Zigzag Quotes

Nor had she missed when they zigzagged between levels, even though the building was a standard grid of hallways and stairwells. As if she'd lose her bearings that easily. She might have been insulted if he wasn't trying so hard.

For, after all, every one who wishes to gain true knowledge must climb the Hill Difficulty alone, and since there is no royal road to the summit, I must zigzag it in my own way. I slip back many times, I fall, I stand still, I run against the edge of hidden obstacles, I lose my temper and find it again and keep it better, I trudge on, I gain a little, I feel encouraged, I get more eager and climb higher and begin to see the widening horizon. Every struggle is a victory. One more effort and I reach the luminous cloud, the blue depths of the sky, the uplands of my desire.

Dragostea mea nu-i nici rătăcire, nici zigzag de încântare supremă și disperări fără fund. Iubesc cum respir: egal, iremediabil și pentru totdeauna...

I am still on my zigzag way, pursuing the diagonal between reason and heart.

I'm just trying to tell you that your life will be very long with zigzags you can't imagine. You won't realize just how young you are until you aren't that young anymore.

When I pictured myself, it was always like just an outline in a coloring book, with the inside not yet completed. All the standard features were there. but the colors, the zigzags and plaids, the bits and pieces that made up me, Halley, weren't yet in place. Scarlett's vibrant reds and golds helped some, but I was still waiting.

Her life was a series of zigzags. At nineteen, she was anxious.

I don’t know if you have ever seem a map of a person’s mind. Doctors sometimes draw maps of other parts of you, and your own map can become intensely interesting, but catch them trying to draw a map of a child’s mind, which is not only confused, but keeps going round all the time. There are zigzag lines on it, just like your temperature on a card, and these are probably roads in the island; for the Neverland is always more or less and island, with astonishing splashes of colour here and there, and coral reefs and rakish-looking craft in the offing, and savages and lonely lairs, and gnomes who are mostly tailors, and caves through which a river runs, and princes with six elder brothers, and a hut fast going to decay, and one very small old lady with a hooked nose.

The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks. See the line from a sufficient distance, and it straightens itself to the average tendency. Your genuine action will explain itself, and will explain your other genuine actions. Your conformity explains nothing. Act singly, and what you have already done singly will justify you now.

You never knew which split second might be the zigzag bolt dividing all that went before from the everything that comes next.

The biggest challenge facing the great teachers and communicators of history is not to teach history itself, nor even the lessons of history, but why history matters. How to ignite the first spark of the will o'the wisp, the Jack o'lantern, the ignis fatuus [foolish fire] beloved of poets, which lights up one source of history and then another, zigzagging across the marsh, connecting and linking and writing bright words across the dark face of the present. There's no phrase I can come up that will encapsulate in a winning sound-bite why history matters. We know that history matters, we know that it is thrilling, absorbing, fascinating, delightful and infuriating, that it is life. Yet I can't help wondering if it's a bit like being a Wagnerite; you just have to get used to the fact that some people are never going to listen.

Signs are small measurable things, but interpretations are illimitable, and in girls of sweet, ardent nature, every sign is apt to conjure up wonder, hope, belief, vast as a sky, and colored by a thimbleful of matter in the shape of knowledge....wrong reasoning sometimes lands poor mortals in right conclusions: starting a long way off the true point, and proceeding by loops and zigzags, we now and then arrive just where we ought to be. Just because Miss Brooke was hasty in her trust, it is not therefore clear that Mr. Casaubon was unworthy of it.

It was as if someone had taken a tiny bead of pure life and decking it as lightly as possible with down and feathers, had set it dancing and zigzagging to show us the true nature of life.

I can't think straight. But why am I trying to do that anyway? Everybody else thinks straight. That's why nobody expects me to think zigzag-hop.

Meantime, a midsize Labrador mutt cut me off at the cul-de-sac. He was in desperate need of a rubdown. I gave it a thought but feared his bark and constant gruff. I locked eyes then noticed his black and white patches rotated with agitations. He yapped and yapped and bluffed mightily, but he cautiously stayed a safe distance away. Eventually, he lost all courage and quietly ran for shelter. As for me, I never stopped advancing toward my brother’s place. It took some effort but I serpentine and zigzagged my way through dandelions and fast-food wrappings lying in the yard.   The closer I got, the more definite the sounds of dishes breaking, kids playing, infants testing their lungs, and TVs watching themselves became. Jerry and his wife had separated some time ago. Regardless, he was left with four adult daughters still in the nest. Obviously, the girls brought kids of their own to the mix. But everything unfolding before me appeared chaotic on the other side of that threshold. That entire scene grew larger andmore intimidating with every timid step I took.

The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks.

Life is unrest, and its passage at best a zigzag course, that only straightens to a direct line when viewed across the years.

Jodie had taught her that the female firefly flickers the light under her tail to signal to the male that she's ready to mate. Each species of firefly has its own language of flashes. As Kya watched, some females signed dot, dot, dot, dash, flying a zigzag dance, while others flashed dash, dash, dot in a different dance pattern. The males, of course, knew the signals of their species and flew only to those females. Then, as Jodie had put it, they rubbed their bottoms together like most things did, so they could produce young. Suddenly Kya sat up and paid attention: one of the females had changed her code. First she flashed the proper sequence of dashes and dots, attracting a male of her species, and they mated. Then she flickered a different signal, and a male of a different species flew to her. Reading her message, the second male was convinced he'd found a willing female of his own kind and hovered above her to mate. But suddenly the female firefly reached up, grabbed him with her mouth, and ate him, chewing all six legs and both wings. Kya watched others. The females all got what they wanted – first a mate, then a meal – just by changing their signals. Kya knew judgment had no place here. Evil was not in play, just life pulsing on, even at the expense of some of the players. Biology sees right and wrong as the same color in different light.

But family life sometimes had a vortex, like weather. It could be like a tornado in a quiet zigzag: get close enough and you might see within it a spinning eighteen-wheeler and a woman.

I chop the broccoli into pieces with ZigZag Knife, sometimes I swallow some when Ma's not looking and she says, "Oh, no, where's that big bit gone?" but she's not really mad because raw things make us extra alive.

A shepherd’s crown, not a royal one. A crown for someone who knew where she had come from. A crown for the lone light zigzagging through the night sky, hunting for a single lost lamb. A crown for the shepherd who was there to herd away the predators.

But human memory resembles a late-night reveller who has had a few too many drinks: hard as it tries, it just cannot follow a straight line. It staggers through a maze of inversions, often moving in dizzying zigzags, immune to reason and liable to collapse altogether.

The policemen agreed they were living with a most peculiar fellow. One moment he was reading classical literature in the original French and quoting Tennyson, and the next he would be discussing the best way to blow up a train.

KEEP IN MIND THAT progress is not always linear. It takes constant course correcting and often a lot of zigzagging. Unfortunate things happen, accidents occur, and setbacks are usually painful, but that does not mean we quit.

When people say they love you, you just have to decide to believe them, because you'll never know for sure.

Life is a zigzag journey, they say, not much straight and easy on the way, but the wrinkles in the map, explorers know, smooth out like magic at the end of where we go.

Our lives really do seem strange and mysterious when you look back on them. Filled with unbelievably bizarre coincidences and unpredictable, zigzagging developments. While they are unfolding, it’s hard to see anything weird about them, no matter how closely you pay attention to your surroundings. In the midst of the everyday, these things may strike you as simply ordinary things, a matter of course. They might not be logical, but time has to pass before you can see if something is logical.

There being no direct route to Savannah from Charleston, I followed a zigzagging course that took me through the tidal flatlands of the South Carolina low country. As I approached Savannah, the road narrowed to a two-lane blacktop shaded by tall trees. There was an occasional produce stand by the side of the road and a few cottages set into the foliage, but nothing resembling urban sprawl. The voice on the radio informed me that I had entered a zone called the Coastal Empire.

The path to self-discovery is not a straight line. It’s a zigzag. We move in and out of awareness: one step forward, three steps to the left, a baby step back, another leap forward. A lightbulb moment might shine brightly one day, but then flicker the next. It takes work to hold tightly to a certain consciousness, to live in its wisdom. Every day, I have to intentionally maintain an awareness of my value.

One of the things she'd learnt on her own, ragged, bemused, zigzag way was that the best sources of useful information were often in strange places...

I’m just trying to tell you that your life will be very long with zigzags you can’t imagine.

I don’t know whether you have ever seen a map of a person’s mind. Doctors sometimes draw maps of other parts of you, and your own map can become intensely interesting, but catch them trying to draw a map of a child’s mind, which is not only confused, but keeps going round all the time. There are zigzag lines on it, just like your temperature on a card, and these are probably roads on the island, for the Neverland is always more or less an island, with astonishing splashes of colour here and there, and coral reefs and rakish-looking craft in the offing, and savages and lonely lairs, and gnomes who are mostly tailors, and caves through which a river runs, and princes with sex elder brothers, and a hut fast going to decay, and one very small old lady with a hooked nose. It would be an easy map if that were all, but there is also first day at school, religion, fathers, the round pond, needle-work, murders, hangings, verbs that take the dative, chocolate-pudding day, getting into braces, say ninety-nine threepence for pulling out your tooth yourself, and so on, and either these are part of the island or they are another map showing through, and it is all rather confusing, especially as nothing will stand still. Of course the Neverlands vary a good deal. John’s, for instance, had a lagoon with flamingos flying over it at which John was shooting, while Michael, who was very small, had a flamingo with lagoons flying over it. John lived in a boat turned upside down on the sands, Michael in a wigwam, Wendy in a house of leaves deftly sewn together. John had no friends, Michael had friends at night, Wendy had a pet wolf forsaken by its parents...

He glances down at me, and a bolt of blue lightning skitters from his jaw to his temple before disappearing into his dark hair. Another bolt zigzags across the hand he rests on his sword’s hilt. They’re chaos lusters, visual reminders that the fae don’t belong in this world, and they’re beautiful, mesmerizing. With his quiet, strong confidence, he’s mesmerizing.

It was hard to get lost in Missoula even if you wanted to. Wherever you were, all you had to do to get your bearings was look around and find the big letter M, embossed in white halfway up the steep shoulder of grass that reared on the south bank of the Clark Fork River. Though only a hill, it was called Mount Sentinel and if you had the legs and lungs and inclination to hike the trail that zigzagged up it, you could stand by the M and gaze out across the town at a travel-brochure shot of forest and mountain dusted from early fall with snow.

Whoo-eeee!” From the corner of her eye, she caught a glimpse of Peter. He was on the road to the side, probably waiting to ensure she’d managed to negotiate the first part of the track. She didn’t stop, her adrenaline pumping. He’d catch up. “Come get me!” she yelled, making a slight counter-direction turn in the air to help her blow into the berm on the other side of the road. The trail crossed a short flat, a marked rock garden, a beam over a bog, another rock drop and berm, a zigzag around massive trees, roots and rocks that kicked the bike’s tyres this way and that and tested her balance, more air over another drop – this one caused by a massive log – enough air for her to do a back flip from a kicker over another part of the forestry trail, steep to the left. The first wall appeared. She took it fast, skidded around to slam into the side of a berm and round off on to another gully crossing. “Whoo-eeee!

Nor was her love for Udayan recognizable or intact. Anger was always mounted to it, zigzagging through her like some helplessly mating pair of insects. Anger at him for dying when he might have lived. For bringing her happiness, and then taking it away. For trusting her, only to betray her. For believing in sacrifice, only to be so selfish in the end.

It didn't feel like a season at the time; it felt like the rest of my life. That's how most seasons feel while you're living them, and then your surroundings transform just as you're getting settled in.

I never cease to wonder at the tenacity of water - its ability to make its way through various strata of rock,zigzagging,back-tracking, finding space, cunningly discovering faults and fissures in the mountain, and sometimes traveling underground for great distances before emerging into the open. Of course, there's no stopping water. For no matter how tiny that little tickle, it has to go somewhere.

…I have changed/I am a dandelion puffball blur. My hair,/scribbles of white lines. My face. Lines/crisscross and zigzag my face./My eyes. I am looking into eyes/whose color has turned lighter, hazy brown./Wind and time are blowing me out." –Maxine Hong Kingston

Anyway... she's asleep, turned away from me on her side. The usual stratagems and repositionings have failed to induce narcosis in me, so I decide to settle myself against the soft zigzag of her body. As I move and start to nestle my shin against a calf whose muscles are loosened by sleep, she sense what I'm doing, and without waking reaches up with her left hand and pulls the hair off her shoulders on the top of her head, leaving me her bare nape to nestle in. Each time she does this I feel a shudder of love at the exactness of this sleeping courtesy. My eyes prickle with tears, and I have to stop myself from waking her up to remind her of my love. At that moment, unconsciously, she's touched some secret fulcrum of my feelings for her.

Rick Grimes: Where'd you find everyone? Daryl Dixon: Well, those guys' tail lights zigzagging all over the road - figured he had to be Asian, driving like that. Glenn: [chuckles] Good one.

There is titillating pleasure in looking back at the past and asking oneself, 'What would have happened if...' and substituting one chance occurrence for another, , observing how, from a gray, barren, humdrum moment in one’s life, there grows forth a marvelous rosy even that in reality had failed to flower. A mysterious thing, this branching structure of life: one senses in every past instant a parting of ways, a 'thus' and an 'otherwise', with innumerable dazzling zigzags bifurcating and trifurcating against the dark background of the past.

And how bewildered is any womb-born creature that has to fly. As if terrified and fleeing from itself, it zigzags through the air, the way a crack runs through a teacup. So the bat quivers across the porcelain of evening.

The way ran zigzag through a forest of pine which the bitter wind, still that morning, had turned to ice; every bough was adorned with lines of stalactite which shivered and glittered in the morning sun; every needle had a brilliant, vitreous case and when she flicked her whip at a wayside shrub she brought down a tinkling shower of ice-leaves, each the veined impression of its crisp, green counterpart.

Watching middle-class conservatives vote for politicians who've proudly pledged to screw them and their children over fills me with the same exasperated contempt I feel for rabbits who zigzag wildly back and forth in front of my tires instead of just getting off the goddamn road.

You do not retreat from a road-block; you make your way around it, or look for another route to where you are going. And you learn to zigzag ... Take a different route, albeit a longer one.

It's time now to rent a car, roll down the windows and prepare for your first big thrill: the freeways. They're so much fun they should charge admission. Never fret about zigzagging back and forth through six lanes of traffic at high speeds; it erases jet lag in a split second. You're now heading toward Hollywood, like any normal tourist. Breathe in that smog and feel lucky that only in L.A. will you glimpse a green sun or a brown moon. Forget the propaganda you've heard about clean air; demand oxygen you can see in all its glorious discoloration.

grief is not linear. It’s not a slow progression forward toward healing, it’s a zigzag, a terrible back-and-forth from devastated to okay until finally there are more okay patches and fewer devastated ones.

A Congreve clock?’ Captain Petersen was puzzled. ‘It’s a clock that keeps time by a steel ball running on a zig-zag track down an inclined plane,’ Keith told him. ‘Only it doesn’t keep very good time. It takes thirty seconds for the ball to run down one way — then the plane tilts and it runs back again. It’s quite fascinating to watch.

ALL HE COULD SEE, IN EVERY DIRECTION, WAS WATER. It was June 23, 1943. Somewhere on the endless expanse of the Pacific Ocean, Army Air Forces bombardier and Olympic runner Louie Zamperini lay across a small raft, drifting westward. Slumped alongside him was a sergeant, one of his plane’s gunners. On a separate raft, tethered to the first, lay another crewman, a gash zigzagging across his forehead. Their bodies, burned by the sun and stained yellow from the raft dye, had winnowed down to skeletons. Sharks glided in lazy loops around them, dragging their backs along the rafts, waiting.

Veterinarian," said Armpit. "That's right," said Mr. Pendanski. "He could work in a zoo," said Zigzag. "He belongs in the zoo," said Squid.

Previous journeys in search of treasure have taught me that a zigzag strategy is the best way to get ahead.

A salaam aleikum.” The elderly Irishwoman has a foamy cloud of white hair and a zigzag cashmere poncho. You wouldn’t cross her.

He does a crazy zigzag maneuver before he straightens the car. “A little forewarning would be nice,” says Dee-Dum in a singsong voice. “A little smoother driving would be nicer,” I say mimicking his tone.

A voice said: One. One. One, two. One, two. Then the footsteps went back into the distance. After a while, another voice said: One, two, three, four- And the universe came into being. It was wrong to call it a big bang. That would just be noise, and all that noise could create is more noise and a cosmos full of random particles. Matter exploded into being, apparently as chaos, but in fact as a chord. The ultimate power chord. Everything, all together, streaming out in one huge rush that contained within itself, like reverse fossils, everything that it was going to be. And, zigzagging through the expanding cloud, alive, that first wild live music. This had shape. It had spin. It had rhythm. It had a beat, and you could dance to it. Everything did.

The other shoppers were too well behaved to stare at the green-headed stoner and the tear-streaked lady zigzagging up the aisles with a chubby bearded guy scurrying behind them picking up the things they dropped.

You've felt it before. You'll feel it again. Heartbreak is one of the trade-offs of getting to spend a precious few decades in this world. Never let the futile fear of it stop you from sending that text, saying it first, trying again, or letting it go.

Emotions are useless during business hours...

I’m gonna head back to the battlefield. Take good care of him, please.” “I will.” With that said, I ran back to my squad. “What’s going on?” I asked Rodriquez as I arrived. “Jake and Isaac are going at it,” the knight replied. In the distance, all I saw were orange blurs jumping and zigzagging everywhere around the elder dragon. “They’re doing it. It’s working.

Britain might be in the grip of rationing, but buying the materials for a homemade bomb was a piece of cake. (In fact, obtaining the ingredients for a decent cake would have been rather harder.)

The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks. See the line from a sufficient distance, and it straightens itself to the average tendency. Your genuine action will explain itself, and will explain your other genuine actions. Your conformity explains nothing. . . . The force of character is cumulative.

Five boys, playing in the woods one winter day, decided to see who could make the straightest set of tracks in the snow. They were very careful to put one foot directly in front of the other, but when they had crossed the clearing, one track was curved, one was crooked, and two were almost zigzag. Only one boy had a straight track. When they asked him how he did it, he replied that he had not looked at his feet; he had picked out a tree across the clearing and had walked straight toward it. If we are to leave a straight track in our daily walk, we must not have our minds centered on ourselves. We must fix our gaze upon the Lord Jesus Christ. We are to “run with patience the race that is set before us, looking unto Jesus…

Imagine a peaceful river running through the countryside. That’s your river of well-being. Whenever you’re in the water, peacefully floating along in your canoe, you feel like you’re generally in a good relationship with the world around you. You have a clear understanding of yourself, other people, and your life. You can be flexible and adjust when situations change. You’re stable and at peace. Sometimes, though, as you float along, you veer too close to one of the river’s two banks. This causes different problems, depending on which bank you approach. One bank represents chaos, where you feel out of control. Instead of floating in the peaceful river, you are caught up in the pull of tumultuous rapids, and confusion and turmoil rule the day. You need to move away from the bank of chaos and get back into the gentle flow of the river. But don’t go too far, because the other bank presents its own dangers. It’s the bank of rigidity, which is the opposite of chaos. As opposed to being out of control, rigidity is when you are imposing control on everything and everyone around you. You become completely unwilling to adapt, compromise, or negotiate. Near the bank of rigidity, the water smells stagnant, and reeds and tree branches prevent your canoe from flowing in the river of well-being. So one extreme is chaos, where there’s a total lack of control. The other extreme is rigidity, where there’s too much control, leading to a lack of flexibility and adaptability. We all move back and forth between these two banks as we go through our days—especially as we’re trying to survive parenting. When we’re closest to the banks of chaos or rigidity, we’re farthest from mental and emotional health. The longer we can avoid either bank, the more time we spend enjoying the river of well-being. Much of our lives as adults can be seen as moving along these paths—sometimes in the harmony of the flow of well-being, but sometimes in chaos, in rigidity, or zigzagging back and forth between the two. Harmony emerges from integration. Chaos and rigidity arise when integration is blocked.

Jack was too absorbed in his work to hear the bell. He was mesmerized by the challenge of making soft, round shapes of hard rock. The stone had a will of its own, and if he tried to make it do something it did not want to do, it would fight him, and his chisel would slip, or dig in too deeply, spoiling the shapes. But once he had got to know the lump of rock in front of him he could transform it. The more difficult the task, the more fascinated he was. He was beginning to feel that the decorative carving demanded by Tom was too easy. Zigzags, lozenges, dogtooth, spirals and plain roll moldings bored him, and even these leaves were rather stiff and repetitive. He wanted to curve natural-looking foliage, pliable and irregular, and copy the different shapes of real leaves, oak and ash and birch.

Acceptance is not a relief; it's the realisation that you will always carry grief with you.

Proceeding by loops and zig-zags, we now and then arrive just where we ought to be.

Zigzag... don't bunch up. Weave like a drunk on New Year's... Got it?

A Drunkard I've never been an individual entity. Sixty trillion cells! I'm a living collectivity. I'm staggering zigzag along, sixty trillion cells, all drunk.

God was grumbling his thunder and playing the zig-zag lightning thru his fingers.

zigzagged

The city of 500,000 is wedged between a granite spine of mountains zigzagging up and down the coast and the Sea of Japan, which Koreans call the East Sea.

I’m just trying to tell you that your life will be very long with zigzags you can’t imagine. You won’t realize just how young you are until you aren’t that young anymore.

Your life will be very long with zigzags you can’t imagine. You won’t realize just how young you are until you aren’t that young anymore.

Our lives really do seem strange and mysterious when you look back on them. Filled with unbelievable bizarre coincidences and unpredictable, zigzagging developments.

If there had not been so much anger, there would have been desperate awkwardness; but their straightforward emotions left no room for the little zigzags of embarrassment.

Well you stick the dynamite in the keyhole and you don't damage the safe, only sometimes you put a little too much in and blow the safe door up, but other times you're lucky and the safe just comes open. Thus the scion of a great banking dynasty learned how to rob a bank.

Most people think in curves and zig-zags. For example, they start from a thought like: I wonder how I can become very rich, and then proceed along an uncertain course which includes thoughts like: I wonder what’s for supper, and: I wonder who I know who can lend me five dollars?

...maybe you believe that we fall into our future blindly, drifting from adventure to adventure, our journey zigzagging not according to plan but according to pure chance. Or just maybe, as random and haphazard as our lives seems--maybe that's exactly what the author had in mind.

War is too messy to produce easy heroes and villains; there are always brave people on the wrong side, and evil men among the victors, and a mass of perfectly ordinary people struggling to survive and understand in between. Away from the battlefields, war forces individuals to make impossible choices in circumstances they did not create, and could never have expected. Most accommodate, some collaborate, and a very few find an internal compass they never knew they had, pointing to the right path.

They say saudade is unique to Portuguese, impossible to define in English. Nostalgia gets pretty close, but saudade is more complicated. It's the remnant of gratitude and bliss that something happened, but the simultaneous devastation that it has gone and will never happen again. It marries the feelings of happy wistfulness and poignant melancholy, anticipation, and hopelessness. it's universally understood by a cross-ocean culture with a constant feeling of absence, a yearning for the return of something now gone.

Quentin found himself staring at the end of his Brakebills careers across the perilously slender gap of only two months of time. It was like he'd been wending his way though a vast, glittering city, zig-zagging through side streets and wandering through buildings and haunted de Chrico arcades and little hidden piazzas, the whole time thinking that he'd barely scratched the surface, that he was just seeing a tiny sliver of one little neighborhood. And then suddenly he turned a corner and it turned out that he'd been through the whole city, it was all behind him, and all that was left was one short street leading straight out of town.

A scream so loud it shattered and splintered into a dreadful chorus that rattled and shook my brain and bones and cells and soul. I grabbed the telegram from Mama’s hand, threw it on the fire, ran out of the room into the hallway, and then outside into the square, and I continued running, zigzagging down streets, through mews, and on and on, as though I could escape from that moment; escape my brother’s death and run back through time.

Varium et mutabile! murmurs the man sagely - "A woman's privilege is to change her mind!" If the nature of his industry were such that he had to change his mind from cooking to cleaning, from cleaning to sewing, from sewing to nursing, from nursing to teaching, and so, backward, forward, crosswise and over again, from morning to night - he too would become adept in the lightning-change act. The man adopts one business and follows it. He develops special ability, on long lines, in connection with wide interests - and so grows broader and steadier. The distinction is there, but it is not a distinction of sex. This is why the man forgets to mail the letter. He is used to one consecutive train of thought and action. She, used to a varying zigzag horde of little things, can readily accommodate a few more.

a crazy elation caught hold of Joel, he ran, he zigzagged, he sang, he was in love, he caught a little tree-toad because he loved it and because he loved it he set it free, watched it bounce, bound like the immense leaping of his heart;

Clearly, their application had been rejected, or merely ignored, on the longstanding principle that anyone who applies to join an espionage service should be rejected.

Quisling, vague, inefficient, and fanatical, won the rare distinction of being so closely associated with a single characteristic—treachery—that a noun was created in his name. At

With every change, I took a step toward my own happiness, and I strengthened the muscles that would lift me out of the place where I thought myself to be stuck.

Apart from the peace and emptiness of the landscape, there is a special smell about winter in Provence which is accentuated by the wind and the clean, dry air. Walking in the hills, I was often able to smell a house before I could see it, because of the scent of woodsmoke coming from an invisible chimney. It is one of the most primitive smells in life, and consequently extinct in most cities, where fire regulations and interior decorators have combined to turn fireplaces into blocked-up holes or self-consciously lit "architectural features." The fireplace in Provence is still used - to cook on, to sit around, to warm the toes, and to please the eye - and fires are laid in the early morning and fed throughout the day with scrub oak from the Luberon or beech from the foothills of Mont Ventoux. Coming home with the dogs as dusk fell, I always stopped to look from the top of the valley at the long zigzag of smoke ribbons drifting up from the farms that are scattered along the Bonnieux road. It was a sight that made me think of warm kitchens and well-seasoned stews, and it never failed to make me ravenous.

For, after all, every one who wishes to gain true knowledge must climb the Hill Difficulty alone, and since there is no royal road to the summit, I must zigzag it in my own way. I slip back many times, I fall, I stand still, I run against the edge of hidden obstacles, I lose my temper and find it again and keep it better, I trudge on, I gain a little, I feel encouraged, I get more eager and climb higher and begin to see the widening horizon. Every struggle is a victory. One more effort and I reach the luminous cloud, the blue depths of the sky, the uplands of my desire. I am not always alone, however, in these struggles.

From the advertisement, his eyes moved up the skywalk, the zigzagging metal bridge that connected various locations in the neighborhood to the Banda train station. Behind the metal grid, men moved back and forth. Tommy Sir's eyes grew tired. He felt that up there, on that seemingly never-ending bridge, shadowy figures were moving toward obscure destinations, possibly only to return to their point of origin, like in an architectural sketch of infinity by M.C. Escher. Hell is a choice, made daily and by millions, and breathing slowly and watching this aerial cage, Tommy Sir saw Mumbai, minute by minute, unbecome and become hell.

There were so many times I felt like I was sitting around waiting. So many times I was meandering around with a heavy heart, mourning the loss of a happier season without any idea what would come next, and when, I can see now that those were the seasons of loss--my own personal autumns--and they were some of the most important.

I quickly learned that choice is a luxury, and is largely responsible for pleasure. Half the enjoyment of putting on perfume is the decision to do so, and the decisions of which one, where, and how much.

You may not always have the same friends or same relationship you have now, but you'll always be with you. As a new adult, now's the time to become the person you want to live with for the rest of your life.

Yimello,' said Bernard finally, breaking the silence. 'Gesundheit?' I asked. 'It's a name for one of the colors that's invisible to us. Yimello," said Bernard. "There could also be glowl and novaly and replitz." 'Yes.' I nodded, stunned the kid could actually string together so many words at once. 'And, uh, don't forget the beautiful grynn, the luminous dulloff, or the subtle winooze.' Bernard's face lit up. He stood and started pacing the room, speaking quickly. 'Or salty, and insomnia, and carefree, and talkative, and lonely, and burnt, and punctual.' 'Some of my favorite colors,' I agreed, nodding. 'We could paint this room whisper. Or zigzag. Or maybe a nice shade of ignored and invisible.

Each human is a complex, contradictory story. Some stories within us have been unfolding for years, others are trembling with fresh life as they peek above the horizon. Each is a zigzag of emotional design and ancestral architecture. All the stories in the earth’s mind are connected.

Do you ever think about how your name doesn't fit you? I mean, you're usually Kit in my head, but really I think your name should have a Z in it, because you're confusing and zigzagged and pop up in surprising places--like my lunch table and these bleachers. I really didn't think you'd come--and maybe also the neighbor eight, because... never mind, and the letter S too. It's my favorite. S. So yeah, Z8S-139. Or 139-Z8S. That's how I think of you sometimes, in my head," I say. "139-Z8S?" I ask. "Really?" "Or if you prefer, I can call you: Z8S-139. Or Z8 for short.

As I look back on my own life, I recognize that some of the greatest gifts I received from my parents stemmed not from what they did for me—but rather from what they didn’t do for me. One such example: my mother never mended my clothes. I remember going to her when I was in the early grades of elementary school, with holes in both socks of my favorite pair. My mom had just had her sixth child and was deeply involved in our church activities. She was very, very busy. Our family had no extra money anywhere, so buying new socks was just out of the question. So she told me to go string thread through a needle, and to come back when I had done it. That accomplished—it took me about ten minutes, whereas I’m sure she could have done it in ten seconds—she took one of the socks and showed me how to run the needle in and out around the periphery of the hole, rather than back and forth across the hole, and then simply to draw the hole closed. This took her about thirty seconds. Finally, she showed me how to cut and knot the thread. She then handed me the second sock, and went on her way. A year or so later—I probably was in third grade—I fell down on the playground at school and ripped my Levi’s. This was serious, because I had the standard family ration of two pairs of school trousers. So I took them to my mom and asked if she could repair them. She showed me how to set up and operate her sewing machine, including switching it to a zigzag stitch; gave me an idea or two about how she might try to repair it if it were she who was going to do the repair, and then went on her way. I sat there clueless at first, but eventually figured it out. Although in retrospect these were very simple things, they represent a defining point in my life. They helped me to learn that I should solve my own problems whenever possible; they gave me the confidence that I could solve my own problems; and they helped me experience pride in that achievement. It’s funny, but every time I put those socks on until they were threadbare, I looked at that repair in the toe and thought, “I did that.” I have no memory now of what the repair to the knee of those Levi’s looked like, but I’m sure it wasn’t pretty. When I looked at it, however, it didn’t occur to me that I might not have done a perfect mending job. I only felt pride that I had done it. As for my mom, I have wondered what

An Incoherent Strategy When a company’s value curve looks like a bowl of spaghetti—a zigzag with no rhyme or reason, where the offering can be described as “low-high-low-low-high-low-high”—it signals that the company doesn’t have a coherent strategy. Its strategy is likely based on independent substrategies. These may individually make sense and keep the business running and everyone busy, but collectively they do little to distinguish the company from the best competitor or to provide a clear strategic vision. This is often a reflection of an organization with divisional or functional silos.

There are zigzag lines on it...and these are probably roads in the island, for Neverland is always more or less an island, with astonishing splashes of colour here and there, and coral reefs and rakish-looking craft in an offering, and savages and lonely lairs, and gnomes who are mostly tailors, and caves through which a river runs, and princes with six elder brothers, and a hut fast going to decay, and one very small old lady with a hooked nose.

Crayfish,” I said. I dumped out a tin of water. “Really?” I nodded. “Big ones?” “Not these. You can find them, though.” “Can I see?” She dropped down off the bank just like a boy would, not sitting first, just putting her left hand to the ground and vaulting the three-foot drop to the first big stone in the line that led zigzag across the water. She studied the line a moment and then crossed to the Rock. I was impressed. She had no hesitation and her balance was perfect. I made room for her. There was suddenly this fine clean smell sitting next to me. Her eyes were green. She looked around. To all of us back then the Rock was something special. It sat smack in the middle of the deepest part of the brook, the water running clear and fast around it.

The spiraling flights of moths appear haphazard only because of the mechanisms of olfactory tracking are so different from our own. Using binocular vision, we judge the location of an object by comparing the images from two eyes and tracking directly toward the stimulus. But for species relying on the sense of smell, the organism compares points in space, moves in the direction of the greater concentration, then compares two more points successively, moving in zigzags toward the source. Using olfactory navigation the moth detects currents of scent in the air and, by small increments, discovers how to move upstream.

He had dipped his right forefinger in his own blood and had written a single word on the blue tiles above the tub, written it in two huge, staggering letters. A zig-zagging bloody fingermark fell away from the second letter of this word – his finger had made that mark, she saw, as his hand fell into the tub, where it now floated. She thought Stanley must have made that mark – his final impression on the world – as he lost consciousness. It seemed to cry out at her: Another drop fell into the tub. Plink. That did it. Patty Uris at last found her voice. Staring into her husband’s dead and sparkling eyes, she began to scream.

Along some northern coast at sundown a beaten gold light is waterborne, sweeping across lakes and tracing zigzag rivers to the sea, and we know we're in transit again, half numb to the secluded beauty down there, the slate land we're leaving behind, the peneplain, to cross these rainbands in deep night. This is time totally lost to us. We don't remember it. We take no sense impressions with us, no voices, none of the windy blast of the aircraft on the tarmac, or the white noise of flight, or the hours waiting. Nothing sticks to us but smoke in our hair and clothes. It is dead time. It never happened until it happens again. Then it never happened.

When you are in command, there is always the next decision to be made. You don't have time to pace back and forth like Hamlet, zigzagging one way and the other. You do your best and live with the consequences. A commander has to compartmentalize his emotions and remain focused on the mission. You must decide, act, and move on.

Can you imagine an infinite tree?...A tree whose roots snake down all the way to the bottomest bottom of everything?...if you've ever looked at a tree you've seen how its trunk divides into boughs, which divide yet again to branches, which divide into twigs, which divide again into twiglings. The whole mess splaying out in all directions, jutting and twisting and zigzagging. At the tips of the tips you might have a million tiny green shoots, scattered like the sparks of an exploding skyrocket.

One night, the Carlton Club was hit by a bomb. The members of the surrounding clubs, in pajamas and slippers, formed long lines to save the library from the flames, passing books from hand to hand and discussing the merits of each as they passed. Such

Do not take this lightly,” Chiron warned. “I’m not talking about some tinfoil-covered zigzag you’d see in a second-grade play. I’m talking about a two-foot-long cylinder of high-grade celestial bronze, capped on both ends with god-level explosives.” “Oh.” “Zeus’s master bolt,” Chiron said, getting worked up now. “The symbol of his power,

For of one will, the actions will be harmonious, however unlike they seem. These varieties are lost sight of at a little distance, at a little height of thought. One tendency unites them all. The voyage of the best ship is a zigzag line of a hundred tacks. See the line from a sufficient distance, and it straightens itself to the average tendency. Your genuine action will explain itself, and will explain your other genuine actions. Your conformity explains nothing. Act singly, and what you have already done singly will justify you now.

You may not always have the same friends or same relationship you have now, but you'll always be with you.

I'd have to go through this pain alone, and it was up to me to decide if it would make me stronger or weaker.

Falling in love with someone else is a little bit about falling for yourself.

Nothing is more natural to drunken men than ellipses. The ellipsis is the zig-zag of the phrase.

The little woman, wearing a pink and black zigzag-striped pantsuit over a black turtleneck, resembled a skinny zebra who'd OD'd on Pepto-Bismol.

And then I felt it again. A change in the air. An invisible fog, strangely warm, hanging low, pressing all around, zigzagging closer like a hundred stealthy snakes in the air.

I’m just trying to tell you that your life will be very long with zigzags you can’t imagine. You won’t realize just how young you are until you aren’t that young anymore

MI5 was careful to destroy the traffic, aware of the potential repercussions if the inhabitants of southern London realized they were being sacrificed to protect the center of the city.

and was built into the shape of a balcony at the top, with insecure, irregular battlements, crumbling as if drawn by an anxious or careless child as they stood out, zigzag fashion, against the blue sky.

Delhi. The ruins of an old city, markets, monuments, broken mansions, the zigzag of roads, the still sad times of music past. And rising up from it, her mother, wind in her hair, laughing like a witch.

As side-by-side we walked along this road, hemmed in by two loose stone-like walls, something running towards us in a zig-zag line passed us at a wild pace, with a sound like a frightened laugh or shudder.

The end of summer is slower. This time of year is precious to everyone. It belongs to the soft cotton pat of your heart that never ages past ten years old. You can smell it - fresh pencil shavings and cinnamon.

Winston Churchill se jacta de cómo, un domingo en El Cairo después de un almuerzo particularmente cargado de whisky, trazó el borde de Jordania con Arabia Saudita: un zigzag temblorosamente ebrio, con hipo incluido.

You could hear the wind in the leaves, and on that wind traveled the screams of the kids on the playground in the distance, the little kids figuring out how to be alive, how to navigate a world that was not built for them by navigating a playground that was. Dad saw me watching the kids and said, "You miss running around like that?" "Sometimes, I guess." But that wasn't what I was thinking about. I was just trying to notice everything: the light on the ruined Ruins, this little kid who could barely walk discovering a stick at the corner of the playground, my indefatigable mother zigzagging mustard across her turkey sandwich, my dad patting his handheld in his pocket and resisting the urge to check it, a guy throwing a Frisbee that his dog kept running under and catching and returning to him. Who am I to say that these things might not be forever? Who is Peter Van Houten to assert as fact the conjecture that our labor is temporary? All I know of heaven and all I know of death is in this park: an elegant universe in ceaseless motion, teeming with ruined ruins and screaming children.

My life didn’t feel like a novel. It felt like a million moments. I didn’t want to make anything fit together. I didn’t want to make anything up. I didn’t want it to make sense the way I understand a novel to make a kind of sense. I didn’t want anywhere to hide. I didn’t want to be able to duck. I wanted the shock of truth. I wanted moments that felt like body blows. I wanted moments of pure hilarity, connected to nothing that came before or after. I wanted it to feel like the way I’ve lived my life. And I wanted to tell the truth. My truth doesn’t travel in a straight line, it zigzags, detours, doubles back. Most truths I have to learn over and over again.

For, after all, every one who wishes to gain true knowledge must climb the Hill Difficulty alone, and since there is no royal road to the summit, I must zigzag it in my own way. I slip back many times, I fall, I stand still, I run against the edge of hidden obstacles, I lose my temper and find it again and keep it better. I trudge on, I gain a little, I feel encouraged, I get more eager and climb higher and begin to see the widening horizon.

Sneaking out unnoticed they left the party way too early that summer night. Him swinging her high heels while she, barefoot, playfully zigzagging. They walked along the quiet family road before stopping by the food stand. They intentionally ordered a double of what they would call 'unhealthy' on a usual Tuesday noon. Sitting there on the grass accompanied merely by millions of starts above them, they shared more than a meal. That, right there, was their type of a party.

I thought of kissing Astrid under the fire escape. I thought of Norm’s rusty microbus and of his father, Cicero, sitting on the busted-down sofa in his old trailer, rolling dope in Zig-Zag papers and telling me if I wanted to get my license first crack out of the basket, I’d better cut my fucking hair. I thought of playing teen dances at the Auburn RolloDrome, and how we never stopped when the inevitable fights broke out between the kids from Edward Little and Lisbon High, or those from Lewiston High and St. Dom’s; we just turned it up louder. I thought of how life had been before I realized I was a frog in a pot. I shouted: “One, two, you-know-what-to-do!” We kicked it in. Key of E. All that shit starts in E.

Show up with stories to tell. Your whole life prepares you for the big moments, so go in confidently knowing you have years of experience to your name. This goes for interviews, dates, or any important conversations. It's ultimately about whether they're a fit for you than you a fit for them, so be funny and self-assured and wear hot pink if you feel like it.

Kaylee, For over a hundred years, magicians have been pulling objects out of hats. Rabbits, flowers... It's become such a famous trick that rabbits are known to represent magic in general. I'm a magician. I've been pulling things from hats since I learned the trick at ten years old. It's all about sleight of hand. Misdirection. Distraction. What people don't really know is it isn't the magician that makes the trick magical. It's the object. What is a zig-zag box without the blades? What is a cage without a dove? The object is the spark--the real reason why the illusion is worth seeing, worth doing, worth discovering. Sometimes magicians lose their rabbits. They get lost in the act, or the magician makes a mistake and has to coax the rabbit back out. Because without the rabbit, the trick is useless. Without the rabbit, the hat becomes insignificant. Kaylee Elizabeth Sperling, you are the rabbit to my hat, and I love you. Please forgive me for losing the spark in your trick. I will do whatever I can to make it up to you, starting with this deck of cards. 52 reasons why I love you. And I could fill another deck. Perhaps two more or three. Whatever it takes to coax my rabbit back out. -Nate

The morning drive in Karachi was nothing like coasting on Storrow, but it hadn't taken Asad long to get used to it and it rarely bothered him now. Dreadful road manners were part of the traffic landscape in Karachi. Vehicles changed lanes without warning, motorcyclists zigzagged in and out, camel and donkey carts fought for road space, rickshaws spewed carbon and sulfur fumes, jaywalkers kept popping up from nowhere, and beggars, beggars and more beggars congregated at every traffic light.

If I could tell you only one thing about my life it would be this: when I was seven years old the mailman ran over my had. As formative events go, nothing else comes close; my careening, zigzag existence, my wounded brain and faith in God, my collisions with joy and affliction, all of it has come, in one way or another, out of that moment on a summer morning when the left rear tire of a United States postal jeep ground my tiny head into the hot gravel of the San Carlos Apache Indian reservation.

Most people, Kamala, are like a falling leaf, which drifts and turns in the air, and sways, and zigzags to the ground. But others, just a few, are like stars; they travel a fixed route, no wind reaches them; their law and their route lie within themselves

What a skeletal wreck of man this is. Translucent flesh and feeble bones, the kind of temple where the whores and villains try to tempt the holistic domes. Running rampid with free thought to free form, and the free and clear. When the matters at hand are shelled out like lint at a laundry mat to sift and focus on the bigger, better, now. We all have a little sin that needs venting, virtues for the rending and laws and systems and stems are ripped from the branches of office, do you know where your post entails? Do you serve a purpose, or purposely serve? When in doubt inside your atavistic allure, the value of a summer spent, and a winter earned. For the rest of us, there is always Sunday. The day of the week the reeks of rest, but all we do is catch our breath, so we can wade naked in the bloody pool, and place our hand on the big, black book. To watch the knives zigzag between our aching fingers. A vacation is a countdown, T minus your life and counting, time to drag your tongue across the sugar cube, and hope you get a taste. WHAT THE FUCK IS ALL THIS FOR? WHAT THE HELL’S GOING ON? SHUT UP! I can go on and on but lets move on, shall we? Say, your me, and I’m you, and they all watch the things we do, and like a smack of spite they threw me down the stairs, haven’t felt like this in years. The great magnet of malicious magnanimous refuse, let me go, and punch me into the dead spout again. That’s where you go when there’s no one else around, it’s just you, and there was never anyone to begin with, now was there? Sanctimonious pretentious dastardly bastards with their thumb on the pulse, and a finger on the trigger. CLASSIFIED MY ASS! THAT’S A FUCKING SECRET, AND YOU KNOW IT! Government is another way to say better…than…you. It’s like ice but no pick, a murder charge that won’t stick, it’s like a whole other world where you can smell the food, but you can’t touch the silverware. Huh, what luck. Fascism you can vote for. Humph, isn’t that sweet? And we’re all gonna die some day, because that’s the American way, and I’ve drunk too much, and said too little, when your gaffer taped in the middle, say a prayer, say a face, get your self together and see what’s happening. SHUT UP! FUCK YOU! FUCK YOU! I’m sorry, I could go on and on but their times to move on so, remember: you’re a wreck, an accident. Forget the freak, your just nature. Keep the gun oiled, and the temple cleaned shit snort, and blaspheme, let the heads cool, and the engine run. Because in the end, everything we do, is just everything we’ve done.

It was a garden, a walled garden. Overgrown but with beautiful bones visible still. Someone had cared for this garden once. The remains of two paths snaked back and forth, intertwined like the lacing on an Irish dancing shoe. Fruit trees had been espaliered around the sides, and wires zigzagged from the top of one wall to the top of another. Hungry, wisteria branches had woven themselves around to form a sort of canopy. Against the southern wall, an ancient and knobbled tree was growing. Cassandra went closer. It was the apple tree, she realized, the one whose bough had reached over the wall. She lifted her hand to touch one of the golden fruit. The tree was about sixteen feet high and shaped like the Japanese bonsai plant Nell had given Cassandra for her twelfth birthday.

Give up", groaned Mauricio, "or else you are a dead duck!" "You give up first," coughed Jacob, "or else I'll snip your tail off!' And then both let go at the same time and sat facing each other, all out of breath. With tears in his eyes the little cat tried to straighten out his tail, which no longer looked elegant in the least but had been bent into a zigzag, while the melancholy raven eyed the feathers scattered on the floor, feathers he couldn't really spare. But as is often the case after such bickering, both felt relatively peaceful and ready for reconciliation. Jacob thought he should not have been so rude to the small, fat tomcat, and Maurizio wondered if he might have done something wrong with the poor, unfortunate raven. "Forgive me, please," he mewed. "I'm sorry, too," rasped Jacob.

No sé si habéis visto alguna vez un mapa de la mente de una persona. A veces los médicos trazan mapas de otras partes vuestras y vuestro propio mapa puede resultar interesantísimo, pero a ver si alguna vez los pilláis trazando el mapa de la mente de un niño, que no sólo es confusa, sino que no para de dar vueltas. Tiene líneas en zigzag como las oscilaciones de la temperatura en un ráfico cuando tenéis fiebre y que probablemente son los caminos de la isla, pues el País de Nunca Jamás es siempre una isla, más o menos, con asombrosas pinceladas de color aquí y allá, con arrecifes de coral y embarcaciones de aspecto veloz en alta mar, con salvajes y guaridas solitarias y gnomos que en su mayoría son sastres, cavernas por las que corre un río, príncipes con seis hermanos mayores, una choza que se descompone rápidamente y una señora muy bajita y anciana con la nariz ganchuda. Si eso fuera todo sería un mapa sencillo, pero también está el primer día de escuela, la religión, los padres, el estanque redondo, la costura, asesinatos, ejecuciones, verbos que rigen dativo, el día de comer pastel de chocolate, ponerse tirantes, dime la tabla del nueve, tres peniques por arrancarse un diente uno mismo y muchas cosas más que son parte de la isla o, si no, constituyen otro mapa que se transparenta a través del primero y todo ello es bastante confuso, sobre todo porque nada se está quieto.

We cannot afford to be discouraged from challenging the corporate control of our food system, our genetic commons, our shared resources, or our democracy. The history of social change in our nation shows that the political system can be reformed, even if the road is long and zigzag.

They were the cars at the fair that were whirling around her; no, they were the planets, while the sun stood, burning and spinning and guttering in the centre; here they came again, Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto; but they were not planets, for it was not the merry-go-round at all, but the Ferris wheel, they were constellations, in the hub of which, like a great cold eye, burned Polaris, and round and round it here they went: Cassiopeia, Cepheus, the Lynx, Ursa Major, Ursa Minor, and the Dragon; yet they were not constellations, but, somehow, myriads of beautiful butterflies, she was sailing into Acapulco harbour through a hurricane of beautiful butterflies, zigzagging overhead and endlessly vanishing astern over the sea, the sea, rough and pure, the long dawn rollers advancing, rising, and crashing down to glide in colourless ellipses over the sand, sinking, sinking, someone was calling her name far away and she remembered, they were in a dark wood, she heard the wind and the rain rushing through the forest and saw the tremours of lightning shuddering through the heavens and the horse—great God, the horse—and would this scene repeat itself endlessly and forever?—the horse, rearing, poised over her, petrified in midair, a statue, somebody was sitting on the statue, it was Yvonne Griffaton, no, it was the statue of Huerta, the drunkard, the murderer, it was the Consul, or it was a mechanical horse on the merry-go-round, the carrousel, but the carrousel had stopped and she was in a ravine down which a million horses were thundering towards her, and she must escape, through the friendly forest to their house, their little home by the sea.

Miyamoto Musashi’s actual burial ground was in close range. According to legend he had been buried in full samurai regalia clutching his faithful sword. The last line of the translation: He died lonely. The Japanese liked loneliness. It had a different quality than our dreaded isolation. More like one with the void, alone with the Alone, no longer separate from anything. It was the final compliment to describe him this way.

For, after all, every one who wishes to gain true knowledge must climb the Hill Difficulty alone, and since there is no royal road to the summit, I must zigzag it in my own way. I slip back many times, I fall, I stand still, I run against the edge of hidden obstacles, I lose my temper and find it again and keep it better. I trudge on, I gain a little, I feel encouraged, I get more eager and climb higher and begin to see the widening horizon. Every struggle is a victory. One more effort and I reach the luminous cloud, the blue depths of the sky, the uplands of my desire.

Once he had found his seat he removed his shoe and discovered a flattened black mass of chewing gum embedded deep in the zigzag tread of the sole. Upper lip arched in disgust, he was still picking, cutting, and scraping away with a pocket knife as the train began to move. Beneath the patina of grime, the gum was still slightly pink, like flesh, and the smell of peppermint was faint but distinct. How appalling, the intimate contact with the contents of a stranger’s mouth, the bottomless vulgarity of people who chewed gum and who let it fall from their lips where they stood.

There were great steppes, and rocky table-lands Stretching half-limitless in starlit night, With alien campfires shedding feeble light On beasts with tinkling bells, in shaggy bands. Far to the south the plain sloped low and wide To a dark zigzag line of wall that lay Like a huge python of some primal day Which endless time had chilled and petrified. I shivered oddly in the cold, thin air, And wondered where I was and how I came, When a cloaked form against a campfire's glare Rose and approached, and called me by my name. Staring at that dead face beneath the hood, I ceased to hope - because I understood. - A Memory

L’Océan sonore Palpite sous l’œil De la lune en deuil Et palpite encore, Tandis qu’un éclair Brutal et sinistre Fend le ciel de bistre D’un long zigzag clair, Et que chaque lame, En bonds convulsifs, Le long des récifs Va, vient, luit et clame, Et qu’au firmament, Où l’ouragan erre, Rugit le tonnerre Formidablement.

However, whatever frightening mask it might assume, the national spirit in its original state was of pristine whiteness. Traveling through a country like Thailand, Honda realized more clearly than ever the simplicity and purity of things Japanese, like transparent stream water through which one could glimpse pebbles below, or the probity of Shinto rites. Honda’s life was not imbued with such spirit. Like the majority of Japanese he ignored it, behaving as though it did not exist and surviving by escaping from it. All his life he had dodged things fundamental and artless: white silk, clear cold water, the zigzag white paper of the exorciser’s staff fluttering in the breeze, the sacred precinct marked by a torii, the gods’ dwelling in the sea, the mountains, the vast ocean, the Japanese sword with its glistening blade so pure and sharp. Not only Honda, but the vast majority of Westernized Japanese, could no longer stand such intensely native elements.

In my effort to fathom my mother, to see things from her per-spective, to accommodate her, to understand what hurt her, what made her do the things she did and to predict what she may or may not do next, I turned into a maze, a labyrinth of pathways that zigzag underground and surface in strange places, hoping to gain a vantage point for a perspective other than my own. Seeing her through lenses that were not entirely coloured by my own experience of her made me value her for the woman she was. It made me a writer. A novelist.  Because that ’s what novelists are  –  labyrinths. And now this labyrinth must make sense of its labyrinthine self without her.

Something was wrong. People were shouting. Doors slammed. Footsteps echoed in the halls. Through the windows, she saw the zigzag pattern of flashlights cutting across the courtyard, illuminating silvery specks of rain and the stark-white statue of a man, reaching down toward the ground, as though to pluck something from the earth.

The clock had been Sylvie's, and her mother's before that. It had gone to Ursula on Sylvie's death and Ursula had left it to Teddy, and so it had zigzagged its way down the family tree... ...The clock was a good one, made by Frodsham and worth quite a bit, but Teddy knew if he gave it to Viola she would sell it or misplace it or break it and it seemed important to him that it stayed in the family. An heirloom. ('Lovely word,' Bertie said.) He liked to think that the little golden key that wound it, a key that would almost certainly be lost by Viola, would continue to be turned by the hand of someone who was part of the family, part of his blood. The red thread.

All this wandering that you do," he said, leaning in the window, his face white as a cream cheese, his scar the carved zigzag of a snowmobile across a winter lake. Wind blew handsomely through his hair. "How will anyone ever get close to you?" "I don't know," she said. She shook his hand through the window and then put on her gloves.

Six saw a caterpillar.' 'What kind?' 'Green, with purple and white zigzags.' 'I see,' Thaniel said slowly. Liking children did not keep him from being perplexed by them. He was recently too old to remember his own childhood with any clarity. 'I imagine that was exciting?' She glanced up at him warily. 'No. It was just a caterpillar.

Listen: magic is life. Life is twisty-turny, topsy-turvy, and breaks as many rules as bright magic. Life can be as dark and cruel as shadow magic. And life can zigzag between them both. You'll meet good people who are vain, self-absorbed, and careless, like the Crystal Faeries. You'll meet bad people who reform and start jewelry shops in cities. Wise old innkeepers will infuriate you with their absentmindedness yet surprise you with their generosity; distinguished judges will be mulish and cantankerous yet ultimately fair. Those meant to care for you will fail you, or fade from your life; strangers will offer shelter, or step in and become family. Find the thread of love and beauty in it all.

He suffers with man as some firm-souled man suffers with the woman he but loves the better because she is extravagant and fickle. His descending power is neither the winding nor the straight line but zigzag, illuminating the passive and active properties, the tree’s two sorts of fruit: it is the sudden lightning, for all his acts of power are instantaneous.

Oxford

Nick grinned, swooping in for another kiss and then leaning back and scruffing his hair up. “Harriet Manners, I’m about to give you six stamps. Then I’m going to write something on a piece of paper and put it in an envelope with your address on it.” “OK …” “Then I’m going to put the envelope on the floor and spin us as fast as I can. As soon as either of us manage to stick a stamp on it, I’m going to race to the postbox and post it unless you can catch me first. If you win, you can read it.” Nick was obviously faster than me, but he didn’t know where the nearest postbox was. “Deal,” I agreed, yawning and rubbing my eyes. “But why six stamps?” “Just wait and see.” A few seconds later, I understood. As we spun in circles with our hands stretched out, one of my stamps got stuck to the ground at least a metre away from the envelope. Another ended up on a daisy. A third somehow got stuck to the roundabout. One of Nick’s ended up on his nose. And every time we both missed, we laughed harder and harder and our kisses got dizzier and dizzier until the whole world was a giggling, kissing, spinning blur. Finally, when we both had one stamp left, I stopped giggling. I had to win this. So I swallowed, wiped my eyes and took a few deep breaths. Then I reached out my hand. “Too late!” Nick yelled as I opened my eyes again. “Got it, Manners!” And he jumped off the still-spinning roundabout with the envelope held high over his head. So I promptly leapt off too. Straight into a bush. Thanks to a destabilised vestibular system – which is the upper portion of the inner ear – the ground wasn’t where it was supposed to be. Nick, in the meantime, had ended up flat on his back on the grass next to me. With a small shout I leant down and kissed him hard on the lips. “HA!” I shouted, grabbing the envelope off him and trying to rip it open. “I don’t think so,” he grinned, jumping up and wrapping one arm round my waist while he retrieved it again. Then he started running in a zigzag towards the postbox. A few seconds later, I wobbled after him. And we stumbled wonkily down the road, giggling and pulling at each other’s T-shirts and hanging on to tree trunks and kissing as we each fought for the prize. Finally, he picked me up and, without any effort, popped me on top of a high wall. Like Humpty Dumpty. Or some kind of really unathletic cat. “Hey!” I shouted as he whipped the envelope out of my hands and started sprinting towards the postbox at the bottom of the road. “That’s not fair!” “Course it is,” he shouted back. “All’s fair in love and war.” And Nick kissed the envelope then put it in the postbox with a flourish. I had to wait three days. Three days of lingering by the front door. Three days of lifting up the doormat, just in case it had accidentally slipped under there. Finally, the letter arrived: crumpled and stained with grass. Ha. Told you I was faster. LBxx

Furthermore we know America, we’re at home; I can go anywhere in America and get what I want because it’s the same in every corner, I know the people, I know what they do. We give and take and go in the incredibly complicated sweetness zigzagging every side.” There was nothing clear about the things he said, but what he meant to say was somehow made pure and clear.

Again and again the demons closed upon Tom, and again and again he took his imaginary basketball and dribbled it into a clear space. He zigzagged fast, dancing feet barely touching the ground, changing direction sharply and unpredictably. “What is he doing?” Stella gasped, her hand over the bleeding wound on her stomach. “He made varsity,” Twist said. “He made what?

Constructed almost entirely of wood, with a two-man crew and no defensive guns, the little plane could carry four thousand pounds of bombs to Berlin. With two Rolls-Royce Merlin engines and a top speed of four hundred miles per hour, it could usually outrun enemy fighters. The Mosquito, nicknamed “the Wooden Wonder,” could be assembled, cheaply, by cabinetmakers and carpenters.

Recent psychological research on grief favors meaning making over closure; accepts zigzagging paths, not just linear stages; recognizes ambiguity without pathology; and acknowledges continuing bonds between the living and the dead rather than commanding decathexis. But old ideas about grief as a linear march to closure still hold powerful sway. Many psychologists and grief counseling programs continue to consider “closure” a therapeutic goal. Sympathy cards, internet searches, and friendly advice often uphold a rigid division between healthy grief that the mourner “gets over” and unhealthy grief that persists. Forensic exhumation, too, continues to be informed by these deeply rooted ideas. The experiences of grief and exhumation related by families of the missing indicate something more complex and mysterious than “closure.” Exhumation heals and wounds, sometimes both at once, in the same gesture, in the same breath, as Dulce described feeling consoled and destroyed by the fragment of her brother’s bones. Exhumation can divide brothers and restore fathers, open old wounds and open the possibility of regeneration—of building something new with the “pile of broken mirrors” that is memory, loss, and mourning.

Then the bandit turned tail and broke for the open. Greeley hit the sidewalk only seconds after him, big as he was and with a panic-stricken woman to detour around. A slice of hindmost heel was all he saw of the man. The store entrance adjoined a corner; that gave the fugitive a few added seconds of shelter, and as Greeley flashed around it in turn, again the breaks were the lawbreaker's. There was a school midway up the street toward the next avenue. It was a couple of minutes past three now, and a torrent of young humanity came pouring out of the building by every staircase and exit, flooding the street. In through them the sprinting man plunged, knocking over right and left the ones that didn't get out of his way quickly enough. If it had been hazardous to take a shot at him in the store, it would have been criminal out here. The kids parted, screaming in delighted excitement, as Greeley tore through them after the bandit with uptilted gun, but he couldn't just callously knock them flat like the man before him had. He sidestepped, got out of their way as often as they did his, and he began to fall behind the other, lose ground. The kids weren't just on that one street - they had dispersed over the entire vicinity by now, for a radius of a block or more in every direction, in frisky, milling, homeward-bound groups. Through them the quarry zigzagged, pulling slowly but surely away. He kept going in a straight line, because it was to his advantage to do so - the presence of these kids made for greater safety - but he was already far enough in the lead so that when he should finally decide to turn off - the answer was pretty obvious; a taxi or a doorway or a basement. Any of them would do. ("Detective William Brown")

Your alarm’s about to go off in ten minutes,” Caden called from the doorway. He had a cup of coffee in hand and wore only jeans. I tried to keep my eyes front and center, but I lost. The tattoos were a nice little zig-zag pattern, pulling my gaze down, all the way down. Caden’s slow, smooth chuckle told me he knew what I’d just done. My cheeks only warmed a little. I shot him a look, falling back to the pillow. “I feel like this should be the first skip day of my school career.” “You’ve never skipped before?” I shook my head, rolling it side to side on the pillow. “Am I missing out? Should I embrace my inner deviant?” He smirked. “You can skip a class for any reason in the world. It’s your life.” I sat up, eyeing that coffee. “You were supposed to be the bad influence.” His eyebrow lifted. “I’m not selling it enough?” He lifted his cup. “You want some coffee?” “I’m wondering if today is the day I try coffee too.” “You’ve never had coffee?” “I’m beginning to think I’m lame.” I thought about it. “Really lame.” “You slept at some guy’s house last night. Think of it that way.” His smirk was back. “Not so lame now.” I could do one better. “I slept at a fraternity house.” “And you drank beer.” “It was the second night in a row that I drank beer.” “See? Not so lame after all.” “You’re right.” I sat up. “I’m halfway to total badass.

I blinked and looked again—but it was still out there, a shiny chrome disc zigzagging around in the sky. My eyes struggled to track the object through a series of increasingly fast, impossibly sharp turns that would have juiced a human being, had there been any aboard. The disc streaked toward the distant horizon, then came to an instantaneous stop just above it. It hovered there motionless over the distant tree line for a few seconds, as if scanning

Though Wilder blamed her family’s departure from Kansas on “blasted politicians” ordering white squatters to vacate Osage lands, no such edict was issued over Rutland Township during the Ingallses’ tenure there. Quite the reverse is true: only white intruders in what was known as the Cherokee Strip of Oklahoma were removed to make way for the displaced Osages arriving from Kansas. (Wilder mistakenly believed that her family’s cabin was located forty—rather than the actual fourteen—miles from Independence, an error that placed the fictional Ingalls family in the area affected by the removal order.) Rather, Charles Ingalls’s decision to abandon his claim was almost certainly financial, for Gustaf Gustafson did indeed default on his mortgage. The exception: Unlike their fictional counterparts, the historical Ingalls family’s decision to leave Wisconsin and settle in Kansas was not a straightforward one. Instead it was the eventual result of a series of land transactions that began in the spring of 1868, when Charles Ingalls sold his Wisconsin property to Gustaf Gustafson and shortly thereafter purchased 80 acres in Chariton County, Missouri, sight unseen. No one has been able to pinpoint with any certainty when (or even whether) the Ingalls family actually resided on that land; a scanty paper trail makes it appear that they actually zigzagged from Kansas to Missouri and back again between May of 1868 and February of 1870. What is certain is that by late February of 1870 Charles Ingalls had returned the title to his Chariton County acreage to the Missouri land dealer, and so for simplicity’s sake I have chosen to follow Laura Ingalls Wilder’s lead, contradicting history by streamlining events to more closely mirror the opening chapter of Little House on the Prairie, and setting this novel in 1870, a year in which the Ingalls family’s presence in Kansas is firmly documented.

The pain in my hip was just short of apocalyptic. And the first five hundred words were uniquely terrifying—it was as if I’d never written anything before them in my life. All my old tricks seemed to have deserted me. I stepped from one word to the next like a very old man finding his way across a stream on a zigzag line of wet stones. There was no inspiration that first afternoon, only a kind of stubborn determination and the hope that things would get better if I kept at it.

They advanced on a zigzagging track as a measure against enemy submarines, but that required mass-choreographed maneuvers that could easily go awry. When one of the cruisers missed a turn and dropped out of position, her captain received a sarcastic message by blinker light from Admiral Halsey: “May I suggest that if at all convenient you get where you belong?” Shortly afterward, he received another: “Have you any officer aboard able to judge distance accurately within 6,000 yards?

In the throes of heartache and grief, I had felt stuck in the awkwardness of not knowing quite how to move forward, I felt bound to the ditch for so long, unable to see what it looked like from above. At times it felt like I'd never get out, and I got used to the constant tripping and stumbling around. It didn't feel like life should be, but it was how my life was. I accepted it. But over time, I strengthened into a different version of myself. I had new muscles, a new way of moving in the world.

(...) secondo me, chi dice di sé con tanta fierezza che "adora i bambini" - e sono in molti a dirlo - nel profondo del cuore li considera un'unica, generica creatura, con un'unica faccia e un unico carattere; insomma, gli "appassionati di bambini" li trattano davvero con disprezzo, perché chi ha mai sentito qualcuno proclamare "adoro gli adulti": non è così? Mentre di "appassionati di bambini" se ne trovano ovunque, e per loro sono tutti dolci e morbidi, fanno solo giochi allegri e ballano tutto il giorno. "Oh" dicono quegli imbecilli cresciuti, "quanto è felice la stagione dell'infanzia!", così ti viene voglia di lisciare quella loro testa tonta e dire: "Già, e quanto sono felici gli stupidi!". Bambini: attenzione agli appassionati di bambini!

Correct. That’s the Sucker Effect. You do something, while making the audience think you did something else. So they’re all busy feeling self-congratulatory that they figured it out, and it gives you all this awesome wriggle room to keep tricking them.

First, if you participate in Movember, fuck you. Second, if you want to raise money for prostate cancer (a noble cause), do it the old-fashioned way, by either begging for it or exerting yourself physically for donations. Sitting on your ass and letting nature take its course above your upper lip is not the same thing as running a 10K at a local high school or breaking out the set of power tools your dad gave you as a housewarming present collecting dust in your garage and using them to go out and build a habitat for humanity. Maybe I can raise money for rectal cancer by getting people to pledge a dollar every time I take a shit. And third no one wants to see that horrific seventies pornstache growing like a caterpillar with cerebral palsy zigzagging across your face; you look like you're about to go door to door informing people that you're a registered sex offender who's just moved in next door and would their kids like to come out and was your windowless van for a dollar? Fuck Movember. And November.

There is no linear way out of grief, and life after loss is not an event with a finish line. While you may notice recurring themes or experiences in your grief, they don’t always appear in order, and they don’t always make sense to your brain. Grief is more like a zigzagging mountain trail than a line on a graph. It’s a mix of uphill and downhill paths, with some switchbacks tossed in for good measure. Know that it’s okay to feel like you’re “back at square one,” because in grief, there are no squares at all.

The bushes puzzled him, they were so big, almost trees, some twice his height, and there seemed so many. They were planted all along the edges of the towering droop-limbed hemlocks that sheltered the place, and in the acres sheltered there were dozens of great rectangular clumps like loaves of porous green bread. The bushes were evergreen. With their zigzag branches and long oval leaves fingering in every direction they seemed to belong to a different climate, to a different land, whose gravity pulled softer than this one.

Hegel proposed that the world makes progress only by lurching from one extreme to another and generally requires three moves before the right balance on any issue can be found. He reminds us that big overreactions are eminently compatible with events broadly moving forward in the right direction. The dark moments of history aren’t the end; they are a challenging, but (in some ways) necessary, part of an antithesis that will eventually locate a wiser point of synthesis. With Hegel in mind, we must strive to be patient with the zigzag course of events.

(...) [H]e removed his shoe and discovered a flattened black mass of chewing gum embedded deep in the zig-zag tread of the sole. Upper lip arched in disgust, he was still picking, cutting and scraping away with a pocket knife as the train began to move. Beneath the patina of grime, the gum was still slightly pink, like flesh, and the smell of peppermint was faint but distinct. How appalling, the intimate contact with the contents of a stranger's mouth, the bottomless vulgarity of people who chewed gum and who let it fall from their lips where they stood.

I’ve sprained it.” “Oh no! Let me see.” The receptionist jumped up from behind her desk. As she bent over Bess’s ankle, she didn’t notice Bess wink at Nancy. “If I could just get some ice,” Bess said, with a weak smile that looked totally convincing. The receptionist nodded. “Of course. We’ve got ice in our break area at the back of the office,” she said. “Here, let me help you.” Great! thought Nancy. Now, if I can just sneak into Bruce’s office . . . “I’ll use my cell phone to call the doctor,” she fibbed. She pulled her cell phone from her backpack. As the receptionist helped Bess down the hall, Nancy slipped quietly into the office. Quick, she thought. Shoving the phone back in her pack, she closed the door behind her and inspected the room. There’s not much time. She saw a candy-filled bowl on the desk. Each candy had a bright red wrapper marked with a distinctive and familiar white zigzag. That clinches it, Nancy thought. Bruce had to be the person she and Bess had chased the night before. Still, she knew she had to find more concrete proof linking him to the vandalism. She set her pack on the floor next to the desk and

At Newgrange, the owl goddess' round eyes, multiple beaks, and brow ridges peer down from the ceiling. They appear in a peculiar quadrupled design and in association with snake coils, zigzags, lozenges, and winding snakes. Eyes and snake coils are interchangeable on many megalithic monuments. Further symbolic fusions of symbols include eyes and suns, with the sun featuring radiating rays or concentric circles with a center dot. These symbols, so elaborately engraved on stones, evoke the goddess' sacred power and energy however she was worshiped: as owl, snake, sun, or moon.

She wandered almost at random, zigzagging streets, following a canal for a bit, stopping to admire the towering red brick buildings that channelled her along, manufacturing heritage trailing along the water. Some were more than eight stories tall, solid behemoths that would outlast whatever food outlet had set up shop on the ground. Looking up changed things, it revealed all the details on the old buildings: secret towers, spires, turrets. They were castles in the city. Rewards for those that saw beyond their shuffling footsteps. This was a city made for looking up, she thought.

Look,let me give you the CliffNotes: You're a bitch in this life and Daniel doesn't care.Shocker! He courts you for a few weeks,there's some exchanging of flowers.A big kiss and then kaboom. Okay? Not much more to see." "You don't understand." "What? I don't understand that Victorians are as stuffy as an attic and as boring as watching wallpaper peel? Come on,if you're going to zigzag through your past,make it count. Let's hit some highlights. Luce didn't budge. "Is there a way to make you disappear?" "Do I have to stuff you in this Announcer like a cat in a suitcase? Let's move!" "I need to see that he loves me, not just some idea of me because of some curse that he's bound to.I need to feel like there's something stronger keeping us together. Something real." Bill took a seat next to Luce on the grass. Then he seemed to think better of it and actually crawled onto her lap. At first,she wanted to swat him, and the flies buzzing around his head,but when he looked up at her,his eyes appeared sincere. "Honey,Daniel loving the real you is the last thing you should be worried about. You're freaking soul mates. You two coined the phrase. You don't have to stick around here to see that.It's in every life.

To give a recipe for getting a rough idea, in case you want to, I recommend the following procedure. Select a flat ten-acre ploughed field, so sited that all the surface water of the surrounding country drains into it. Now cut a zig-zag slot about four feet deep and three feet wide diagonally across, dam off as much water as you can so as to leave about a hundred yards of squelchy mud; delve out a hole at one side of the slot, then endeavour to live there for a month on bully beef and damp biscuits, whilst a friend has instructions to fire at you with his Winchester every time you put your head above the surface.

Mam drove the same way she walked, freestyle, also known as bumpily. She didn’t really go in for right- and left-hand lanes, which was fine this side of Faha where the road is cart-wide and Mohawked with a raised rib of grass and when two cars meet there is no hope of passing, someone has to throw back a left arm and reverse to the nearest gap or gate, which Faha folks do brilliantly, flooring the accelerator and racing in soft zigzag to where they have just been, defeating time and space both and making a nonsense of past and present, here and there. As any student of Irish history ancient and recent will know, we are a nation of magnificent reversers.

From this line of reasoning, I concluded that only the material that is clearly and visibly part of a dream should be used in interpreting it. The dream has its own limitation. Its specific form itself tells us what belongs to it and what leads away from it. While “free” association lures one away from that material in a kind of zigzag line, the method I evolved is more like a circumambulation whose center is the dream picture. I work all around the dream picture and disregard every attempt that the dreamer makes to break away from it. Time and time again, in my professional work, I have had to repeat the words: “Let’s get back to your dream. What does the dream say?

And so begins the strangest campaign in military history : a competent general and a seasoned army of eighty thousand men chased like deer, in their own country, by an invader who used his vastly smaller forces more like a pack of hunting dogs than men; laying them on the scent rather than mapping routes, caring no more for their feelings, their fatigues, their lives, than a hunter who is rather fond of a good dog. Up and down the map of East Germany they ran, hunter and hunted, in an Alexandrian zig-zag of the best manner. The only strategical question in Charles’ science was “ Where are they ? ” Never, “ How many ? How entrenched ? ” At last Charles had made war into what schoolboys dreamed it ought to be.

Ha! that’s the infamy of it. Those dandies in Paris ordered the greatest attention paid to their damned females. How dare they dishonor good and brave patriots by trailing us after petticoats? As for me, I march straight, and I don’t choose to have to do with other people’s zigzags. When I saw Danton taking mistresses, and Barras too, I said to them: ‘Citizens, when the Republic called you to govern, it was not that you might authorize the vices of the old regime!’ You may tell me that women — oh yes! we must have women, that’s all right. Good soldiers of course must have women, and good women; but in times of danger, no! Besides, where would be the good of sweeping away the old abuses if patriots bring them back again?

Take your hands off my sister!" The lieutenant's head swiveled toward the owner of the surly voice, and met with a hard fist. He stumbled and bumped into another brawling twosome, slacking his grip on Willie's legs. Seizing the advantage, she aimed a well-placed kick, and this time connected with her intended target. Rider grabbed his crotch and lurched forward in pain, dropping the little hellion on top of her brother. Like cats, the girl and her sibling were on their feet, weaving a zigzag escape through the mayhem. Rider quickly regained his balance and swore, "Damn, I should have known the little rebel had a brother." Still cupping his privates and cursing the air blue, he watched brother and sister disappear. "Someday, freckle face, someday.

He’d been toting it, and checking it, and packing and unpacking, all the way since fate was on the river - that’s how long - the Big River” - Fate Marable and his riverboat caliope (Cleo seemed to recall), who hadastonished the landings between New Orleans and St. Louis with the wild, harsh, skirling Gypsy music, and left there, echoing in the young and restless even as it dies off round the bed; to linger with them thereafter, in the pelting roar of November midnights and the clickety-clack of lonesome valley freights, until they up one night and go after it in a battered bus, following the telephone wires that make a zigzag music staff against the evening sky - some variation of that basic beginning could be told for everyone who jazz has touched and altered.

I am kissing David Drucker. I am kissing David Drucker. I am kissing David Drucker. I Was wrong. I had assumed this would be his first kiss, that it would be fumbling and a bit messy but still fun. No way. Can’t be. This guy knows exactly what he’s doing. How to cradle the back of my head with his hands. How to move in soft and slow, and then pick up the pace, and then slow down again. How to brush my cheeks with even smaller kisses, how to work his way down my jaw, and to soften the worry spot in the center of my brow. How to pause and look into my eyes, really look, so tenderly I feel it all the way down in my stomach. He even traces the small zigzag scar on my eyebrow with his fingertips, like it’s something beautiful. I could kiss him forever. I’m going to kiss him forever.

Children, now we shall try to write a capital letter L,” I say and go to the blackboard. “Ten lines of L’s, then five lines of Lina, and five lines of Larch.” I write out the words slowly with chalk. A shuffling and rustling begins behind me. I expect to find that they are laughing at me and turn around. But it is only the notebooks being opened and the slates put in readiness. The forty heads are bent obediently over their task. —I am almost surprised. The slate pencils are squeaking, the pens scratching. I pass to and fro between the forms. On the wall hangs a crucifix, a stuffed barn owl and a map of Europe. Outside the windows the clouds drive steadily by, swift and low. The map of Germany is coloured in brown and green. I stop before it. The frontiers are hatched in red, and make a curious zigzag from top to bottom. Cologne—Aachen, there are the thin black lines marking the railways; Herbesthal, Liège, Brussels, Lille—I stand on tiptoe—Roubaix, Arras, Ostend—Where is Mount Kemmel then? It isn’t marked at all; but there is Langemarck, Ypres, Bixschoote, Staden. How small they are on the map—tiny points only, secluded, tiny points—and yet how the heavens thundered and the earth raged there on the 31st of July when the Big Offensive began and before nightfall we had lost every officer. I turn away and survey the fair and dark heads bending zealously over the words, Lina and Larch. Strange—for them those tiny points on the map will be no more than just so much stuff to be learned—a few new place names and a number of dates to be memorized by note in the history lesson—like the Seven Years’ War or some battle against the Romans. A

Un grondement montait de la grille où elle s'était immobilisée. Des profondeurs souterraines émanait le grincement des roues d'acier, puis soudain, plus proche, un tintamarre de klaxons, de crissements de pneus et de freins, de heurts de pare-chocs se déchaîna. Pivotant sur elle-même, elle vit des conducteurs vitupérant Clyde qui traversait en zigzag à toute vitesse. Il lui attrapa la main et ils se mirent à courir, jusqu'à une paisible ruelle latérale qu'adoucissait encore une rangée d'arbres. Quand il s'arrêtèrent essoufflés pour s'appuyer contre un mur, il lui glissa dans les mains un petit bouquet de violettes. Elle n'eut pas besoin de les regarder pour savoir qu'il les avait volées, comme si elle avait assisté à la scène. Les fleurs contenaient l'été tout entier, avec ses ombres et ses lumières gravées dans les feuilles, et elle en pressa toute la fraîcheur contre sa joue.

Oppenheimer’s character witnesses offered eloquent and sometimes poignant testaments. George Kennan was unequivocal: In Oppenheimer, he said, we were faced with “one of the great minds of this generation of Americans.” Such a man, he suggested, could not “speak dishonestly about a subject which had really engaged the responsible attention of his intellect. . . . I would suppose that you might just as well have asked Leonardo da Vinci to distort an anatomical drawing as that you should ask Robert Oppenheimer to speak . . . dishonestly.” This provoked Robb to ask Kennan under cross-examination if he meant to suggest that different standards should be used when judging “gifted individuals.” Kennan: “I think the church has known that. Had the church applied to St. Francis the criteria relating solely to his youth, it would not have been able for him to be what he was later. . . . it is only the great sinners who become the great saints and in the life of the Government, there can be applied the analogy.” One member of the Gray Board, Dr. Ward Evans, interpreted this to mean that “all gifted individuals were more or less screwballs.” Kennan politely demurred: “No, sir; I would not say that they are screwballs, but I would say that when gifted individuals come to a maturity of judgment which makes them valuable public servants, you are apt to find that the road by which they have approached that has not been as regular as the road by which other people have approached it. It may have zigzags in it of various sorts.” Seeming to agree, Dr. Evans responded, “I think it would be borne out in the literature. I believe it was Addison, and someone correct me if I am wrong, that said, ‘Great wits are near to madness, closely allied and thin partitions do their bounds divide.

For all his courtly title, the monarch (Danaus plexippus, thank you, Madame Goody) is the most down-home of butterflies. That is, before they were virtually extirpated by air pollution and pesticides, monarchs were familiar figures in most American neighborhoods. They fluttered their zigzag course (as if under the orders of some secret navigator whose logic was as fanciful as true) across backyards and vacant lots and swimming holes and fairgrounds and streets of towns and cities: they have been spotted from the observation deck of the Empire State Building by surprised tourists from Indiana who thought they had left such creatures down by the barn. Indeed, wherever there is access to milkweed (Asclepias syriaca: let's not carry this too far, Madame G.) there you will find monarchs, for the larvae of this species is as addicted to milkweed juice as the most strung-out junky to smack. His appetite is awesome in its singularity for he would rather starve than switch.

ALL WARS—BUT this war in particular—tend to be seen in monochrome: good and evil, winner and loser, champion and coward, loyalist and traitor. For most people, the reality of war is not like that, but rather a monotonous gray of discomforts and compromises, with occasional flashes of violent color. War is too messy to produce easy heroes and villains; there are always brave people on the wrong side, and evil men among the victors, and a mass of perfectly ordinary people struggling to survive and understand in between. Away

The Calf Path One day, through the primeval wood, A calf walked home, as good calves should; But made a trail all bent askew, A crooked trail as all calves do. Since then three hundred years have fled, And, I infer, the calf is dead. But still he left behind his trail, And thereby hangs my moral tale. The trail was taken up next day By a lone dog that passed that way; And then a wise bell-wether sheep Pursued the trail o’er vale and steep, And drew the flock behind him, too, As good bell-wethers always do. And from that day, o’er hill and glade, Through those old woods a path was made. And many men wound in and out, And dodged, and turned, and bent about And uttered words of righteous wrath Because ’twas such a crooked path.15 But still they followed—do not laugh— The first migrations of that calf, And through this winding wood-way stalked, Because he wobbled when he walked. This forest path became a lane, That bent, and turned, and turned again; This crooked lane became a road, Where many a poor horse with his load Toiled on beneath the burning sun, And traveled some three miles in one. And thus a century and a half They trod the footsteps of that calf. The years passed on in swiftness fleet, The road became a village street; And this, before men were aware, A city’s crowded thoroughfare; And soon the central street was this Of a renowned metropolis; And men two centuries and a half Trod in the footsteps of that calf. Each day a hundred thousand rout Followed the zigzag calf about; And o’er his crooked journey went The traffic of a continent. A hundred thousand men were led By one calf near three centuries dead. They followed still his crooked way, And lost one hundred years a day; For thus such reverence is lent To well-established precedent. A moral lesson this might teach, Were I ordained and called to preach; For men are prone to go it blind Along the calf-paths of the mind, And work away from sun to sun To do what other men have done. They follow in the beaten track, And out and in, and forth and back, And still their devious course pursue, To keep the path that others do. They keep the path a sacred groove, Along which all their lives they move. But how the wise old wood-gods laugh, Who saw the first primeval calf! Ah! Many things this tale might teach— But I am not ordained to preach. —Sam Walter Foss

Like perhaps most people whose loved ones have died, I wish that I had some guarantees about the afterlife. I wish I were absolutely certain that my father and uncle are now together in some tranquil and restful place, sharing endless walks and talks beyond what their too-few and too-short visits allowed. I wish I knew that they were offering enough comfort to one another to allow them both not to remember their distressing, even excruciating, last hours and days. I wish I could fully make sense of the fact that they’re now sharing a gravesite and a tombstone in Queens, New York,after living apart for more than thirty years.In any case, every now and then I try to imagine them on a walk through the mountains of Beauséjour. It’s dawn, a dazzling morning over the green hills. The sun is slowly rising, burning through the fog. They’re peacefully making their way down the zigzag trail that joins the villages to the rest of the world below. And in my imagining, whenever they lose track of one another, one or the other calls out in a voice that echoes throughout the hills, “Kote w ye frè m?” Brother, where are you? And the other one quickly answers, “Mwen la. Right here, brother. I’mright here.

It was as Harry dodged another Bludger, which went spinning dangerously past his head, that it happened. His broom gave a sudden, frightening lurch. For a split second, he thought he was going to fall. He gripped the broom tightly with both his hands and knees. He’d never felt anything like that. It happened again. It was as though the broom was trying to buck him off. But Nimbus Two Thousands did not suddenly decide to buck their riders off. Harry tried to turn back toward the Gryffindor goalposts — he had half a mind to ask Wood to call time-out — and then he realized that his broom was completely out of his control. He couldn’t turn it. He couldn’t direct it at all. It was zigzagging through the air, and every now and then making violent swishing movements that almost unseated him. Lee was still commentating. “Slytherin in possession — Flint with the Quaffle — passes Spinnet — passes Bell — hit hard in the face by a Bludger, hope it broke his nose — only joking, Professor — Slytherins score — oh no . . .” The Slytherins were cheering. No one seemed to have noticed that Harry’s broom was behaving strangely. It was carrying him slowly higher, away from the game, jerking and twitching as it went.

The soldiers had been entrenched in their positions for several weeks but there was little, if any fighting, except for the dozen rounds they ritually exchanged every day. The weather was extremely pleasant. The air was heavy with the scent of wildflowers and nature seem to be following its course, quite unmindful of the soldiers hiding behind rocks and camouflaged by mountain shrubbery. The birds sang as they always had and the flowers were in bloom. Bees buzzed about lazily. Only when a shot rang out, the birds got startled and took flight, as if a musician had struck a jarring note on his instrument. It was almost the end of September, neither hot nor cold. It seemed as if summer and winter had made their peace. In the blue skies, cotton clouds floated all day like barges on a lake. The soldiers seemed to be getting tired of this indecisive war where nothing much ever happened. Their positions were quite impregnable. The two hills on which they were placed faced each other and were about the same height, so no one side had an advantage. Down below in the valley, a stream zigzagged furiously on its stony bed like a snake. The air force was not involved in the combat and neither of the adversaries had heavy guns or mortars. At night, they would light huge fires and hear each other's voices echoing through the hills. From The Dog of Titwal, a short story.

Eddie would have loved the publicity. His old friends said he should have worn a T-shirt emblazoned ‘I am a Spy for MI5.’ The last time I met him he described how he had missed a fortune in ermine (to be used in coronation robes) during a furs robbery, because he thought it was rabbit. He also said he successfully convinced a German au pair girl that he was a post office telephone engineer, and robbed the wall safe. He was also once visited by an income tax inspector, and produced a doctor’s certificate that he had a weak heart and could not be ‘caused stress.’ Ten minutes later, he drove, in a Rolls-Royce, past the inspector waiting in the rain at a bus stop, and gave him a little wave.

Rider cursed, ducked another blow, threw one of his own, and then bent down, hoisting the scrappy little female, none too gently, over his shoulder. "This is no place for you, girl, even if this whole mess is your fault." "My fault!" screamed Willie, dangling upside down. "You're the one who had to go and open his big mouth!" She beat on his back as he dodged brawlers, and headed for safe ground. "Dammit, put me down, you overgrown ox. You're gonna make me miss the fight!" As she screeched and kicked in a most unladylike manner,her small feet barely missed his vunerable groin. Raising his hand to smack her bottom, Rider found it suddenly immobilized by a fierce grip. "Take your hands off my sister!" The lieutenant's head swiveled toward the owner of the surly voice, and met with a hard fist. He stumbled and bumped into another brawling twosome, slacking his grip on Willie's legs. Seizing the advantage,she aimed a well-placed kick,and this time connected with her intended target. Rider grabbed his crotch and lurched forward in pain, dropping the little hellion on top of her brother. Like cats, the girl and her sibling were on their feet,weaving a zigzag escape through the mayhem. Rider quickly regained his balance and swore, "Damn,I should have known the little rebel had a brother." Still cupping his privates and cursing the air blue, he watched brother and sister disappear. "Someday, freckle face, someday.

Motor-scooter riders with big beards and girl friends who bounce on the back of the scooters and wear their hair long in front of their faces as well as behind, drunks who follow the advice of the Hat Council and are always turned out in hats, but not hats the Council would approve. Mr. Lacey, the locksmith,, shups up his shop for a while and goes to exchange time of day with Mr. Slube at the cigar store. Mr. Koochagian, the tailor, waters luxuriant jungle of plants in his window, gives them a critical look from the outside, accepts compliments on them from two passers-by, fingers the leaves on the plane tree in front of our house with a thoughtful gardener's appraisal, and crosses the street for a bite at the Ideal where he can keep an eye on customers and wigwag across the message that he is coming. The baby carriages come out, and clusters of everyone from toddlers with dolls to teenagers with homework gather at the stoops. When I get home from work, the ballet is reaching its cresendo. This is the time roller skates and stilts and tricycles and games in the lee of the stoop with bottletops and plastic cowboys, this is the time of bundles and packages, zigzagging from the drug store to the fruit stand and back over to the butcher's; this is the time when teenagers, all dressed up, are pausing to ask if their slips shows or their collars look right; this is the time when beautiful girls get out of MG's; this is the time when the fire engines go through; this is the time when anybody you know on Hudson street will go by. As the darkness thickens and Mr. Halpert moors the laundry cart to the cellar door again, the ballet goes under lights, eddying back nad forth but intensifying at the bright spotlight pools of Joe's sidewalk pizza, the bars, the delicatessen, the restaurant and the drug store. The night workers stop now at the delicatessen, to pick up salami and a container of milk. Things have settled down for the evening but the street and its ballet have not come to a stop. I know the deep night ballet and its seasons best from waking long after midnight to tend a baby and, sitting in the dark, seeing the shadows and hearing sounds of the sidewalk. Mostly it is a sound like infinitely patterning snatches of party conversation, and, about three in the morning, singing, very good singing. Sometimes their is a sharpness and anger or sad, sad weeping, or a flurry of search for a string of beads broken. One night a young man came roaring along, bellowing terrible language at two girls whom he had apparently picked up and who were disappointing him. Doors opened, a wary semicircle formed around him, not too close, until police came. Out came the heads, too, along the Hudsons street, offering opinion, "Drunk...Crazy...A wild kid from the suburbs" Deep in the night, I am almost unaware of how many people are on the street unless someone calls the together. Like the bagpipe. Who the piper is and why he favored our street I have no idea.

To Anita Pollitzer Canyon, Texas 11 September 1916 Tonight I walked into the sunset — to mail some letters — the whole sky — and there is so much of it out here — was just blazing — and grey blue clouds were rioting all through the hotness of it — and the ugly little buildings and windmills looked great against it. But some way or other I didn't seem to like the redness much so after I mailed the letters I walked home — and kept on walking — The Eastern sky was all grey blue — bunches of clouds — different kinds of clouds — sticking around everywhere and the whole thing — lit up — first in one place — then in another with flashes of lightning — sometimes just sheet lightning — and sometimes sheet lightning with a sharp bright zigzag flashing across it —. I walked out past the last house — past the last locust tree — and sat on the fence for a long time — looking — just looking at the lightning — you see there was nothing but sky and flat prairie land — land that seems more like the ocean than anything else I know — There was a wonderful moon — Well I just sat there and had a great time all by myself — Not even many night noises — just the wind — I wondered what you are doing — It is absurd the way I love this country — Then when I came back — it was funny — roads just shoot across blocks anywhere — all the houses looked alike — and I almost got lost — I had to laugh at myself — I couldnt tell which house was home — I am loving the plains more than ever it seems — and the SKY — Anita you have never seen SKY — it is wonderful — Pat.

One of the few entry points to the Baltic Sea, the Kattegat passage is a busy and treacherous waterway. The entire region is a maze of fractured islands, shallow waters and tricky cur-rents which test the skills of all mariners. A vital sea route, the strait is used by large container ships, oil tankers and cruise ships alike and provides a crucial link between the Baltic coun-tries and Europe and the rest of the world. Navigating is difficult even in calm weather and clear visibility is a rare occurrence in these higher latitudes. During severe winters, it’s not uncommon for sections of the Baltic Sea to freeze, with ice occasionally drifting out of the straits, carried by the surface currents. The ship I was commandeering was on a back-and-forth ‘pendulum’ run, stopping at the ports of St Petersburg (Russia), Kotka (Finland), Gdańsk (Poland), Aarhus (Denmark) and Klaipėda (Lithuania) in the Baltic Sea, and Bremerhaven (Ger-many) and Rotterdam (Netherlands) in the North Sea. On this particular trip, the weather gods were in a benevolent mood and we were transiting under a faultless blue sky in one of the most picturesque regions of the world. The strait got narrower as we sailed closer to Zealand (Sjælland), the largest of the off-lying Danish islands. Up ahead, as we zigzagged through the laby-rinth of islands, the tall and majestic Great Belt Bridge sprang into view. The pylons lift the suspension bridge some sixty-five metres above sea level allowing it to accommodate the largest of the ocean cruise liners that frequently pass under its domi-nating expanse.

Something was flickering and swimming exactly on the spot he was looking at, so that he couldn’t see it clearly, though everything around it seemed clear, at least until he moved his gaze to look at something else and the flickery thing moved too. It was always in the way, and he could see nothing behind it. He brushed the page, but there was nothing there. He rubbed his eyes, but it still didn’t go away. In fact, it was even more curious because he could still see it when his eyes were closed. And it was very slowly getting bigger. It wasn’t a spot anymore. It was a line: a curved line, like a loosely scribbled letter C, and it was sparkling and flickering in a zigzag pattern of blacks and whites and silvers. Asta said, “What is it?” “Can you see it?” “I can feel something. What can you see?” He described it as well as he could. “And what can you feel?” he added. “Something strange, like a sort of far-off feeling…as if we’re a long way apart and I can see for miles and everything’s very clear and calm….I’m not afraid of anything, just calm….What’s it doing now?” “Just getting bigger. I can see past it now. It’s getting closer, and I can see the words on the page and everything through the middle of it. It’s making me feel dizzy, a bit. If I try and look at it directly, it slides away. It’s about this big now.” He held out his left hand with the thumb and forefinger curved round, indicating the gap between them to be about as long as the thumb itself. “Are we going blind?” said Asta. “I don’t think so, ’cause I can see perfectly well through it. It’s just getting closer and bigger, but sort of sliding out of the way too, out towards the edge…as if it’s just going to float past and behind my head.” They sat in the quiet little room, in the warm lamplight, and waited until the sparkling line had drifted closer and closer to the edge of his vision, and eventually just beyond it, and then was gone. Altogether, from beginning to end, the experience lasted about twenty minutes. “That was very strange,” he said. “Like spangled. Like that hymn—you remember: And the Hornèd moon at night, ’Mid her spangled sisters bright. It was spangled.” “Was it real?” “Of course it was real. I saw it.” “But I couldn’t see it. It wasn’t outside. It was in you.” “Yeah…but it was real. And you were feeling something. That was real too. So it must be part of it.” “Yeah…I wonder what it means.” “Maybe…I don’t know. Maybe nothing.” “No, it must be something,” she said firmly.

All day long the red squirrels came and went, and afforded me much entertainment by their manoeuvres. One would approach at first warily through the shrub-oaks, running over the snow crust by fits and starts like a leaf blown by the wind, now a few paces this way, with wonderful speed and waste of energy, making inconceivable haste with his “trotters,” as if it were for a wager, and now as many paces that way, but never getting on more than half a rod at a time; and then suddenly pausing with a ludicrous expression and a gratuitous somerset, as if all the eyes in the universe were fixed on him,—for all the motions of a squirrel, even in the most solitary recesses of the forest, imply spectators as much as those of a dancing girl,—wasting more time in delay and circumspection than would have sufficed to walk the whole distance,—I never saw one walk,— and then suddenly, before you could say Jack Robinson, he would be in the top of a young pitch-pine, winding up his clock and chiding all imaginary spectators, soliloquizing and talking to all the universe at the same time,—for no reason that I could ever detect, or he himself was aware of, I suspect. At length he would reach the corn, and selecting a suitable ear, frisk about in the same uncertain trigonometrical way to the top-most stick of my wood-pile, before my window, where he looked me in the face, and there sit for hours, supplying himself with a new ear from time to time, nibbling at first voraciously and throwing the half-naked cobs about; till at length he grew more dainty still and played with his food, tasting only the inside of the kernel, and the ear, which was held balanced over the stick by one paw, slipped from his careless grasp and fell to the ground, when he would look over at it with a ludicrous expression of uncertainty, as if suspecting that it had life, with a mind not made up whether to get it again, or a new one, or be off; now thinking of corn, then listening to hear what was in the wind. So the little impudent fellow would waste many an ear in a forenoon; till at last, seizing some longer and plumper one, considerably bigger than himself, and skilfully balancing it, he would set out with it to the woods, like a tiger with a buffalo, by the same zig-zag course and frequent pauses, scratching along with it as if it were too heavy for him and falling all the while, making its fall a diagonal between a perpendicular and horizontal, being determined to put it through at any rate;—a singularly frivolous and whimsical fellow;—and so he would get off with it to where he lived, perhaps carry it to the top of a pine tree forty or fifty rods distant, and I would afterwards find the cobs strewn about the woods in various directions.

And if you wish to receive of the ancient city an impression with which the modern one can no longer furnish you, climb—on the morning of some grand festival, beneath the rising sun of Easter or of Pentecost—climb upon some elevated point, whence you command the entire capital; and be present at the wakening of the chimes. Behold, at a signal given from heaven, for it is the sun which gives it, all those churches quiver simultaneously. First come scattered strokes, running from one church to another, as when musicians give warning that they are about to begin. Then, all at once, behold!—for it seems at times, as though the ear also possessed a sight of its own,—behold, rising from each bell tower, something like a column of sound, a cloud of harmony. First, the vibration of each bell mounts straight upwards, pure and, so to speak, isolated from the others, into the splendid morning sky; then, little by little, as they swell they melt together, mingle, are lost in each other, and amalgamate in a magnificent concert. It is no longer anything but a mass of sonorous vibrations incessantly sent forth from the numerous belfries; floats, undulates, bounds, whirls over the city, and prolongs far beyond the horizon the deafening circle of its oscillations. Nevertheless, this sea of harmony is not a chaos; great and profound as it is, it has not lost its transparency; you behold the windings of each group of notes which escapes from the belfries. You can follow the dialogue, by turns grave and shrill, of the treble and the bass; you can see the octaves leap from one tower to another; you watch them spring forth, winged, light, and whistling, from the silver bell, to fall, broken and limping from the bell of wood; you admire in their midst the rich gamut which incessantly ascends and re-ascends the seven bells of Saint-Eustache; you see light and rapid notes running across it, executing three or four luminous zigzags, and vanishing like flashes of lightning. Yonder is the Abbey of Saint-Martin, a shrill, cracked singer; here the gruff and gloomy voice of the Bastille; at the other end, the great tower of the Louvre, with its bass. The royal chime of the palace scatters on all sides, and without relaxation, resplendent trills, upon which fall, at regular intervals, the heavy strokes from the belfry of Notre-Dame, which makes them sparkle like the anvil under the hammer. At intervals you behold the passage of sounds of all forms which come from the triple peal of Saint-Germain-des-Prés. Then, again, from time to time, this mass of sublime noises opens and gives passage to the beats of the Ave Maria, which bursts forth and sparkles like an aigrette of stars. Below, in the very depths of the concert, you confusedly distinguish the interior chanting of the churches, which exhales through the vibrating pores of their vaulted roofs. Assuredly, this is an opera which it is worth the trouble of listening to. Ordinarily, the noise which escapes from Paris by day is the city speaking; by night, it is the city breathing; in this case, it is the city singing. Lend an ear, then, to this concert of bell towers; spread over all the murmur of half a million men, the eternal plaint of the river, the infinite breathings of the wind, the grave and distant quartette of the four forests arranged upon the hills, on the horizon, like immense stacks of organ pipes; extinguish, as in a half shade, all that is too hoarse and too shrill about the central chime, and say whether you know anything in the world more rich and joyful, more golden, more dazzling, than this tumult of bells and chimes;—than this furnace of music,—than these ten thousand brazen voices chanting simultaneously in the flutes of stone, three hundred feet high,—than this city which is no longer anything but an orchestra,—than this symphony which produces the noise of a tempest.

Not liking to think of him so, and wondering if they had guessed at dinner why he suddenly became irritable when they talked about fame and books lasting, wondering if the children were laughing at that, she twitched the stockings out, and all the fine gravings came drawn with steel instruments about her lips and forehead, and she grew still like a tree which has been tossing and quivering and now, when the breeze falls, settles, leaf by leaf, into quiet. It didn't matter, any of it, she thought. A great man, a great book, fame—who could tell? She knew nothing about it. But it was his way with him, his truthfulness—for instance at dinner she had been thinking quite instinctively, If only he would speak! She had complete trust in him. And dismissing all this, as one passes in diving now a weed, now a straw, now a bubble, she felt again, sinking deeper, as she had felt in the hall when the others were talking, There is something I want—something I have come to get, and she fell deeper and deeper without knowing quite what it was, with her eyes closed. And she waited a little, knitting, wondering, and slowly rose those words they had said at dinner, "the China rose is all abloom and buzzing with the honey bee," began washing from side to side of her mind rhythmically, and as they washed, words, like little shaded lights, one red, one blue, one yellow, lit up in the dark of her mind, and seemed leaving their perches up there to fly across and across, or to cry out and to be echoed; so she turned and felt on the table beside her for a book. And all the lives we ever lived And all the lives to be, Are full of trees and changing leaves, she murmured, sticking her needles into the stocking. And she opened the book and began reading here and there at random, and as she did so, she felt that she was climbing backwards, upwards, shoving her way up under petals that curved over her, so that she only knew this is white, or this is red. She did not know at first what the words meant at all. Steer, hither steer your winged pines, all beaten Mariners she read and turned the page, swinging herself, zigzagging this way and that, from one line to another as from one branch to another, from one red and white flower to another, until a little sound roused her—her husband slapping his thighs. Their eyes met for a second; but they did not want to speak to each other. They had nothing to say, but something seemed, nevertheless, to go from him to her. It was the life, it was the power of it, it was the tremendous humour, she knew, that made him slap his thighs. Don't interrupt me, he seemed to be saying, don't say anything; just sit there. And he went on reading. His lips twitched. It filled him. It fortified him. He clean forgot all the little rubs and digs of the evening, and how it bored him unutterably to sit still while people ate and drank interminably, and his being so irritable with his wife and so touchy and minding when they passed his books over as if they didn't exist at all. But now, he felt, it didn't matter a damn who reached Z (if thought ran like an alphabet from A to Z). Somebody would reach it—if not he, then another. This man's strength and sanity, his feeling for straight forward simple things, these fishermen, the poor old crazed creature in Mucklebackit's cottage made him feel so vigorous, so relieved of something that he felt roused and triumphant and could not choke back his tears. Raising the book a little to hide his face, he let them fall and shook his head from side to side and forgot himself completely (but not one or two reflections about morality and French novels and English novels and Scott's hands being tied but his view perhaps being as true as the other view), forgot his own bothers and failures completely in poor Steenie's drowning and Mucklebackit's sorrow (that was Scott at his best) and the astonishing delight and feeling of vigour that it gave him.