Watkins Quotes

Every mother should be a true artist, who knows how to weave into her child's life images of grace and beauty, the true poet capable of writing on the soul of childhood the harmony of love and truth, and teaching it how to produce the grandest of all poems - the poetry of a true and noble life.

A river cuts through rock, not because of its power, but because of its persistence.

A promise unkept will take a man's mind.

Like all our memories, we like to take it out once in a while and lay it flat on the kitchen table, the way my wife does with her sewing patterns, where we line up the shape of our lives against that which we thought it would be by now.

You don't love people," he said. "You love what they do to you.

Sometimes love is a wound that opens and closes, opens and closes, all our lives.

But life doesn't turn out the way you expect. Ever. - Iris from What Comes After

Did you know, young lady," said Watkin to her, "that the Book of Revelation was written on Patmos? It was indeed. By Saint John the Divine, as you know. To me it shows very clear signs of having been written while waiting for a ferry. Oh, yes, I think so. It starts off, doesn't it, with that kind of dreaminess you get when you're killing time, getting bored, you know, just making things up, and then gradually grows to a sort of climax of hallucinatory despair.

Now, I've made mistakes. I've lost people. But you've thrown them away. There is an important difference.

It’s only religion. Faith is faith, but religions are no better than the people who practise them.

To be successful, you need to mobilize the energy of many others in your organization. If you do the right things, then your vision, your expertise, and your drive can propel you forward and serve as seed crystals.

His cigarettes helped mark the passage of time, especially on days that seemed all sun and sky...The dependable dwindling of his cigarette supply reassured him that he hadn't been left out here, that eventually he would have to ride into town and things would still be there, that the world hadn't stopped whirling.

Luz, we all have an obligation to the people who love us. They've given us this gift whether we want it or not and it is our duty to stand up and be worthy. We are not loved in proportion to our deserving, and thank God for that, for unworthies like you and me would find that life a bitch. We're loved to the level we ought to rise, and even in returning it we are obligated to be gentle.

The sooner that Layla understands that we are nothing but the sum of that which we endure, the better.

In the silence, I could hear the distinct sound of goats maa-ing in the barn. Lying there listening to them made me smile, too. I'd always loved goats - every one of them different from every other one, and all of them goofy and playful.

In 1965 two British scientists, Henry Harris and John Watkins, took cell sex an important step further. They fused HeLa cells with mouse cells and created the first human-animal hybrids—cells that contained equal amounts of DNA from Henrietta and a mouse. By doing this, they helped make it possible to study what genes do, and how they work.

Don’t you ‘baby’ me, you backwoods barbarian. I'm not settling for bringing you pie and beer for the rest of my life. I have plans. They don’t include marriage to you.

What was attraction if not a form of telepathy? The wild luck of two people feeling the exact same thing at the exact same time. That word again: purpose.

The true source of economic security is self-reliance and economic freedom—Social Security is immoral because it subverts both.

Intense love is often akin to intense suffering.

Don't diss the caterpillar and then sweat it when it starts to turn into a beautiful butterfly.

He loved her as though it had never occurred to him that he could feel otherwise. She wanted to be someone who deserved a love like that.

On a hot night in Apartment C4, Blandine Watkins exits her body. “Are you?

He was no Tin Man—he had a heart. And it belonged to Georgiana Watkins.

(Frances Ellen Watkins Harper) "In closing, Harper challenged the white women in the audience to stand by their black sisters, to look beyond their own white privilege. “You white women speak here of rights. I speak of wrongs,” she reminded them. “Talk of giving women the ballot-box? … While there exists this brutal element in society which tramples upon the feeble and treads down the weak, I tell you that if there is any class of people who need to be lifted out of their airy nothings and selfishness, it is the white women of America.

What is so incredible and essential about an authentic cultural scene is it rejects a value system based on consumption and productivity and instead celebrates creation, critical thought, aesthetics and expression. That can’t be mass marketed.

No, Mo," Miss Watkins said, turning to Nesta who was crying with laughter. "Nesta Williams, seeing as you clearly find it so funny. What do you think the name of God might be?" "Er, not sure," said Nesta, looking caught out. "What do you think?" "I don't think," said Miss Watkins."I know." "I don't think I know either," giggled Nesta. The whole class got detention, but it was worth it. I felt like i'd spent the whole morning laughing my head off We never did get to know what God's name was.

As a writer, I will go down any dark alley, inch my way through the tightest crawl space, and feed on your every fear. I will take your sense of calm and tear it to shreds. - Horror Author Barbara Watkins

Match Strategy to Situation

I don't know, maybe it's easier to be lost than found. At least there's energy in lostness. Something to be done.

Luz’s father had had it; it was how he kept himself atop everyone around him. He believed harder in stupider things, and there was somehow authority in this.

Four days ago, I realized that being alone was better than living every day lonely with him.

Being a leader is hard; being an honest one harder still

Leadership ultimately is about influence and leverage. You are, after all, only one person. To be successful, you need to mobilize the energy of many others in your organization.

Begin with no; it's easier to say yes later. It's difficult (and damaging to your reputation) to say yes and then change your mind.

Our Country is Gone, our cause is lost

Everything I can say about what it means to lose, what it means to do without, the inadequate weight of the past, you already know.

But we soon found out that the glory of war was at home among the ladies and not upon the field of blood and carnage of death, where our comrades were mutilated and torn by shot and shell.

Hoosiers aren't quitters. California people are quitters. No offense. It's just you've got restlessness in your blood." "I don't," she said, but he went on. "Your people came here looking for something better. Gold, fame, citrus. Mirage. They were feckless, yeah? Schemers. That's why no one wants them now. Mojavs.

Joseph Smith and the early Mormons had tried their best to murder all Indians in their path across the country, but in the end did not quite succeed. Arthur V. Watkins decided to use the power of his office to finish what the prophet had started. He didn’t even have to get his hands bloody.

Joining a new company is akin to an organ transplant—and you’re the new organ. If you’re not thoughtful in adapting to the new situation, you could end up being attacked by the organizational immune system and rejected.

P.S. On second thought, perhaps sometimes these things are best left by the side of the road, as it were. Sometimes a person wants a part of you that's no good. Sometimes love is a wound that opens and closes, opens and closes, all our lives.

She was brave from wine and unseasonable sunshine and the newfound closeness of home.

I take her to the Tecopa house. I tell her about the now and the big gnar, about everybody doing the best they can with what they have, choosing darkness, choosing light.

Assume that the job of building a positive relationship with your new boss is 100 percent your responsibility. In short, this means adapting to his style.

the reason we are so focused on time management as opposed to energy management is because it’s easier.

Everyone there pretended to be so bohemian and radical but really they were all worried about offending everyone else and she was fucking sick of it.

Any complex system that has a repeating signal, pattern, beat or rhythm will always synchronize to the strongest and most powerful ‘pendulum’ or beat.

They'd drink like men, like their fathers and uncles, like George fucking Washington...

After killing Aeysha, I left Chicago like Simone told me to. I ended up in Minnesota, where most niggas went when they wanted to come up.

Jules liked that I was a local. I made her feel authentic, which is especially important to Californians.

Secure early wins. Early wins build your credibility and create momentum.

The most important decisions you make in your first 90 days will probably be about people.

I draw inspiration and energy from trying to make my little part of the world a better, healthier, more beautiful, and more sustainable place.

The mind is a mine. So often we revisit its winding, unsound caverns when we ought to stay out.

Wealth is not distributed by society: it is produced and traded by the people who create it. To distribute it, society would first have to seize it from the people who created it. This

One way to say all this is, Our mother was an addict and she overdosed. Another way is, Our mother was suicidal and she killed herself. Another way is, Our mother was poor and ignored and dismissed for years by doctors who put her on legal and extremely profitable heroin, which eventually killed her. Another way is, Our mother needed help and no one, including us, gave it to her.

I love you," he said, and though she knew it was true she kept her eyes closed and said, "Don't say that." She did not want to allow that love could be so fearful and meager and misshapen. He left, and she did not try to stop him. She was through trying to stop him. She had been trying to stop him since the day they met.

The streets provide an education in everything that many of these schools don’t, such as survival skills, kinship, moneymaking opportunities, and love. A love that is absent from the cold hallways of schools such as the ones Butta, I, and millions of other African Americans attend or attended. Butta’s school has been shut down, along

[W]hile our souls are meager, nature has surplus. Yet something of the mechanism's subject was indeed dissolved in that silver chloride, flattened then minted as those promiscuous postcards we saw now, which we could not now unsee, for we had accepted unawares a bit of the Canyon each time we saw a photograph of it, and those pieces, filtered and diluted, had accumulated in us, so that we never saw anything for the first time. Perhaps the ugliest of our impulses, to shove the sublime through a pinhole.

... I do think there’s no better way to enrich your life than learning about the way things used to be and weaving into your daily routine at least a few time-honored practices and traditions whose simplicity and charm nourish the mind, body, and spirit.

When you kissed me…I felt special. I never really felt like I deserved it. That isn’t your fault. That was me. When I looked down the aisle on our wedding day and you weren’t there, my first thought, as awful as this sounds, wasn’t, “Where is he?” it was, “Oh, it figures.

Aligning an organization is like preparing for a long sailing trip. First, you need to be clear on whether your destination (the mission and goals) and your route (the strategy) are the right ones. Then you can figure out which boat you need (the structure), how to outfit it (the processes), and which mix of crew members is best (the skill bases). Throughout the journey, you keep an eye out for reefs that are not on the charts.

Ancient people, we don’t just need to find out what things they made, how they lived. We need to see through their eyes, sense what they sensed… aware that their senses would have been much sharper than ours… accepting that they might well have been aware of things we no longer perceive.

To live in God’s city here and now is to enjoy God’s limitless peace, love, and creativity; it is also to live a subversive, revolutionary life in this world as we repeatedly scratch the surface of the earthly city to reveal God’s goodness, truth, and beauty under its makeshift palimpsest.

The fabric of human life is woven with relationships. Once we thematize the importance of dialogue, the multiplicity of ongoing and created situations in which dialogical skills can be nurtured abound. As we have seen, this requires us to slow down and turn toward each other, having a clear sense of the relationship between our current footing in dialogue with one another and the future we are trying to create. The nurture of dialogical capacities is essential to human liberation.

She’d long ago given up trying to visualize God. There was no He or She. This was a Presence higher than gender, race or religion, transcending identity. All she would ever hope to do was follow the lamplit path into a place within and yet beyond her own heart and stay there and wait, patient and passive and without forced piety.

When an inner-city child is stuck in a school that doesn’t educate him, that is a tragedy. But the problem isn’t that other children get a better education—it’s that the government has created an educational system that often doesn’t educate, and that makes it virtually impossible for anyone but the affluent to seek out alternatives. Of

All the same and each one better than the next

I looked at Tarbox and saw he was a dangerous and ugly man. It was as if he had been born in someone's nightmare, then kicked his way out of their head.

What is culture? It’s a set of consistent patterns people follow for communicating, thinking, and acting, all grounded in their shared assumptions and values.

Hate the way if people have a problem they type it into their computers, and scream it out to the world and wait for the world to give them stupid, dangerous advice.

He’d always had a crush on me. I never liked him because he wasn’t a challenge.

no religion run by human beings should ever be trusted.

a wicked problem: 1. Is multi-dimensional 2. Has multiple stakeholders 3. Has multiple causes 4. Has multiple symptoms 5. Has multiple solutions, and 6. Is constantly evolving

Remember: You don’t want to be meeting your neighbours for the first time in the middle of the night when your house is burning

Finally, when your relationship with your boss has matured a bit (roughly the 90-day mark is a good rule of thumb), begin to discuss how you’re doing.

Don’t surprise your boss. It’s no fun bringing your boss bad news. However, most bosses consider it a far greater sin not to report emerging problems early enough.

Don’t stay away. If you have a boss who doesn’t reach out to you, or with whom you have uncomfortable interactions, you will have to reach out yourself.

Everybody wants to say bye, show the dying that they here and they somehow living on in spite of everything.

Wicked problems are social problems. Global warming requires individuals to change what they are ‘doing’ in enough numbers to reverse the damage. But they won’t do that unless their ‘being’ can be changed and they can be connected with enough like-minded individuals through ‘relating’ to push through the change that alters the ‘doing’ and the actual interacting.

Matthew Watkins At the first Thanksgiving, one of the bloodiest battles ensued when it was discovered that the deliveryman forgot to bring extra duck sauce. Finn Is God is, on this enchanted evening, in love with a wonderful guy. Julie Seagle Going to write a book called “Binge, Screw, Loathe.” It will be about a hateful woman who travels across the US visiting all-you-can-eat brothels.

My grandfather was a railroad brakeman, sixty years with the D&H. I'd sit on his lap when I was little, I remember, at the upstairs apartment on Watkins Avenue in Oneonta overlooking the tracks, and we'd look out at the yard together and watch the trains hooking up, and he'd pull his gold watch out of his vest pocket and squint at the dial, a gold pocket watch, and the bulging surface of the watch case was all scritch-scratched, etched with tiny soft lines, hundreds of tiny scratches, interlaced. And then he'd check the yard, my Grandpa, to see if the trains were running on time. In those days there was a rhythm to everything, there was an order to things, but now we're riding a runaway train that's carrying us all away to that final night where nothing is remembered and nothing matters.

It seemed that Watkins wanted Indians both to disappear and to love him for making them disappear. And now that Thomas had read as much of The Book of Mormon as he could stay awake for, he understood why this man was completely dismissive of treaty law. In Watkins’s religion, the Mormon people had been divinely gifted all of the land they wanted. Indians weren’t white and delightsome, but cursed with dark skin, so they had no right to live on the land. That they had signed legal treaties with the highest governmental bodies in the United States was also nothing to Watkins. Legality was second to personal revelation. Everything was second to personal revelation. And Joseph Smith’s personal revelation, all written down in The Book of Mormon, was that his people alone were the best and should possess the earth.

The true source of economic security is self-reliance and economic freedom—Social Security is immoral because it subverts both. It sabotages the virtues that enable us to survive, prosper, and enjoy our lives—and the social system that lets us exercise those virtues.

She saw for the first time the way we fill our homes with macabre altars to the live things we've murdered__ the floral print of the twin mattress in her childhood bedroom, stripped of its sheets when she soiled them; ferns on throw pillows coated in formaldehyde; poppies on petrochemical dinner plates; boxes and bags of bulk pulpstuffs emblazoned with plant imagery the way milk cartons are emblazoned with children. A rock on a window ledge, cut flowers stabbed in vases, a wreath of sprigs nailed to the front door-- every house a mausoleum, every house a wax museum.

While at Colonel Niel's marquee I saw a detail of soldiers bring out a man by the name of Rowland, whom they were going to shoot to death with musketry, by order of a court-martial, for desertion. He was being hauled to the place of execution in a wagon, sitting on an old gun box, which was to be his coffin. When they got to the grave, which had been dug the day before, the water had risen in it, and a soldier was baling it out. Rowland spoke up and said, 'Please hand me a drink of that water, as I want to drink out of my own grave so the boys will talk about it when I am dead, and remember Rowland.

We are rendered powerless; our voice is silenced by whatever form of elitism is working through a political system that gives us virtually no say while appearing to allow us to participate. As French philosopher Paul Valéry suggested, ‘Politics is the art of preventing people from becoming involved in affairs which concern them.’3

Delegating, thinking strategically, communicating—you may think this all sounds like Management 101. And you’re right. The most basic elements of management are often what trip up managers early in their careers. And because they are the basics, the bosses of rookie managers often take them for granted. They shouldn’t—an extraordinary number of people fail to develop these skills. I’ve maintained an illusion throughout this article—that only rookie managers suffer because they haven’t mastered these core skills. But the truth is, managers at all levels make these mistakes. An organization that supports its new managers by helping them to develop these skills will have surprising advantages over the competition.

Our life is our responsibility, and if we want something from other people, justice requires that we earn it through voluntary exchange. The bare fact that we want or need something from other people doesn’t give us a right to it. Other people are not our servants, and their job isn’t to spend their days and hours working for our benefit rather than their own.

Don’t run down your checklist. There is a tendency, even for senior leaders, to use meetings with a boss as an opportunity to run through your checklist of what you’ve been doing. Sometimes this is appropriate, but it is rarely what your boss needs or wants to hear. You should assume she wants to focus on the most important things you’re trying to do and how she can help.

If it is humanly possible, you should plan to have one or more in-person meetings with your boss early on. It is essential to make face-to-face connections early on to begin to establish a basis of confidence and trust (the same is true if you’re leading a virtual team). So if this means you need to fight for the resources and fly halfway around the world, you should do it.

Even though I was born in America, and my ancestors built its infrastructure for free, I’m not a part of the “Our” when they sing, “Our flag was still there!” I feel like the “Our” doesn’t include blacks, most women, gays, trans, and poor people of all colors. And, sadly, our nation reminds us every day. Some may reject the anthem because Francis Scott Key sang for freedom while enslaving blacks. His hatred even bled into the lyrics of the elongated version of “The Star-Spangled Banner” you won’t hear at a sporting event. The third stanza reads: No refuge could save the hireling and slave/From the terror of flight, or the gloom of the grave That line was basically a shot at slaves who agreed to fight with the British during the War of 1812 in exchange for their freedom.

Strategic direction encompasses mission, vision, and strategy. Mission is about what will be achieved, vision is about why people should feel motivated to perform at a high level, and strategy is about how resources should be allocated and decisions made to accomplish the mission. If you keep in mind the what, the why, and the how, you won’t get lost in debates about what a mission is, what a vision is, and what a strategy is.

Not for the last time in these pages, we find that the subversive logic of love quietly enters—then devastatingly explodes—the matchstick scaffolding of simple binaries upon which the modern world hangs its most cherished values. Ask a lover if she experiences her passion to please her sweetheart as a constraint; ask her whether she feels like a dupe of someone else’s power games: she will either laugh out loud or look at you with profound pity.

Crowdocracy is based on this fundamental Integral principle that ‘everybody is right’ (or ‘true but partial’), and it is simply a putting into action of that principle in as many places as possible when we want truly ‘full-spectrum’ solutions to our problems – particularly our ‘wicked problems’ – where one of the reasons they are ‘wicked’ is that not a wide enough range of developmental and Integral diversity has been taken into account to produce real solutions.

During a British conference on comparative religions, experts from around the world debated what, if any, belief was unique to the Christian faith. They began eliminating possibilities. Incarnation? Other religions had different versions of gods appearing in human form. Resurrection? Again, other religions had accounts of return from death. The debate went on for some time until C. S. Lewis wandered into the room. “What’s the rumpus about?” He asked, and heard in reply that his colleagues were discussing Christianity’s unique contribution among world religions. Lewis responded, “Oh, that’s easy. It’s grace.” After some discussion, the conferees had to agree. The notion of God’s love coming to us free of charge, no strings attached, seems to go against every instinct of humanity. The Buddhist eight-fold path, the Hindu doctrine of karma, the Jewish covenant, and Muslim code of law—each of these offers a way to earn approval. Only Christianity dares to make God’s love unconditional

We need to start by asking one very simple question: where does wealth come from? The answer, as we’ve seen, is that it is created, and so one man’s fortune does not come at anyone else’s expense. How is wealth created? By individual thought and effort. Morally, what an individual creates through his own thought and effort belongs to him. Politically, an individual can only exercise thought and effort if he is free. This is the individualist framework that’s required to defeat the campaign against economic inequality.

Acts of faithful remembrance reach across the centuries without collapsing them. For example, the last supper is folded on top of the Passover feast, establishing a proximity across the centuries and retroactively reinterpreting the Passover meal itself as the foreshadowing of Christ’s death. Similarly, Psalm 22 is folded into Jesus’s experience and interpretation of the cross as if it had been written for that very moment—which, in fact, it had. In the pages of the Bible and in the Christian experience of time, promise and fulfilment kiss.

When you are diagnosing a new organization, start by meeting with your direct reports one-on-one. (This is an example of taking a horizontal slice across an organization by interviewing people at the same level in different functions.) Ask them essentially the same five questions: What are the biggest challenges the organization is facing (or will face in the near future)? Why is the organization facing (or going to face) these challenges? What are the most promising unexploited opportunities for growth? What would need to happen for the organization to exploit the potential of these opportunities? If you were me, what would you focus attention on?