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| Link | Quote | Stars | Tags | Author |
| 632f40f | You speak in ignorant disdain of the foremost nation of the world," Yongxing said, growing angry himself, "like all your country-men, who show no respect for that which is superior, and insult our customs." "For which I might consider myself as owing you some apology, sir, if you yourself had not so often insulted myself and my own country, or shown respect for any customs other than your own," Laurence said." | insult respect retort | Naomi Novik | |
| d1a8890 | He scowled at me. "Jaga," he said, and for a moment I stood cold and still. Old Jaga had died a long time ago, but there weren't very many songs about her, and bards mostly sang them warily, only in summer, at midday. She had been dead and buried five hundred years, but that hadn't stopped her turning up in Rosya only forty years ago, at the baptism of the newborn prince. She'd turned six guards who tried to stop her into toads, put two oth.. | Naomi Novik | ||
| 387754d | Araminta had generally considered the laws of etiquette as the rules of the chase, and divided them into categories: those which everyone broke, all the time; those which one could not break without being frowned at; and those which caused one to be quietly and permanently left out of every future invitation to the field. | decorum etiquette humor observations | Naomi Novik | |
| 6a679af | Hollin was still sitting with Levitas's head in his lap, a bucket now beside him; he was squeezing water from a clean cloth into the dragon's open mouth. He looked at Rankin without bothering to hide his contempt, but then he bent over and said, "Levitas, come along now; look who's come." Levitas's eyes opened, but they were milky and blind. "My captain?" he said uncertainly. Laurence thrust Rankin forward and down onto his knees, none too .. | Naomi Novik | ||
| 9af3a00 | Rather, it is bearing in mind what is most important to you so that it is not lost or betrayed in the heat and reactivity of a particular moment. | Jon Kabat-Zinn | ||
| 52cdcf2 | One practical way to do this is to look at other people and ask yourself if you are really seeing them of just your thought about them. Sometimes our thoughts act like dream glasses. When we have them on, we see dream children, dream husband, dream wife, dream ob, dream colleagues, dream partners, dream friends. We can live in a dream present for a dream future...But if we take off the glasses, maybe, just maybe, we might see a little more .. | Jon Kabat-Zinn | ||
| 8e2c811 | In some ways, it's as if you died and the world continued on. If you did die, all your responsibilities and obligations would immediately evaporate. Their residue would somehow get worked out without you. No one else can take over your unique agenda. It would die or peter out with you just as it has for everyone else who has ever died. So you don't need to worry about it in any absolute way. If this is true, maybe you don't need to make o.. | Jon Kabat-Zinn | ||
| f5d4185 | Meditation is not so concerned with how much thinking is going on as it is with how much room you are making for it to take place within the field of your awareness from one moment to the next. | Jon Kabat-Zinn | ||
| e2a50ca | Mindfulness as a practice provides endless opportunities to cultivate greater intimacy with your own mind and to tap into and develop your deep interior resources for learning, growing, healing, and potentially for transforming your understanding of who you are and how you might live more wisely and with greater well-being, meaning, and happiness in this world. | Jon Kabat-Zinn | ||
| 264863b | When we can be centered in ourselves, even for brief periods of time in the face of the pull of the outer world, not having to look elsewhere for something to fill us up or make us happy, we can be at home wherever we find ourselves, at peace with things as they are, moment by moment. | Jon Kabat-Zinn | ||
| 11bc217 | From the perspective of the consciousness disciplines, our ordinary state of waking consciousness is severely suboptimal. Rather than contradicting the Western paradigm, this perspective simply extends it beyond psychology's dominant concern, at least until very recently, with pathology and with therapies aimed at restoring people to "normal" functioning in the usual waking state of consciousness. At the heart of this "orthogonal," paradigm.. | Jon Kabat-Zinn | ||
| 53e1fd3 | When I was talking to a reporter, she said, "Oh, you mean to live for the moment." I said, "No, it isn't that. That has a hedonistic ring to it. I mean to live in the moment." | Jon Kabat-Zinn | ||
| b83cab0 | By grounding yourself in mindfulness early in the morning, you are reminding yourself that things are always changing, that good and bad things come and go, and that it is possible to embody a perspective of of constancy, wisdom, and inner peace as you face any conditions that present themselves. | Jon Kabat-Zinn | ||
| b5d3ae3 | There can be no resolution leading to growth until the present situation has been faced completely and you have opened to it with mindfulness, allowing the roughness of the situation itself to sand down your own rough edges. In other words, you must be willing to let life itself become your teacher. | Jon Kabat-Zinn | ||
| 39830a8 | The next time you feel a sense of dissatisfaction, of something being missing or not quite right, turn inward as an experiment. See if you can capture the energy of that very moment. Instead of picking up a magazine or going to the movies, calling a friend or looking for something to eat or acting up in one way or another, make a place for yourself. Sit down and enter into your breathing, if only for a few minutes. Don't look for anything -.. | Jon Kabat-Zinn | ||
| b2fa786 | including salutary effects on the following: * major depression * drug addiction * binge eating * smoking cessation * stress among cancer patients * loneliness among senior citizens * ADHD * asthma * psoriasis * irritable bowel syndrome Studies also indicated that meditation reduced levels of stress hormones, boosted the immune system, made office workers more focused, and improved test scores on the GRE. Apparently mindfulness did everythi.. | Dan Harris | ||
| 00f9e2a | Can we be in touch with our own life unfolding? Can we rise to the occasion of our own humanity? Can we take on the challenges we meet, even seeking them out to test ourselves, to grow, to act in a principled way, to be true to ourselves, to find our own way, and ultimately not only have it but, more importantly, live it? | Jon Kabat-Zinn | ||
| 123cb60 | Meditation does not involve trying to change your thinking by thinking some more. It involves watching thought itself. The watching is the holding. By watching your thoughts without being drawn into them, you can learn something profoundly liberating about thinking itself, which may help you to be less of a prisoner of those thought patterns (....) | holding-thought liberation-about-thinking meditation mindfulness not-drawn-into-thought thinking thought-patterns watching-thought | Jon Kabat-Zinn | |
| 29b6610 | As you begin befriending your breath, you see immediately that unawareness is everywhere. | breath breathing meditation stillness unawareness | Jon Kabat-Zinn | |
| e7a61c8 | Mindful sitting meditation is not an attempt to escape from problems or difficulties into some cut-off "meditative" state of absorption or denial. On the contrary, it is a willingness to go nose to nose with pain, confusion, and loss, if that is what is dominating the present moment, and to stay with the observing over a sustained period of time, beyond thinking." | Jon Kabat-Zinn | ||
| 560f199 | The present is the only time that we have to know anything. | Jon Kabat-Zinn | ||
| d0bf10b | Is that a dangler in your memo or are you just glad to see me? | June Casagrande | ||
| 22f25df | This chapter is dedicated to those other delights of punctuation--exquisite little squiggles, those most delightful dots and dashes, and other tragically under-appreciated tiny tidbits! Nah. I'm just yankin' your chain. | June Casagrande | ||
| b1a711a | You must now--before God, Jon Stewart, and whoever's sleeping next to you (even if these entities are one and the same)--make a solemn oath. | June Casagrande | ||
| 8f0a98c | Like the bad guy said, never give an artist a Browning; they're some of the most dangerous folks you can meet... Artists almost always want an audience, the spectacle of destruction. That name -- Dadaist. It's a dead giveaway. Expect a senseless act of mass violence, the theater of cruelty. About all I can do is try and keep him talking while you get in position to kill him. And don't give him anything he might mistake for an audience." --C.. | Charles Stross | ||
| f6cf347 | Because, you see, everything you know about the way this universe works is correct--except for the little problem that this isn't the only universe we have to worry about. Information can leak between one universe and another. And in a vanishingly small number of the other universes there are things that listen, and talk back--see Al-Hazred, Nietzsche, Lovecraft, Poe, et cetera. The many-angled ones, as they say, live at the bottom of the M.. | Charles Stross | ||
| 91cbc20 | What entity aboard this ship exhibits all the personality traits of a cold-blooded killing machine, combined with the monstrous, overweening vanity and laziness of a convalescent war god lounging in their personal Valhalla while their minions prepare their armor? There's only one answer. The Persian tomcat sits underneath the alien horror, washing itself without concern. | Charles Stross | ||
| 49def94 | We shouldn't even be here, I think distantly as I raise my weapon and take aim, we're management, not heroes. | Charles Stross | ||
| 56779c5 | This is how the iron law of bureaucracy installs itself at the heart of an institution. Most of the activities of any bureaucracy are devoted not to the organization's ostensible goals, but to ensuring that the organization survives: because if they aren't, the bureaucracy has a life expectancy measured in days before some idiot decision maker decides that if it's no use to them they can make political hay by destroying it. It's no consolat.. | Charles Stross | ||
| a7ba013 | Look." I pointed. "Shin-Tethys as a whole maintains a positive trade surplus with the rest of the system. A third of the local nations don't export directly, but there's a lot of internal, intramural trade between the tribes--the main six exporters account for eighty-two percent of the uranium and fifty-seven percent of the rare earths. What comes in is, well, lots of skilled labor, finished high-tech assemblies, anything that needs microgr.. | Charles Stross | ||
| 00ae9aa | But I had fallen among pirates and life insurance underwriters. | Charles Stross | ||
| 1090620 | Georgina darts forward, grabs my hand, and pumps it up and down while peering at my face as if she's wondering why water isn't gushing from my mouth. | Charles Stross | ||
| 19df437 | Don't you have any concept of individuality?" she asks, annoyed by its presumption at meddling with her internal states. "Individuality is an unnecessary barrier to information transfer," says the ghost, morphing into its original form, a translucent reflection of her own body. "It reduces the efficiency of a capitalist economy. A large block of the DMZ is still inaccessible to we-me. Are you sure you have defeated the monster?" | individuality information-transfer | Charles Stross | |
| b6ff785 | Humans: such a brilliant model of emotional self-awareness," Aineko says with a theatrical sigh. "You're as stupid as it's possible for an intelligent species to be - there being no evolutionary pressure to be any smarter - but you still don't internalize that and act accordingly around your superiors. Listen, girl, everything you remember is true. That doesn't mean you remember it because it actually happened, just that you remember it bec.. | Charles Stross | ||
| 96b290d | Humans: such a brilliant model of emotional self-awareness. | self-awareness | Charles Stross | |
| 14715bd | Twas the night before Christmas, the office was closed, The transom was shut, the staff home in repose; The stockings were hung by the chimney with care, But St. Nicholas won't be coming because this is a Designated National Security Site within the meaning of Para 4.12 of Section 3 of the Official Secrets Act (Amended) and unauthorised intrusion on such a site is an arrestable offense ... | Charles Stross | ||
| e0d31b3 | Fifteen minutes later I'm hunched over the steering wheel of a two-seater that looks like something you'd find in your corn flakes packet. The Smart is insanely cute and compact, does about seventy miles to a gallon, and is the ideal second car for nipping about town but I'm not nipping about town. I'm going flat out at maybe a hundred and fifty kilometers per hour on the autobahn while some joker is shooting at me from behind with a cannon.. | Charles Stross | ||
| ddea1da | You've just spent an entire prehistoric human lifetime as an ice ghoul and people are needling you for having too many arms?" I shake my head. "I just assume you have a good reason." | Charles Stross | ||
| 810f702 | AFTER WE DO THE WASHING-UP, I GET TO SPEND THE REST OF the evening reading FAQs on cat maintenance on the web. It takes about half an hour to come to the unwelcome realization that they're almost as complex as home-brew gaming PCs, and have even more failure modes. (When your gaming PC malfunctions it doesn't stealthily dump core in your shoes.) | Charles Stross | ||
| 4ccb1c4 | Never bring a knife to a gun fight," I tell Mr. Crispy as I turn away from him. His right arm thinks about it for a moment, then falls off." | Charles Stross | ||
| 8523ef7 | I can get you a cheaper ticket if you let me amputate your legs: I can even take your thighs as a deposit," said the travel agent." | Charles Stross | ||
| abf062d | She paused, staring into the void. The void, for its part, stared back unblinking. | Charles Stross | ||
| 97f7679 | Starships are all work and no fun. | Charles Stross | ||
| 8680545 | Money. An instrument invented in ancient temple complexes, to keep track of debt: counters that acquired mobility and went a-walking, weaving webs of debt into vast and intricate meshes, enslaving and directing the labor of billions in service of the obligations created by its issuance. . . . Money: a shadow play projected on the walls of our minds by the dark sun of debt. | Charles Stross |