She said, "Spend the night with me. Tonight."
That sounded good.
She got a wistful look and said, "I need you, Joe."
And that didn't sound so good because -- there it was again -- it sounded familiar, and he had to tell himself that playing was okay, they were just having some fun. Except that she made it sound serious.
She said, "Hold me."
He did, he held her tight and she felt good. Before she felt too good he sneaked a look at his watch.
Every age treats its penal system as natural, inevitable, and regrettable. When men were hanged in the public square, intellectuals explained that the practice was as helpful to the hanged as it was instructive for the audience. [...] Public hangings were simply part of street life. Pickpockets attended the hangings of other pickpockets in order to pick pockets.
Both Lovell and Swigert thought that the bang—or shudder—had come from the lunar module, and as Haise emerged from the tunnel Swigert shot out of his seat and slammed the command-module hatch shut behind him. Haise scrambled to his seat—the right-hand one—for the master alarm was now sounding in his earphones. Swigert had noticed an amber caution light glowing overhead. It didn’t signal trouble in the oxygen tank, because that alarm system was still tied up by the low-pressure warning in the hydrogen tanks; rather, it signified trouble with the electrical system, the controls for which were near Haise. About this time, the Flight Surgeon, Dr. Willard R. Hawkins, noticed that the pulse readings for all three astronauts had shot up from about seventy to over a hundred and thirty.
Prudence, justice, temperance, and courage.
from the Nicomachean Ethics
First of all, to have a career in this business is extremely hard. To have a long career is even harder. To have a long career where you’re getting good work is almost impossible.
I hate the implication that I was creating drama. It’s like when men use the word “crazy” to describe an ex. The translation is: “She expected emotional maturity from me.”
I really wanted to get out of Wales. When I was growing up, I was a little rough around the edges, and I tried to do whatever I could to develop a musical style. All the music I was raised on was Alban Berg, Schoenberg—a lot of strange groupings. And there was a little library in my village; the library was put there by the coal miners’ union, and if you wanted to learn anything about a song or a style of music you could find something in the library that would have that, and I went for it. That’s where I found Stockhausen. So I was growing up with real music. [emphasis mine]
Journalists, as a group, have to believe that the act of writing can bring light to darkness, help our fellow-citizens make sense of the world, and compose the first draft of history. The job, in many ways, is about converting chaos into clichés, in order to satisfy the profession’s clichés about its own importance.
It is better to be spurred to acquire scholarship because you enjoy the poetry, than to suppose that you enjoy the poetry because you have acquired the scholarship.
--T. S. Eliot
an essay on Dante (1930)
I have not found the exact source.
I had a friend in junior high—I don’t know why I was friends with him, probably because I couldn’t get anyone else to be my friend—and “Happy Days” had just come out, and he thought he was the Fonz. He thought he was the coolest guy. I remember thinking, He’s happier than I am, and it’s just because he doesn’t know any better. There’s something to be said for that kind of unfounded confidence.
Two and two continue to make four, in spite of the whine of the amateur for three, or the cry of the critic for five.
