, and the back of the boat too off-center. Disappointment demanded I hyper-focused on what didn't look quite right.
It was my choice which narrative to hold on to: "Not good enough" or "Find delight in what is right." Each perspective swirled, begging me to declare it as truth.
I was struggling to make peace with my painting creation, because I was struggling to make make peace with myself as God's creation. Anytime we feel not good enough we deny the powerful truth that we are a glorious work of God in progress.
We are imperfect because we are unfinished.
So, as unfinished creations, of course everything we attempt will have imperfections. Everything we accomplish will have imperfections. And that's when it hit me: I expect a perfection in me and in others that not even God Himself expects. If God is patient with the process, why can't I be?
How many times have I let imperfections cause me to be too hard on myself and too harsh with others?
I force myself to send a picture of my boat to at least 20 friends. I was determined to not not be held back by the enemy's accusations that my artwork wasn't good enough to be considered "real art". This wasn't for validation but rather confirmation that I could see the imperfections in my painting but not deem it worthless. I could see the imperfections in me and not deem myself worthless. It was an act of self-compassion.
I now knew to stand before each painting with nothing but love, amazement, and delight. I refused to demand anything more from the artist. I just wanted to show up for every single piece she was so brave to put on display..
Might I just be courageous enough to stand before her work and require myself to find everything about it I love? Release my clenched fist and pouty disappointments, and trade my "live up" mentality for a "show up" one? It is so much more freeing to simply show up and be a finder of the good. Break from the secret disappointments. Let my brain venture down the tiny little opening of love..
And I realized what makes paintings so delightful. It's there imperfections. That's what makes it art. It's been touched by a human. It's been created by someone whose hands sweat and who can't possibly transfer divine perfection from what her eyes see to what her fingertips can create. It will be flawed.
”
”
Lysa TerKeurst (It's Not Supposed to Be This Way: Finding Unexpected Strength When Disappointments Leave You Shattered)
“
He undid the lock and pulled open the cover to reveal a large stack of envelopes, each one labeled with a different name: Franklin Hobart, Brian Yancey, Everett Singer, Larry Steczynski…it was this last one he grabbed and pulled open, emptying its contents into his wallet and pockets.
“Larry Steczynski?” I asked incredulously.
Sage smiled. “You don’t think it suits me?”
“Oh, I think you suits you perfectly. How many aliases do you have?”
“I’m a bit of a collector.”
I placed a hand on his wrist, stopping him as he transferred something into his wallet. “Does Larry Steczynski carry a black AmEx?”
“He might.”
“My mom doesn’t even carry a black AmEx.”
“Apparently your mom doesn’t move in the same circles as Larry Steczynski.”
“Sage,” Ben called from across the room. He had knelt down to gaze closely at a sculpted figurine that sat on an end table, and his voice broke with awe. “This...this is a real Michelangelo, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, yeah it is.”
“But it’s a Michelangelo!”
“Yep.”
“And that painting,” Ben said, nodding to a piece on the wall featuring a sketch of what looked like a somewhat cherubic version of Sage himself. “That’s a real Rubens?”
“It is.”
“It looks like you.”
“Strong genetics in the family line,” Sage explained.
”
”
Hilary Duff (Elixir (Elixir, #1))
“
be apart. Despite getting rejected by my top-choice school, I was starting to really believe in myself again based on all the positive feedback we continued to get on our videos. And besides, I knew I could always reapply to Emerson the following year and transfer. • • • College started out great, with the best part being my newly found freedom. I was finally on my own and able to make my own schedule. And not only was Amanda with me, I’d already made a new friend before the first day of classes from a Facebook page that was set up for incoming freshmen. I started chatting with a pretty girl named Chloe who mentioned that she was also going to do the film and video concentration. Fitchburg isn’t located in the greatest neighborhood, but the campus has lots of green lawns and old brick buildings that look like mansions. My dorm room was a forced triple—basically a double that the school added bunk beds to in order to squeeze one extra person in. I arrived first and got to call dibs on the bunk bed that had an empty space beneath it. I moved my desk under it and created a little home office for myself. I plastered the walls with Futurama posters and made up the bed with a new bright green comforter and matching pillows. My roommates were classic male college stereotypes—the football player and the stoner. Their idea of decorating was slapping a Bob Marley poster and a giant ad for Jack Daniels on the wall.
”
”
Joey Graceffa (In Real Life: My Journey to a Pixelated World)
“
As Wundt is read today only by those with a specialized interest, he is not included in the list of classics. American philosopher William James (1842–1910), however, also considered a “founding father” of modern psychology, is still widely read. The brother of novelist Henry James, he trained in medicine and then transferred to philosophy, but like Wundt felt that the workings of the mind deserved to be a separate field of study. Building on a theory by German neuroanatomist Franz Gall that all thoughts and mental processes were biological, James helped to spread the remarkable idea that one’s self—with all its hopes, loves, desires, and fears—was contained in the soft gray matter within the walls of the skull.
”
”
Tom Butler-Bowdon (50 Psychology Classics: Who We Are, How We Think, What We Do: Insight and Inspiration from 50 Key Books (50 Classics))
“
My intention, this time, was to transfer a play to the screen while keeping its theatrical character. It was in some senses a matter of walking, invisibly, around the stage and catching the different aspects and nuances in the play, the urgency and the facial expressions that escape a spectator who cannot follow them in detail from a seat in the stalls.
Apart from that, I had noticed how effective a play becomes when you have a bird's-eye view from it, for example from the flies, that is to say from the viewpoint of a voyeur. The Audience is enclosed with the characters in a room lacking its fourth wall and listens to them on equal terms, without the element of my story conferred on scenes of intimacy by the whimsical shape of a keyhole.”
“L'aigle à deux têtes is not History. It is a story, an invented story lived out by imaginary heroes, and I should never have dared venture into the realistic world of cinema without being able to rely on the help of Christian Bérard. He has a genius for situating whatever he touches, for giving it a depth in time and space and an appearance of truth that are literally inimitable.” (...)
“A drama of this kind would be unacceptable, and almost impossible to tell, unless it was interpreted by superb actors who could instill grandeur and life into it. Edwige Feuillère and Jean Marais, applauded evening after evening in their parts in the play, surpass themselves on the screen and give of themselves, as I suggested above, everything that they cannot give us on the stage.”
“George Auric's music and the Strauss waltzes at the krantz ball make up the liquid in this drama of love and death is immersed.” (...)
“In L'aigle à deux têtes, I wanted to make a theatrical film.” (...)
“I know the faults of the film, but unfortunately the expense of the medium and the constraints of time that it imposes on us, prevent us from correcting our faults, Cinematography costs too much.” (...)
“In Les parents terribles (1948), what I determined to do was the opposite of what I did in L'aigle à deux têtes; to de-theatricalize a play, to film it in chronological order and to catch the characters by surprise from the indiscreet angle of the camera. In short, I wanted to watch a family through the keyhole instead of observing its life from a seat in the stalls.
”
”
Jean Cocteau (The Art of Cinema)
“
Vest"
I put on again the vest of many pockets.
It is easy to forget
which holds the reading glasses,
which the small pen,
which the house keys,
the compass and whistle, the passport.
To forget at last for weeks
even the pocket holding the day
of digging a place for my sister's ashes,
the one holding the day
where someone will soon enough put my own.
To misplace the pocket
of touching the walls at Auschwitz
would seem impossible.
It is not.
To misplace, for a decade,
the pocket of tears.
I rummage and rummage—
transfers
for Munich, for Melbourne,
to Oslo.
A receipt for a Singapore kopi.
A device holding music:
Bach, Garcia, Richter, Porter, Pärt.
A woman long dead now
gave me, when I told her I could not sing,
a kazoo.
Now in a pocket.
Somewhere, a pocket
holding a Steinway.
Somewhere, a pocket
holding a packet of salt.
Borgesian vest,
Oxford English Dictionary vest
with a magnifying glass
tucked inside one snapped-closed pocket,
Wikipedia vest, Rosetta vest,
Enigma vest of decoding,
how is it one person can carry
your weight for a lifetime,
one person
slip into your open arms for a lifetime?
Who was given the world,
and hunted for tissues, for ChapStick.
”
”
Jane Hirshfield (Ledger: Poems)
“
working from the center of the dough out, gently roll it back and forth until it stretches to 15 inches long. Place the loaves, seam-side down, on the kitchen towel dusted with flour and cover with plastic wrap or a damp kitchen towel. Let the loaves rise at room temperature for the final time, until they have doubled in size, about 35—45 minutes. Meanwhile, preheat the oven to 475°F. Carefully place the loaves on a baking sheet. Brush them with water using a pastry brush. With a sharp razor blade and swift motions, make 4 or 5 diagonal slashes along the length of each baguette. To do this successfully, do not drag the entire edge of the blade through the dough—use just the tip. Just before you are ready to slide the baking sheet into the oven, spray the inside of the oven with water using a spray bottle or plant mister and close the door immediately. This will create steam, which promotes a good crust. Put the bread in the oven and spray the walls of the oven two more times within the first minute of baking. Bake for 15—20 minutes or until the bread makes a hollow sound when you knock on the bottom of it with your knuckles. Transfer the bread to a rack and allow it to cool before slicing (or tearing apiece off).
”
”
Peter Mayle (Confessions of a French Baker: Breadmaking Secrets, Tips, and Recipes)
“
Fortunately—or unfortunately—Mo’s high chair was beside Sarah, who had already angled her stool toward her. There was an expression that I wouldn’t have believed she was capable of yesterday on her face as she watched Mo, like she was a fucking unicorn or something. Which she was.
Jonah, though, was on the side I’d planned to sit on next to Peter, with a free stool beside him. I slipped into it and looked around expectantly.
What the hell was everyone waiting for? Did they… did the Collins family pray before eating? Because it was a Sunday? Was that why Peter and Grandpa weren’t moving? Jonah had never prayed before a meal.
Uh….
“Baby Jesus, thank you for our food. Amen,” Grandpa Gus rushed out all of a sudden out of fucking nowhere, startling the fuck out of Peter and me, who both stared at him like we didn’t know who the hell he was anymore.
And….
Did he say baby Jesus?
The cough beside me had me glancing at Jonah, who had his lips pressed together and his gaze straight ahead at the wall behind his mom and Mo.
Glancing back at Grandpa, his cheeks were pink like he didn’t know why the hell he’d said that and was debating whether or not he regretted it.
“Ah, amen,” Sarah managed to get out, sounding pretty damn graceful and not like my gramps had just thanked baby Jesus of all people.
“That’s the last time I let you watch Talladega Nights,” I muttered under my breath just loud enough for my grandpa to hear.
And apparently Jonah too because he coughed, a lot.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Grandpa replied before nudging the plate of pancakes closer to the middle of the island, avoiding eye contact. “Okay, let’s eat unless someone else wants to… pray or make another useless comment that I have no reference for.”
I laughed.
But it was Jonah beside me who cleared his throat, reached for the spatula, slid two pancakes onto it before transferring them over to my plate first, as he said, very quietly, very calmly, “I do have a question, were you praying to eight-pound, five-ounce baby Jesus or….”
I threw my head back and laughed a second before I slid off the stool and onto the floor.
It was a long, long time before I managed to start eating.
”
”
Mariana Zapata (The Best Thing)
“
The granite complex inside the Great Pyramid, therefore, is poised ready to convert vibrations from the Earth into electricity. What is lacking is a sufficient amount of energy to drive the beams and activate the piezoelectric properties within them. The ancients, though, had anticipated the need for more energy than what would be collected only within the King's Chamber. They had determined that they needed to tap into the vibrations of the Earth over a larger area inside the pyramid and deliver that energy to the power center—the King's Chamber —thereby substantially increasing the amplitude of the oscillations of the granite.
Modern concert halls are designed and built to interact with the instruments performing within. They are huge musical instruments in themselves. The Great Pyramid can be seen as a huge musical instrument with each element designed to enhance the performance of the other. While modern research into architectural acoustics might focus predominantly upon minimizing the reverberation effects of sound in enclosed spaces, there is reason to believe that the ancient pyramid builders were attempting to achieve the opposite. The Grand Gallery, which is considered to be an architectural masterpiece, is an enclosed space in which resonators were installed in the slots along the ledge that runs the length of the gallery. As the Earth's vibration flowed through the Great Pyramid, the resonators converted the vibrational energy to airborne sound. By design, the angles and surfaces of the Grand Gallery walls and ceiling caused reflection of the sound, and its focus into the King's Chamber. Although the King's Chamber also was responding to the energy flowing through the pyramid, much of the energy would flow past it. The specific design and utility of the Grand Gallery was to transfer the energy flowing through a large area of the pyramid into the resonant King's Chamber. This sound was then focused into the granite resonating cavity at sufficient amplitude to drive the granite ceiling beams to oscillation. These beams, in turn, compelled the beams above them to resonate in harmonic sympathy. Thus, with the input of sound and the maximization of resonance, the entire granite complex, in effect, became a vibrating mass of energy.
”
”
Christopher Dunn (The Giza Power Plant: Technologies of Ancient Egypt)
“
When they're alive, people are so free that they need boundaries. Both instinctively and culturally they identify boundaries with death. That's how it's always been, it's been that way for everyone, and still is. People think that when you stop living, there's a bright line. Whether they envision it as a direct transfer to paradise or the simple cessation of all vital functions, they've always imagined this dividing line. They need that wall. They need to know that there is no knocking it down. No one has the courage to imagine it doesn't exist. Literature and religion have covered that wall with pious inscriptions.
”
”
Viola Di Grado (Hollow Heart)
“
This curve, which looks like an elongated S, is variously known as the logistic, sigmoid, or S curve. Peruse it closely, because it’s the most important curve in the world. At first the output increases slowly with the input, so slowly it seems constant. Then it starts to change faster, then very fast, then slower and slower until it becomes almost constant again. The transfer curve of a transistor, which relates its input and output voltages, is also an S curve. So both computers and the brain are filled with S curves. But it doesn’t end there. The S curve is the shape of phase transitions of all kinds: the probability of an electron flipping its spin as a function of the applied field, the magnetization of iron, the writing of a bit of memory to a hard disk, an ion channel opening in a cell, ice melting, water evaporating, the inflationary expansion of the early universe, punctuated equilibria in evolution, paradigm shifts in science, the spread of new technologies, white flight from multiethnic neighborhoods, rumors, epidemics, revolutions, the fall of empires, and much more. The Tipping Point could equally well (if less appealingly) be entitled The S Curve. An earthquake is a phase transition in the relative position of two adjacent tectonic plates. A bump in the night is just the sound of the microscopic tectonic plates in your house’s walls shifting, so don’t be scared. Joseph Schumpeter said that the economy evolves by cracks and leaps: S curves are the shape of creative destruction. The effect of financial gains and losses on your happiness follows an S curve, so don’t sweat the big stuff. The probability that a random logical formula is satisfiable—the quintessential NP-complete problem—undergoes a phase transition from almost 1 to almost 0 as the formula’s length increases. Statistical physicists spend their lives studying phase transitions.
”
”
Pedro Domingos (The Master Algorithm: How the Quest for the Ultimate Learning Machine Will Remake Our World)
“
Buttresses were one of the prime structural features of Gothic architecture: by accommodating the thrust of the vaults transferred to them from strategic points, they allowed for walls pierced by a multitude of windows to rise to spectacular heights, filling the church with heavenly light—the aspiration of all Gothic builders.
”
”
Ross King (Brunelleschi's Dome: How a Renaissance Genius Reinvented Architecture)
“
By the mid-twenties, Philip’s son, Robert, began to assume principal responsibility for the partnership. He was a small, trim man, about five feet seven inches, with well-tanned, smooth skin and a dapper appearance. Unfailingly polite, Robert nevertheless knew what he wanted. First he wanted to move the firm. And in 1928 the headquarters of the partnership was transferred from a cramped space in the Farmers Loan & Trust Company building at 16 William Street to Lehman’s very own eleven-story triangular Italian Renaissance-style building at One William Street, in the heart of the financial district.* For the next fifty-two years this would be the home of Lehman Brothers.
”
”
Ken Auletta (Greed and Glory on Wall Street: The Fall of the House of Lehman)
“
Margit Hosseini was also a child of this decade, and she undertook various visits to East Berlin with her family and witnessed firsthand the disparity in everyday living standards compared with her own life. “My French-born father was working for the government and had been transferred over to the French zone in 1949. The suburb of West Berlin that was my home was a world away from the life of my cousin in East Berlin. The only way my family crossed was by S-Bahn, and even as a child one immediately sensed and saw how quickly the atmosphere changed. . .
”
”
Iain MacGregor (Checkpoint Charlie: The Cold War, the Berlin Wall and the Most Dangerous Place on Earth)
“
For a US military posting to a hot spot such as West Berlin, one had to have a record of good conduct and exceptional service. Tom had impressed his superiors with his eagerness to take more language courses, but a transfer to Berlin came with good and bad news. “The US Army cannot, and will not, try to rescue any unit, or anyone else,” said his lieutenant, “if war breaks out in Berlin. Two things can happen to you if the Russians decide to take Berlin. Neither one of them is good.
”
”
Iain MacGregor (Checkpoint Charlie: The Cold War, the Berlin Wall and the Most Dangerous Place on Earth)
“
My first depression actually started when I was about thirteen years old. Now when I read back what I wrote in my diary at the time, it's quite clear - one page says in giant letters: "I hate this, I hate my life!" I also complained about stomach aches a lot. When I was fifteen, I really hit a brick wall. I was exhausted from copying behaviour, from trying to fit in, from acting "normal". I wouldn't go to school for days and eventually had to transfer to a lower level high school. I had a pretty negative self-image, and I couldn't understand why nothing ever worked out quite right. I was a quiet, shy girl who always stretched herself too thin and gave too much. It felt like a war going on in my head, and it was draining. My parents are still amazed I got my high school diploma, as I never had the energy to study.
”
”
Bianca Toeps (Maar je ziet er helemaal niet autistisch uit)
“
Decker’s longtime FBI partner, Alex Jamison, had been transferred to New York and found what looked to be love with a Wall Street investment banker. His old boss at the FBI, Ross Bogart, had retired and was learning to play golf—badly, he had heard—in Arizona.
”
”
David Baldacci (Long Shadows (Amos Decker, #7))
“
On Monday, Lehman Brothers had filed for bankruptcy, and Merrill Lynch, having announced $55.2 billion in losses on subprime bond–backed CDOs, had sold itself to Bank of America. The U.S. stock market had fallen by more than it had since the first day of trading after the attack on the World Trade Center. On Tuesday the U.S. Federal Reserve announced that it had lent $85 billion to the insurance company AIG, to pay off the losses on the subprime credit default swaps AIG had sold to Wall Street banks—the biggest of which was the $13.9 billion AIG owed to Goldman Sachs. When you added in the $8.4 billion in cash AIG had already forked over to Goldman in collateral, you saw that Goldman had transferred more than $20 billion in subprime mortgage bond risk into the insurance company, which was in one way or another being covered by the U.S. taxpayer.
”
”
Michael Lewis (The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine)
“
It takes just one generation to put an end to the transference of inhumanity. If you stand as wall between your child's future and the inhuman practices of the past, automatically the world ushers into an era of practicing humanity.
”
”
Abhijit Naskar (Yarasistan: My Wounds, My Crown)
“
IT WAS STILL DARK when we pulled up to the prison, but I could see the imposing high walls with their barbed wire and watchtowers. As I’d later learn, international law prohibits an occupying power from transferring prisoners outside occupied territory. But Hasharon Prison is in Israel, and like other Palestinian prisoners, I felt as though I were being kidnapped.
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Ahed Tamimi (They Called Me a Lioness: A Palestinian Girl's Fight for Freedom)
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While further exploring the first floor of the hospital, the friends discovered a dusty room filled with old photographs and crumbling letters; the room was labeled “Archives”. One picture caught their attention — a group of children in tattered school uniforms, their faces frozen in time. The letters spoke of longing and loneliness, and the pain of separation. “These kids do not look like they were at this school according to their own will. They look very sad, almost disturbed.” Emily said as she looked around, cautious of what may be in the basement of this place. Continuing on the main floor, a second room also had file cabinets in it but had no name on the door. Inside the room was an article from the Mountainside times of a time when the hospital had its own tale of tragedy and despair. During the war, the medical facility had been overwhelmed with wounded soldiers, and the staff struggled to provide adequate care. Rumors circulated of a nurse who, unable to cope with the constant death and suffering, succumbed to madness, killing 3 interns and one patient before being shot. It went on to say that since this incident, patients reported she still wandered the desolate corridors, her soft footsteps and distant sobs haunting those who dared to stay overnight. The war department cited an increase in transfer requests out of the hospital citing the interactions with “the inhabitants” that haunt the place. As the friends explored the hospital's abandoned wards and empty rooms, they could almost feel the weight of the past pressing down on them the whole time. Shadows danced along the peeling wallpaper, and the air was filled with an otherworldly chill and the dampness of a bog. Every creak and groan of the building seemed to whisper the stories of those who had lived and died within its walls. Its decrepit walls and shattered windows bathed in the ghostly light of the full moon.
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Shae Dubray (The Magician's Society: Rivalry in Mountainside)
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Most’s eclectic background also provided the spark behind the invention of what would become known as the ETF. During his travels around the Pacific, he had appreciated the efficiency of how traders would buy and sell warehouse receipts of commodities, rather than the more cumbersome physical vats of coconut oil, barrels of crude, or ingots of gold. This opened up a panoply of opportunities for creative financial engineers. “You store a commodity and you get a warehouse receipt and you can finance on that warehouse receipt. You can sell it, do a lot of things with it. Because you don’t want to be moving the merchandise back and forth all the time, so you keep it in place and you simply transfer the warehouse receipt,” he later recalled.19 Most’s ingenious idea was to, after a fashion, mimic this basic structure. The Amex could create a kind of legal warehouse where it could place the S&P 500 stocks, and then create and list shares in the warehouse itself for people to trade. The new warehouse-cum-fund would take advantage of the growth and electronic evolution in portfolio trading—the simultaneous buying and selling of big baskets of stocks first pioneered by Wells Fargo two decades earlier—and a little-known aspect of mutual funds: They can do “in kind” transactions, exchanging shares in a fund for a proportional amount of the stocks it contains, rather than cash. Or an investor can gather the correct proportion of the underlying stocks and exchange them for shares in the fund. Stock exchange “specialists”—the trading firms on the floor of the exchange that match buyers and sellers—would be authorized to be able to create or redeem these shares according to demand. They could take advantage of any differences that might open up between the price of the “warehouse” and the stock it contained, an arbitrage opportunity that should help keep it trading in line with its assets. This elegant creation/redemption process would also get around the logistical challenges of money coming in and out continuously throughout the day—one of Bogle’s main practical concerns. In basic terms, investors can either trade shares of the warehouse between themselves, or go to the warehouse and exchange their shares in it for a slice of the stocks it holds. Or they can turn up at the warehouse with a suitable bundle of stocks and exchange them for shares in the warehouse. Moreover, because no money changes hands when shares in the warehouse are created or redeemed, capital gains tax can be delayed until the investor actually sells their shares—a side effect that has proven vital to the growth of ETFs in the United States. Only when an ETF is actually sold will investors have to pay any capital gains taxes due.
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Robin Wigglesworth (Trillions: How a Band of Wall Street Renegades Invented the Index Fund and Changed Finance Forever)
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Now, stop being so sentimental and let's enjoy our final day in Venice. What would you like to do?" Just then, we were passing a chocolatier and I was drawn to the arrays of goodies on display. I suddenly had a voracious appetite for chocolate, which I later would realize was transference from my sexual desire for the Count. I suggested we go into the chocolate shop. Since Ramiz and Ubaid couldn’t eat during daylight hours, they continued browsing the antiques market while we ventured into the store. There were so many temptingly delicious chocolates; I couldn't squelch the urge to try as many varieties as possible. I was using chocolates to drown my sorrows for being stupid enough to fall in love with an Italian Casanova. Why was I missing this ‘man-izer,’ when I already had a fabulous lover standing by my side? I sat at a corner table drinking latte and eating choc olates, gobbling the delicious sweets, my comfort food. "Young, I'm worried about you. You’re behaving very strangely today. I've never seen you eat like a mad person. Tell me what's wrong. I want to help." Tears began flowing again as I continued to stuff chocolate after chocolate in my mouth. How could I tell my beloved what was happening inside my head when I myself didn’t know what was wrong with me? The more I cried, the more I ate. I consumed dozens of chocolates. "I don't know what’s wrong with me. I'm a silly stupid boy!" I started banging my head against the wall where I was leaning. Andy looked very concerned and commanded, "Young! Stop it! You are hurting yourself. Stop this nonsense at once!" I blurted out, in the midst of sobs, "Is parting always such a difficult thing to do?" Andy, not realizing I was grieving over Mario, caught hold of my hands and whispered into my ears, "My sweet darling boy! I'm here, aren’t I? And I'm not leaving you anytime soon." Wiping my tears I said between sobs, "I know, I know! You are the kindest person in the world and I love you very much." "Well then, stop this silly crying.
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Young (Initiation (A Harem Boy's Saga Book 1))
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He settled into the Chelsea apartment as best he could with everything in his life in turmoil — no permanent abode, no publishing agreements, growing difficulties with the police, and what was to happen now with Marianne? — but when he turned on the TV he saw a great wonder that dwarfed what was happening to him. The Berlin Wall was falling, and young people were dancing on its remains.
That year, which began with horrors — on a small scale the fatwa, on a much larger scale Tiananmen — also contained great wonders. The magnificence of the invention of the hypertext transfer protocol, the http:// that would change the world, was not immediately evident. But the fall of Communism was. He had come to England as a teenage boy who had grown up in the aftermath of the bloody partition of India and Pakistan, and the first great political event to take place in Europe after his arrival was the building of the Berlin Wall in August 1961. Oh no, he had thought, are they partitioning Europe now? Years later, when he visited Berlin to take part in a TV discussion with Günter Grass, he had crossed the wall on the S-Bahn and it had looked mighty, forbidding, eternal. The western side of the wall was covered in graffiti but the eastern face was ominously clean. He had been unable to imagine that the gigantic apparatus of repression whose icon it was would ever crumble. And yet the day came when the Soviet terror-state was shown to have rotted from within, and it blew away, almost overnight, like sand. Sic semper tyrannis. He took renewed strength from the dancing youngsters’ joy.
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Salman Rushdie (Joseph Anton: A Memoir)
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The Wall Street Journal (The Wall Street Journal) - Clip This Article on Location 1055 | Added on Tuesday, May 5, 2015 5:10:24 PM OPINION Baltimore Is Not About Race Government-induced dependency is the problem—and it’s one with a long history. By William McGurn | 801 words For those who see the rioting in Baltimore as primarily about race, two broad reactions dominate. One group sees rampaging young men fouling their own neighborhoods and concludes nothing can be done because the social pathologies are so overwhelming. In some cities, this view manifests itself in the unspoken but cynical policing that effectively cedes whole neighborhoods to the thugs. The other group tut-tuts about root causes. Take your pick: inequality, poverty, injustice. Or, as President Obama intimated in an ugly aside on the rioting, a Republican Congress that will never agree to the “massive investments” (in other words, billions more in federal spending) required “if we are serious about solving this problem.” There is another view. In this view, the disaster of inner cities isn’t primarily about race at all. It’s about the consequences of 50 years of progressive misrule—which on race has proved an equal-opportunity failure. Baltimore is but the latest liberal-blue city where government has failed to do the one thing it ought—i.e., put the cops on the side of the vulnerable and law-abiding—while pursuing “solutions” that in practice enfeeble families and social institutions and local economies. These supposed solutions do this by substituting federal transfers for fathers and families. They do it by favoring community organizing and government projects over private investment. And they do it by propping up failing public-school systems that operate as jobs programs for the teachers unions instead of centers of learning. If our inner-city African-American communities suffer disproportionately from crippling social pathologies that make upward mobility difficult—and they do—it is in large part because they have disproportionately been on the receiving end of this five-decade-long progressive experiment in government beneficence. How do we know? Because when we look at a slice of white America that was showered with the same Great Society good intentions—Appalachia—we find the same dysfunctions: greater dependency, more single-parent families and the absence of the good, private-sector jobs that only a growing economy can create. Remember, in the mid-1960s when President Johnson put a face on America’s “war on poverty,” he didn’t do it from an urban ghetto. He did it from the front porch of a shack in eastern Kentucky’s Martin County, where a white family of 10 eked out a subsistence living on an income of $400 a year. In many ways, rural Martin County and urban Baltimore could not be more different. Martin County is 92% white while Baltimore is two-thirds black. Each has seen important sources of good-paying jobs dry up—Martin County in coal mining, Baltimore in manufacturing. In the last presidential election, Martin Country voted 6 to 1 for Mitt Romney while Baltimore went 9 to 1 for Barack Obama. Yet the Great Society’s legacy has been depressingly similar. In a remarkable dispatch two years ago, the Lexington Herald-Leader’s John Cheves noted that the war on poverty sent $2.1 billion to Martin County alone (pop. 12,537) through programs including “welfare, food stamps, jobless benefits, disability compensation, school subsidies, affordable housing, worker training, economic development incentives, Head Start for poor children and expanded Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid.” The result? “The problem facing Appalachia today isn’t Third World poverty,” writes Mr. Cheves. “It’s dependence on government assistance.” Just one example: When Congress imposed work requirements and lifetime caps for welfare during the Clinton administration, claims of disability jumped. Mr. Cheves quotes
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Anonymous
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Yet their preservation would last only so long and by the ninth century relics were transferred with increased frequency to churches within the city walls. The catacombs were doomed to a form of extinction. Their entrances became overgrown by vegetation and they were lost in time, completely forgotten until the sixteenth century when Antonio Bosio, the Christopher Columbus of subterranean Rome, rediscovered one, then another, then thirty of them, and systematically began their study.
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Glenn Cooper (The Devil Will Come)
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When I got out of baseball, the first thing I did was enroll in Carroll College (now Carroll University) to finish the degree I started at Clemson. Fortunately, all of my credits transferred. I had one year left and went back full time. I think I needed 24 or 26 credits. I commuted back and forth from Hales Corners to Waukesha and got my degree.
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Bill Schroeder (If These Walls Could Talk: Milwaukee Brewers: Stories from the Milwaukee Brewers Dugout, Locker Room, and Press Box)
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If you are considering a two-story space with a balcony overlooking from above, keep in mind the potential sound transfer problem that can happen when the sounds from downstairs reflect off of the walls and reverberate into the bedrooms above. You can help ameliorate this by making sure the bedroom doors are somewhat remote from the second-floor balcony.
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William J. Hirsch Jr. (Designing Your Perfect House: Lessons from an Architect)
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Women today do not believe that their bodies know what to do, much less that their babies also know what to do. Because they are afraid and feel like they lack knowledge, they are often reassured rather than anxious when they enter the hospital. At the conscious level, they believe that all will be well within those walls. They believe this because they trust that someone else will know what to do if something goes wrong. The authority has been transferred to someone outside. But the body doesn't lie, and that is why, despite a feeling of comfort in the hospital, many women still find that their labor slows or stops on admission to the maternity unit. It is also why so many women harbor nagging doubts about the necessity of many of the procedures done - to them and to their babies - in the name of helping. It is why so many women - and most health workers today - do not know the difference between intervention and support.
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Suzanne Arms (Immaculate Deception II: Myth, Magic and Birth)
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It never gets easier. Sometimes I’m met with confusion, and sometimes anger, but the hardest is the sadness. Sadness can break a person. It can make a home inside you, slowly building a wall around your soul.
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Ava Harrison (Transference (The Montgomery Family, #1))
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But in the new housing marketplace of the 21st century, everything had changed. People were getting rich, House values were soaring. There was no need for archaic processes values were writing or income verification. This was a new era. And no one wanted in on the profits more than Wall era. Ainvestment banks. They couldn't stand to sit on the sidelines and watch everyone else get rich. Making money was their game, and they not only wanted to play, they wanted to write the rules. And so they did.
And what did these "Titans of Finance" create? The "100-percent financing, No-Doc, Stated Income, Negative Amortizing" loan. I laugh as I write this. Literally, a person could wrap all those features into one loan. It was beyond comical. It was insane. And what do these terms actually mean?
• 100-percent financing: The buyers didn't need to contribute a single dime to actually purchase the house. They could finance it all, transferring all of the risk to the financial institutions.
• No-Doc: The banks didn't verify such silly things as job status or credit history. Nope. If you could sign your name, you could buy a home.
Stated Income: The clients told the banks how much they made. In other words, they lied.
• Negative Amortizing: The clients payments wouldn't be large enough to even cover the monthly interest, so the principle balance on the loan would increase each month, putting them further and further into debt
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Patrick Kelly (The Retirement Miracle)
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The smack helped my siege mentality. It was my wall against all of that daily stuff, because rather than deal with it, I shut it out, to concentrate on what I wanted to do. You could go out and about, totally insulated. Without it, in certain cases you wouldn’t have walked into that room at that time to deal with something. With it, you could go in there, brazen it off and be very smooth. And then go back and get the guitar out and finish what it was you were doing. It made everything possible. Whereas straight, I don’t know, there were too many things going on. While you’re insulated like this, you live in a world where other people go round with the sun and the moon. They wake up, go to sleep.… If you break that cycle and you’ve been up for four, five days, your perception of these people who have just got up, who have crashed out, is very distant. You’ve been working, writing songs, transferring tape to tape, and these people come in and they’ve been to bed and everything! They’ve even eaten stuff! Meanwhile, you’re sitting at this desk with a guitar and this pen and paper. “Where the fuck you been?” It got to the point where I’d be thinking, how can I help these poor people who have to sleep every day?
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Keith Richards (Life)
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found that by copying the distinctive prints and scratches made by other animals we could gain a new power; here was a method of identifying with the other animal, taking on its expressive magic in order to learn of its whereabouts, to draw it near, to make it appear. Tracing the impression left by a deer’s body in the snow, or transferring that outline onto the wall of the cave: these are ways of placing oneself in distant contact with the Other, whether to invoke its influence or to exert one’s own. Perhaps by multiplying its images on the cavern wall we sought to ensure that the deer itself would multiply, be bountiful in the coming season…. All of the early writing systems of our species remain tied to the mysteries of a more-than-human world. The petroglyphs of pre-Columbian North America abound with images of prey animals, of rain clouds and lightning, of eagle and snake, of the paw prints of bear. On rocks, canyon walls, and caves these figures mingle with human shapes, or shapes part human and part Other (part insect, or owl, or elk.) Some researchers assert that the picture writing of native North America is not yet “true” writing, even where the pictures are strung together sequentially—as they are, obviously, in many of the rock inscriptions (as well as in the calendrical “winter counts” of the Plains tribes). For there seems, as yet, no strict relation between image and utterance. In a much more conventionalized pictographic system, like the Egyptian hieroglyphics (which first appeared during the First Dynasty, around 3000 B.C.E. and remained in use until the second century C.E.),4 stylized images of humans and human implements are still interspersed with those of plants, of various kinds of birds, as well as of serpents, felines, and other animals. Such pictographic systems, which were to be found as well in China as early as the fifteenth century B.C.E., and in Mesoamerica by the middle of the sixth century B.C.E., typically include characters that scholars have
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David Abram (The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World)
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Ulay’s Polaroids of that period often showed him piercing his own flesh in various bloody ways. In one work, he tattooed one of his aphorisms on his arm: ULTIMA RATIO (meaning final argument or last resort, referring to force). Then he cut a square hunk of flesh containing the tattoo out of his arm, slicing so deeply that the muscle and tendon were visible. He framed and preserved the tattooed flesh in formaldehyde. For another image, he held a bloodstained paper towel over a self-inflicted razor wound in his belly. A series of shots showed him slicing his fingertips with a box cutter and painting the white tiles of a bathroom with his own blood.
(...)somebody gave Ulay a Newton’s cradle. He was fascinated by the back-and-forth swinging of the shiny metal balls, the little clack they made when they collided, the perfect transfer of energy.
“What if we did that?” he said.
I immediately understood what he was talking about: a performance where the two of us would collide and bounce off each other.
We were naked, standing twenty meters apart. We were in a warehouse on the island of Giudecca, just across the lagoon from Venice. A couple hundred people were watching. Slowly at first, Ulay and I began to run toward each other. The first time, we just brushed past each other as we met; on each successive run, though, we moved faster and faster and made harder contact—until finally Ulay was crashing into me. Once or twice he knocked me over. We had placed microphones near the collision point, to pick up the sounds of flesh slapping flesh.
(...)
then [Ulay] took out a heavy needle, the kind used to sew leather, attached to some thick white thread, and he sewed his lips shut.
This didn’t happen quickly. First he had to penetrate the skin below his lower lip—not easy—and then the skin above his upper lip. Also not easy. Then he pulled the thread tight and tied a knot. And then he and I changed places: Ulay sat down among the audience, and I sat in the chair he had just occupied.
“Now,” I told our friends, “you will ask me questions and I will answer as Ulay.
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Marina Abramović (Walk Through Walls: A Memoir)
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He didn’t just transfer money—coffee, bananas, and citrus fruits were favorites of his East Berlin community.
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Iain MacGregor (Checkpoint Charlie: The Cold War, the Berlin Wall and the Most Dangerous Place on Earth)
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McQuown argued that a more scientific approach to investing was the future. In his telling, the traditional approach followed a version of the “Great Man” theory first espoused by the nineteenth-century philosopher Thomas Carlyle. Some preternaturally gifted hero would pick stocks that he thought would rise. When his touch inevitably deserted him at some point—and in the 1960s it was invariably a “him”—the investor would simply transfer their hopes onto another Great Man. “The whole thing is a chance-driven process. It’s not systematic and there is lots we still don’t know about it and that needs study,” McQuown argued.
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Robin Wigglesworth (Trillions: How a Band of Wall Street Renegades Invented the Index Fund and Changed Finance Forever)
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At this point I should pause for a moment to mention the universe does not care at all who is the attacker and who is the defender in any given situation. If you generate some momentum or some energy, the universe is not going to say, “Good for you. I will now damage your opponent with it.” The universe just takes whatever you generate and spends it in the easiest possible manner. If it is easier to move your opponent back after you punch him with a high-momentum strike, he will move back, but if it is easier to move yourself back after the punch (if he is up against a brick wall), you will push yourself back instead. The same thing goes for energy. If it is easier to compress tissue in your opponent’s body, you will, but if it is easier to spend that energy breaking your own hand (if you punch a brick wall), your hand will suffer the damages. This complete indifference from the universe shows up all the time in physics, including Newton’s third law of motion, which states every action has an equal and opposite reaction. This indifference means your ability to transfer energy and momentum into your opponent depends on how well grounded you are, as well as how compressible you are.
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Jason Thalken (Fight Like a Physicist: The Incredible Science Behind Martial Arts (Martial Science))
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what?” “She wants to start teaching me how to take care of you,” he says. He shrugs. “I guess they feel you need to leave here sooner rather than later.” “Okay,” I say. A week ago, that would’ve really scared me. But now that I know I’m going home with my husband, it doesn’t bother me nearly as much. Clark seizes the handle of my chair and pushes me out of the gym, and down the hallway to my room. I am getting slightly better at pushing the chair myself, but it’s a slow process, and half the time I bump into a wall. I don’t want Clark to see me hitting the wall. So I just let him push me. Valerie is waiting in my room. When I come in, the first thing she does is look down at her watch and roll her eyes. “Well,” she says, “the only thing we have time for is to do a transfer, considering you’re forty-five minutes late to our session.” I feel my cheeks get hot. “I am?” “Not you,” Valerie says. She’s looking at Clark. “I’m really sorry about that,” he says. “Something really important came up.” Valerie just shakes her head. The first thing Valerie demonstrates is how to transfer me out of the wheelchair into my bed. I can’t really help with that, so it’s lucky she’s very strong. The first thing she does is remove the right armrest of my chair and both leg rests. Then she stands in front of me, with my knees between her knees, bracing me. She bends forward, and I grab onto her shoulder with my right hand, and she puts my left hand on her shoulder.
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Freida McFadden (Brain Damage)