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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Intense love is often akin to intense suffering.

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

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.

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

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

(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.

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.

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

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.

I was trying to be a good friend,’ said Ilsa, sounding frustrated. ‘However much of a dickhead he is, I don’t want him paying child support to bloody Bijou Watkins for the next eighteen years. She’d make a nightmarish

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Match Strategy to Situation

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.

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.

As James K. A. Smith points out, “It’s precisely when your ultimate conviction is that there is no eternal that you’re most prone to absolutize the temporal.

Before the dick, I had my shit together. I had goals, dreams, and aspirations. But after the dick, I was lost, turned out all over again, and needed Iyanla to fix my life.

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

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

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

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

I only hoped that now that he thought I was pregnant, he would ejaculate into me freely and I would eventually really be pregnant.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

Our Country is Gone, our cause is lost

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

We are all bound up together in one great bundle of humanity, and society cannot trample on the weakest and feeblest of its members without receiving the curse on its own soul

After a dinner at a Loire Valley chateau, he left Watkins behind to teach the French how to work with carbon fiber and make their production lines efficient.

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

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.

[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.

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

We are all bound up together in one great bundle of humanity, and society cannot trample on the weakest and feeblest of its members without receiving the curse in its own soul.

Believers in the early church were not persecuted for worshipping God. They were persecuted for worshipping no god or emperor apart from God.9

Neither we nor the universe are necessary. We may be important, precious, glorious even, but preciously and gloriously unnecessary.

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.

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.

We have, of course, this continuity, but we are conscious of something more; we have, as no animal or plant has, the power of self-reflection and we can see in ourselves something more than a mere continuity of identity.

Mismanaged emotion is the ‘superhighway’ to disease and distress. Your emotions not only determine whether you are likely to become ill and how happy you feel but also determine whether you will do a good job and get promoted.

To the orthodox there must always be a case for revolution; for in the hearts of men God has been put under the feet of Satan. In the upper world hell once rebelled against heaven. But in this world heaven is rebelling against hell.

What their relationship could not survive were the cost figures for the Roadster unearthed by Watkins. It looked to Musk as if Eberhard had mismanaged the company by allowing the parts costs to soar so high. Then, as Musk saw it, Eberhard had failed to disclose the severity of the situation to the board. While on his way to give a talk in Los Angeles, Eberhard received a call from Musk and in a brief, uncomfortable chat learned that he would be replaced as CEO.

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.

It is just as matter of fact as the “there was” and “it was so” of verses 3, 7, 9, 11, 15, 24, and 30. God speaks, and it exists. God speaks, and it is good. Both ontology (the existence of things) and axiology (the goodness of things) are equally and inseparably dependent on the divine word.41

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.

Our men died the death of heroes. I sometimes think that surely our brave men have not died in vain. It is true, our cause is lost, but a people who loved those brave and noble heroes should ever cherish their memory as men who died for them. I shed a tear over their memory. They gave their all to their country.

The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. . . . The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.

To live in the last days is to live in a series of overlaps and tensions, between the “now” and the “not yet,” between the “in” and the “not of,” between giving to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s, all within a culture that thinks it is rejecting Christianity at the very moment it affirms its deep and irreducible debt to Christian figures.

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.

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.

I am a democrat because I believe in the Fall of Man. I think most people are democrats for the opposite reason. A great deal of democratic enthusiasm descends from the ideas of people like Rousseau, who believed in democracy because they thought mankind so wise and good that everyone deserved a share in the government. The danger of defending democracy on those grounds is that they’re not true.

The cultural theorist Peter Sloterdijk insists on what he calls “enlightened false consciousness” in which an individual or a group intentionally and ironically cultivates a state of consciousness they know to be false because it is advantageous to do so.35 Frankfurt school theorist Max Horkheimer argues for a similar idea: the bourgeoise embraces ideology out of cunning and a will to dominate, not because they are duped by it.36

We have only to reflect upon the fact that no human being can be a substitute for another, a fact of which love makes us sharply aware with its impelling desire for a unique relationship with a unique person, to realise what this means and to discover that we have here something not met with in the rest of nature; that we are dealing with a uniqueness which goes far beyond mere individuation of bodies or mere differences of appearance and behaviour.

We marinate the wings in a mix of seasonings. Then, right before we fry them, we coat them in my breading mixture, which includes my grandmother’s special ingredient: instant mashed potatoes. Instant mashed potatoes mixed in with the flour and herbs makes Sweet Tea’s fried chicken extra-crispy. Grandmommy found this out by accident when she was running low on flour one Sunday afternoon and made a quick substitute with Betty Crocker potato flakes. I’m

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

Blood typing had a second, unanticipated benefit: establishing parenthood. In a famous case in Chicago in 1930, two sets of parents, the Bambergers and the Watkinses, had babies in the same hospital at the same time. After returning home, they discovered to their dismay that their babies were wearing labels with the other family’s name on them. The question became whether the mothers had been sent home with the wrong babies or with the right babies mislabeled. Weeks of uncertainty followed, and in the meantime both sets of parents did what parents naturally do: they fell in love with the babies in their care. Finally, an authority from Northwestern University with a name that might have come out of a Marx Brothers movie, Professor Hamilton Fishback, was called in, and he administered blood tests to all four parents, which at the time seemed the very height of technical sophistication. Fishback’s tests showed that both Mr. and Mrs. Watkins had type O blood and therefore could produce only a type O baby, whereas the child in their nursery was type AB. So, thanks to medical science, the babies were swapped back to the right parents, though not without a lot of heartache. —

Jacques Ellul has a word for this instrumentalizing attitude: technique. His analysis helps us to appreciate just how deep and wide the n-shaped dynamic runs in our society. He defines technique as “the totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency in every field of human activity.”14 It is “never anything but a collection of means and the search for the most efficient means” in any given situation,15 with its origin in Cain’s city-building and Lamech’s polygamy.16 Up until the eighteenth century, Ellul argues, technique was largely absent from all areas of society apart from the mechanical, but in the industrial revolution, technical progress suddenly exploded and began to reconfigure every area of life, from industrial production through politics to the family. The result is that today technique is not a thing out there in the world; it is how we do everything we do in the world: “The Third World, Europe, militarization, etc., are all political matters. Inflation, exchange rates, standards of living, and growth are all economic matters. Yet technique has a part in all of them. It is like a key, like a substance underlying all problems and situations. It is ultimately the decisive factor.

The outcome of colonialism has been a controlling or blocking of interconnectivity and interdependence in related arenas: the environment (where rivers are dammed, channeled, or drained and natural geographies replaced by grids), in societies (where communities are divided in a pseudologic of superiority/inferiority), in economies (where resources like trees, coal, or oil are extracted as rapidly and brutally as possible without regard for surrounding destruction and pollution), and thought (where knowledge is organized under the rubrics of specialization, expertise, and compartmentalization, affected by racism and Eurocentrism). Colonialism, globalization, and development planning are ways of thinking as well as ways of life, and we need to find their alternatives, islands where other ways of life are explored through the resurgence of interconnectivity at local levels, creating dialogue among diverse points of view and projects of counter-development and liberation. When we take the idea of colonialism out of its location in history texts as a period of conquest located in the past, and begin to think of it as a metaphor for a way to live in the environment, certain general patterns appear. Before colonialism, there were environments of interpenetrating local biodiversities with cyclic retreats and advances, in which human groups integrated and competed; after colonialism, there was a large-scale monoculture, control of land and resources by distant privileged elites who exploit and fragment local communities while polluting and destroying ecosystems. Before colonialism, there were many diverse cultural worlds, each its own center of meaning-making and language arts, with Europe at the periphery. After colonialism, cultures were ranked on a kind of "great chain of being" according to European notions of culture and development, with Europe at the center. As a corollary, individual subjectivities were ranked as to how completely they could think through decontextualized universals in European languages. One way to think about liberation psychologies is as an evolving and multiple set of projects of decolonization.