The Cuckoo's Calling - Robert Galbraith / J.K. Rowling

"He had never been able to understand the assumption of intimacy fans felt with those they had never met. People had sometimes referred to his father as "Old Jonny" in his presence, beaming, as if they were talking about a mutual friend, repeating well-worn press stories and anecdotes as though they had been personally involved."

[on CCTV cameras in London] "You're like everyone else Strike; you want your civil liberties when you've told the missus you're at the office and you're at a lap-dancing club, but you want twenty-four-hour surveillance on your house when someone's trying to force your bathroom window open. Can't have it both ways."

"The dead could only speak through the mouths of those left behind, and through the signs they left scattered behind them. Strike had felt the living woman behind the words she had written to friends; he had heard her voice on a telephone held to his ear; but now, looking down on the last thing she had ever seen in her life, he felt strangely close to her. The truth was coming slowly into focus out of the mass of disconnected detail. What he lacked was proof."

"Like other inveterate womanizers Strike had encountered, Duffield's voice and mannerisms were slightly camp. Perhaps such men became feminized by prolonged immersion in women's company, or perhaps it was a way of disarming their quarry."

Gone Girl - Gillian Flynn

"Love was like drugs or booze or porn: There was no plateau. Each exposure needed to be more intense than the last to achieve the same result."


"Friends see most of each other's flaws. Spouses see every awful last bit."


"Our only one. There is an unfair responsibility that comes with being an only child - you grow up knowing you aren't allowed to disappoint, you're not even allowed to die. There isn't a replacement toddling around; you're it. It makes you desperate to be flawless, and it also makes you drunk with the power. In such ways are despots made."


My thank-yous always come out rather labored. I often don't give them at all. People do what they're supposed to do and then wait for you to pile on the appreciation - they're like frozen-yogurt employees who put out cups for tips.


"We're not animals, asshole. We don't steal women. People want to feel okay for not helping us. See, they don't deserve it, they're a bunch of rapists. Well, bullshit."


"If you're about to do something, and you want to know if it's a bad idea, imagine seeing it printed in the paper for all the world to see."


"You are a cheater. You have failed one of the most basic male tests. You are not a good man."



"For several years, I had been bored. Not a whining, restless child's boredom (although I was not above that) but a dense, blanketing malaise. It seemed to me that there was  nothing new to be discovered ever again. Our society was utterly, ruinously derivative (although the word derivative as a criticism is itself derivative). We were the first human beings who would never see anything for the first time. We stare at the wonders of the world, dull-eyed, underwhelmed. Mona Lisa, the Pyraminds, the Empire State Building. Jungle animals on attack, ancient icebergs collapsing, volcanoes erupting. I can't recall a single amazing thing I have seen firsthand that I didn't immediately reference to a movie or TV show. A fucking commercial. You know the awful singsong of the blase: Seeeeen it. I've literally seen it all, and the worst thing, the tihng that makes me want to blow my brains out, is: The secondhand experience is always better. The image is crisper, the view is keener, the camera angle and the soundtrack manipulate my emotions in a way reality can't anymore. I don't know that we are actually human at this point, those of us who are like most of us, who grew up with TV and movies and now the Internet. If we are betrayed, we know the words to say: when a loved one dies, we know the words to say. If we want to play the stud or the smart-ass or the fool, we know the words to say. We are all working from the same dog-eared script. 

It's a very difficult era in which to be a person, just a real, actual person, instead of a collection of personality traits selected from an endless Automat of characters.

And if all of us are play-acting, there can be no such thing as a soulmate, because we don't have genuine souls. 

It had gotten to a point where it seems like nothing matters, be I'm not a real person and neither is anyone else.

I would have done anything to feel real again.

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."

Steve Job's Stanford Commencement Address

***
Although this isn't referencing a book, i read it every now & then to gain some perspective on the decisions that must be made in my life...
***

(Selected text of Steve Job's 2005 Stanford Commencement address. Provides some very personal insight into his life and current thinking.)

"Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don't lose faith. I'm convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You've got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven't found it yet, keep looking. Don't settle. As with all matters of the heart, you'll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don't settle."

"When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something."

"Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that your are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart."

"No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don't want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life's change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true."

"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma - which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of other's opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary."

"Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish."




Full Commencement Speech here:
http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2005/june15/jobs-061505.html

The Alchemist - Paulo Coelho

[EXCERPTS]
"And dreams are the language of God. When he speaks in our language, I [Gypsy] can interpret what he has said. But if he speaks in the language of the soul, it is only you who can understand."

"Everyone seems to have a clear idea of how other people should lead their lives, but none about his or her own."

"What's the World's Greatest Lie? It's this: that at a certain point in our lives, we lose control of what's happening to us, and our lives become controlled by fate. That's the world's greatest lie."

"When I had my sheep, I was happy, and I made those around me happy. People saw me coming and welcomed me, he thought. But now I'm sad and alone. I'm going to become bitter and distrustful of people because one person betrayed me. I'm going to hate those who have found their treasure because I never found mine. And I'm going to hold on to what little I have, because I'm too insignificant to conquer the world."

"If good thing are coming, they will be a pleasant surprise," said the seer. 'If bad things are, and you know in advance, you will suffer greatly before they even occur.'"

"Only when He, Himself, reveals it. And God only rarely reveals the future. When he does so, it is for only one reason: it's a future that was written so as to be altered."

"The fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself."

"Isn't wine prohibited here?" the boy asked.
"It's not what enters men's mouths that's evil." said the alchemist. "It's what comes out of their mouths that is."

"Everything that happens once can never happen again. But everything that happens twice will surely happen a third time."

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

THE PALACE & THE SPOON OF OIL

"But before I go, I want to tell you a little story."
"A certain shopkeeper sent his son to learn about the secret of happiness from the wisest man in the world. The lad wandered through the desert for forty days, and finally came upon a beautiful castle, high atop a mountain. It was there that the wise man lived."
"Rather than finding a saintly man, though, our hero, on entering the main room of the castle, saw a hive of activity: tradesman came and went, people were conversing in the corners, a small orchestra was playing soft music, and there was a table covered with platters of the most delicious food in that part of the world. The wise man conversed with everyone, and the boy had to wait for two hours before it was his turn to be given the man's attention."
"The wise man listened attentively to the boy's explanation of why he had come, but told him that he didn't have time just then to explain the secret of happiness. He suggested that the boy look around the palace and return in two hours."
"Meanwhile, I want to ask you to do something,' said the wise man, handing the boy a teaspoon that held two drops of oil. 'As you wander around, carry this spoon with you without allowing the oil to spill.'
"The boy began climbing and descending the many stairways of the palace, keeping his eyes fixed on the spoon. After two hours, he returned to the room where the wise man was."
"Well,' asked the wise man, 'did you see the Persian tapestries that are hanging in my dining hall? Did you see the garden that it took the master gardener ten years to create? Did you notice the beautiful parchments in my library?'
"The boy was embarrassed, and confessed that he had observed nothing. His only concern had been not to spill the oil that the wise man had entrusted to him."
"Then go back and observe the marvels of my world," said the wise man. 'You cannot trust a man if you don't know his house.'
"Relieved, the boy picked up the spoon and returned to his exploration of the palace, this time observing all of the works of art on the ceilings and the walls. He saw the gardens, the mountains all around him, the beauty of the flowers, and the taste with which everything had been selected. Upon returning to the wise man, he related in detail everything he had seen."
"'But where are the drops of oil I entrusted to you?' asked the wise man."
"Looking down at the spoon he held, the boy saw that the oil was gone."
"'Well, there is only one piece of advice I can give you', said the wisest of wise men. 'The secret of happiness is to see all the marvels of the world, and never to forget the drops of oil on the spoon."

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

Little Bee - Chris Cleeve

[EXCERPTS]
"Most days I wish I was a British pound rather than an African girl. Everyone would be pleased to see me coming. Maybe I would visit you for the weekend and then suddenly, because I am fickle like that, I would visit with the man from the corner shop instead - but you would not be sad because you would be eating a cinnamon bun, or drinking a cold Coca-Cola from the can, and you would never think of me again. We would be happy, like lover's who met on holiday and forgot each other's names."

"How I would love to be a British pound. A pound is free to travel to safety, and we are free to watch it go. This is the human triumph. This is called, globalization. A girl likes me gets stopped at immigration, but a pound can leap the turnstiles, and dodge the tackles of those big men with their uniform caps, and jump straight into a waiting airport taxi. 'Where to, sir?' 'Western Civilization, my good man, and make it snappy.' See how nicely a British pound coin talks? It speaks with the voice of Queens Elizabeth the Second of England. Her face is stamped upon it, and sometimes when I look very closely I can see her lips moving. I hold it up to my ear. What is she saying? 'Put me down this minute, young lady, or I shall call my guards.'


"I ask you right here please to agree with me that a scar is never ugly. That is what the scar makers want us to think. But you and I, we must make an agreement to defy them. We must see all scars as beauty. Okay? This will be our secret. Because take it from me, a scar does not form on the dying. A scar means, I survived."


"On our honeymoon we talked and talked. We stayed in a beachfront villa, and we drank rum and lemonade and talked so much that I never even noticed what color the sea was. Whenever I need to stop and remind myself how much I once loved Andrew, I only need to think about this. That the ocean covers seven tenths of the earth's surface, and yet my husband could make me not notice it."


"The flatscreen at our end of the floor was showing BBC News 24 with the sound down. They were running a segment on the war. Smoke was rising above one of the countries involved. Don't ask me which - I'd lost track by that stage. That war was four years old. It had started in the same month my son was born, and they'd grown up together. At first both of them were a huge shock and demanded constant attention but as each year went by, they became more autonomous and one could start to take one's eye off them for extended periods. Sometimes a particular event would cause me momentarily to look at one or the other of them - my son, or the war - with my full attention, and at times like these I would always think, 'Gosh, haven't you grown?'"


"I think I shall teach you the names of all the English flowers," said Sarah. "This is fuschia, and this is a rose, and this is honeysuckle. What? What are you smiling about?"
"There are no goats. That is why you have all these beautiful flowers."
"There were goats, in your village."
"Yes, and they ate all the flowers."
"I'm sorry."
"Do not be sorry. We ate all the goats."


"Perhaps at 21, one is naturally curious about life, but at 30, simply suspicious of anyone who still has one."

Coolie Odyssey - David Dabydeen

[EXCERPT]
"To bring me to this library of graves,
This small clearing of scrubland.
There are no headstones, epitaphs, dates.
The ancestors curl and dry to scrolls of parchment.
They lie like texts
Waiting to be written by the children
For whom they hacked and ploughed and saved
To send faraway schools.
'Is foolishness fill your head
Me dead.
Dog-bone and dry-well.
Got no story to tell.
Just how me born stupid is so me gone.'
Still we persist before the grave
Seeking fables."

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles - Haruki Murakami

[EXCERPTS]
"You can't I guess. There's nothing you can do. There's no way to prevent baldness. Guys who are going to go bald go bald. When there time comes, that's it: They just go bald. There's nothing you can do to stop it. They tell you you can keep from going bald with proper hair care, but that's bullshit. Look at the bums who sleep in Shinjuku Station. They've all got great heads of hair. You think they're washing it every day with Clinique or Vidal Sassoon or rubbing Lotion X into it? That's what the cosmetics makers will tell you, to get your money."

"I bet the reason people are afraid of going bald is because it makes them think of the end of life. I mean, when your hair starts to thin, it must feel as if your life is being worn away...as if you've taken a giant step in the direction of death, the last Big Consumption."

"When you sneak into somebody's backyard, it does seem that guts and curiousity are working together. Curiousity can bring guts out of hiding at times, maybe even get them going. But curiousity usually evaporates. Guts have to go for the long haul. Curiousity's like a fun friend you can't really trust. It turns you on and then it leaves you to make it on your own - with whatever guts you can muster."

"If people lived forever - if they never got older - if they could just go on living in this world, never dying, always healthy - do you think they'd bother to think hard about things, the way we're doing now? I mean, we think about just about everything, more or less - philosophy, psychology, logic. Religion. Literature. I kinda think, if there were no such thing as death, that complicated thoughts and ideas like that would never come into the world. I mean...this is what I think, but...people have to think seriously about what it means for them to be alive here and now because they know they're going to die sometime. Right? Who would think about what it means to be alive if they were just going to go on living forever? Why would they have to bother? Or even if they should bother, they'd probably just figure, 'Oh, well, I've plenty of time for that. I'll think about it later.' But we can't wait till later. We've got to think about it right this second...Nobody knows what's going to happen. So we need death to make us evolve. That's what i think. Death is this huge, bright thing, and the bigger and brighter it is, the more we have to drive ourselves crazy thinking about things."

The Life of God (as told my himself) - Franco Ferrucci

[EXCERPTS]
“Bored by the reptiles and mystified by the birds, I decided that it was time for a fresh idea, and soon I hit upon a radical new concept. I wanted life to meditate upon itself so as to better comprehend itself. There followed from this that my next living beings should bear their children inside themselves, and that their eggs should open in the warmth of the womb instead of being hatched outside...I had chosen the females to carry the burden because they were the more generous and patient gender.”

“I had to find an animal that I could transform into the most splendid of beings, and I immediately started to look around…I rejected the ferocious inhabitants, the tiger, the alligator, the predator. Violent types wouldn’t do for this assignment…I found birds something profoundly mediocre…One disappointment followed another. The cat was too lazy, the marsupial was prone to getting lost, the worked blindly and was undecided between the wet and the dry, the serpent was perfidious [disloyal] and unable to build anything at all…Look at the dog, how distracted he gets…One day I was sitting beneath a tree on the beach, munching a banana and wondering where in creation I would find the animal I needed. Right then, from a branch above me, dropped the monkey.”

“I concede that God should not have such a profound need for affection that he immediately trusts whoever compliments him. But it is not his fault that he was born an orphan, that he spent his childhood alone and starved for affection. I’m being defensive, I suppose, so it comes naturally to fall into the third person.”

“It was also necessary to do something to reinforce sexual desire, which had dwindled dangerously. I decided to invent clothes to cover limbs of both men and women to see if they would become more desirable. The genitials figured prominently in my plan; they became invisible to the point of being dreamed about and even idolized. This proved an excellent ploy. The human body, which naked soon provokes only boredom mixed with irritation, once covered is clouded in an indistinct élan. Such is the power of illusion.”

“In reality there were neither angels nor pairs of gods. There was only myself, capable of so many mistakes, something that I found hard to get across to humankind…My only genius consisted in having created someone who might understand and describe me…I was waiting for them to become clever enough to explain to me who I was and why I was carrying on in such an unseemly manner.”

“Everything led me to believe that the devil was the fruit of an overactive human imagination. But I also knew that when there’s talk about something, it means that something does exist, and it becomes a matter of looking for it in the right place. Finally I gave in to the most obvious but distasteful strategy before me: I became an exorcist.”

“The popes appearance was so incredibly noble. I was about to fall to my knees and ask him to give me a sign of paternal welcome, but I caught myself just in time. ‘It is I who am his God,’ I repeated to myself several times.”

“[God leaving] I go back and forth, make the rounds, close the doors, turn off the lights. My anxiety about watering the plants before I leave has made me overflow more than one region. My moving the furniture and my emptying the drawers has caused some recent earthquakes that could have been avoided with more caution on my part. I feel sorry about that.”

“Confused prayers reach me, intersected by electrical signals. I can barely make out the words.”

"Worshipping an Orb called Christ" The Illustrated Man - Ray Bradbury

[EXCERPT] "Consider the Chinese," replied Father Peregrine imperturbably. "What sort of Christ do Christian Chinese worship? An oriental Christ, naturally. You've all seen oriental Nativity scenes. How is Christ dressed? In Eastern robes. Where does He walk? In Chinese settings of bamboo and misty mountain and crooked tree. His eyelids taper, His cheekbones rise. Each country, each race adds something to Our Lord. I am reminded of the Virgin of Guadalupe, to whom all Mexico pays its love. Her skin? Have you noticed the paintings of her? A dark skin, like that of her worshippers. Is this blasphemy? Not at all. It is not logical that men should accept a God, no matter how real, of another color. I often wonder why our missionaries do well in Africa, with a snow-white Christ. Perhaps because white is a sacred color, in albino, or any form, to the African tribes. Given time, mighn't Christ darken there too? The form does not matter. Content is everything. We cannot expect these Martians to accept an alien form. We shall give them Christ in their own image."
"There's a flaw in your reasoning, Father," said Father Stone. "Won't the Martians suspect us of hypocrisy? They will realize that we don't worship a round, globular Christ, but a man with limbs and a head. How do we explain the difference?"
"By showing there is none. Christ will fill any vessel that is offered. Bodies or globes. He is there, and each will worship the same thing in a different guise. What is more, we must believe in this globe we give the Martians. We must believe in a shape which is meaningless to us as to form. This spheroid will be Christ. And we must remember that we ourselves, and the shape of our Earth Christ, would be meaningless, ridiculous, a squander of material to these Martians."
Father Peregrine laid aside his chalk. "Now let us go into the hills and build our church."
The Fathers began to pack their equipment.

The Tipping Point - Malcolm Gladwell

[EXCERPTS]

"weak ties" are always more important than strong ties. Your friends, after all, occupy the same world that you do. The might work with you, or live near you, and go to the same churches, schools or parties. How much, then, would they know that you wouldn't know? Your acquaintances, on the other hand, by definition occupy a very different world than you. They are much more likely to know something that you don't....Acquaintances, in short, represent a source of social power, and the more aquaintances you have the more powerful you are...We rely on them to give us access to opportunities and worlds to which we don't belong."

"Here is another example of the subtleties of persuasion. A large group of students were recruited for what they were told was a market research study by a company making high-tech headphones. They were each given a headset and told that the company wanted to test to see how well they worked when the listener was in motion - dancing up and down, say or moving his or her head. All of the students listened to songs Linda Ronstadt and the Eagles, and then heard a radio editorial arguing that tuition at their university should be raised from its present level of $587 to $750. A third were told that while they listened to the taped radio editorial they should nod their heads vigoursly up and down. The next third were told to shake their heads from side to side. The final third were the control group. They were told to keep their heads still. When they were finished, all the students were given a short questionaire, asking them questions about the quality of the songs and the effect of the shaking. Slipped in at the end was the question the experimenters really wanted an answer to: 'What do you feel would be an appropriate dollar amount for undergraduate tuition per year?'
The answers to that question are just as difficult to believe...The students who kept their heads still were unmoved by the editorial. The tuition amount that they guessed was appropriate was $582 - or just about where tuition was already. Those who shook their heads from side to side as they listened to the editorial - even though they thought they were simply testing headset quality - disagreed strongly with the proposed increase. They wanted tuition to fall on average to $467 a year. Those who were told to nod their heads up and down, meanwhile, found the editorial very persuasive. They wanted tuition to rise, on average, to $646. The simple act of moving their heads up and down, ostensibly for another reason entirely - was sufficient to cause them to recommend a policy that would take money out of their own pockets. Somehow nodding, in the end, mattered..."

"Six degrees of separation doesn't mean that everyone is linked to everyone else in just six steps. It means that a very small number of people are linked to everyone else in a few steps, and the rest of us are linked to the world through those special few."

"One of the most infamous incidents in New York City history, for example, was the 1964 stabbing death of a young Queens woman by the name of Kitty Genovese. Genovese was chased by her assailant and attacked three times on the street, over the course of half an hour, as 38 of her neighbors watched from their windows. During that time, however, none of the 38 witnesses called the police. The case provoked rounds of self-recrimination [blame]. It became symbolic of the cold and dehumanizing effects of urban life. Abe Rosenthal, who would later become editor of the New York Times, wrote in a book about the case:
...
Nobody can say why the 38 did not lift the phone while Miss Genevese was being attacked, since they cannot say themselves. It can be assumed, however, that their apathy [lack of concern] was indeed one of the big-city variety. It is almost a matter of psychological survival, if one is surrounded and pressed by millions of people, to prevent them from constantly impinging on you, and the only way to do this is to ignore them as often as possible. Indifference to one's neighbor and his troubles is a conditioned reflex in life in New York as it is in other big cities.
...
This is the kind of environmental explanation that makes intuitive sense to us. The anonymity and alienation of big-city life makes people hard and unfeeling. The truth about Genovese, however, turns out to be a little more complicated - more interesting. Two NYC psychologists...subsequently conducted a series of studies to try to understand what they dubbed the "bystander problem." They staged emergencies of one kind or another in different situations in order to see who would come and help. What they found, surprisingly, was that the one factor above all else that predicted helping behavior was how many witnesses there were to the event.
...
In one experiment, for example, Latane and Darley had a student alone in a room stage an epileptic fit. When there was just one person next door, listening, that person rushed to the student's aid 85% of the time. But when subjects thought that there were 4 others also overhearing the seizure, they came to the students aid only 31% of the time. In another experiment, people who saw smoke seeping out from under a doorway would report it 75% of the time when there were on their own, but the incident would be reported only 38% of the time when they were in a group. When people are in a group, in other words, repsonsibility for acting is diffused. They assume that someone else will make the call, or they assume that because no one else is acting, the apparent problem - the seizure-like sounds from the other room, the smoke from the door - isn't really a problem. In the case of Kitty Genovese, then, social psychologists like Latane and Darley argue, the lesson is not that no one called despite the fact that 38 people heard her scream; it's that no one called BECAUSE 38 people heard her scream. Ironically, had she been attacked on a lonely street with just one witness, she might have lived."

Runners Guide to the Meaning of Life - Amby Burfoot

[EXCERPTS]

"Running has its roots in our prehistory. We don't run because Baron de Coubertin invented the modern Olympic Games in 1896, but because our survival once depended upon it and, to a lesser extent, still does. Millenia ago, small packs of early man stalked game for food on the plains of East Africa, chasing for a while, then resting, then chasing again until their hapless prey was exhausted and could escape no more."

"To describe the agony of a marathon to someone who's never run it is like trying to explain color to someone who was born blind." - Jerome Drayton, Canadian winner of the 1977 Boston Marathon

"I have learned that there is no failure in running, or in life, as long as you keep moving. It's not about speed and gold medals. It's about refusing to be stopped. You might find that one particular direction proves difficult, but there are many directions on a compass. Infinite, in fact. As long as you keep searching, you'll find your winning way."

" You don't need any skill to run. In golf, by contrast, you have to hit your drives straight enough to stay in the fairway, and that requires thinking about a dozen technical details of your golf swing. In tennis, you'd better master the backhand stroke, or your rallies will be short. In swimming...well, you'll drown if you don't develop some skills.
Not so with running. Every 3-year-old knows how to run. At the same time, running is the most vigorous excercise known to science. It forces your heart to pump vast quantities of blood throughout your body - including your brain. So the brain's getting all this oxygen at a time when it doesn't have any work to do. You're just running. You're not putting together business plans, solving quadratic equations, or trying to keep your drive from slicing off the fairway.
No wonder the brain spins out most fantastical thoughts while you're running. No wonder fresh, creative ideas pop into your head when you're least expecting them. No wonder millions of runners consider their workouts the perfect time to reenergize both their bodies and their minds."

Post-Mortem - Patricia Cornwell

[EXCERPTS]

"The dead have never bothered me. It is the living I fear...."

"You artists think you're the only ones who can relate to these things [separation]. Many of us have the same feelings, the same emptiness, the same loneliness. But we don't have the tools to verbalize them. So we carry on, we struggle. Feelings are feelings. I think people's feelings are pretty much the same all over the world."

The Science of Harry Potter - Roger Highfield

[EXCERPT] "If Newton had not...voyaged through strange seas of thought alone, someone else would have. If Marie Curie had not lived, we still would have discovered the radioactive elements polonium and radium. But if J.K.Rowling had not been born, we would never have known about Harry Potter..."