A Line Made By Walking Quotes

Whether or not I want to see him, I do not want him to see me. ~ Sara Baume

But nowadays I feel guilty that I am granted the immunity of the artistically gifted, having never actually achieved anything to prove myself worthy. ~ Sara Baume

The old summer's-end melancholy nips at my heels. There's no school to go back to; no detail of my life will change come the onset of September; yet still, I feel the old trepidation. ~ Sara Baume

Sometimes things happen that give me cause to believe I no longer exist. Car park barriers which do not lift when I drive towards them, automatic doors which do not open automatically as I approach. ~ Sara Baume

But I have never wanted to be perceived as chatty and bright. I have always wanted to be solemn and mysterious. ~ Sara Baume

The last time I went out at night in the city was almost a year ago. It began with anxiety, then I was pleasantly pissed for a couple of hours, and finally, around the point at which people started taking to the dance floor, I sobered and saddened and the old chant returned: I want to go home. ~ Sara Baume

This morning, I see the lead in my glass tumbler. A slim, bright glint, a silverfish. I feel it collecting in my blood, papercutting the lining of my veins. ~ Sara Baume

I decided that if I didn't allow myself to fall asleep, then I wouldn't have to wake up again and despair. ~ Sara Baume

This morning, the sun endures past dawn. I realise that it is August: the summer's last stand. ~ Sara Baume

There really isn't much wrong with me,' I say, 'it's just that, well, I'm not like other people; I don't want the things they want. And this is not right, I mean, in other people's eyes, and I feel as though they feel they are duty-bound to normalise me, that it isn't okay just to not want the things they want, you know? ~ Sara Baume

I lie down and think about how this whole long, strange summer ought to end in a substantial event. But, probably, won't. For the first time I acknowledge the possibility that nothing will die, or change, or even happen. ~ Sara Baume

Though I am naturally curious about people, I'm also naturally uneasy when they are right in front of me; when I am right in front of them. ~ Sara Baume

I can't remember the name of the piece, or the artist. Maybe it wasn't even an artwork. Why must I automatically assume that every strange object is a sculpture, that every public display of unorthodox behavior is an act of performance. ~ Sara Baume

My mother says: 'People who suffer from anxiety are usually those with the most vivid imaginations. ~ Sara Baume

But now I remember, of course, I'm never going to be old. ~ Sara Baume

My only chance is to pretend it's a day like any other; to keep the despair only as great as on all the others. ~ Sara Baume

I've always longed to have a patch of personal wilderness. Of waist-high grass entwined with wildflowers through which I can prance; within which I can lie down and disappear from sight. ~ Sara Baume

I look at the cake in my mother's arms and think: here stands the only person in the whole world who'd go to such trouble for fractious, ungrateful me. ~ Sara Baume

I know with unqualified certainty that I want to die. But I also know with equivalent certainty that I won't do anything about it. That I will only remain here and wait for death to indulge me. ~ Sara Baume

There's a table with some catalogues and a guest book in the corner; there are artworks. Today, I need so badly to be inspired by them, even though I hate that word: inspiration. It crops up in too many advertisements, politcians' speeches, Disney films, its meaning obliterated. I refuse to be 'inspired' in the same insipid way that ad executives and politicians and Hollywood producers suggest I should be. What I need from these works is to be reminded of why I used to care about art - so much that I'd try and make it for myself. ~ Sara Baume

It makes me wonder if living under tragic circumstances inflects a person's sentences, irresistibly, with poetry. ~ Sara Baume

My phone doesn't ring and the doorbell doesn't either and I begin to wonder whether I am still alive. ~ Sara Baume

No matter how far I try to travel from people, people always appear. Either they follow me, or they're already there, and I followed them, unwittingly. ~ Sara Baume

I tried to think of a vice I want to sacrifice, and ended up reasoning that I need my bad habits, desperately, just to coax myself through each day. ~ Sara Baume

It happens so seldom; I must catch and keep this slender yearning, a rare beetle in a jam-jar trap. But mustering will is not the same as wanting. I lie in the garden and think about all the footsteps between my body on the grass and my pencil-case and notebook on the table in the sun room. All the muscles I have to flex and relax to get myself there. ~ Sara Baume

The entrepreneurs are only about my age, probably younger, but they don't seem so. Their tailored clothes and unbending hairdos, their clipboards and laser pointers, make them seem like real grown-up people in a way I have never been. ~ Sara Baume

Tim bid us good-bye after helping us carry in my three-hundred-pound suitcase, and Marlboro Man and I looked around our quiet house, which was spick-and-span and smelled of fresh paint and leather cowboy boots, which lined the wall near the front door. The entry glowed with the light of the setting sun coming in the window, and I reached down to grab one of my bags so I could carry it to the bedroom. But before my hand made it to the handle, Marlboro Man grabbed me tightly around the waist and carried me over to the leather sofa, where we fell together in a tired heap of jet lag, emotional exhaustion, and--ironically, given the week we'd just endured--a sudden burst of lust.
"Welcome home," he said, nuzzling his face into my neck. Mmmm. This was a familiar feeling.
"Thank you," I said, closing my eyes and savoring every second. As his lips made their way across my neck, I could hear the sweet and reassuring sound of cows in the pasture east of our house. We were home.
"You feel so good," he said, moving his hands to the zipper of my casual black jacket.
"You do, too," I said, stroking the back of his closely cut hair as his arms wrapped more and more tightly around my waist. "But…uh…" I paused.
My black jacket was by now on the floor.
"I…uh…," I continued. "I think I need to take a shower." And I did. I couldn't do the precise calculation of what it had meant for my hygiene to cross back over the international date line, but as far as I was conce ~ Ree Drummond

There has always been a temptation to classify economic goods in clearly defined groups, about which a number of short and sharp propositions could be made, to gratify at once the student's desire for logical precision, and the popular liking for dogmas that have the air of being profound and are yet easily handled. But great mischief seems to have been done by yielding to this temptation, and drawing broad artificial lines of division where Nature has made none. The more simple and absolute an economic doctrine is, the greater will be the confusion which it brings into attempts to apply economic doctrines to practice, if the dividing lines to which it refers cannot be found in real life. There is not in real life a clear line of division between things that are and are not Capital, or that are and are not Necessaries, or again between labour that is and is not Productive. ~ Alfred Marshall

The type of cartooning that I think is generally referred to as 'alternative' or 'underground' is usually - the distinction is usually in terms of whether it's made by one person, the entire thing is done by one hand or more of a production line process, which is how the comics that we grew up reading were made. ~ Adrian Tomine

Mysteries are powerful, Cialdini says, because they create a need for closure. "You've heard of the famous Aha! experience, right?" he says. "Well, the Aha! experience is much more satisfying when it is preceded by the Huh? experience." By creating a mystery, the writer-astronomer made dust interesting. He sustained attention, not just for the span of a punch line but for the span of a twenty-page article dense with information on scientific theories and experimentation. ~ Chip Heath

You could take up the line that some of the gnostics took up - a line which I often thought was a very plausible one - that as a matter of fact this world that we know was made by the devil at a moment when God was not looking. There is a good deal to be said for that, and I am not concerned to refute it. ~ Bertrand Russell

Our lips just trespassed on those inner labyrinths hidden deep within our ears, filled them with the private music of wicked words, hers in many languages, mine in the off color of my own tongue, until as our tones shifted, and our consonants spun and squealed, rattled faster, hesitated, raced harder, syllables soon melting with groans, or moans finding purchase in new words, or old words, or made-up words, until we gathered up our heat and refused to release it, enjoying too much the dark language we had suddenly stumbled upon, craved to, carved to, not a communication really but a channeling of our rumored desires, hers for all I know gone to Black Forests and wolves, mine banging back to a familiar form, that great revenant mystery I still could only hear the shape of, which in spite of our separate lusts and individual cries still continued to drive us deeper into stranger tones, our mutual desire to keep gripping the burn fueled by sound, hers screeching, mine – I didn't hear mine – only hears, probably counter-pointing mine, a high-pitched cry, then a whisper dropping unexpectedly to practically a bark, a grunt, whatever, no sense any more, and suddenly no more curves either, just the straight away, some line crossed, where every fractured sound already spoken finally compacts into one long agonizing word, easily exceeding a hundred letters, even thunder, anticipating the inevitable letting go, when the heat is ultimately too much to bear, threatening to burn, scar, tea ~ Mark Z. Danielewski

Had the girl had any common sense, she would have dropped the line at once. But she had no sense. She made no sense. She was a pale English rose of a governess, adrift in a watery wilderness, on her way to a grueling post on a godforsaken island, when any fool could have told her-a woman so lovely need never work for her keep.
Had the men around her any sense, they would have cut the rope immediately. But they were idiots, bloody shite-for-brains idiots, too entranced by the pretty girl in peril to reach for their knives.
Had Gray his own knife, he would have drawn it. But he wasn't wearing his knife, because he wasn't the captain on this ship, was he? Nor an officer, nor even part of the crew. He was just a stupid, overdressed passenger who hadn't strapped on a goddamned knife that morning because it might ruin the lines of his goddamned brand-new coat. ~ Tessa Dare

Be so busy loving your life and your loved ones so that you have no time for the naysayers, doubters, haters, or regrets. You will be joined on this mission by other AAOC's some known to you and some yet to reveal themselves to you as you progress on this journey known as life. The reward will be a legacy of meaningful lessons learned and experiences shared with family and friends which will make it clear that you have truly lived not simply existed. Like most challenges that seem incredibly hard, this is no different. However, what awaits you at the finish line is what you have made of it. Agent 025 The Oracle ~ Donavan Nelson Butler

While most science moves in a sort of curve, being constantly corrected by new evidence, this science flies off into space in a straight line uncorrected by anything. But the habit of forming conclusions, as they can really be formed in more fruitful fields, is so fixed in the scientific mind that it cannot resist talking like this. It talks about the idea suggested by one scrap of bone as if it were something like the aeroplane which is constructed at last out of whole scrapheaps of scraps of metal. The trouble with the professor of the prehistoric is that he cannot scrap his scrap. The marvellous and triumphant aeroplane is made out of a hundred mistakes. The student of origins can only make one mistake and stick to it. ~ G.K. Chesterton

The truck looked just like a Civil War truck if they'd had trucks back in those times. But the truck ran, even though it didn't have a gas tank.
There was an empty fifty-gallon gasoline drum on the bed of the truck with a smaller gasoline can on top of it, and there was a syphon leading from that can to the fuel line.
It worked like this. Lee Mellon drove and I stayed on the back of the truck and made sure everything went all right with the syphon, that it didn't get knocked out of kilter by the motion of the truck.
We looked kind of funny going down the highway. I'd never had the heart to ask Lee Mellon what happened to the gas tank. I figured it was best not to know. ~ Richard Brautigan

Everything surrounding the ship is gray or dark blue and nothing is particularly hip, and once or maybe twice a day this thin strip of white appears at the horizon line but its so far in the distance you cant be sure whether its land or more sky. Its impossible to believe that any kind of life sustains itself beneath this flat, slate-gray sky or in an ocean so calm and vast, that anything breathing could exist in such limbo, and any movement that occurs below the surface is so faint its like some kind of small accident, a tiny indifferent moment, a minor incident that shouldnt have happened, and in the sky there's never any trace of sun - the air seems vaguely transparent and disposable, with the texture of Kleenex - yet its always bright in a dull way, the wind usually constant as we drift through it, weightless, and below us the trail the ship leaves behind is a Jacuzzi blue that fades within minutes into the same boring gray sheet that blankets everything else surrounding the ship. One day a normal looking rainbow appears and you vaguely notice it, thinking about the enormous sums of money the Kiss reunion tour made over the summer, or maybe a whale swims along the starboard side, waving its fin, showing off. It's easy to feel safe, for people to look at you and think someone's going somewhere. Surrounded by so much boring space, five days is a long time to stay unimpressed. ~ Bret Easton Ellis

Once the question of grace and free will is reduced to a juridical matter, once witnesses line up with plaintiff or defendant and the jurors strive to determine who is entitled to what, we are inevitably tempted to act as if everything that was given to free will was taken from grace and everything conceded to grace was withdrawn from our own liberty.

On both sides of the debate, whether one is arguing "for grace" or whether one is a defender of "nature," it seems that everyone is more or less obsessed with this great illusion of ownership and possession. What is strictly mine? How much can God demand of me - how much can I demand of Him? Even if I come up with the answer that nothing is strictly mine at all, I have still falsified the perspective by asking a foolish question in the first place. "How much is mine?" Should such a question ever be asked? Should such a division ever be made at all? To ask such a question makes it almost impossible for me to grasp the paradox which is the only possible answer: That everything is mine precisely because everything is His. If it were not His, it could never be mine. If it could not be mine, He would not even want it for Himself. And all that is His is His very self. All that He gives me becomes, in some way, my own self. What, then is mine? He is mine. And what is His? I am His. ~ Thomas Merton

Can you sharpen this for me, please?"

Logan leaned across the table and took the pencil from him. "You want me to play with your pencil, Tate?"

"Hilarious. The sharpener is right by you. You just have to pick it up and slide it in."

As soon as the words left his mouth and Logan's quirked into an arrogant line, Tate bit his tongue.

"Really? Did you really just say that to me?"

Feeling more comfortable than ever with Logan and this group, Tate shrugged and nodded. Time to give it to Logan as good as he gives.

"Yeah. Is there a problem? You just line it up...and slide it in."

"You know, Tate - "

"Don't do it." Tate cut him off as he moved his foot, the one he'd had sitting between Logan's feet all night, so his shin bumped Logan's calf.

"Do what?"

"Say something dirty. I know you're dying to, but just sharpen the pencil."

Logan picked up the sharpener and made a big show of inserting the tip in the hole.

"Jesus," Shelly muttered from beside Logan. "I thought Rachel and Cole were bad. ~ Ella Frank

She saw the others were gathered nearby, though MacRieve stood off to the side. All eyes were on her, with Cade's focus on her neck. Unnerved by their scrutiny, she wanted to blurt, "We didn't do anything!"
Instead she turned to Rydstrom and casually asked, "Hey, top, what's the op?"
MacRieve grated, "Who made him the . . . top?"
"Rydstrom's like a king." She looked him up and down. "And you're . . . not."
"I'm third in line . . ." He trailed off at Rydstrom's amused glance. ~ Kresley Cole

Time does not heal wounds. It's a body's ritual that does. The instinctual cleansing with rain or other waters, the application of salves. Despite the sting. Even neglected, the body begins to take care. To repair itself. Blood clots, tissues regenerate, flesh scars. Soon, the thin white line is the only evidence of the pain. It is the body, not time. Time does nothing except create distance between the body and that which caused it harm.
Recollection of fear can be stronger than the original fear itself. Similarly, bliss is sometimes more vivid when recollected. How else do you explain longing? Longing for what has already passed. That's the real pain.
But you insisted, you pried with your fingers to see. You retuned to me after I turned away. You made me recollect for you, collect again and again for you, inturrupting the healing with your curiosity.
Now that I have given you the words, you may long for them. You may miss me. YOu may try to find the notes to the song again and again and won't be able to find them. Perhaps, the wounds I made will already have begun to scar. Maybe the body will have begun its ritual of forgetting.
I told you not to ask for haunted, not to ask me to recollect. Because recollection is like tearing at closed wounds. Like pealing back the careful tissue put there by the body to make it safe. And because remembered pain is always worse than the original pain, because this time it is expected. This time you already know how ~ T. Greenwood

Given an area of law that legislators were happy to hand over to the affected industries and a technology that was both unfamiliar and threatening, the prospects for legislative insight were poor. Lawmakers were assured by lobbyists
a) that this was business as usual, that no dramatic changes were being made by the Green or White papers; or
b) that the technology presented a terrible menace to the American cultural industries, but that prompt and statesmanlike action would save the day; or
c) that layers of new property rights, new private enforcers of those rights, and technological control and surveillance measures were all needed in order to benefit consumers, who would now be able to "purchase culture by the sip rather than by the glass" in a pervasively monitored digital environment.
In practice, somewhat confusingly, these three arguments would often be combined. Legislators' statements seemed to suggest that this was a routine Armageddon in which firm, decisive statesmanship was needed to preserve the digital status quo in a profoundly transformative and proconsumer way. Reading the congressional debates was likely to give one conceptual whiplash.
To make things worse, the press was - in 1995, at least - clueless about these issues. It was not that the newspapers were ignoring the Internet. They were paying attention - obsessive attention in some cases. But as far as the mainstream press was concerned, the story line on the Internet was sex: po ~ James Boyle

In the movie I was played by an actor who actually looked more like me than the character the author portrayed in the book: I wasn't blond, I wasn't tan, and neither was the actor. I also suddenly became the movie's moral compass, spouting AA jargon, castigating everyone's drug use and trying to save Julian. (I'll sell my car," I warn the actor playing Julian's dealer. "Whatever it takes.") This was slightly less true of Blair's character, played by a girl who actually seemed like she belonged in our group-- jittery, sexually available, easily wounded. Julian became the sentimentalized version of himself, acted by a talented, sad-faced clown, who has an affair with Blair and then realizes he has to let her go because I was his best bud. "Be good to her," Julian tells Clay. "She really deserves it." The sheer hypocrisy of this scene must have made the author blanch. Smiling secretly to myself with perverse satisfaction when the actor delivered that line, I then glanced at Blair in the darkness of the screening room. ~ Bret Easton Ellis

There'd never been a clothing line made by a young woman like me: a multiethnic woman who has one foot in Gucci and one foot in the ghetto. ~ Kimora Lee Simmons

You will not find Jesus in heaven, reclining on a cloud. He isn't in church on Sunday morning, sitting in the pews. He isn't locked away in the Vatican or held hostage by a denominational seminary. Rather, Jesus is sitting in the Emergency Room, an uninsured, undocumented immigrant needing healing. He is behind bars, so far from his parole date he can't think that far into the future. He is homeless, evicted from his apartment, waiting in line at the shelter for a bed and a cup of soup. He is the poor child living in government housing with lice in his hair, the stripes of abuse on his body and a growl in his stomach. He is an old forgotten woman in a roach infested apartment who no one thinks of anymore. He is a refugee in Sudan, living in squalor. He is the abused and molested child who falsely feels responsible for the evil that is perpetrated against her. He is the young woman who hates herself for the decisions she has made, decisions that have imperiled her life, but did the best she could, torn between impossible choices. Jesus is anyone without power, ability or the means to help themselves, and he beckons us to come to him; not on a do-gooding crusade, but in solidarity and embrace. ~ Ronnie McBrayer

Statements made by distant church bells remind me it is Sunday. Today the sky has become cloudy. I have been watching the clouds and it occurs to me that I have never done this in my life before, simply sit and watch clouds. As a child I would have been far too anxious to 'waste time' in this way. And my mother would have stopped me. As I write this I am sitting on my plot of grass behind the house where I have put a chair, cushions, rugs. It is evening. Thick lumpy slate-blue clouds, their bulges lit up to a lighter blue, move slowly across a sky of muddy and yet brilliant gold, a sort of dulled gilt effect. At the horizon there is a light glittering slightly jagged silver line, like modern jewellery. Beneath it the sea is a live choppy lyrical goldeny-brown, jumping with white flecks. The air is warm. Another happy day. ('Whatever will you do down there?' they asked.)
In a quiet surreptitious way I am feeling very pleased with myself. ~ Iris Murdoch

The small Japanese immortal sat cross-legged, his two swords resting flat on the ground before him. He folded his hands in his lap, closed his eyes and breathing through his nose, forcing the chill night air deep into his chest. He held it for a count of five, then shaped his lips into an O and blew it out again, puncturing a tiny hole in the swirling fog before his face.
Even though he would never admit it to anyone, Niten loved this moment. He had no affection for what was to come, but this brief time, when all preparations for battle were made and there was nothing left to do but wait, when the world felt still, as if it was holding its breath, was special. This moment, when he was facing death, was when he felt completely, fully alive.
He'd still been called Miyamoto Musashi and had been a teenager when he'd first discovered the genuine beauty of the quiet moment before a fight. Every breath suddenly tasted like the finest food, every sound was distinct and divine, and even on the foulest battlefields, his eyes would be drawn to something simple and elegant: a flower, the shape of a branch, the curl of a cloud.
A hundred years ago, Aoife had given him a book as a birthday present. He hadn't had the heart to tell her that she'd missed his birthday by a month, but he had treasured the book, the first edition of The Professor by Charlotte Bronte. It included a line he had never forgotten: In the midst of life we are in death. Years later, he'd heard Ghandi tak ~ Michael Scott

The size and shape of the birds have also made it impossible for commercial turkeys to mount and breed naturally. This means that workers at breeding facilities have to masturbate male turkeys, called toms, to collect their semen. Then, in rapid succession, the females are turned upside down and their legs secured by a clamp. The semen is put in straws and inserted into the hen. She's then released from the clamp, making way for the next in line. Not a pleasant process for the bird, nor a job one can take much pride in. ~ Gene Baur

The novel was born with the Modern Era, which made man, to quote Heidegger, the "only real subject," the ground for everything. It is largely through the novel that man as an individual was established on the European scene. Away from the novel, in our real lives, we know very little about our parents as they were before our birth; we have only fragmentary knowledge of the people close to us: we see them come and go and scarcely have they vanished than their place is taken over by others: they form a long line of replaceable beings. Only the novel separates out an individual, trains a light on his biography, his ideas, his feelings, makes him irreplaceable: makes him the center of everything. ~ Milan Kundera

I took care to replace the Compendium in its correct pamphlet, and in doing so dislodged a slim pamphlet by Grastrom, one of the most eccentric authors in Solarist literature. I had read the pamphlet, which was dictated by the urge to understand what lies beyond the individual, man, and the human species. It was the abstract, acidulous work of an autodidact who had previously made a series of unusual contributions to various marginal and rarefied branches of quantum physics. In this fifteen-page booklet (his magnum opus!), Grastrom set out to demonstrate that the most abstract achievements of science, the most advanced theories and victories of mathematics represented nothing more than a stumbling, one or two-step progression from our rude, prehistoric, anthropomorphic understanding of the universe around us. He pointed out correspondences with the human body-the projections of our sense, the structure of our physical organization, and the physiological limitations of man-in the equations of the theory of relativity, the theorem of magnetic fields and the various unified field theories. Grastrom's conclusion was that there neither was, nor could be any question of 'contact' between mankind and any nonhuman civilization. This broadside against humanity made no specific mention of the living ocean, but its constant presence and scornful, victorious silence could be felt between every line, at any rate such had been my own impression. It was Gibarian who drew it to my attention, ~ Stanisław Lem

Romero never made any contortions, always it was straight and pure and natural in line. The others twisted themselves like cork-screws, their elbows raised, and leaned against the flanks of the bull after his horns had passed, to give a faked look of danger. Afterward, all that was faked turned bad and gave an unpleasant feeling. Romero's bull-fighting gave real emotion, because he kept the absolute purity of line in his movements and always quietly and calmly let the horns pass him close each time. He did not have to emphasize their closeness. Brett saw how something that was beautiful done close to the bull was ridiculous if it were done a little way off. I told her how since the death of Joselito all the bull-fighters had been developing a technic that simulated this appearance of danger in order to give a fake emotional feeling, while the bull-fighter was really safe. Romero had the old thing, the holding of his purity of line through the maximum of exposure, while he dominated the bull by making him realize he was unattainable, while he prepared him for the killing. ~ Ernest Hemingway

Your existence is defiance: as those around you perish, you gather those passed souls and rise with them, as if your voice and leadership is made stronger by a long line of ancestors who stand tall, in spirit, with you. And I think that's what I loved most about your description of your physical self: 'I would not change anything about me. I represent my ancestors. ~ Ashley Asti

Reggie had to take several deep breaths just to keep from screaming "Take me!" like the heroine in some melodramatic romance novel. Ye gods and little fishes. Would she ever get used to the way this man looked? From the top of his tousled, black hair to the soles of his leather-clad feet, the man oozed masculine perfection. And he was all hers. She offered up a quick and fervent prayer of thanks while he prowled toward her on his hands and knees.
"Help," she whispered, a small smile curving her lips while lust darkened his eyes. "I think I'm about to be ravished by a wicked vampire. Help. Somebody please help me."
"There is no one to hear your screams, girl." He grinned at her, wicked and sexy, while he forced her legs wide apart and crawled between them. "I have you at my mercy."
"And will you be merciful?" Her question made it clear mercy was the last thing she wanted. She reached out to trace a line down the center of his chest before she wrapped her hand around his erect cock.
"Not even if you beg, milka. ~ Christine Warren

Like you, I grew up in a remote animist village. But then I went to a strict Catholic education in France. I was perfectly content to accept the grand Shee Yee of the Otherworld and the Lord B, and Jesus and his mother as my spiritual icons as long as I didn't have to spend too long on my knees. I would have settled for a committee. I just wanted order. But once I started to see my own ghosts I understood what these religions were all about. They were clubs set up by people like me to stop themselves from going mad. You know what I really think happens? You die. You wait for your number. There's a bit of time to take care of unfinished business. And you pass on. And, as you don't come back, nobody actually knows what you pass on to. But that description has never been acceptable. People want an ending. They don't want to vanish into thin air. So these great religious gurus made some endings up. The more comfortable and happy your ending, the more members signed up and paid their fees. And the kings and emperors started to add rules and regulations to subjugate the commoners and keep them in line. As so they invented hell and told you if you coveted your neighbor's mule you wouldn't even get into the clubhouse at the end of it all. ~ Colin Cotterill

Remember that a little learning can be a pleasant thing. Italy gives much, in beauty, gaiety, diversity of arts and landscapes, good humor and energy - willingly, without having to be coaxed or courted. Paradoxically, she requires (as do other countries, probably more so) and deserves some preparation as background to enhance her pleasures. It is almost impossible to read a total history of Italy; there was no united country until a hundred years ago, no single line of power, no concerted developments. It is useful, however, to know something about what made Siena run and stop, to become acquainted with the Estes and the Gonzagas, the Medicis and the Borgias, the names that were the local history. It helps to know something about the conflicts of the medieval church with the Holy Roman Empire, of the French, Spanish and early German kings who marked out large chunks of Italy for themselves or were invited to invade by a nervous Italian power. Above all, it helps to turn the pages of a few art and architecture books to become reacquainted with names other those of the luminous giants.

The informed visitors will not allow himself to be cowed by the deluge of art. See what interests or attracts you; there is no Italian Secret Service that reports on whether you have seen everything. If you try to see it all except as a possible professional task, you may come to resist it all. Relax, know what you like and don't like - not the worst of measures - and let the rest go. ~ Kate Simon

They go down the ladder and clamber out through the wardrobe. No soldiers wait in the hall with guns drawn. Nothing seems different at all. A line comes back to Marie-Laure from Jules Verne: Science, my lad, is made up of mistakes, but they are mistakes which it is useful to make, because they lead little by little to the truth. Etienne laughs as though to himself. "Do you remember what Madame said about the boiling frog?" "Yes, Uncle." "I wonder, who was supposed to be the frog? Her? Or the Germans? ~ Anthony Doerr

It seems to me that to-day, or I may say this present moment is a moment of trial for this people. I have often heard the President say, in relation to our having been driven from our homes, hated and mistreated by our enemies and the enemies of truth, that we were not then particularly tried. I believe it. I believe that then we were more happy and better alive to the work we are engaged in than many are to-day. I believe, of the two, take the period when the Saints were driven from the State of Missouri, or subsequently, when we were driven from the State of Illinois, and compare it with the present day, that to-day is the day of trial for this people. When you go along the street, and meet a man or a woman, do you know whether he or she is a Latter-day Saint or not? There was a time when we could walk up and down the streets and tell by the very countenances of men whether they were Latter-day Saints, or not; but can you do it now? You can not, unless you have greater discernment and more of the Spirit and power of God than I have. Why? Because many are trying as hard as they can to transform themselves into the very shape, character, and spirit of the world. Elders in Israel, young men, mothers and daughters in Israel are conforming to the world's fashions, until their very countenances indicate its spirit and character. This course is to the shame and disgrace of those who are so unwise. . . . And when the line is drawn and the choice made, there are many, who we think t ~ Joseph F. Smith

Alister McGrath has now written two books with my name in the title. The poet W. B. Yeats, when asked to say something about bad poets who made a living by parasitizing him, wrote the splendid line, 'was there ever dog that praised his fleas? ~ Richard Dawkins

Moderate giftedness has been made worthless by the printing press and radio and television and satellites and all that. A moderately gifted person who would have been a community treasure a thousand years ago has to give up, has to go into some other line of work, since modern communications put him or her into daily competition with nothing but the world's champions. ~ Kurt Vonnegut

Freud taught us that it wasn't God that imposed judgment on us and made us feel guilty when we stepped out of line. Instead, it was the superego - that idealized concept of what a good person is supposed to be and do - given to us by our parents, that condemned us for what had been hitherto regarded as ungodly behavior. ~ Tony Campolo

I was working with a Crookes tube covered by a shield of black cardboard. A piece of barium platino-cyanide paper lay on the bench there. I had been passing a current through the tube, and I noticed a peculiar black line across the paper ...
The effect was one which could only be produced in ordinary parlance by the passage of light. No light could come from the tube because the shield which covered it was impervious to any light known even that of the electric arc ...
I did not think I investigated ...
I assumed that the effect must have come from the tube since its character indicated that it could come from nowhere else ... It seemed at first a new kind of invisible light. It was clearly something new something unrecorded ...
There is much to do, and I am busy, very busy.
[Describing to a journalist the discovery of X-rays that he had made on 8 Nov 1895.] ~ Wilhelm Conrad Rontgen

Making these choices [to attend school instead of skipping], as it turned out, wasn't about willpower. I always admired people who "willed" themselves to do something, because I have never felt I was one of them. If sheer will were enough by itself, it would have been enough a long time ago, back on University Avenue, I figured. It wasn't, not for me anyway. Instead, I needed something to motivate me. I needed a few things that I could think about in my moments of weakness that would cause me to throw off the blanket and walk through the front door. More than will, I needed something to inspire me.

One thing that helped was a picture I kept in mind, this image that I used over and over whenever I was faced with these daily choices. I pictured a runner running on a racetrack. The image was set in the summertime and the racetrack was a reddish orange, divided in white racing stripes to flag the runners' columns. Only, the runner in my mental image did not run alongside others; she ran solo, with no one watching her. And she did not run a free and clear track, she ran one that required her to jump numerous hurdles, which made her break into a heavy sweat under the sun. I used this image every time I thought of things that frustrated me: the heavy books, my crazy sleep schedule, the question of where I would sleep and what I would eat. To overcome these issues I pictured my runner bolting down the track, jumping hurdles toward the finish line.

Hunger, hurdle ~ Liz Murray

[The] structural theory is of extreme simplicity. It assumes that the molecule is held together by links between one atom and the next: that every kind of atom can form a definite small number of such links: that these can be single, double or triple: that the groups may take up any position possible by rotation round the line of a single but not round that of a double link: finally that with all the elements of the first short period [of the periodic table], and with many others as well, the angles between the valencies are approximately those formed by joining the centre of a regular tetrahedron to its angular points. No assumption whatever is made as to the mechanism of the linkage. Through the whole development of organic chemistry this theory has always proved capable of providing a different structure for every different compound that can be isolated. Among the hundreds of thousands of known substances, there are never more isomeric forms than the theory permits. ~ Nevil Vincent Sidgwick

Then a movement began among the people. They creaked to their feet, shuffled and fumbled up to the front, kneeling on the floor, and she saw little Thomas at the beginning of the row. The priest turned and made the sign of the cross and all signed themselves; then he came forward and moved along the line, placing the Hosts in the mouths of the people.

Cecil had a very strange feeling; she felt that this was at the same time the most natural and the most unnatural thing she had ever seen. They were like little birds being fed by their mother, and yet it was grown people who knelt to receive what looked like a paper penny of bread on their tongues. She knew at once why the Mass provoked such love and such hate. Either what they believe is true, or else it is a dreadful delusion, she thought. ~ Meriol Trevor

And then finally the magic flowed, but not the same way as when the Dragon's spell-lessons dragged it in a rush out of me. Instead it seemed to me the sound of the chanting became a stream made to carry magic along, and I was standing by the water's edge with a pitcher that never ran dry, pouring a thin silver line into the rushing current. ~ Naomi Novik

Mathilde made an effort to use the more intimate form; she was evidently more attentive to this unusual way of speaking than to what she was saying. This use of the singular form, stripped of the tone of affection, ceased, after a moment, to afford Julien any pleasure, he was astonished at the absence of happiness; finally, in order to feel it, he had recourse to his reason. He saw himself highly esteemed by this girl who was so proud, and never bestowed unrestricted praise; by this line of reasoning he arrived at a gratification of his self-esteem. ~ Stendhal

He pulled me up into the world of advanced literature, where you wrote essays about a line of Dante, where nothing could be made complex enough, where art dealt with the supreme, not in a high-flown sense because it was the modernist canon with which we were engaged, but in the sense of the ungraspable, which was best illustrated by Blanchot's description of Orpheus's gaze, the night of the night, the negation of the negation, which of course was in some way above the trivial and in many ways wretched lives we lived, but what I learned was that also our ludicrously inconsequential lives, in which we could not attain anything of what we wanted, nothing, in which everything was beyond our abilities and power, had a part in this world, and thus also in the supreme, for books existed, you only had to read them, no one but myself could exclude me from them. You just had to reach up. ~ Karl Ove Knausgaard

he could feel the outside world closing in on him, demanding his consideration, but as long as he stayed by himself in the woods he was able to remain true to his refusal. He came from a long line of refusers, he had the constitution for it. There seemed to be almost nothing left of Lalitha; she was breaking up on him the way dead songbirds did in the wild
they were impossibly light to begin with, and as soon as their little hearts stopped beating they were barely more than bits of fluff and hollow bone, easily scattered in the wind
but this only made him more determined to hold on to what little of her he still had. ~ Jonathan Franzen

That is why the second coming of the Lord is not only salvation, not only the omega that sets everything right, but also judgment. Indeed at this stage we can actually define the meaning of the talk of judgment. It means precisely this, that the final stage of the world is not the result of a natural current but the result of responsibility that is grounded in freedom. This must be regarded as the key to understanding why the New Testament clings fast, in spite of its message of grace, to the assertion that at the end men are judged "by their works" and that no one can escape giving an account of the way he has lived his life. There is a freedom that is not cancelled out even by grace and, indeed, is brought by it face to face with itself: man's final fate is not forced upon him regardless of the decisions he has made in his life. This assertion is in any case also necessary in order to draw the line between faith and false dogmatism or a false Christian self-confidence. This line alone confirms the equality of men by confirming the identity of their responsibility. ...

Perhaps in the last analysis it is impossible to escape a paradox whose logic is completely disclosed only to the experience of a life based on faith. Anyone who entrusts himself to a life of faith becomes aware that both exist: the radical character of grace that frees helpless man and,no less, the abiding seriousness of the responsibility that summons man day after day. Both together mean that the ~ Benedict XVI

I have always been interested in this man. My father had a set of Tom Paine's books on the shelf at home. I must have opened the covers about the time I was 13. And I can still remember the flash of enlightenment which shone from his pages. It was a revelation, indeed, to encounter his views on political and religious matters, so different from the views of many people around us. Of course I did not understand him very well, but his sincerity and ardor made an impression upon me that nothing has ever served to lessen.

I have heard it said that Paine borrowed from Montesquieu and Rousseau. Maybe he had read them both and learned something from each. I do not know. But I doubt that Paine ever borrowed a line from any man...

Many a person who could not comprehend Rousseau, and would be puzzled by Montesquieu, could understand Paine as an open book. He wrote with a clarity, a sharpness of outline and exactness of speech that even a schoolboy should be able to grasp. There is nothing false, little that is subtle, and an impressive lack of the negative in Paine. He literally cried to his reader for a comprehending hour, and then filled that hour with such sagacious reasoning as we find surpassed nowhere else in American letters - seldom in any school of writing.

Paine would have been the last to look upon himself as a man of letters. Liberty was the dear companion of his heart; truth in all things his object.

...we, perhaps, remember him ~ Thomas A. Edison

That's when Eena cut in. Both Ravelly and Unan looked to her as she announced, "My favorite part of the book is at the very end."

"Where Imorih battles the three-headed dragon," Unan presumed.

Eena shook her head. "Nope."

"Afterwards, where Imorih befriends the beast and earns his trust," Ravelly guessed.

Eena shook her head again. "No, sir. I mean the very end."

Unan's brow crinkled as he tried to recall what came next in the story. "Where she finds her prince who was held captive by none other than the same three-headed dragon?"

The young Sha shook her head a third time.

"I know! When the dragon flies them on his back to the edge of their homeland! That would be quite the experience, wouldn't it?" Ravelly seemed certain he had guessed the finishing act of the story.

"That's not the very, very end," Eena grinned.

"But that's the last page," Unan contended, his finger pointing at the final leaf in the book.

Wahlister was the one who finally guessed the correct answer. "They kiss on the dragon's back at the very end. That's where they promise to never allow anything, even death, to separate them again."

"Yes!" Eena chirped. "That's the best scene of all."

"I don't recall that promise," Ravelly admitted.

Unan assured the old Grott, "It's right here." He read the line that told of a promise made sure by a kiss. "Their lips sealed the whi ~ Richelle E. Goodrich

She came by ... I couldn't help but look ... only to look and she smiled back!Wheeew, she blown me away,to realize i made her my goal from the hands of the man he have at present ... A family of her own i never want to destroy laid on the line ... a story was made, a secret was solemnly shared by two ... Oh i loved her and she loved me too ... most of the time she got scared, i got scared too..for fighting aginst the odds and she stayed back ... i stood up to break ... flew just to fall ... only to realize a love i have no control of and no one can ... i am not to bid goodbye ... I can't ... only to keep a love unrequited like mine. ~ Bob Villarosa

People, he had said, were always being looked at as points, and they ought to be looked at as lines. There weren't any points, it was false to assume that a person ever was anything. He was always becoming something, always changing, always continuous and moving, like the wiggly line on a machine used to measure earthquake shocks. He was always what he was in the beginning, but never quite exactly what he was; he moved along a line dictated by his heritage and his environment, but he was subject to every sort of variation within the narrow limits of his capabilities.
...
She shut her mind on that too. There was danger in looking at people as lines. The past spread backward and you saw things in perspective that you hadn't seen then, and that made the future ominous, more ominous than if you just looked at the point, at the moment. There might be truth in what Bruce said, but there was not much comfort. ~ Wallace Stegner

Michelle: It wasn't my house. It was owned by a brownie couple who owned it and rented out suites. There were a few long-term renters, like me, but it also functioned as a bed and breakfast to people and magical creatures passing through. A renter, like myself, was entitled to two meals a day, which made up for the microscopic kitchen. Being something of an indifferent or terrible cook, those kept me from eating fast food every day. I walked inside, barely pausing to wipe my feet on the mat. I swung to the right and stumbled into the dining room, hardly looking at the long table or who might be at it. I made a bee-line for the tea and slurped down half a mug. The hot, caffeinated beverage forced my eyes open and gave my movement some energy. While topping off my mug, I looked around and saw two unicorns, a dwarf and five shifters. ~ N.E. Conneely