Bossypants - Tina Fey

[Women aren't funny] It is an impressively arrogant move to conclude that just because you don't like something, it is empirically not good.

Ask yourself the following question: "Is this person in between me and what I want to do?" If the answer is no, ignore it and move on. Your energy is better used doing work and outpacing people that way...Again, don't waste your energy trying to educate or change opinions. Go "Over! Under! Through!" and opinions will change organically when you're the boss. Or they won't. Who care? Do your thing and don't care if they like it.

"My mother did this for me once," she will realize as she cleans off...her baby's neck. "My mother did this for me." And the delayed gratitude will wash over her as it does each generation and she will make a Mental Note to call me.

The Age of Miracles - Karen Thompson Walker

"This was middle school, the age of miracles, the time when kids shot up three inches over the summer, when breasts bloomed from nothing, when voices dipped and dove. Our first flaws were emerging, but they were being corrected. Blurry vision could be fixed invisibly with the magic of contact lenses. Crooked teeth were pulled straight with braces. Spotty skin could be chemically cleared. Some girls were turning beautiful. A few boys were growing tall. I knew I still looked like a child."


"The only thing you have to do in this life is die," said Mrs. Pinsky. This was one of her favorite sayings. "Everything else is a choice."


We were a different kind of Christian, the quiet, reasonable kind, a breed embarassed by the mention of miracles.


Some of the stars you'll see out there  don't exist anymore," said my father, gently turning the knobs of the telescope with his thumb. The gears squeked softly. "Some of the stars you'll see have been dead for thousands of years already."
"What you'll see with the telescope are not the stars as they are today but how they were thousands of years ago....thats how far away they are; even the light takes centuries to reach us."
I liked the idea, how the past could be preserved, fossilized, in the stars. I want to think that somewhere on the other end of time, a hundred light-years from then, someone else, some distant future creature, might be looking back at a preserved image of me and my father at that very moment in my bedroom.


"I'd grown up hearing stories about the special hazards that girls faced. I knew where the bodies were found: naked on beaches or cut into pieces, parts frozen in freezers or buried in cement. These stories were never kept from us girls. Instead they were spread around like ghost stories, our parents hoping that fear would do the job that our judgement might not."

The Last Patriot - Brad Thor

"You see Muslims believe that the Koran is the complete and immutable word of God. To suggest anything else is considered blasphemy and an outright attack on Islam. Nevertheless, about a fifth of the Koran is filled with contradictions and incomprehensible passages that don't make sense."

"For examples, in the beginning of Mohammed's career as a prophet in Mecca, Allah revealed to him through the Angel Gabriel the concept of living peacefully with Jews and Christians. Later when Mohammed, who had been shunned by the Jews and Christians, became a warlord and raised a powerful army in Medina, Allah supposedly revealed that it was every Muslim's duty to subdue all non-Muslims and not rest until Islam was the dominant religion on the planet."

"Part of the confusion comes from the fact that the Koran isn't organized chronologically. It's organized predominantly from the longest chapters, or suras to the shortest. The peaceful verses from the beginning of Islam can therefore be found throughout. The problem, though, is that the violent verses take precedence due to something called abrogation."
"What's abrogation?"
"Basically, it says that if two verses in the Koran conflict, the later verse shall take precedence. The most violent sura in the Koran is the ninth. It is the only chapter in the Koran that doesn't begin with the phrase known as the Bismillah - All the compassionate, the merciful. It contains verses like slay idolaters wherever you find them and those who refuse to fight for Allah will be afflicted with a painful death and will go to hell as well as calling for warfare against and the subjugation of all Jews and Christians."

"The difficulty for peaceful Muslims who do not espouse violence," clarified Harvath, "is that they don't have a contextual leg to stand on in their religion. When Mohammed said 'go do violence' and when he himself committed violence, Muslims are not allowed to argue with that. In fact, they are expected to follow his example."
"Why" asked Tracey.
"Because Mohammed is viewed as the 'perfect man' in Islam. His behavior - every single thing he ever said or did - is above reproach and held as the model for all Muslims to follow. Basically, Islam teaches that the more a Muslim is like Mohammed, the better off he or she will be."
"But, if Mohammed did in fact have a final revelation beyond Sura 9," said Nicholas, "and if, as Jefferson believed, it could abrogate all of the calls to violence in the Koran-"
"Then its impact would be incredible."


"Al-Jazari [Muslim equivalent to Leonardo Da Vinci was a dedicated man of science. Even as early as the 12th century, Muslim scientists and academics were aware of multiple errors throughout the Koran such as Mohammed's incorrect explanations of the workings of the human body, the earth, the stars, and the planets, which he had communicated as being the true words of God. There were also the satanic verses.
Harvath knew all too well about the satanic verses. Desperate to make peace with his family's tribe, the Quraish ['Koor-iysh], Mohammed claimed that it was legitimate for Muslims to pray before the Quraysh's three pagan godesses as intercessors before Allah.
But when Mohammed realized what he had done and how he had compromised his monotheism to get his family's tribe to join him, he took it all back and claimed the devil had put words in his mouth. The abrupt about-face acted like gasoline being poured on a smoldering fire with the Quraish and remained a fascinating retraction, which many throughout history, Salman Rushdie included, have found quite notable."

"The Islamic tradition is pretty well known for the penalty it imposes on those who blaspheme Islam or apostasize themselves from the faith."
"Death," replied Harvath.
"Exactly. There are many lay people and scholars alike, both within and without the Muslim community, who feel that the pure, orthodox Islam of the fundamentalists could never survive outside the context of its 7th century Arabian origins. Apply 21st century science, logic or humanistic reasoning to it and it falls apart."
"They believe this is why Islam has always relied so heavily on the threat of death. Question Islam, malign Islam, or leave Islam and you will be killed. It is a totalitarian operandi that silences all dissent and examination, thereby protecting the faith from ever having to defend itself."


"An interesting footnote is that after the victory, Prince Hamet [Arab] presented Lieutenant O'Bannon with a scimitar used by his Mameluke tribesman in appreciation of his courage and that of his Marines. This is the model for the saber the Marines still carry to this day."

The Nostradamus Prophecies - By Mario Reading

"We [writers] hacks are used to being insulted. We are resolutely bottom of the pecking order. Unless we write bestsellers, that is, or contrive to become celebrities, when we magically spring to the top. Then, when we can't follow up, we sink back down to the bottom again. It's a heady profession, don't you agree?"


Well, Isis, the Egyptian godess, wife and sister of Osiris and sister of Set, was also believed to save sailors from the sea. And we know that she was frequently depicted seated on a throne, with her son, Horus the Child, on her lap. Horus is the god of light, of the sun, of the day, of life, and of good, and his nemesis, Set, who was Isis's sworn enemy, was the god of the night, of evil, or darkness, and of death. Set had tricked Osiris, cheif of the gods, into trying out a beautifully crafted coffin, and had sealed him inside it and sent him down the Nile, where a tree grew around him. Later, he cut Osiris's body into fourteen pieces. But Isis found the coffin and its contents and reassembled them, with Thoth, the mediator's, help, and Osiris then came back to life just long enough to impregnate her with Horus, their son."
"I don't understand..."
"Macron, the Black Virgin is Isis. The Christ figure is Horus. All that happened was that the Christians usurped the ancient Egyptian gos and transformed them into something more palatable to a modern sensibility."
"Modern?"
"Osiris was resurrected, you see. He came back from the dead. And he had a son. Who pitted himself against the forces of evil. Doesn't that sound familiar to you?"
"Both Jesus and Horus were born in a stable. And their births are both celebrated on the 25th of December."


"Fitness equated to health. Your body listened to you. Fitness freed it from the oppression of gravity. Find the right balance and you could very nearly fly."


"No one owns their soul. It is a gift. A part of God. And we take it back to Him when we die and offer it to Him as our sacrifice. Then we are judged on the strength of it."

A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry

"There must be a lot of duplication in our country's laws," said Dukhi. "Every time there are elections, they talk of passing the same ones passed twenty years ago. Someone should remind them they need to apply the laws."

"Life without dignity is worthless."

"What I wonder is, how Ashraf Chacha can have someone so horrible for his friend."
"All people are not the same. Besides, Nawaz's years in the city must have altered him. Places can change people, you know. For better or worse."


"Sometimes you have to use your failures as stepping-stones to success. You have to maintain a fine balance between hope and despair. In the end, it's all a question of balance."

"You have a dirty mind."
"Yes, I do," said Om, "Listen, a riddle for you: to make it stiff and stand up straight, she rubs it; to make it slice and slide it in, she licks it. What is she doing?" He was laughing before he had finished reciting the question, while Maneck hushed him with a finger to his lips.
"Come on, answer. What's she doing?"
"Fucking, what else?"
"Wrong. Give up? She's threading a needle," said Om smugly, as Maneck clapped his hand to his forehead. "Now whose mind is dirty."


"The idea of independence was a fantasy. Everyone depended on someone."

"The secret to survival is to balance hope and despair, to embrace change, to adapt."

 "Money can buy the necessary police order. Justice is sold to the highest bidder."

The Lost Symbol - Dan Brown

"The goal of tattooing was never beauty. The goal was change. From the scarified Nubian priests of 2000 B.C., to the tattooed acolytes of the Cybele cult of ancient Rome, to the moko scars of the modern Maori, humans have tattooed themselves as a way of offering up their bodies in partial sacrifice, enduring the physical pain of embellishment and emerging changed beings. Despite the ominous admonitions of Leviticus 19:28, which forbade the marking of one's flesh, tattoos had become a rite of passage shared by millions of people in the modern age - everyone from clean-cut teenagers to hard-core drug users to suburban housewives."


"The Statue of Freedom peered out into the misty darkness like a ghostly sentinel. Langdon always found it ironic that the workers who hoisted each piece of the nineteen-and-a-half-foot bronze statue to perch were slaves - Capitol secret that seldom made the syllabi of high school history classes."


"Occult symbols!" The freshman looked excited again. "So there are devil symbols in D.C.!"
Langdon smiled. "Sorry, but the word occult, despite conjuring images of devil worship, actually means 'hidden' or 'obscured.' In times of religious oppression, knowledge that was counterdoctrinal had to be kept hidden or 'occult,' and because the church felt threatened by this, they redefined anything 'occult' as evil, and the prejudice survived."


"Okay, and how many of you have ever been to Washington?"
A scattering of hands went up.
"So few?" Langdon feigned surprise. "And how many of you have been to Rome, Paris, Madrid, or London?"
Almost all the hands went up.
As usual. One of the rites of passage for American college kids was a summer with a Eurorail ticket before the harsh reality of real life set in. "It appears many more of you have visited Europe than have visited your own capital. Why do you think that is?"
"No drinking age in Europe!" someone in back shouted.
Langdon smiled. "As if the drinking age here stops any of you?"
Everyone laughed.
It was the first day of school, and the students were taking longer than usual to get settled, shifting and creaking in their wooden pews. Langdon loved teaching in this hall because he always knew how engaged the students were simply by listening to how much they fidgeted in their pews.
"Seriously," Langdon said, "Washington D.C., has some of the world's finest architecture, art and symbolism. Why would you go overseas before visiting your own capital?"
"Ancient stuff is cooler," someone said.
"And by ancient stuff," Langdon clarified, "I assume you mean castles, crypts, temples, that sort of thing?"
Their heads nodded in unison.
"Okay. Now, what if I told you that Washington D.C., has every one of those things? Castles, crypts, pyramids, temples...it's all there."
The creaking diminished.
"My friends," Langdon said, lowering his voice and moving to the front of the stage, "in the next hour, you will discover that our nation is overflowing with secrets and hidden history. And exactly as in Europe, all of the best secrets are hidden in plain view."
The wooden pews fell dead silent.
Gotcha.


"She says Masonry is some kind of strange religion."
"A common misperception."
"Its not a religion?" (...)

"So tell me, what are the 3 prerequisites for an ideology to be considered a religion."

"ABC," one woman offered, "Assure, Believe, Convert."

"Correct," Langdon said. "Religions assure salvation; religions believe in a precise theology; and religions convert nonbelievers." He paused. "Masonry, however, is batting zero for three. Masons make no promises of salvation; they have no specific theology; and they do not seek to convert you. In fact, within Masonic lodges, discussions of religion are prohibited."
"So...Masonry is antireligious?"
"On the contrary. One of the prerequisites for becoming a Mason is that you must believe in a higher power. The difference between Masonic spirituality and organized religion is that the Masons do not impose a specific definition or name on a higher power. Rather than definitive theological identities like God, Allah, Buddha, or Jesus, the Masons use more general terms like Supreme Being or Great Architect of the Universe. This enables Masons of different faiths to gather together."
"Sounds a little far-out," someone said.
"Or, perhaps, refreshingly open-minded?" Langdon offered. "In this age when different cultures are killing each other over whose definition of God is better, one could say the Masonic tradition of tolerance and open-mindedness is commendable." Langdon paced the stage. "Moreover, Masonry is open to men of all races, colors, and creeds, and provides a spirituality fraternity that does not discriminate in any way."


"If Masonry is not a secret society, not a corporation, and not a religion, then what is it?"
"Well, if you were to ask a Mason, he would offer the following definition: Masonry is a system of morality, veiled in allegory and illustrated by symbols."
"Sounds to me like a euphemism of 'freaky cult.'"
"Freaky, you say?"
"Hell yes!" the kid said, standing up. "I heard what they do inside those secret buildings! Weird candlelight rituals with coffins, and nooses, and drinking wine out of skulls. Now that's freaky!"
Langdon scanned the class. "Does that sound freaky to anyone else?"
"Yes!" they all chimed in.
Langdon feigned a sad sigh. "Too bad. If that's too freaky for you, then I know you'll never want to join my cult."
Silence settled over the room. The student from the Women's Center looked uneasy. "You're in a cult?"
Langdon nodded and lowered his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. "Don't tell anyone, but on the pagan day of the sun god Ra, I kneel at the foot of an ancient instrument of torture and consume ritualistic symbols of blood and flesh."
The class looked horrified.
Langdon shrugged. "And if anyone of you care to join me, come to the Harvard chapel on Sunday, kneel beneath the crucifix, and take Holy Communion."
The classroom remained silent.
Langdon winked. "Open your minds, my friends. We all fear what we do not understand."


"Some found it suspicious that the Great Seal of the United States had 13 stars, 13 arrows, 13 pyramid steps, 13 shield stripes, 13 olive leaves, 13 olives, 13 letters in annuit coeptis, 13 letters in e pluribus unum, and on and on."


"Don't find it unnerving that Masons meditate with skulls and scythes?"
"No more unnerving than Christians praying at the feet of a man nailed to a cross, or Hindus chanting in front of a four-armed elephant named Ganesh. Misunderstanding a culture's symbols is common root of prejudice."


"Known as the Unfinished Pyramid, it was a symbolic reminder that man's ascent to his full human potential was always a work in progress. Though few realized it, this symbol was the most widely published symbol on earth. Over twenty billion in print. Adoring every one-dollar bill in circulation, the Unfinished Pyramid waited patiently for its shining capstone, which hovered above it as a reminder of America's yet-unfulfilled destiny and the work yet to be done, both as a country and as individuals."



"Even the Bible concurs," Bellamy said. "If we accept, as Genesis tells us, that 'God created man in his own image,' then we also must accept what this implies - that mankind was not created inferior to God. In Luke 17:20 we are told, 'The kingdom of God is within you.'"

"I'm sorry, but I don't know any Christians who consider themselves God's equal."

"Of course not," Bellamy said, his tone hardening. "Because most Christians want it both ways. They want to be able to proudly declare they are believers in the Bible yet simply ignore those parts they find too difficult or too inconvenient to believe."


"Do you see Moses?"
Langdon gazed up at the library's celebrated statue of Moses. "Yes."
"He has horns."
"I'm aware of that."

"But do you know why he has horns?"

Like most teachers, Langdon did not enjoy being lectured to. The Moses above them had horns for the same reason thousands of Christian images of Moses had horns - a mistranslation of the book of Exodus. The original Hebrew text described Moses has having "karan 'ohr panav" - "facial skin that glowed with rays of light" - but when the Roman Catholic Church created the official Latin translation of the Bible, the translator bungled Moses's description, rendering it as "cornuta esset facies sua," meaning "his face was horned." From that moment on, artists and sculptors, fearing reprisals if they were not true to the Gospels, began depicting Moses with horns.
"It was a simple mistake," Langdon replied. "A mistranslation by Saint Jerome around 400 A.D."
Bellamy looked impressed. "Exactly. A mistranslation. And the result is...poor Moses is now misshapen for all history...I mention the horned Moses, to illustrate how a single word, misunderstood, can rewrite history."


"Gold resists the entropic laws of decay; that's one of the reasons the ancients considered it magical."


"Since the days of Michelangelo, sculptors had been hiding the flaws in their work by smearing hot wax into the cracks and then dabbing the wax with stone dust. The method was considered cheating, and therefore, any sculpture "without wax" - literally sine cera - was considered a "sincere" piece of art. The phrase stuck. To this day we still sign our letters "sincerely" as a promise that we have written "without wax" and that our words are true."


"Humans who spoke to invisible forces and requested help were a dying breed in this modern world."


"The congregation declared, "Amen!"
Amon, Mal'akh corrected. Egypt is the cradle of your religion. The god Amon was the prototype for Zeus...for Jupiter...and for every modern face of God. To this day, every religion on earth shouted out a variation of his name. Amen! Amin! Aum!


*******************
CAN YOU WEIGH A HUMAN SOUL?

The notion was impossible, of course...foolish even to ponder.
Her brother stared at the strange machine. "An incubator?"
"See if this helps you guess," Katherine said.
When she was done, the display read:

0.0000000000 kg

"A scale?" Peter asked, looking puzzled.
"Not just any scale." Katherine took a tiny scrap of paper off a nearby counter and laid it on the capsule.

0.0008194325 kg

"High-precision microbalance." she said. "Resolution down to a few micrograms."
Peter still looked puzzled. "You built a precise scale for...a person?"
"Exactly." She lifted the transparent lid on the machine. "If I place a person inside this capsule and close the lid, the individual is in an entirely sealed system. Nothing gets in or out. No gas, no liquid, no dust particles. Nothing can escape - not the person's breathing exhalations, evaporating sweat, body fluids, nothing."
A very old man in an oxygen mask lay inside.
"The man in the capsule was a science teacher of mine at Yale," Katherine said. "He and I have kept in touch over the years. He's been very ill. He always said he wanted to donate his body to science, so when I explained my idea for this experiment, he immediately wanted to be a part of it."
She pointed to the scale beneath the dying man's sealed pod. The digital numbers read:

51.4534644 kg

"That's his body weight." Katherine said.
"This is what he wanted," Katherine whispered. "Watch what happens."
Over the course of the next sixty seconds, the man's shallow breathing grew faster, until all at once, as if the man himself had chosen the moment, he simply took his last breath. Everything stopped.
It was over.
Nothing else happened.
Wait for it, she thought, redirecting Peter's gaze to the capsule's digital display, which still quietly glowed, showing the dead man's weight.
Then it happened.
When Peter saw it, he jolted backward, almost falling out of his chair. "But...that's..." He covered his mouth in shock. "I can't..."
Moments after the man's death, the numbers on the scale had decreased suddenly. The man had become lighter immediately after his death. The weight change was minuscule, but it was measurable...and the implications were utterly mind-boggling.
Katherine recalling writing in her lab notes with a trembling hand: "There seems to exist an invisible 'material' that exits the human body at the moment of death. It has quantifiable mass which is unimpeded by physical barriers. I must assume it moves in a dimension I cannot yet perceive."


*******************

"But isn't the Apocalypse about the end of the world? You know, the Antichrist, Armageddeon, the final battle between good and evil?"
Solomon chuckled. "Who here studies Greek?"
Several hands went up.
"What does the word apocalypse literally mean?"
"It means," one student began, and then paused as if surprised. "Apocalypse means 'to unveil'...or 'to reveal.'"
Solomon gave the boy a nod of approval. "Exactly. The Apocalypse is literally a reveal-ation. The Book of Reveal-ation in the Bible predicts an unveiling of great truth and unimaginable wisdom. The Apocalypse is not the end of the world, but rather it is the end of the world as we know it. The prophecy of the Apocalypse is just one of the Bible's beautiful messages that has been distorted." Solomon stepped to the front of the stage. "Believe me, the Apocalypse is coming...and it will be nothing like what we were taught."



"Teachers teach Peter. We speak openly. Why would the prophets - the greatest teachers in history - obscure their language? If they hoped to change the world, why would they speak in code? Why not speak plainly so the world could understand?"
"Robert, the Bible does not talk openly for the same reason the neophytes had to be initiated before learning the secret teachings of the ages...for the same reason the scientists in the Invisible College refused to share their knowledge with others. This information is powerful, Robert. The Ancient Mysteries cannot be shouted from the rooftops. The mysteries are a flaming torch, which, in the hands of a master, can light the way, but which, in the hands of madman, can scorch the earth."


"Peter, I hear you - I do. And I'd love to believe we are gods, but I see no gods walking our earth. I see no superhumans. You can point to the alleged miracles of the Bible, or any other religious text, but they are nothing but old stories fabricated by man and then exaggerated over time."


"I'm no Bible scholar, but I'm pretty sure the Scriptures describe in detail a physical temple that needs to be built. The structure is described as being in two parts - an outer temple called the Holy Place and an inner sanctuary called the Holy of Holies. The two parts are separated from each other by a thin veil."
Katherine grinned. "Pretty good recall for a Bible skeptic. By the way, have you ever seen an actual human brain? It's built in two parts - an outer part called the dura mater and an inner part called the pia mater. These two parts are separated by the arachnoid - a veil of weblike tissue."
Langdon cocked his head in surprise.
Gently, she reached up and touched Langdon's temple. "There's a reason they call this your temple, Robert."

Wicked - Gregory Maguire

"I just think, like our teachers here, that if ministers are effective, they're good at asking questions to get you to think. I don't think they're supposed to have the answers. Not necessarily."



           "Father always said that magic was the sleight of hand of the devil. He said pleasure faith was no more than an exercise to distract the masses from the true object of their devotion."
            "That's a unionist talking," said Galinda, not taking offense. "A sensible opinion, if what you're up against is charlatans or street performers. But sorcery doesn't have to be that. What about the common witches up in the Glikkus? They say that they magick the cows they've imported from Munchkinland so they don't go mooing over the edge of some precipice. Who could ever afford to put a fence on every ledge there? The magic is a local skill, a contribution to community well-being. It doesn't have to supplant religion."
          "It may not have to," said Nessarose [future Wicked Witch of the East], "but if it tends to, then have we a duty to be wary of it?"
          "Oh, wary, well, I'm wary of the water I drink, I might be poisoned," said Glinda [future Good Witch of the South]. "That doesn't mean I stop drinking water."
          "Well, I don't even think it's so big an issue," said Elphaba [future Wicked Witch of the West]. "I think sorcery is trivial. It's concerned with itself mostly, it doesn't lead outward."