Will Byers Quotes

A child has a greater chance of being sexually abused than burned in a fire. Along with stop, drop, and roll we must teach them to yell, run, and tell.

Are you always so cynical?' said Angelica. 'No,' said Katherine. 'Sometimes I'm asleep.

Sexual abuse injects poisonous lies into its victims’ hearts and minds. “You’re not worthy” is one of them.

The only secrets that are good are the ones with an ending. Keep surprises instead of secrets in your home.

Adults need to teach the children they love about sexual abuse so they know what to do if they encounter it. We need to prepare them so they know who to tell, should a violation occur, so they don't have to live with a painful secret, long into adulthood.

I was just four when a hired teenage field hand attempted to molest me. Miraculously, I got away, and I told my dad. My father made three important choices that day: He listened to me, he believed me, and he took action. I was one of the fortunate ones--I had a childhood.

Rebecca Byers, the comm officer on duty, could have been bred from a shark and a hatchet. Black eyes, sharp features, lips so thin they might as well not have existed. The story on board was that she’d taken the job to escape prosecution for killing an ex-husband. Holden liked her.

When we talk with our children about sexual abuse, we are not only taking a proactive step toward protecting them, we are building our relationship with them--grounded in honesty and trust. It's a win-win situation.

Imagine, pretend, and play so you can become anyone you want to be. You don't need to be afraid.

I don't much like it when people commit unsavory acts and try to shift the blame onto me.

And Ana remembered her father's words, "Say no! Run! Tell me!

Protecting our kids from sexual abuse is not accomplished in a single conversation, but in ongoing conversations grounded in honesty and trust.

His relationship with illness was flirtatious; only a particularly attractive ailment could tempt him into bed.

Rebecca Byers, the comm officer on duty, could have been bred from a shark and a hatchet.

There was, Katherine speculated, no possible way of concealing his Englishness, or any English person's Englishness for that matter. You could spot them immediately - pasty white; muffin bellied; Rorschached with quasi-Celtic tattoos.

Build a bridge over shame by teaching kids about sexual abuse. Give them a chance to run to us should they encounter it. Be their hero.

Don't put your child at risk. Limit unsupervised one-on-one time between your child & another adult or another child.

That was the year Marguerite Carlough first filed suit in New Jersey and Martland devised his tests. The executives had read Kjaer’s studies, attended the radium conference and seen the Eben Byers story: they knew radium was dangerous.

Games where someone wants to touch your body where your swimsuit covers or they ask you to touch their body where their swimsuit covers. Those body parts are private. No one is allowed to touch you there, or ask you to touch them there.

Sometimes I hesitate to use the term sexual abuse. It conjures up worst-case scenarios in our minds, and we think, "That will never happen to my kids." And we never begin the conversation regarding sexual abuse with our children. But one violation left in secret can cause significant pain.

Read Sonya Renee Taylor’s The Body Is Not an Apology, Da’Shaun Harrison’s Belly of the Beast, Charlotte Cooper’s Fat Activism, Roxane Gay’s Hunger, Caleb Luna’s Revenge Body, Kiese Laymon’s Heavy, Nicole Byer’s #VeryFat #VeryBrave, Esther Rothblum and Sondra Solovay’s The Fat Studies Reader, Rachel Wiley’s Fat Girl Finishing School, and more.

Like anything in life, something new takes a hot-ass minute to get used to, so if you need to be #brave alone at home for a bit, that’s okay. You can take your time.

They responded to sadness only when it expressed itself as sadness, she thought. Sadness expressed as anger or hostility just turned people off.

Once Victor and Violet’s baby is here, will we be calling that one Violet Junior as well?” Jack asked.

Now here he was: sartorially, facially and interpersonally sharpened; every inch the beatific boffin.

She didn’t want to slide gently from this world. She wanted to go out with strawberries and champagne on her lips. With her loves holding her hand, and with the surety that she would be missed. The

Our lives intersect and interfere and there is no telling where certain beauties might come from. Some song in her heart where otherwise there wouldn't have been one and in Sarah's too passed on down.

Byerly will no doubt wish to squire Rish.” Thus saving steps for ImpSec, too. Mamere was well aware of every angle. Ivan managed not to choke. “Just . . . don’t invite Miles. Or let him invite himself.

Det er forbløffende hvor stemningsfull kunstig belysning kan være når det har begynt å mørkne, hvordan den kan påvirke oss følelsmessig, selv nå, ved begynnelsen av det enogtyvende århundre, i byer så store og godt opplyst som denne.

A healthy Christian life cannot be stitched together from a series of disjointed mountain-top experiences. We need a Christian spirituality that endures the shadowy, low-lying valleys and the rocky slopes in between all those glorious summits.

It is hypocritical to exhort the Brazilians to conserve their rainforest after we have already destroyed the grassland ecosystem that occupied half the continent when we found it. A large-scale grassland restoration project would give us some moral authority when we seek conservation abroad. I must admit that I also like the idea because it would mean a better home for pronghorn, currently pushed by agriculture into marginal habitats-The high sagebrush deserts of the West. I would love to return the speedsters to their evolutionary home, the Floor of the Sky. Imagine a huge national reserve where anyone could see what caused Lewis and Clark to write with such enthusiasm in their journals-the sea of grass and flowers dotted with massive herds of bison, accompanied by the dainty speedsters and by great herds of elk. Grizzly bears and wolves would patrol the margins of the herds and coyotes would at last be reduced to their proper place. The song of the meadowlarks would pervade the prairie and near water the spring air would ring with the eerie tremolos of snipe.

The appearance of Professor Benjamin Peirce, whose long gray hair, straggling grizzled beard and unusually bright eyes sparkling under a soft felt hat, as he walked briskly but rather ungracefully across the college yard, fitted very well with the opinion current among us that we were looking upon a real live genius, who had a touch of the prophet in his make-up.

The traitor elves of the World Above professed to hate evil. In reality, Quenthel thought, they feared what they didn’t understand. Thanks to the tutelage of Lolth, the drow did, and having understood it, they embraced it. For evil, like chaos, was one of the fundamental forces of Creation, manifest in both the macrocosm of the wide world and the microcosm of the individual soul. As chaos gave rise to possibility and imagination, so evil engendered strength and will. It made sentient beings aspire to wealth and power. It enabled them to subjugate, kill, rob, and deceive. It allowed them to do whatever was required to better themselves with never a crippling flicker of remorse. Thus, evil was responsible for the existence of civilization and for every great deed any hero had ever performed. Without it, the peoples of the world would live like animals. It was amazing that so many races, blinded by false religions and philosophies, had lost sight of this self-evident truth. In contrast, the dark elves had based a society on it, and that was one of the points of superiority that served to exalt them above all other races.

This should not be the only book you read by a fat person about fatness and anti-fatness. Read Sonya Renee Taylor’s The Body Is Not an Apology, Da’Shaun Harrison’s Belly of the Beast, Charlotte Cooper’s Fat Activism, Roxane Gay’s Hunger, Caleb Luna’s Revenge Body, Kiese Laymon’s Heavy, Nicole Byer’s #VeryFat #VeryBrave, Esther Rothblum and Sondra Solovay’s The Fat Studies Reader, Rachel Wiley’s Fat Girl Finishing School, and more. Whether you’re new to thinking critically about anti-fatness or a longstanding fat activist, be sure to locate this book, accurately, as just one of many fat perspectives available to you. Writers who aren’t fat have made substantial contributions here too. Sabrina Strings’s Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia is an indispensable history linking anti-Black racism to anti-fatness. J. Eric Oliver’s Fat Politics analyzes the emergence in the 1990s and 2000s of the United States’ so-called obesity epidemic. Each of these works offer vital analysis of the mechanics and history of anti-fatness. And each will deepen your thinking about anti-fatness and your clarity in countering anti-fatness.

[Benjamin Peirce's] lectures were not easy to follow. They were never carefully prepared. The work with which he rapidly covered the blackboard was very illegible, marred with frequent erasures, and not infrequent mistakes (he worked too fast for accuracy). He was always ready to digress from the straight path and explore some sidetrack that had suddenly attracted his attention, but which was likely to have led nowhere when the college bell announced the close of the hour and we filed out, leaving him abstractedly staring at his work, still with chalk and eraser in his hands, entirely oblivious of his departing class.

I wanted to say to them: I don't even know what we're doing. There is no scheme. There's nothing we want or hope for. I felt as if everything was pressing in, as if my mind was a sludgy and toxic as the slurry that covered the floor, the walls, our skin. There is no difference anymore, I realised, between what we were taking in and what we were expelling, between what we were and what we might aspire to be, between what we consumed and expelled, and what we'd become. It was all shit. We were shit. Our world was shit. Everything was a single, flowing, un-dammed, undifferentiated river of filth, and within that river we were formless and liquid and horribly free, and all anyone wanted to do was to fashion new moulds into which we should pull the cooling and hardening putrescence of who we were, so they could force what was formless into a form that they could comfortably condemn.’ (p.290)

Sometimes, looking back, I try to isolate a moment to change, a day or a night on either side of which things were demonstrably different. I never succeed. Partly, I think, is because it's simply not possible. Outside of sudden, violent events, changes is ongoing; we measure it only by holding what we've become against the memory of what we once were. But it's also because, in that space, at that particular time, We were so enmeshed in change, so completely caught up in it that singular, momentary factors became lost and blurred. Day and night slipped their boundaries. Our bodies ached, contorted, then were numbed with narcotics and went slack. My fingernails became sharp, then broken. In regular life, the life we'd left, we would have managed these processes, checked them, turned things back to how they were and how we liked them. There, in that concrete room, we surrendered ourselves to time and all its effects. The heat was unrelenting, pooling us in sweat and thickening the stink in which we lived. (p.271)

She used to test his commitment by hurting him. She threatened to leave him, or cheat on him, then watched his face and measured the depth of his feelings for her by the extent to which it crumbled. He was insecure; prone to worry. If he ever became confident, she thought, it would mean that he no longer loved her, since to love someone is to worry; to need someone is to fear the inevitability of their absence. Without fear, she thought, without drama, there was only the grey blankness of late-middle-age relationships, where, as far as she could make out, concepts like love and passion were replaced by what she saw as the wretched terminology of codependent ennui: companionship, contentment, compromise; where one person’s love for another was no longer stated simply because it was no longer questioned; where the key indicator not only of love but also of solidity would simply be the mere fact of the solidity and love that had gone before. No, no, she thought. Better the sense of odds, of struggle; the ongoing and repeated relief of trauma endured and survived. Without it, there was only the security of the unimaginative: an unspokenly dwindling sex life; roiling resentment; his-and-hers facial hair.

The traitor elves of the World Above professed to hate evil. In reality, Quenthel thought, they feared what they didn’t understand. Thanks to the tutelage of Lolth, the drow did, and having understood it, they embraced it. For evil, like chaos, was one of the fundamental forces of Creation, manifest in both the macrocosm of the wide world and the microcosm of the individual soul. As chaos gave rise to possibility and imagination, so evil engendered strength and will. It made sentient beings aspire to wealth and power. It enabled them to subjugate, kill, rob, and deceive. It allowed them to do whatever was required to better themselves with never a crippling flicker of remorse. Thus, evil was responsible for the existence of civilization and for every great deed any hero had ever performed. Without it, the peoples of the world would live like animals. It was amazing that so many races, blinded by false religions and philosophies, had lost sight of this self-evident truth. In contrast, the dark elves had based a society on it, and that was one of the points of superiority that served to exalt them above all other races. Paradoxically, though, a touch of the pure black heart of this darkest of all powers could be deadly, just as the highest expression of comforting warmth was the fire that consumed. Even folk who spent their lives in the adoration of evil generally had no real comprehension of the endless burning sea of it raging below and beyond the material world, and that was just as well. Even a fleeting glimpse could convey secrets too huge and fearsome for the average mind. Its touch could annihilate sanity and even identity. The threat was sufficiently grave that the majority of spellcasters hesitated to regard the force directly. They preferred to treat with evil at one remove, by dealing with the devils and undead that embodied it.

Daniel was a little slow getting out of the locker room afterward and was one of the last guys to head to the parking lot. He was nearly to his car when he saw Stacy emerge from the edge of the woods. “Hey,” she said. “Hey.” She hugged her books to her chest. “I don’t know if we ever officially met. I’m Stacy.” She was waiting for you. She wanted to talk to you! “I’m Baniel Dyers—Daniel. I’m Daniel Byers.” Oh, you are such an idiot! A glimmer of a smile. “I know who you are.” “I know you too.” “Really?” “Uh-huh.” “How?” “I’ve seen you around.” “Oh.” A long pause. “So.” “So,” he replied lamely. “Well, it’s good to meet you. Officially.” “Good to meet you too.” He had the sense that she would reach out to shake his hand, but instead she stared down at the ground between them for a moment, then back at him. “You played good against Spring Hill.” “You were there?” A slight eye roll. “Of course I was there.” “Not everyone comes to the games.” “I do.” “Me too.” Dude, that was the stupidest thing ever to say! “Of course you do,” she said lightly. He felt like he wanted to hide somewhere—anywhere—but when she spoke again she just did so matter-of-factly and not the least bit in a way to make him feel more put on the spot. “Um, I just wanted to wish you luck on the game. I mean, the one tomorrow night.” “Thanks.” She waited. Ask her to the dance on Saturday—at least get her number. “Um . . .” He repositioned his feet. “Say, I was wondering . . .” “Yes?” “About the game.” No, not the game, the dance— “Yes?” He took a deep breath. “So, I was . . .” Go on! “Um . . . So maybe I’ll see you there. At the game.” “Oh. Sure. So, good luck,” she repeated. “Right.” Ask her for her number. But he didn’t. And then she was saying good-bye and he was fumbling out a reply. “See you around, Stacy.” “See you around, Baniel,” she replied good-naturedly. As she stepped away he opened his mouth to call her back, but nothing came out. And then she was gone. But at least he’d talked to her. You can’t be expected to ask a girl out or get her number the first time you officially meet her, can you? Um, yeah. He climbed into his car and leaned his forehead against the steering wheel. Man, you sounded like a moron! Well, talk to her tomorrow. You can still ask her. The dance was Saturday night, but at least that gave him one more day. Before starting the car, he saw a text from Kyle asking what he was up to tonight, and he texted back that he was going to be at home finishing up his homework and then head to bed early to get a good night’s sleep before game day. He didn’t bring up anything about the conversation with Stacy. It would have only made him more embarrassed if Kyle knew how he’d failed to sound like even a halfway intelligent human being talking with her. Imagine that. Daniel Byers not knowing how to talk to a girl. What else is new? That night back in his bedroom, it took him a while to write his second blog entry, the one he was going to have to read in front of Teach’s class tomorrow. Without Kyle there to help him, he felt like a guy stuck on a boat in the middle of the ocean with no idea which direction to row toward land. Eventually he got something out, this time about hoping to send the vultures away, but it wasn’t nearly as good as if he’d had Kyle brainstorming with him. Then he went to bed, but his thoughts of Stacy kept him awake. Talk to her tomorrow at school, or at least before the game. But he also found that, just before falling asleep, his thoughts were drifting toward Nicole as well.

I was drunk but not drunk enough to say what I wanted, that we don't live our lives so much as come to them, as different people and things collect mysteriously around us.

Each day, Internet users share more than 1.8 billion photos, according to a report by venture firm Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. For advertisers, the social media posts that include those photos are more valuable than those with just text because pictures reveal how consumers act "in the wild." "You have a window into their world," said Duncan Alney, CEO of Firebelly Marketing in Indianapolis, which uses Ditto Labs' service. Alney, whose firm represents a beer company, learned from Ditto that people drink beer not just with pub grub but also with healthier snacks like hummus. And that consumers who favor mainstream beers also consume craft brews. Other companies use it to interact with fans. Nissan North America found a photo on Twitter of a baby peeking out from behind a cardboard cutout of a Nissan race car driver. Nissan got the Twitter user's permission and reposted the photo on the company's account, garnering 17 retweets and 37 favorites. The original photo was not tagged with "Nissan," so without Ditto the company never would have found it, said Rob Robinson, a senior specialist in social communications at the automaker.

The mother of chaos was fear, not evil, and the enjoyment of chaos was the continual fear of the unknown, the shifting foundation of everything, the knowledge that every twist and turn could lead to disaster.

If you want to know where your heart [desire] is, look where your mind goes when it wanders.” --

done beats perfect any day. I

You can't depend on your eyes when your imagination is out of focus.” ~Mark Twain

Real quick, I just wanna tell you why I wrote this book. I wanted to write a book about fat ladies—because I am one. Not curvy, not plus-size, not big-boned, not fluffy, not phat. I’m FAT.

When Ged comments to her that they have passed beyond the malign influence of the gods, Tenar experiences her release from the burden of relinquishing through tears, and in his company: "She did feel it. A dark hand had let go its lifelong hold upon her heart. But she did not feel joy, as she had in the mountains. She put her head down in her arms and cried, and her cheeks were salt and wet. She cried for the waste of her years in bondage to a useless evil. She wept in pain, because she was free" (Ursula K. Le Guin, "The Tombs of Atuan"). Tenar literally cries freedom, with "the pain of memory" for an originary lack, that of freedom and of self. Her ability to cry is returned to her by Ged's knowledge of her true name, a word from a language other than his own, a thing of great value that both restores her to herself and places him in her trust.

like a good butler should,

Honestly, no editor ever said to me that [Forgotten] Realms fiction was targeted at the YA market, and I didn’t think of it that way.

I'm in lockdown , self imposed exile, just me myself and Denial! I 'm in lockdown, in good company. Denial, myself and ME! I'm in lockdown, Oh YES! Self imposed house arrest! No one can get me, everyone will leave me be! They'll compare me to Amy and Britney, but I just wanna figure out ME!

I'm surrounded by people; Rarely alone Yet I'm lonely most of the time I just don't feel at home.

A place where you're the sane one Where the inmates run the asylum We let them think they are in charge It's so funny how easy it is To lie to them.

Oh Dragon, was that supposed to scare me? Asked Princess Lydia calmly.

I shall call upon my Fairy Godmother, Bella, to cast a spell of protection around us then we shall all go and rescue the Prince. said Princess Lydia.

Princess William is my friend and we must rescue him! shouted the Princess By the way Knights, what are your names? asked the Princess Each knight took a turn responding. Your Royal Highness, my name is Ahamd. Your Royal Highness, my name is Amanda. Your Royal Highness, my name is Jamal. It is a pleasure to meet you all of you and thank you for your help. Now, we must rescue the Prince! replied Princess Lydia.

Someone flip the switch For where there is light Darkness can't exist.

I don't want you to put down this book And feel like there is no chance for you to survive. Mental illness is real; it just needs to be treated So you can navigate it and feel alive, wanted and needed.

Only when the feelings pass away is archaeology a legitimate science.

found that celebrating the holidays when you can didn’t ruin a thing if you chose not to let it.

A modest frugal retirement for a loyal Imperial bureaucrat?” said Pidge. “And yet your mother so wealthy.” “Doesn’t bother her,” Ivan said stoutly. “But does it bother him?” About to deny this with equal vehemence, Ivan realized that among the many things he didn’t know about Simon . . . that was another. “I am sure he has more important things on his mind.” Pidge smiled at him. “Fascinating.” With a little Shiv-like wave of her fingers, she trailed away toward the party; Byerly, with one of his less-comprehensible grimaces, promptly trailed after.

They hired her for $ 17.50 a term, $ 1.50 less than Mr. Byers because she was a woman.

The events of Valentine’s evening and the jewel thief referenced in the first chapter are available in Mystery on Valentine’s Day co-written with the fabulous Lee Strauss.

Reading was like accumulating wisdom in a jar. The great magic was being able to bring it out again without being a bore.

Selvom verden var blevet én stor online social netværksklub på tværs af landegrænser og nationalitet, levede vi tilsyneladende stadig i bobler, hvor andres ulykke kun vedkom os, hvis det vakte genkendelse i os selv. Der var mere genkendelse i tragedien ved maratonløbet i et land, som vi kulturelt sammenlignede os med, end i angreb på syriske byer, ingen havde hørt om.

You’re my friend, right, Tina? Don’t get mad when I say this, but, like, lick my asshole, Tina. I’ma wear what I want.

The West Memphis Three may have been innocent, but that didn't mean that Byers was guilty. "We really hard-core believed that the profile was real," Lisa Fancher told me. "'Look, they're human bite marks!' And...nope. When you get real people who cost a whole lot of money, they're like, 'no, those are turtle marks.

For Zelma it was less about expression and more about reply. She couldn't tune out the exhortations but neither could she allow them simply to pass through her unchecked and uninterrogated. She had to respond and yet the responses that were expected of her work proscribed. It wasn't enough, she often said, to discuss these things online. To do so, she felt, was to accept the space she had been allotted. She wanted argument and debate to unfold in the same location it was initiated. When an advert invaded her mental and visual space, she invaded its physical and aesthetic space right back. In our rush to the web, she said, we had ceded ground in the physical world. As a result, ever more overt expressions went unnoticed and unchallenged. What once would have found itself defaced was now, instead, photographed and shared online for critique. But its form, its face, remained unaltered, untarnished, clean. (p.128)

But what aren't you doing already? What more can you possibly do?’ ‘I guess he means the team stuff’, I said. ‘The bonding. The camaraderie I've never really been –‘. ‘Don't start judging yourself’, she said sharply. ‘Don't start seeing yourself in the light of those kinds of standards.’ ‘No, but it's true. There's always been the part of work I've struggled with, the unquestioning side. The feeling of joining in. I've always tried to do it at this kind of remove. Maybe what he's saying is –‘ ‘Of course you've done it at a remove. How else are you supposed to do it and still be you?’ ‘But maybe those days are gone’, I said. ‘Maybe I have to accept that. Maybe there just won't be those kind of jobs anymore - the ones where you can roll out of bed and staggering without speaking to anyone and keep your head down and just do it, you know? maybe this is what work is, now’ […] ‘Definitely. Simple tasks can be automated. They've already almost got the machine learning to do what you do. It's about what else a human can bring to the table, which is, literally, their humanity.’ It was possible, I realised, to imagine. A semi-global future in which the bulk of paid human employment would revolve not around hard skills, but around the messy, blurry business of interpersonal success. A new divide would open up, between the well liked, The easy to get along with, and the awkward, The rude, the unfriendly. I pictured the encampment on which I had lived, filled not as it was then, with migrants, unfortunates, hard drinkers, the out of luck. But instead, the abrasive, the poorly adjusted, the excessively reserved and painfully shy. (p.136-7)

You know what I think?’ said Zelma. ‘You got to start small, start symbolic, then grow it until it's huge.’ ‘Meaning what’, I said ‘Meaning take back certain moments, enjoy certain moments starting with your body. Starting with how the only shit you can actually save her is at the weekend. I mean, Why? Why is that?’ ‘In the morning I'm rushed. And when I get and then I get to work and I'm busy. And I feel like people notice when I'm away from my desk. I feel like either they think to themselves that I'm skiving, or that they just immediately know that I'm shitting. ‘Why shouldn't they know that you're shitting?’ ‘I don't know.’ ‘From now on, she said, I want you to prioritise your shitting. In your day now starting tomorrow nothing matters except shitting. Your sole purpose is to shit. I want you to get professional at shitting. And when you get good at it, celebrate it.’ (p.141)

I understood, too, what was upsetting my supposed benefactors. This wasn't about my work or my Instagram feed, or whatever uncomfortable email or phone call. Ryan and Seth had received this morning from whichever of their corporate partners was currently on edge. This was about the extent to which I would seem to be playing my role. Just as I had come to understand that in the world of Pict it wasn't enough simply to go to work and go home - that there was, in addition, and expectation of some deeper, human contribution - so too, in the context of this programme, this opportunity, it would never be enough simply to point to the material gains I had made. They needed me to be not only successful, but happy, evolved, gratefully aglow. It was my job to make them feel good about themselves and to help them package up that satisfaction for the consumption of others. In my mind, I saw their vision: me, on a podium or stage, perhaps giving a TED talk, gushing about the life in the change in my life they'd occasioned. (p.165)

Margot felt self-conscious, timid. She had a fear running into people when she was unwashed. She seemed particularly worried about the people who worked on the estate, most of whom were men, most of whom, I tried to explain, were filthy in their own ways - smeared with grease and dust, or spattered with spray paint and oil. I tried pointing out to her the unfairness of this divide, the way some kinds of dirt were associated with honest, masculine labour, while others were associated with malaise or inertia. She understood this, warmed to it as an idea, but whenever the moment came to leave, she found it some excuse to stay. (p.198)

I began to feel as if we were merging with one another. The process was more than simply emotional. It was biological, systemic. Each of our bodies was a biosphere, slick with bacterial and insect life. Reteamed, and what we teamed with brought us closer not only to each other, but to the ecosystem we inhabited, fed off, and nourished. Bacteria bred in the ooze of our waste, our discarded food remains and puddled shit, then travelled onto us and between us, carried not only on the thickened air, but by the fleas and lice that hopped and crawled from one body to another. There was no difference, I began to think, between the puddles on the floor and the streaks of filth on my skin and the acne that erupted on Margot’s face. It was all just life, matter, the biome. We were leaking out into the world, and the pooled primordial essence of the world was soaking back into us in turn. (p.235)

I came to understand that this truly was what it meant to go back to nature, that this was nature in its truest form. No forests and campfires, no rolling hills and reassuring rambles. Just rivers of shit and decay, a chamber in which we ate and shat and ate and shat and lived among the carcasses of all the things we didn't want and couldn't fully consume. The processes of the world were known to us. (p.235)

We were inundated with food. Delivery, vans from local supermarkets arrived, laden with crates of booze, fine chocolates, cooked meats, exotic fruits.... What once had felt necessary, then abundant, now began to feel obscene. In part, we revelled in that obscenity. We took pictures of ourselves awash with food, not, just eating it, but rolling in it, lying on it, burying ourselves in it. When people found this offensive, we simply absorbed and digested their disgust in much the same way as we re-absorbed the shit we produced from our bodies. Zelma, in particular, enjoyed this aspect of what we did. It harked back to her adjustment of adverts. Her violent hatred of consumerism. This isn't our life, she wrote in the caption of a particularly excessive and indulgent image - Kim lying on her back while from above eight bottles of champagne were emptied over her face - it's yours. The post attracted a particularly high level of outrage. What was this? People wanted to know. Was this a protest? Or just debauchery? Were we anti-consumerist, as many seemed to feel we should be, or in fact, hyper-consumerist, an idea which some people found it offensive as the idea that we were some sort of plague cult. (p.266)

We could barely even recognise each other, let alone differentiate. With our hair slicked down with awful, a faces glistening with translucent slime, our clothes rotted and tattered, and revealing bodies in equal and complementary states of decay, we appeared to each other simply as shining, semi-fluid forms in the darkness. We reached for anything we could consume - food, old and new, detritus from the floor, are own squelching shit - and washed it down with all the booze we could manage [...] If we kept on, I knew, our skin itself would leave us, rotting from our bones and pooling at her ankles, until there was nothing at all to tell one of us from the other, or any of us from anyone else. Even in the haze, I understood what I had achieved. I’d stripped everything back, rendered myself down to nothing but the shit I contained. I had transcended even wildness and animality, become bacterial, amoebic, viral. I was infinite and self-dividing, no longer near to death, but death itself, airborne and particulate. The skin of the world had been peeled away, and what was beneath, I knew was the true face of God: pulsing and writhing and ugly with life. (p.300)

Routine was a system, a machine that would make me, well. Where before I had noted the ease with which routine arose, here, I felt its implacability, it's remorselessness and determination. It was a schedule designed to stifle possibility, because an excess of possibility had made me ill. At night, the lights in my room snapped off and told me that it was time to sleep. In the morning they flared and told me it was time to wake. After I woke I showered. After I showered I ate. Then I washed down a rainbow of pills and went to my first class or session. My body was irrelevant, my desires redundant and discouraged. To each external stimulus, only a single, pre-approved response was acceptable. (p.319)

I’m a badass bitch. Every body is a different body; the one I have now is amazing. If I want to change it, I can, but for now, this is it, and this is perfect.

Just imagine dying old and alone and always wondering what would have happened if you had just been brave.

This world was not made for women. And it certainly wasn’t made for mothers who had to look after themselves and their babies.

Most of the time I believed in God. Most of the time I liked the idea of seeing those we loved again in heaven or whatever came next. Most of the time, I wanted to meet those we’d tried to help after they died and hope they could tell us that we’d done enough.

I'm an inexhaustible font of tricks, haven't you noticed?" Pharaun beamed at the assembled paupers and said, "How would you all like to assist two masters of the Academy engaged in a mission of vital importance? I assure you, Archmage Baenre himself will wax giddy with gratitude when I inform him of your aid." His audience stared back at him, fear in their eyes. One of the female commoners produced a bone-handled, granite-headed mallet and threw it. Ryld caught it and hurled it back. The makeshift weapon thudded into the center of the laborer's forehead, and she collapsed. "Would anyone else care to express a reservation of any sort?" Pharaun asked. He waited a beat. "Splendid, then just stand still. I assure you, this won't hurt." The Master of Sorcere pulled a wisp of fleece from a pocket and recited an incantation. With a soft hissing, a wave of magical force shimmered through the room. When it touched the paupers, they changed, each into a facsimile of Ryld or Pharaun himself. Only a single child remained unaffected. "Excellent," said Pharaun. "Now all you have to do is go outside, at which point, I recommend you scatter. With luck, many, if not all of you, will survive.

the

I suppose I understand," the priestess said, "but I wonder why it's come to this. All these years, I've never truly understood the basis for our feud. If I'm to die, will you at least tell me why you chose Sabal over me? Was it fondness? Was it lust?" "Neither," Pharaun chuckled. "My choice had nothing whatever to do with personalities. How could it, when you twins were so alike? I threw in with Sabal simply because she was dangling from the bottom rung of the Mizzrym ladder. I thought it would be an amusing challenge to lift her to the top.

She cast about for her next adversary. She didn't seem to have one. The fight was over, and the few surviving hobgoblins were running away. "Form up!" she shouted. "I want a column with the traders in the middle. Fast!" Once the procession was under way, Aunrae, striding along at Greyanna's side, asked, "May I know where we're going? An ally's castle?" "No," Greyanna replied. "I suspect we couldn't get in. We're going to hide our charges in Bauthwaf." The column crept past corpses and burning stone, and as they made their way to the cavern wall, other commoners came running out of their homes to join the procession. Greyanna's first impulse was to turn away those without ties to House Mizzrym, but she thought better of it. Many of the newcomers carried swords, and she could press the dolts into martial service if needed. Occasionally someone collapsed, coughing feebly, poisoned by the stinging smoke. The rest stepped over her and pressed on. Someone gave a thin, high cry, as if at an unexpected pain. Greyanna spun around. The goblins weren't attacking. Her client the canoe maker had simply seized his opportunity to knife another male in the back. "A competitor," the craftsman explained.

There’s nothing wrong with making friends across all races and stations. I think the quibble point comes when you romanticize the struggles of another without understanding them.

I’m sorry, did I— Did you continue to confide in him about your experiences with an adult male in Hawaii over your junior— The prosecutor, Jon Byers, says, I’m going to object to that on relevance and rape shield. It is a terrible thing when you feel grateful that someone who is supposed to defend you finally begins to defend you. Rape shield means you can’t ask an alleged rape victim about other sexual encounters. It means you can’t try to prove that whore is her baseline.

Scott Byer's journey is one of continuous self-improvement and growth. He's an avid reader of self-improvement books and financial literature, always seeking to expand his knowledge and skills.

If someone doesn’t second-guess their qualifications at least upon occasion, we have to wonder if they’re connected to reality at all.

Whenever you want to interfere, imagine that Jane is a brother instead of a sister. If Jane were a man, would it be suffocating or unfair or ridiculous if you acted on that desire to interfere? If so, don’t.

but she knew if she stayed in alone and undistracted, she’d find herself truly blue.

Reflection is a process whereby we examine the past to learn from our actions and behaviors. It provides an opportunity to view ourselves as the subject, removed from the immediacy of the moment, and pick apart our thoughts about our previous decisions, actions, and behaviors. In an ongoing conscious transaction with the past, reflective thought involves contemplating both into the past and into the future to determine if past experiences and perceptions align with current reality and future desires.

Reflection gives the brain an opportunity to pause amidst the chaos, untangle, and sort through observations and experiences, consider multiple interpretations, and create meaning… This meaning becomes learning.

The things men do to each other can be awful. The things men do for each other can be wonderful. I wasn’t in the trenches, thank god, but I saw men throw themselves over the body of a friend, one life for another. The good things aren’t exclusive to war heroism, either. People are heroic and kind and beautiful every day.

Obsessing over the little things until they became huge, and then suddenly her days turned gray and her mood soured.

Uncertainty is real,” Byers writes. “It is the dream of total certainty

According to a 2015 report from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers based on data from the US Census Bureau, from 1948–2000, jobs grew 1.7× faster than popuation. Since 2000, the population has grown 2.4× faster than jobs.3

Working Nine to Five   Wet, cold, miserable, Monday morning.  I had toast for breakfast, no bananas.  I think my mum is taking out her revenge on Steve’s behalf by withholding the purchase of bananas.  I stood by the sink sipping my morning tea watching the rain wash down the kitchen window.  Damn, I noticed that an eye had fallen off one of my bunny slippers.  I decided to wear the blue pencil skirt with a white blouse to work and to tie my hair up as best I could.  The journey was short and uneventful, no desperate people throwing themselves in

If any of my readers could get a tenth of the enjoyment in reading my books as I do in writing them, then all the time and effort put in to this dream would make it all worthwhile.

                 First, think of the color of clouds. Next think of the color of snow. Last, think of the color of the moon. Now, what do cows drink? GO