First Name

1:'AHAM' is the first name of God. The word ['Aham'] means that which exists, Self-shining and Self-evident. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi,

2:Who am I?' is not a mantra. It means that you must find out where in you the 'I-thought' arises, which is the source of all other thoughts. But if you find that vichara marga (path of enquiry) is too hard for you, you go on repeating 'I-I' and that will lead you to the same goal. There is no harm in using 'I' as a mantra. It is the first name of God. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, Gems,

* WISDOM TROVE *

* NEWFULLDB 2.4M *

1:Last name 'Ever', first name 'Greatest' ~ Drake,

2:Last name ever first name greatest ~ David Drake,

3:Other-Love is writing's first name. ~ Helene Cixous,

4:First name: Mister; middle name: period; last name T. ~ Mr T,

5:Koko B. Ware … his mom’s first name was Tupper. ~ Bobby Heenan,

6:Feel free to call me by my first name: Master. ~ Patrick Rothfuss,

7:My name was Salmon like the fish, first name Susie. ~ Alice Sebold,

8:My name was Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. ~ Alice Sebold,

9:I'm Mitt Romney-and yes Wolf, that's also my first name. ~ Mitt Romney,

10:And since when have he and Snape been on first-name terms? ~ J K Rowling,

11:Luck is my middle name. Mind you, my first name is Bad. ~ Terry Pratchett,

12:If Jesus was a Jew, how come he has a Mexican first name? ~ Billy Connolly,

13:Her first name was India-she was never able to get used to it. ~ Evan S Connell,

14:When I met Mr. Right I had no idea that his first name was Always ~ Rita Rudner,

15:My first name ain't baby, it's Janet, Miss Jackson if you're nasty ~ Janet Jackson,

16:Rembrandt's first name was Beauregard, which is why he never used it. ~ Dave Barry,

17:The only name on my birth certificate was Henley, no first name. ~ Rickey Henderson,

18:When I married Mr. Right, I didn’t realize his first name was ALWAYS. ~ Jill Kargman,

19:You got a name?” “Kim,” he spat. “What’s your first name?” “Mister. ~ Craig Schaefer,

20:When I eventually met Mr. Right, I had no idea his first name was Always. ~ Rita Rudner,

21:Nope, there wasn't any getting out of this. Real first name meant business. ~ Mindee Arnett,

22:Historically, Abd was the first name given to man. ~ Jean Maximillien De La Croix de Lafayette,

23:Started off local but thanks to all the haters, I know G4 pilots on a first name basis. ~ Drake,

24:When Thomas wakes up in the lift, the only thing he can remember is his first name. ~ Anonymous,

25:Please, we're all friends here. Feel free to call me by my first name: Master. ~ Patrick Rothfuss,

26:Someday the world is going to know who I am-just be hearing my first name. ~ Arnold Schwarzenegger,

27:I like that Maersk is a first name. It's like a massive global corporation named Derek. ~ Rose George,

28:My name is Salmon, like the fish; first name, Susie. I was fourteen when I was murdered. ~ Alice Sebold,

29:Never allow your child to call you by your first name. He hasn't known you long enough. ~ Fran Lebowitz,

30:Luck is my middle name," said Rincewind, indistinctly. "Mind you, my first name is Bad. ~ Terry Pratchett,

31:His name was Rayner. First name unknown. By me, at any rate, and therefore, presumably, by you too. ~ Hugh Laurie,

32:But what the fuck ... ever gave you the idea that Locke was the first name I was actually born with? ~ Scott Lynch,

33:My dad named me Dakota and my mom came up with my first name Hannah. So it's Hannah Dakota Fanning. ~ Dakota Fanning,

34:My first name was inspired by the character of Aslan, the lion in C.S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia. ~ Aselin Debison,

35:I haven’t yet learned to call you by your first name, and Miss Nin sounds so stiff, like an invitation to tea. ~ Ana s Nin,

36:Now it’s my turn,” Riley said. “What’s your first name? Where’d you grow up? Who’s your favorite Batman? ~ Janet Evanovich,

37:[To Jean Harlow, who repeatedly mispronounced her first name:] No, no, Jean. The t is silent, as in Harlow. ~ Margot Asquith,

38:George?” said Puller. “Oh, I’m sorry. You probably just knew him as Father Rooney. His first name is George. ~ David Baldacci,

39:'AHAM' is the first name of God. The word ['Aham'] means that which exists, Self-shining and Self-evident. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi,

40:If you give way to fear, you'll be a coward; and ... a coward is apt to be a liar. The devil's first name is Fear. ~ Margaret Deland,

41:It doesn't help for you to name a character's first name be Mindy and then be like, "I'm nothing like the character." ~ Mindy Kaling,

42:I hate academic mysteries. As soon as I come across the word 'don' and it's not someone's first name, I close the book. ~ Fran Lebowitz,

43:It was the first time I had ever heard him address me by my first name. I wanted to live long enough to hear him do it again. ~ William Ritter,

44:I've no desire to start a movement, to be the first name on an open petition, or to be the poster child for disgruntled writers. ~ John Ridley,

45:Mr Cameron Anderson was in his mid-twenties and hailed from Edinburgh: which explained why he had a first name like Cameron. ~ Stuart MacBride,

46:Doakes had a first name! It was Albert - had anyone ever really called him that? Unthinkable. I had assumed his name was Sergeant. ~ Jeff Lindsay,

47:I get called 'Memphis Eve,' but my first name is Eve. I know Memphis is in there somewhere, but on my passport I'm 'Eve Sunny Day Hewson. ~ Eve Hewson,

48:It is like the feeling you have when someone says your first name all the time in conversation and you know he’s been reading Carnegie. ~ Reid Hoffman,

49:I once dealt with a prima donna on a movie set. I won't say who, but his first name is a country. A communist country. Run by Fidel Castro. ~ Artie Lange,

50:We demand that the government of Canada force Stockwell Day to change his first name to Doris. "Why do this," you may ask? Because it'll be fun. ~ Rick Mercer,

51:It’s my experience that when people go on repeating your first name, they want something from you, and it’s usually not something you want to give. ~ Herman Koch,

52:I want to thank the President and the CEO of Constellation Energy, Mayo Shattuck. That's a pretty cool first name, isn't it, Mayo. Pass the Mayo. ~ George W Bush,

53:his ass on a first-name basis. I squeal, but he ignores me as I hear the crunch of the gravel as his boots hit it with each step. I listen as the ~ Justine Elvira,

54:...imagining her name in a record book. All those demure round letters in the first name, followed by the stalky surprise of the surname. Ona Vitkus. ~ Monica Wood,

55:I was looking for a last name that was a first name. Growing up, I knew a kid who was the most obnoxious kid I ever knew, and his last name was Herman. ~ Paul Reubens,

56:AND THE PERSON OUTSIDE TO WHOM YOU WERE speaking?” Inspector Hewitt asked. "Dogger," I said.
"First name?" "Flavia," I said. I couldn't help myself. ~ Alan Bradley,

57:Buchan had discovered a wealth of small tidbits. He now knew her first name - Tatiana. Like Shakespeare's fairy queen. "Be she but little, she is fierce. ~ Karen Hawkins,

58:I take it ASAC Frazer”—God, I don’t know the guy’s first name—“should have told you about your friend?” It must be the agent he’d told her about earlier. ~ Toni Anderson,

59:Dimitri was on a first name basis with one of the most badass guardians around. Of course, Dimitri was pretty badass himself, so I shouldn’t have been surprised. ~ Richelle Mead,

60:People want to say there isn't racial profiling at the airport, but let's be honest. If you first name is Mohammed, and your last name isn't Ali, leave a little extra time. ~ Jay Leno,

61:I thought I would keep the first name Susan and change the last name but I picked up this book and as I opened it the lead character in it was called Morgan Brittany. ~ Morgan Brittany,

62:I was in the mood to make out in the back row of the movie theater with someone who did not know my first name. I wanted three guys to fight for the honor of buying me a drink ~ Jodi Picoult,

63:Not Mr. Rasmussen. Call me Dom. I really think we should be on a first-name basis, since you know that I strip off my suit every night and get into bed wearing nothing at all.". ~ Avery Flynn,

64:It's a physical sickness. Étienne. How much I love him. I love Étienne. I love that the accent over his first name is called an acute accent, and that he has a cute accent. ~ Stephanie Perkins,

65:My name is Towner Whitney. No, that's not exactly true. My real first name is Sophya. Never believe me. I lie all the time.

I am a crazy woman... That last part is true. ~ Brunonia Barry,

66:They were on a first-name basis now, united in female solidarity after a twenty-minute conversation about cats. How women cemented alliances over less than nothing impressed him anew. ~ Monica Wood,

67:In the same way that it makes sense for the airport security screeners to give my father extra scrutiny every time he flies because his skin is brown and his first name is Muhammad? ~ Chris Grabenstein,

68:The name of Nalwa became a terror in the tribal territory’, and Pashtun mothers would for years frighten children into good behaviour by speaking of ‘Haria’, after Nalwa’s first name. ~ Rajmohan Gandhi,

69:Does the Great Colinski have a first name?” “Royal. Such a name, don’t you think? Royal Colinski from East L.A.” The burner vibrated in my pocket, but I was learning too much to stop. “Why ~ Robert Crais,

70:I fondle the last two charms: a letter C- oh yes, I was his first girlfriend to use his first name. I smile at the thought. And finally, there's a key.

"To my heart and soul," he whispers. ~ E L James,

71:Lady” is not used before the lady’s first name unless she is the daughter of a duke, marquess or earl; those who come by the title through marriage use it before the husband’s name. Fortunately, ~ Judith Martin,

72:Mackenzie noticed at once that Porter had referred to her by her first name and called her a girl rather than a woman. The sad thing was that she didn’t think he was even aware of the disrespect. ~ Blake Pierce,

73:I am Rose Howard and my first name has a homonym. To be accurate, it has a homophone, which is a word that’s pronounced the same as another word, but spelled differently. My homophone name is Rows. ~ Ann M Martin,

74:So identified was Jesus with Nazareth that he was known throughout his life simply as “the Nazarean.” Considering how common a first name Jesus was, the city of his birth became his principal sobriquet. ~ Reza Aslan,

75:So here’s the issue,” said Adara briskly. “Mr Fleetwood—” “Was his first name Mac?” asked Elliot. “No, why would you ask that?” Adara snapped. “No reason,” Elliot told her, disappointed. “Continue ~ Sarah Rees Brennan,

76:Steve. That always felt made-up to me. Like, when your kid says, “Tell me about my daddy, Mama!” and you’re on the spot so you blurt out the first name that comes to mind—“Uh, his name was, um, Steve, honey. ~ Erin Watt,

77:Rosie stood up. ‘Is everything all right? Is Amy —’ ‘She’s fine, Rosie.’ They had long been on first-name terms. ‘But there’s been a change in today’s schedule. Can you come and see the consultant now? ~ Monica McInerney,

78:Tennessee. Now there's a name for you. His mama named him that on account of their last name being so regular. 'With a plain vanilla name like Jones, you gotta have a first name that's special,' she'd said. ~ Kathi Appelt,

79:You are so full of yourself, Trent,” I said, wishing I could shift the car into reverse and drive over his foot.
His smile widened.
“What?” I demanded.
“You called me by my first name. I like that. ~ Kim Harrison,

80:A great deal of research in social psychology shows that people are warmer and more trusting toward people who look like them, dress like them, talk like them, or even just share their first name or birthday. ~ Jonathan Haidt,

81:T. Ray said 'Who do you think you are? Julias Shakespeare?' The man sincerely thought that was Shakespeare's first name, and if you think I should have corrected him, you are ignorant about the art of survival. ~ Sue Monk Kidd,

82:We know that he gave Aschenbach Mahler's first name, and also his facial features. So Visconti picks up on something interesting. That led me to think about ways of developing further the Aschenbach-Mahler connection. ~ Philip Kitcher,

83:Oh, by the way, you should know that we can’t, after all, use Elizabeth as Janeway’s first name, there happens to be a living author with that name, so we’ve decided to call her Kathryn. We thought that would please you. ~ Kate Mulgrew,

84:You look beautiful in those colors, Kathleen.” His voice was low and soft.
She felt her face prickle. “Don’t use my first name.”
“By all means,” Devon mocked, glancing down at his towel-clad form, “let’s be formal. ~ Lisa Kleypas,

85:Myron, all six feet of super cuteness, comes forward. He smiles and I almost die, because he has one adorable dimple. Instead of getting embarrassed about his first name, he offers his hand and says, “Call me McDaniel. ~ Courtney Brandt,

86:No one knew his first name, and in general he was known in the country as Beauty Smith. But he was anything save a beauty. To antithesis was due his naming. He was preeminently unbeautiful. Nature had been niggardly with him. ~ Jack London,

87:Nash." Lola nodded toward the disappearing SUV. "Deputy Grayson." She grinned. "His first name is Nash. He's one of the four Grayson brothers. Every last one of them is tall, dark and so handsome they'll make your panties damp. ~ Elle James,

88:Mr. Wayne is an owner of The Sheffield, Blue,” Tiffa said simply. I tried not to quake. Tiffa turned back to Mr. Wayne. I wondered briefly if his first name was Bruce. He looked like he could have a Batmobile stashed on the roof. ~ Amy Harmon,

89:The Franklin known to the French, the Franklin who had briefly visited Paris in 1767 and 1769 was—in Voltaire’s description—the discoverer of electricity, a man of genius, a first name in science, a successor to Newton and Galileo. ~ Stacy Schiff,

90:Within the last minute, I had heard my own first name repeated—how often?—six times. It’s my experience that when people go on repeating your first name, they want something from you, and it’s usually not something you want to give. ~ Herman Koch,

91:Whenever I opened one, T. Ray said, “Who do you think you are, Julius Shakespeare?” The man sincerely thought that was Shakespeare’s first name, and if you think I should have corrected him, you are ignorant about the art of survival. ~ Sue Monk Kidd,

92:I think it is often easier to make progress on mega-ambitious dreams. Since no one else is crazy enough to do it, you have little competition. In fact, there are so few people this crazy that I feel like I know them all by first name. ~ James Altucher,

93:I dunno when I started writing really. I was, like, filling out applications and stuff real early. Last name first, first name last, sex. 'occasionally' , stuff like that. Then I was writing letters, filling out forms, writing on bathroom walls. ~ Tom Waits,

94:My mother's very proud of the name she gave me. She thought it sounded rhythmically better. It doesn't really make a difference to me what people call me, but since my mother calls me Holly Marie when she's angry, I prefer just my first name. ~ Holly Marie Combs,

95:Why is she convinced Ambrose is out to get her" Leif asked "Ambrose?" Yelena raised a slender eyebrow. She carried a tray of tea and fruit. "You're on a first name basis with the Commander now?" "I usually call him Amby, but not in mixed company. ~ Maria V Snyder,

96:Wong is the most common surname in the world . . . "
" . . . John is the most common first name in the world."
"That's right," I said. "And yet there's not a single person named John Wong. I looked it up."
"You know, I work with a John Wong. ~ David Wong,

97:My first name - I have no middle name - was chosen by my father, as he told me, on that solitary walk in the forested hills. He selected it from a verse of the seventh chapter of Isaiah; there was no Immanuel among our ancestors known to him. ~ Immanuel Velikovsky,

98:I eyed the spirit. “You know the name ‘Alfred’ is a joke, right?” It stared at me. A wind that didn’t exist stirred the hem of its cloak. I raised my hands in surrender and said, “All right. I guess you need a first name, too. Alfred Demonreach it is. ~ Jim Butcher,

99:All the douchebags are starting fights the police will have to break up. Do you trust me, Beckett?”
Beckett had never heard Eve use his first name before. It made him long for a home, a blanket, and her pussy all at once.
“Abso-fucking-lutely. ~ Debra Anastasia,

100:Why is she convinced Ambrose is out to get her" Leif asked
"Ambrose?" Yelena raised a slender eyebrow. She carried a tray of tea and fruit. "You're on a first name basis with the Commander now?"
"I usually call him Amby, but not in mixed company. ~ Maria V Snyder,

101:This is completely unacceptable. Your investigative skills are getting rusty, Angie. You usually have a guy’s entire life history memorized within the first ten minutes of him showing up on your hot guy radar, and all you know about this one is his first name? ~ C J Anaya,

102:I love it when he cocks an eyebrow whenever I say something he finds clever or amusing.
I love listening to his boots clomp across my bedroom ceiling.
I love that the accent over his first name is called an acute accent, and that he has a cute accent. ~ Stephanie Perkins,

103:Pete,” I say. “Beg your pardon?” He glares at me. “My name is Pete,” I say. “We should probably be on a first name basis if you’re going to get intimate enough to chop my nuts off.” I motion to his hatchet. He blows out a quick breath, grins, and shakes his head. ~ Tammy Falkner,

104:You saw the way everyone looked at him? And when I asked for nominations, his was the first name mentioned. I don’t like it, his being Nurse Temple’s son. That’s a bad coincidence. Get a read on him. If he has the power, we may not be able to wait to deal with him. ~ Michael Grant,

105:My second Christian name is John. Good solid bourgeois Christian name, like my first name, Peter, a rock. Minerals. Build on rock, rocks, uranium. Peter and John were two of the twelve apostles - arguable the two most significant. Were my parents hedging their bets? ~ Peter Greenaway,

106:I was born Joseph Lane, but when I applied to the actors union, they said they already had a Joe Lane on the books and I'd have to change my last or first name. I had played the character of Nathan Detroit, whom I liked very much, in 'Guys and Dolls,' so I took the name Nathan. ~ Nathan Lane,

107:Oh shit. He first-named me. Tucker only calls me John when I’ve really pissed him off.

Except now he’s pissed me off, so I first-name him right back. “What’s wrong with that, John?”

Yup, we’re both John. I guess we should take a blood oath and form a club or something. ~ Elle Kennedy,

108:Renie was always engaged," said Judith dryly. "At one point, she was engaged to three guys at once, all with the same first name."

Joe shrugged one broad shoulder. "Kept her from making tactless mistakes, anyway. Which one did she marry?"

"None of them," answered Judith. ~ Mary Daheim,

109:And what first name are you called?” Illythe asked softly, moving up very close to Bryant.

“Bryant.” When he said it, Alex saw the upward tilt of Bryant’s chin, and the squaring of his shoulders. He was playing tough, and all Alex could do was to stand by and wait for the train wreck. ~ Lia Black,

110:My first name, Benjamin, dates back a thousand years earlier to Benjamin - Binyamin - the son of Jacob, who was also known as Israel. Jacob and his 12 sons roamed these same hills of Judea and Samaria 4,000 years ago, and there's been a continuous Jewish presence in the land ever since. ~ Benjamin Netanyahu,

111:Saudia Arabia takes in half a trillion dollars every year in oil revenue, and the country has a population smaller than New York state, but when your system of government is an eleventh century monarchy, someone's going to end up poor, and it's not gonna be the guy whose first name is King. ~ Craig Ferguson,

112:Rino’s mother is named Raffaella Cerullo, but everyone has always called her Lina. Not me, I’ve never used either her first name or her last. To me, for more than sixty years, she’s been Lila. If I were to call her Lina or Raffaella, suddenly, like that, she would think our friendship was over. ~ Elena Ferrante,

113:Because on that watch list, they would be like, yeah, your name - they told me like, yeah, your name matches the name of a terrorist or someone that they're watching. I was just like, what terrorist is running around with a Hebrew first name and a Muslim - Arabic last - I'm like, who's that guy? ~ Mahershala Ali,

114:„Ma'am?“ She glanced up at me, pushing her glasses up her nose as she did. “Hmm? Oh, I remember you. Miss Melbourne.“ “Melrose,“ I corrected. “Are you sure? I could've sworn you were named after someplace in Australia.“ „Well, my first name is Sydney,“ I said, not sure if I should be encouraging her. ~ Richelle Mead,

115:You: Why did you pick my first name? Your dad: I don’t remember. You: I see. Can you give me an example of something else you can’t remember? Your dad: Uh . . . what? You: Did you like the sound of my name? Your dad: Yes. Your name rhymes with platypus, and that has always been one of our favorite animals. ~ Bart King,

116:The name's Old Testament derivation did not surprise him. Campbell's first name was Exra, and there was an Absalom and a Solomon in the camp. But no Lukes or Matthews, which Buchanan had once noted, telling Pemberton that from his research the highlanders tended to live more by the Old Testament than the New. ~ Ron Rash,

117:Esperanza gestured with her chin at a man with slicked-back hair oiling his way toward them. When he filled out his job application, Myron had little doubt that it read, Last Name: Trash. First Name: Euro. Myron checked the man’s wake for slime tracks. Euro smiled with ferret teeth. “Poca, mi amor.” “Anton, ~ Harlan Coben,

118:... the surprised bookseller, whose name (inexplicably) was Mendelssohn. He was no relation to the German composer, and this Mendelssohn either overliked his last name or disliked his first so much that he never revealed it. (When Ted had once asked him his first name, Mendelssohn had said only: "Not Felix.") ~ John Irving,

119:My father's a frustrated explorer, so I'm on a first-name basis with a lot of dead men." "Yes, there's a whole generation of those kind of fathers, isn't there? Men cut out for Shackleton's adventures but forced to work as accountants or teachers...It's a bloody shame, actually. There's nothing left for them. ~ Ashley Shelby,

120:„Ma'am?“
She glanced up at me, pushing her glasses up her nose as she did. “Hmm? Oh, I remember you. Miss Melbourne.“
“Melrose,“ I corrected.
“Are you sure? I could've sworn you were named after someplace in Australia.“
„Well, my first name is Sydney,“ I said, not sure if I should be encouraging her. ~ Richelle Mead,

121:I love our fans. Our fans are so supportive. It's been incredible to end four playoff games with 'Go Pack Go.' It's great at home, they travel well, it's on a first-name basis. It's a special play to play and all of us are blessed to play in Green Bay, and hopefully we will be repaying those fans with the Lombardi trophy. ~ Aaron Rodgers,

122:Compassion is never enough. Nor is the hunger for vengeance. But, for now, for what awaits us, perhaps they will do. We are the Bonehunters, and sail to another name. Beyond Aren, beyond Raraku and beyond Y’Ghatan, we now cross the world to find the first name that will be truly our own. Shared by none other. We sail to give answer. ~ Steven Erikson,

123:My name," said Mr. Fresh.
"Pardon?" Charlie stopped tying himself up.
"I dress in mint green because of my first name. It's Minty."
Charlie completely forgot what he was worried about. "Minty? Your name is Minty Fresh?"
Charlie appeared to be trying to stifle a sneeze, but then snorted an explosive laugh. Then ducked. ~ Christopher Moore,

124:But the fascinating and unbelievable-but-true thing about Dr. Jefferson Jeffersonis that he was not a doctor of any kind. He was just an orange juice salesman named Jefferson Jefferson. When he became rich and powerful, he went to court, made "Jefferson" his middle name, and then changed his first name to "Dr." Capital D. Lowercase r. Period. ~ John Green,

125:Anjan was Batty because Bhattacharya had too many syllables. He’d told one man his first name; the fellow had blinked, and then had immediately dubbed him John. That’s who they thought he was: John Batty. These well-meaning English boys had taken his name as easily, and with as much jovial friendship, as their fathers had taken his country. ~ Courtney Milan,

126:If you’ve ever felt a flash of distaste when a salesperson called you by first name without being invited to do so, or if you felt a pang of awkwardness when an older person you have long revered asked you to call him by first name, then you have experienced the activation of some of the modules that comprise the Authority/subversion foundation. ~ Jonathan Haidt,

127:You' re Benjamin Ripley, aren't you?"
"Uh... no." It was worth a shot.
And for half a second it almost seemed to work. The assassin hesitated, slightly confused, then asked, "Then who are you?"
"Jonathan Monkeywarts" I winced. It had been the first name to popped into my head. I made a mental note to be more prepared next time this happened. ~ Stuart Gibbs,

128:Eve sucked air through her nose. "The next person, the very next person, who says that is going to know my wrath."

"I'm on a first-name basis with your wrath, sir. I guess this isn't the best time to tell you that McNab and I are thinking of cohabitating."

"Oh my God. My eye." Desperate, Eve pressed her fist to the twitch. "Not while I'm driving. ~ J D Robb,

129:Back in Georgie's attic, he yanks the phone out of the socket and begins scrolling down the names under dialed calls, praying to anyone who will listen. God. Baby Jesus. Saint Thomas the doubter. Saint Whoever, patron saint of losers. Praying, Please, please, don't let it be true.

The first name shatters him.

The second makes his head spin. ~ Melina Marchetta,

130:The Prosecutor. His first name was Wagner, an extremely odd choice by his mother, but then it was her maiden name and she thought it fit him nicely, at least in the hospital. By the age of ten, though, he hated it for many reasons and chopped it in half. He’d gone by Wag for the past thirty years. Wag Dunlap. The voters seemed to like the oddness of his name. ~ John Grisham,

131:Who am I?' is not a mantra. It means that you must find out where in you the 'I-thought' arises, which is the source of all other thoughts. But if you find that vichara marga (path of enquiry) is too hard for you, you go on repeating 'I-I' and that will lead you to the same goal. There is no harm in using 'I' as a mantra. It is the first name of God. ~ Sri Ramana Maharshi, Gems,

132:She pressed buttons and waited for answering beeps, and then she said, “I want the personnel jacket for U.S. Army Private First Class Wiley, first name unknown, currently four months absent without leave from an air defense unit in Germany. To me in Hamburg, seriously fast.” Then she clicked off. The National Security Council. The keys to the kingdom. There was a knock at the door. For ~ Lee Child,

133:The federal government said today they've begun training sessions for airport security workers to provide what they call more customer satisfaction to the travels, they want to make it easier for us. They're instructing security guards to glance at your luggage tags so that they can call you by your first name. Isn't that creepy? The guy touching your wife, calling her by her first name. ~ Jay Leno,

134:You don’t like my restaurant, Miss Connor?”
“I couldn’t say since the waiting list to get in is six months long.”
One side of his mouth curved up. “This is true.”
His finger lingered, and I tried to swallow the nervous lump in my throat. “I think you can call me by my first name now, seeing as how you’re touching my boob. That puts us a little past formality, don’t you think? ~ Jenny Lyn,

135:I think it is often easier to make progress on mega-ambitious dreams. I know that sounds completely nuts. But, since no one else is crazy enough to do it, you have little competition. There are so few people this crazy that I feel like I know them all by first name. They all travel as if they are pack dogs and stick to each other like glue. The best people want to work the big challenges. ~ Larry Page,

136:Um, I don’t know your name but -”
“Knight,”
“Right, Mr. Knight-”
“No, Knight.”
“That’s what I said, Knight. Now, Mr. Knight-”
“No, not Mr. Knight. Knight. My name is Knight.”
“Your Christian name is Knight?”
“If that means first name, yeah.”
“With a ‘K’?”
“Yeah, babe, with a ‘K’.”
“That’s an unusual name.”
“Yeah.”
“I kind of like it.”
“I can die happy. ~ Kristen Ashley,

137:Some of the names will naturally create a picture like the surnames Baker, Cruise or Gardner. My surname is Horsley so you can think of a horse and Bruce lee. My first name is Kevin and it sounds like Cave in, making it easy to create an image and meaning out of my name. Other names may be more difficult, but by using a bit of creativity any name can be given meaning and turned into a picture. ~ Kevin Horsley,

138:I may own my vagina, both in theory and in practice (we are on a first-name basis, Vag and me-Scar's idea, by the way, not mine; no, not even a little bit mine), but that doesn't mean I'm not terrified of its appetites. For a moment, I imagine Vag's almost-blank résumé. Sixteen years: closed for business. Hobbies and interests: cheesy romance novels, collecting information about Ethan, Ethan Marks. ~ Julie Buxbaum,

139:My name,” he said, “is Dr. Hyde. I have a first name, of course. So far as you are concerned, it is Doctor. Your parents pay a great deal of money so that you can attend school here, and I expect that you will offer them some return on their investment by reading what I tell you to read when I tell you to read it and consistently attending this class. And when you are here, you will listen to what I say. ~ John Green,

140:There are some women who can make souffles. Who just happen to have a recipe for mocha parfait stuffed into their sports bra. Who can stack up their own wedding cakes with one hand and produce pepper steak Nossi Be with the other. That ought to make all of us happy. As long as it doesn't mean that the rest of us have to have a guilty conscience because we're still not on a first-name basis with our toasters. ~ Anonymous,

141:The thing I get the most [in public] is, 'Hey, Eugene.' You know what I mean? There's no catch phrase like: 'What a week I'm having.' People will actually just say, 'Hey, Eugene' or 'Hi, Eugene.' It's a great thing; they feel that comfortable calling me by my first name. It's not being forward. It depends how you say it. I think they can't help themselves. They think they know me. I find it gratifying. ~ Samuel L Jackson,

142:I believe he's been asked to testify today," I told Lennox, who'd continued to track Truman's progress through the room. "He's a member of the historical undead, Truman Capote, the author. He wrote Breakfast at Tiffany's and In Cold Blood."...
"Hi, Truman, you're sitting next to me," I said, pulling out his chair. I figured after he'd asked me to suck on his cherry, we should be on a first-name basis. ~ Suzanne Johnson,

143:A book about the Bible by a memoirist may seem like an odd undertaking, but anyone who has loved the Bible as much as I have, and who has lost it and found it again, knows how a relationship with the Bible can be as real and as complicated as a relationship with a family member or close friend. For better or worse, my story is inextricably tethered to the stories of Scripture, right down to my first name. ~ Rachel Held Evans,

144:Their moral indignation was sometimes feigned, but the Elizabethans’ nearly four hundred references to the Florentine Secretary introduced the derogatory terms ‘Machiavellian’ and ‘Machiavellianism’ into the English language. Some churchmen branded the book the work of the devil and its author an atheist, and Machiavelli’s first name came to be associated with an already popular term for the devil: Old Nick. ~ Niccol Machiavelli,

145:In French, as in other romance languages, speakers are forced to choose whether they’ll address someone using the respectful form (vous) or the familiar form (tu). Even English, which doesn’t embed status into verb conjugations, embeds it elsewhere. Until recently, Americans addressed strangers and superiors using title plus last name (Mrs. Smith, Dr. Jones), whereas intimates and subordinates were called by first name. ~ Jonathan Haidt,

146:Every early metaphysical sensation happened there, too—the feeling on a canoe trip of seeing a mountain at dawn, the way a simple rock can be coated with enchantment when it was the place you sat during the first raptures of teenage love. I have few friends left over from high school or college, but I have about forty or fifty lifelong friends from camp, and for decades they did not even realize that Brooksie had a first name. ~ David Brooks,

147:Pamela Anderson: 'He called and called, leaving about twenty messages, just drunk dialing. One of them was him singing his version of the Oscar Mayer theme song:

"My baloney has a first name, it's L-A-R-G-E. My baloney has a second name, it's P-E-N-I-S. I like to use it every day and if you ask me why, I'll saaay, 'Cuz my Large Penis has a way with P-U-S-S-Y today!"

Actually that was the message that got me interested. ~ Tommy Lee,

148:Just one question, you arrogant fucking cocksucker" said Locke. "I'll grant the Lamora part is easy to spot; the truth is, I didn't know about the apt translation when I took the name. I borrowed it from this old sausage dealer who was kind to me once, back in Catchfire before the plague. I just liked the way it sounded.
"But what the fuck" he said slowly, "ever gave you the idea that Locke was the first name I was actually born with? ~ Scott Lynch,

149:Nomenclature
My mother never heard of Freud
and she decided as a little girl
that she would call her husband Dick
no matter what his first name was
and did. He called her Ditty. They
called me Bud, and our generic names
amused my analyst. That must, she said,
explain the crazy times I had in bed
and quoted Freud: "Life is pain."
"What do women want?" and "My
prosthesis does not speak French."
~ Alan Dugan,

150:What kind of world is it, Ben thought, that lets its coaches die without his boys around him, buying him Cokes, calling him by his first name, and rubbing his shoulder with Atomic Balm? He died without a face in a room I never saw without my kisses in the stained gauze or without my prayers entering the center of his pain. But worst of all, O God, you let him die, let Coach Murphy die, let Dave die, without my thanks, my thanks, my thanks. ~ Pat Conroy,

151:They may already know too much about their mother and father--nothing being more factual than divorce, where so much has to be explained and worked through intelligently (though they have tried to stay equable). I've noticed this is often the time when children begin calling their parents by their first names, becoming little ironists after their parents' faults. What could be lonelier for a parent than to be criticized by his child on a first-name basis? ~ Richard Ford,

152:She flicked the paper with a finger. “First name on here,” she said. “Does the name Acosta mean anything to you?” I nodded. “It means trouble,” I said. Joe Acosta was a major figure in the city government, a sort of old-school commissioner who still carried the kind of clout you might have found fifty years ago in Chicago. If our Vlad was his son, we might be in for a fecal shower. “Different Acosta?” I asked hopefully. Deborah shook her head. “Same address,” she said. “Shit. ~ Jeff Lindsay,

153:With my two brothers, Jean-Marie and Joel, I wrote a two-page story and wanted to make some kind of movie. We met a French production company, called Why Not?, and the first name we put on the list was Ken Loach. It was a dream for all of us. So, we tried and we met Ken and Paul Laverty, his writer, and they read the two pages and were inspired by that to do something. Paul had the freedom to do his own story - and he wrote his own story, which is better than the one we'd written. ~ Eric Cantona,

154:I’ve gotten about whether their relationship is “legal” since they are now “family.” It doesn’t seem odd at all to me because my mother’s brother and sister married a brother and sister, giving me nine “double” cousins. To make things even more complicated, both the “brides” had the same first name, so they basically traded last names. Are you scratching your head yet? It takes new members of our family quite some time, as well as diagrams, to fully understand how we’re all related! ~ Marie Force,

155:Rosie: Actually, I’m surprised to admit it myself but she’s not so bad. In fact she’s not bad at all. As far as bosses go she’s been really, really pleasant. Her name is Julie. Can you believe it? She actually has a first name. And all this time I had convinced myself it was Big Nose Smelly Breath. And it’s a nice, normal name too; I would have thought it was something more like Vladimir or Adolf.

Ahern, Cecelia (2005-02-01). Love, Rosie (p. 308). Hachette Books. Kindle Edition. ~ Cecelia Ahern,

156:Arjuro made a scoffing sound. ‘You think Lumatere will invade because of you? Are you that important?’

Froi looked away. ‘Isaboe would invade if you kidnapped a servant, let alone a friend.’

‘Isaboe? We’re on first-name terms with the Queen of Lumatere, are we?’ Gargarin asked.

Froi found himself bristling. ‘What? Do you think I’m some cutthroat for hire who they found hanging around the palace walls with the words “I want
to kill a Charynite King” tattooed on my arse? ~ Melina Marchetta,

157:McIntyre hesitated, and for a moment the tall, gray-haired man looked almost boyish. "After all this time...don't you think you could call me William?"
Amy and Dan exchanged glances. As fond as they were of him, they couldn't imagine calling their lawyer by his first name.
He saw the hesitation on their faces. "Will?"
Amy cleared her throat. Dan fiddled with the new GPS.
"How about 'Mac'?"
"Mac," Dan said, trying out the name.
Mr. McIntyre looked wistful. "I always wanted to be a Mac. ~ Jude Watson,

158:There's a scientific hypothesis that every person's name is a primary suggestive command that contains the entire script of their life in highly concentrated form. . . . According to this point of view, there is only a limited number of names, because society only needs a limited number of human types. Just a few models of worker and warrior ants, if I could put it like that. And everybody's psyche is preprogrammed at a basic level by the associative semantic fields that their first name and surname activate. ~ Victor Pelevin,

159:Anjan was Batty because Bhattacharya had too many syllables. He’d told one man his first name; the fellow had blinked, and then had immediately dubbed him John. That’s who they thought he was: John Batty. These well-meaning English boys had taken his name as easily, and with as much jovial friendship, as their fathers had taken his country. And Emily had called him Bhattacharya. He’d fallen a little bit in love with her the moment she’d said his name as if it had value. His fist clenched, but he kept on smiling. ~ Courtney Milan,

160:So, who is it?" Stella is persisting, somewhat suspiciously. "What's his name?"
But if I don't tell her the truth, what do I say? My mind draws a blank. I don't want to lie to her- "um..." walking back to the bedroom, I notice the postcard Spike chose for me resting on my top of my dresser. I haven't written that one yet. Absently I pick it up and turn it over. On the back is written "Matthew Macfadyen as Fitzwilliam Darcy." "Fitzwilliam," I blurt. "No, what's his first name?" she asks. "That is his first name. ~ Alexandra Potter,

161:In cinema people are always walking into something and saying this is who I am, what I want, and how I'm going to get it and we don't in life - particularly not in public situations. People might know your first name, not your last name, they don't know what you do, and you're not going to offer it up. So if you start there and you realize this is a much more normal presentation in a film then you would ordinarily have; you know that there is a big life behind what everyone presents and that I think is super interesting. ~ Julianne Moore,

162:And don’t get me started on your manwhoring,” Tucker grumbles. “You’ve always been a player, but dude, you’ve hooked up with five chicks this week.”

“So?”

“So it’s Thursday. Five girls in four days. Do the fucking math, John.”

Oh shit. He first-named me. Tucker only calls me John when I’ve really pissed him off.

Except now he’s pissed me off, so I first-name him right back. “What’s wrong with that, John?”

Yup, we’re both John. I guess we should take a blood oath and form a club or something. ~ Elle Kennedy,

163:Can I admit I’m a little freaked out that Socrates only has one name? I know that’s how it was done in those days, but it bugs me. I can’t tell if it’s his last name or his first name or what. And it can’t be shortened—except to Sock, which is completely stupid. I want him to have a more familiar name—something laid back and modern, so I can relate to him better. So I stare at the picture in my book of the curly-bearded guy with the pug nose, and by the end of study hall, I name him Frank. Frank Socrates. Makes him more huggable. ~ A S King,

164:I was eighteen now, just gone. Eighteen was not a young age. At eighteen old Wolfgang Amadeus had written concertos and symphonies and operas and oratorios and all that cal, no, not cal, heavenly music. And then there was old Felix M. with his "Midsummer Night's Dream" Overture. And there were others. And there was this like French poet set by old Benjy Britt, who had done all his best poetry by the age of fifteen, O my brothers. Arthur, his first name. Eighteen was not all that young an age then. But what was I going to do? ~ Anthony Burgess,

165:Mrs. Steadman, do you have a first name?” The question had taken her aback, and she had stammered out, “Well, of course I do. It’s Summer.” The boy’s eyes had widened. “Summer? I like that name.” She had shared the reason for her unusual name, watching his eyebrows rise. When she was finished, he had exclaimed, “You’re like me, then. You don’t have a ma, either.” She had shaken her head. “No, I don’t.” Abruptly, he had turned the conversation back to her name. “May I call you Summer? When it’s just us, I mean? Not in front of Rupert. ~ Kim Vogel Sawyer,

166:Paul Scholes was the jewel in the crown, the first name on the teamsheet and unquestionably one of the finest England players of the age. He flourished at once in the international arena, which didn't surprise me given his fabulous all-round attributes. He had almost everything - talent, intelligence, courage. His only blemish, which he never really shook off, was his tackling. There was always the chance of that red mist coming down. Overall, though, Paul was a wonderful player and he's a lovely lad, a credit to his club and to himself. ~ Glenn Hoddle,

167:Growing up after the Second World War in a Jewish family, I really understand that, and have members of my family who are very committed to this concept. My grandfather's first name was Israel and he thought it was his country. In my own sense of this issue as an American Jew, I have been on both sides of this. At this point I think it is very important for there to be separation of religion and state. It's not good for Jews. It's not good for Muslims. It's not good for Christians. The marriage of state and religion is inherently problematic. ~ Jill Stein,

168:Molly wants to know her father's name," Arch said to them. "Why don't you give her a hint?"
His first name with 'splatter,'" said Ripkins.
And 'matter'," said Blister.
Also 'fatter,'" said Ripkins.
Likewise 'chatter'," added Blister.
And his surname?" Arch asked.
It rhymes with 'that again'," said Ripkins.
And 'Flanagan," put in Blister.
Also, um...'pad a fin'?" offered Ripkins.
Arch and Blister looked at him.
'Pannikin!'" he said proudly.
Shut up, shut up, shut up!" Molly screamed. "You don't know what you're talking about! ~ Frank Beddor,

169:And it is true that we are warmed by being called by our names. We all know people who hardly ever do it, who only do it when they absolutely must. They manage to steer conversations along, ask questions, respond, without ever using a first name. And they chill others with their apparent detachment, those others who can never understand that it is diffidence which keeps them from committing themselves to the use of names. They might get the names wrong, or use them too often, be claiming an intimacy to which they have no right, be forward, pushy, presumptuous. ~ Ruth Rendell,

170:A certain ultra-dignified gentleman of unusual prominence carried himself so stiffly that nobody felt free to call him by his first name. He quarreled with a friend of earlier days and from then on the two never spoke. The day the friend died an associate found the ultra-dignified gentleman staring through the window. When he came out of his reverie, he soliloquized with a sigh, ""He was the last to call me John."" Is any man really entitled to regard himself a success who has failed to inspire at least a goodly number of fellow mortals to greet him by his first name? ~ B C Forbes,

171:Simon,” she whispered, vaguely surprised that she had just used his first name, for she had never used it even in the privacy of her thoughts. Moistening her dry lips, she tried once more, and to her astonishment, she did it again. “Simon…” “Yes?” A new tension had entered his long, hard body, and at the same time, his hand moved over the shape of her skull in the softest caress possible. “Please… take me to my room.” Hunt tilted her head back gently and regarded her with a sudden faint smile playing on his lips. “Sweetheart, I would take you to Timbuktu if you asked. ~ Lisa Kleypas,

172:“Simon,” she whispered, vaguely surprised that she had just used his first name, for she had never used it even in the privacy of her thoughts. Moistening her dry lips, she tried once more, and to her astonishment, she did it again. “Simon…” “Yes?” A new tension had entered his long, hard body, and at the same time, his hand moved over the shape of her skull in the softest caress possible. “Please… take me to my room.” Hunt tilted her head back gently and regarded her with a sudden faint smile playing on his lips. “Sweetheart, I would take you to Timbuktu if you asked.“ ~ Lisa Kleypas,

173:Raphael had taken notice of Greg at lunchtime—it was hard not to being that he was the biggest human at school. Raphael was pleased to have a class with him. I knew this because he said so in his non-stop Gregory Johnson commentary: What astounding athletic skills that Gregory Johnson must have. Gregory Johnson could slay a battalion of enemy soldiers wielding nothing but a sword. What a pity Gregory Johnson’s soul was not meant to become an angel. My hairstyle would look exceptional on Gregory Johnson. Evidently, the human-first-name-only-concept was lost to Archangels. ~ Ashlan Thomas,

174:the Holyhead Harpies. . . . People are always astonished to hear I’m on first-name terms with the Harpies, and free tickets whenever I want them!” This thought seemed to cheer him up enormously. “And all these people know where to find you, to send you stuff?” asked Harry, who could not help wondering why the Death Eaters had not yet tracked down Slughorn if hampers of sweets, Quidditch tickets, and visitors craving his advice and opinions could find him. The smile slid from Slughorn’s face as quickly as the blood from his walls. “Of course not,” he said, looking down at Harry. ~ J K Rowling,

175:Owen," Henry said excitedly, "I think Coach wants you to hit for Meccini."

Owen closed The Voyage of the Beagle, on which he had recently embarked. "Really?"

"Runners on first and second," Rick said. "I bet he wants you to bunt."

"What's the bunt sign?"

"Two tugs on the left earlobe," Henry told him. "But first he has to give the indicator, which is squeeze the belt. But if he goes to his cap with either hand or says your first name, that's the wipe-off, and then you have to wait and see whether--"

"Forget it," Owen said. "I'll just bunt. ~ Chad Harbach,

176:But unlike Erica, who had never worked a day in her privileged life, he felt most strongly about those who were sentenced by fate and misfortune to work in such places, part of a faceless corps of first-name-onlys who bartered their raw freedom for a paycheck, spending their lives in boxes as spare as the cages at a zoo, selling shoes, selling soda, filing nails, serving crap on a bun with a side of fries, restocking shelves picked clean by ravaging hordes, pinching their pennies while extravagantly spending the hours of their lives to satisfy the basest needs of the American consumer. ~ William Lashner,

177:Simon,” she whispered, vaguely surprised that she had just used his first name, for she had never used it even in the privacy of her thoughts. Moistening her dry lips, she tried once more, and to her astonishment, she did it again. “Simon…”

“Yes?” A new tension had entered his long, hard body, and at the same time, his hand moved over the shape of her skull in the softest caress possible.

“Please… take me to my room.”

Hunt tilted her head back gently and regarded her with a sudden faint smile playing on his lips. “Sweetheart, I would take you to Timbuktu if you asked. ~ Lisa Kleypas,

178:Nicely, thank you, Mr. Laurence. But I am not Miss March, I'm only Jo," returned the young lady.

"I'm not Mr. Laurence, I'm only Laurie."

"Laurie Laurence, what an odd name."

"My first name is Theodore, but I don't like it, for the fellows called me Dora, so I made them say Laurie instead."

"I hate my name, too, so sentimental! I wish every one would say Jo instead of Josephine. How did you make the boys stop calling you Dora?"

"I thrashed 'em."

"I can't thrash Aunt March, so I suppose I shall have to bear it." And Jo resigned herself with a sigh ~ Louisa May Alcott,

179:The woman with the cat complex is named Mrs. Alice Plesher, but she doesn't reveal her first name to him and Sai only finds out by accident, later. Mrs. Plesher calls the paper and is put through to Sai. He has no idea why although he could guess the new guy gets all of the reporter-on-the-beat drudgery assignments until proven worthy. Alice speaks haltingly as if hardened by age and her voice reveals a rasp. Sai pictures her in a long house dress from the fifties, wide pink and white stripes fading with age---a smock of beige over the dress, a multitude of cats clinging to the fabric like stick-ons. ~ Justin Bog,

180:We knew that some guys that looked as though they were al-Qaeda-associated were traveling to KL,” said a senior CIA official, referring to Kuala Lumpur. “We didn’t know what they were going to do there. We were trying to find that. And we were concerned that there might be an attack, because it wasn’t just Mihdhar and Hazmi, it was also ‘eleven young guys’—which was a term that was used for operatives traveling. We didn’t have the names of the others, and on Hazmi we only had his first name, ‘Nawaf.’ So the concern was: What are they doing? Is this a prelude to an attack in KL—what’s happening here? ~ James Bamford,

181:Dan Lynch was chuckling, his hand around his small glass. 'I remember Billy saying that AA was a Protestant thing when you came right down to it. Started by a bunch of Protestants. He said he didn't like the chummy way some of them were always calling Our Lord by his first name. I drove him to the first meeting and waited to take him home, 'cause Maeve didn't want him driving, and when he came out he said you could tell who the Catholics were because they'd all been bowing their heads every ten seconds while the Protestants bantered on about Jesus, Jesus Jesus.'
(And sure enough, up and down our stretch of table, heads bobbed at the name.) ~ Alice McDermott,

182:Wouldn’t it be more natural to operate with several names since their identities and self-perceptions are so very different? Such that the fetus might be called Jens Ove, for example, and the infant Nils Ove, and the five- to ten-year-old Per Ove, the ten- to twelve-year-old Geir Ove, the twelve- to seventeen-year-old Kurt Ove, the seventeen- to twenty-three-year-old John Ove, the twenty-three- to thirty-two-year-old Tor Ove, the thirty-two- to forty-six-year-old Karl Ove – and so on and so forth? Then the first name would represent the distinctiveness of the age range, the middle name would represent continuity, and the last, family affiliation. ~ Karl Ove Knausg rd,

183:Sure, I would have enjoyed buying that private fantasy island. Yes, I would have enjoyed legally changing my first name to Gilligan and starting my own perfect civilization on that uncharted desert isle—but Mom and Dad knew better. They had foresight to realize I would handle my money better once I was older. Mom became my manager when it was clear we couldn’t afford the costs related to acting unless she got a full-time job. Someone needed to take me to the studio daily and stay there, because it was required by law that every underage kid have a parent or legal guardian around all day. It seemed silly to pay someone else to do that, so she took the job. ~ Kirk Cameron,

184:Increase similarity, not diversity. To make a human hive, you want to make everyone feel like a family. So don’t call attention to racial and ethnic differences; make them less relevant by ramping up similarity and celebrating the group’s shared values and common identity.49 A great deal of research in social psychology shows that people are warmer and more trusting toward people who look like them, dress like them, talk like them, or even just share their first name or birthday.50 There’s nothing special about race. You can make people care less about race by drowning race differences in a sea of similarities, shared goals, and mutual interdependencies.51 ~ Jonathan Haidt,

185:That’s good,” young Tom said. “I told the headmaster neither papa nor Mr. Joyce had dirty minds and now I can tell him about Mr. Davis if he asks me. He was pretty set on it that I had a dirty mind. But I wasn’t worried. There’s a boy at school that really has one and you can tell the difference all right. What was Mr. Pascin’s first name?” “Jules.” “How do you spell it?” David asked. Thomas Hudson told him. “What ever became of Mr. Pascin?” young Tom asked. “He hanged himself,” Thomas Hudson said. “Oh gee,” Andrew said. “Poor Mr. Pascin,” young Tom said in benediction. “I’ll pray for him tonight.” “I’m going to pray for Mr. Davis,” Andrew said. “And do it often,” Roger said. ~ Ernest Hemingway,

186:This is what we are for, Alin,” the older guardsman said, turning to his companion. Adare had never heard anyone use Birch’s first name. She hadn’t even known it herself. “Our lives for hers. If she refuses this, there’s no saying what the zealots will do to her.”

“There’s no saying what the zealots will do if she agrees,” Birch pointed out. “We can’t save her if we’re dead.”

“That is a risk that the princess will have to assess for herself. Our duty is to serve.”

“I thought service meant fighting,” Birch protested, but the anger had gone out of him. Resignation thinned his voice.

“Sometimes, Alin,” Fulton replied, nodding. “And sometimes it means dying. ~ Brian Staveley,

187:In Praise Of Clothes
If it is only for the taking offthe velvet cloak,
the ostrich feather boa,
the dress which slithers to the floor
with the sound of strange men sighing
on imagined street corners. . .
If it is only for the taking offthe red lace bra
(with rosewindows of breasts),
the red lace pants
(with dark suggestion
of Venus' first name),
the black net stockings
cobwebby as fate,
criscrossed like our lives,
the silver sandals
glimmering as rainclothes are necessary.
Oh bulky barrier between soul & soul,
soul & selfhow it comforts us
to take you down!
How it heartens us to strip you off!
& this is no matter of fashion.
~ Erica Jong,

188:For me, there are distinct levels of friendship:
BEST FRIEND: An extremely close individual you can do anything with, talk about everything with, confide in, and be comfortable with sitting in silence on car journeys; those people you consider to be part of your family
GOOD FRIEND: A person you are comfortable hanging out with one-on-one for an extended period of time and see semiregularly; someone who shares experiences with you but not your deepest troubles and secrets
FRIEND: Someone you hang out with in a group setting occasionally
Acquaintance: Someone you know on a first-name basis and say "hi" to but that's pretty much the extent of it
STRANGERS: The rest of the world (and all your potential best friends in the future) ~ Connor Franta,

189:Vi! There you are.”

Buck worms his way into the group, inadvertently saving us from further interrogation. Well, worm probably isn’t the right word. He’s too large to be able to worm into anything, so he barrels his yeti ass into the group and says hello to Alex’s parents. He even calls them Mr. and Mrs. Waters. Daisy giggles and tells him to call her by her first name. It’s reminiscent of my mom.

Then Buck introduces himself to Alex’s little sister. I have yet to be formally introduced to her; the focus having been on Alex sticking his tongue down my throat in widely-publicized pictures. Her name is Sunshine. She goes by Sunny. Sunshine and Daisy. Violet and Skye. I see a theme here. Alex is lucky his name wasn’t Woody, or Bark. ~ Helena Hunting,

190:Mr. Smith?” she said, much as he’d said “Flora.” Flora was the first name she thought of when she decided not to reveal who she was. “Aye, that’s right,” he said with that sincere smile she didn’t trust at all. “But you’re Scottish.” She slipped out of her clogs, then was sorry she did because barefoot, she lost a good two inches in height. “Smith is a gey common name north of the border.” Whereas there was only one Ewan Macrae, Earl of Lyle, she thought grimly. She glanced toward the fine leather baggage piled beside the table. “That’s odd. The initials on your saddlebags are E.A.A.M.” To her satisfaction, chagrin flashed in those deep-set, dark blue eyes. Take that, Ewan Macrae, whatever that double A stands for. “Arrogant Ass,” I’m guessing. After ~ Anna Campbell,

191:Wind and a bobwhite And the afternoon sun. By ceasing to question the sun I have become light, Bird and wind. My leaves sing. I am earth, earth All these lighted things Grow from my heart. A tall, spare pine Stands like the initial of my first Name when I had one. When I had a spirit, When I was on fire When this valley was Made out of fresh air You spoke my name In naming Your silence: O sweet, irrational worship! I am earth, earth My heart's love Bursts with hay and flowers. I am a lake of blue air In which my own appointed place Field and valley Stand reflected. I am earth, earth Out of my grass heart Rises the bobwhite. Out of my nameless weeds His foolish worship. [1499.jpg] -- from Selected Poems of Thomas Merton, by Thomas Merton

~ Thomas Merton, O Sweet Irrational Worship
,

192:Not all social animals are social with the same degree of commitment. In some species, the members are so tied to each other and interdependent as to seem the loosely conjoined cells of a tissue. The social insects are like this; they move, and live all their lives, in a mass; a beehive is a spherical animal. In other species, less compulsively social, the members make their homes together, pool resources, travel in packs or schools, and share the food, but any single one can survive solitary, detached from the rest. Others are social only in the sense of being more or less congenial, meeting from time to time in committees, using social gatherings as ad hoc occasions for feeding and breeding. Some animals simply nod at each other in passing, never reaching even a first-name relationship. ~ Lewis Thomas,

193:What are you thinking when you look at me like that?” she asked softly. “I can’t say.” “Why not?” Kev felt the smile hovering on his lips again, this time edged with wryness. “It would frighten you.” “Merripen,” she said decisively, “nothing you could ever do or say would frighten me.” She frowned. “Are you ever going to tell me your first name?” “No.” “You will. I’ll make you.” She pretended to beat against his chest with her fists. Kev caught her slim wrists in his hands, restraining her easily. His body followed the motion, rolling to trap her beneath him. It was wrong, but he couldn’t stop himself. And as he pinned her with his weight, felt her wriggle instinctively to accommodate him, he was almost paralyzed by the primal pleasure of it. He expected her to struggle, to fight him, but instead she went passive in his hold, smiling up at him. ~ Lisa Kleypas,

194:Hello there,” he said to me. “My name is Buddy Ray. What’s yours?” He had a faint lisp. I swallowed. “Robert Johnson.” Buddy Ray’s smile would make small children flee to their mamas. “Nice to meet you, Robert.” Buddy Ray—I didn’t know if that was a double first name or a first and last name—looked me over as though I were a bite-size snack. Something was off with this guy—you could just see it. He kept licking his lips. I risked a glance back at the big bouncer. Even he looked jittery in Buddy Ray’s presence. As Buddy Ray approached, a pungent stench of cheap cologne failing to mask foul body odor wafted off him, the foul smell taking the lead like a Doberman he was walking. Buddy Ray stopped directly in front of me, maybe six inches away. I held my breath and stood my ground. I, too, had a foot on him. The bouncer took another step backward. Buddy ~ Harlan Coben,

195:The goodness of God fills all the gaps of the universe, without discrimination or preference. God is the gratuity of absolutely everything. The space in between everything is not space at all but Spirit. God is the “goodness glue” that holds the dark and light of things together, the free energy that carries all death across the Great Divide and transmutes it into Life. When we say that Christ “paid the debt once and for all,” it simply means that God's job is to make up for all deficiencies in the universe. What else would God do? Basically, grace is God's first name, and probably last too. Grace is what God does to keep all things he has made in love and alive—forever. Grace is God's official job description. Grace is not something God gives; grace is who God is. If we are to believe the primary witnesses, an unexplainable goodness is at work in the universe. ~ Richard Rohr,

196:You look beautiful in those colors, Kathleen.” His voice was low and soft.
She felt her face prickle. “Don’t use my first name.”
“By all means,” Devon mocked, glancing down at his towel-clad form, “let’s be formal.
She made the mistake of following his gaze, and colored deeply at the sight of him…the intriguing dark hair on his chest, the way the muscle of his stomach seemed to have been carved like mahogany fretwork.
A knock came at the bedroom door. Kathleen retreated deeper into the bathroom like a turtle withdrawing in its shell.
“Come in, Sutton,” she heard Devon say.
“Your clothes, sir.”
“Thank you. Lay them out on the bed.”
“Won’t you require assistance?”
“Not today.”
“You will dress yourself?” the valet asked, bewildered.
“I’ve heard that some men do,” Devon replied sardonically. “You may leave now.”
The valet heaved a long-suffering sigh. “Yes, sir. ~ Lisa Kleypas,

197:Same first name as a president and an obscure comic book character. Half-Jewish. Excellent grammar. Easily nauseated. Likes Reese's and Oreos (i.e. not an idiot). Divorced parents. Big brother to a fetus. Dad lives in Savannah. Dad's an English teacher. Mom's an epidemiologist.
The problem is, I'm beginning to realize I hardly know anything about anyone. I mean I generally know who's a virgin. But I don't have a clue whether most people's parents are divorced, or what their parents do for a living. I mean, Nick's parents are doctors. But I don't know what Leah's mom does, and I don't even know what the deal is with her dad, because Leah never talks about him. I have no idea why Abby's dad and brother still live in DC. And these are my best friends. I've always thought of myself as nosy, but I guess I'm just nosy about stupid stuff.
It's actually really terrible, now that I think about it. ~ Becky Albertalli,

198:To illustrate: A man with 314 employees joined one of these courses. For years, he had driven and criticized and condemned his employees without stint or discretion. Kindness, words of appreciation and encouragement were alien to his lips. After studying the principles discussed in this book, this employer sharply altered his philosophy of life. His organization is now inspired with a new loyalty, a new enthusiasm, a new spirit of teamwork. Three hundred and fourteen enemies have been turned into 314 friends. As he proudly said in a speech before the class: “When I used to walk through my establishment, no one greeted me. My employees actually looked the other way when they saw me approaching. But now they are all my friends and even the janitor calls me by my first name.” This employer gained more profit; more leisure and—what is infinitely more important—he found far more happiness in his business and in ~ Dale Carnegie,

199:To illustrate: A man with 314 employees joined one of these courses. For years, he had driven and criticised and condemned his employees without stint or discretion. Kindness, words of appreciation and encouragement were alien to his lips. After studying the principles discussed in this book, this employer sharply altered his philosophy of life. His organisation is now inspired with a new loyalty, a new enthusiasm, a new spirit of teamwork. Three hundred and fourteen enemies have been turned into 314 friends. As he proudly said in a speech before the class: ‘When I used to walk through my establishment, no one greeted me. My employees actually looked the other way when they saw me approaching. But now they are all my friends and even the janitor calls me by my first name.’ This employer gained more profit, more leisure and – what is infinitely more important – he found far more happiness in his business and in his home. ~ Dale Carnegie,

200:It's a physical sickness. Étienne. How much I love him.

I love Étienne.

I love it when he cocks an eyebrow whenever I say something he finds clever or amusing. I love listening to his boots clomp across my bedroom ceiling. I love that the accent over his first name is called an acute accent, and that he has a cute accent.

I love that.

I love sitting beside him in physics. Brushing against him during labs. His messy handwriting on our worksheets. I love handing him his backpack when class is over, because then my fingers smell like him for the next ten minutes. And when Amanda says something lame, and he seeks me out to exchange an eye roll — I love that, too. I love his boyish laugh and his wrinkled shirts and his ridiculous knitted hat. I love his large brown eyes, and the way he bites his nails, and I love his hair so much I could die.

There's only one thing I don't love about him. Her. ~ Stephanie Perkins,

201:Most days what I felt was this: the minute you put a first name and a last name together, you've got a pair of tusks coming right at you (i.e., Watch out, buddy). but on days when I didn't disapprove of everything on principle--days when the whole cologned, cuff-shooting ruck of my co-workers didn't repulse me from the moment they disembarked from the sixth-floor elevator and began squidging their way along the carpeted track that led to the office--my thinking stabbed more along these lines: a name belittles that which is named. Give a person a name and he'll sink right into it, right into the hollows and the dips of the letters that spelled out the whole insultingly reductive contraption, so that you have to pull him up and dance him out of it, take his attendance, and fuck some life into him if you expect to get any work out of him. Multiply him by twenty-two and you will have some idea of what the office was like, except that a good third of my colleagues were female. ~ Gary Lutz,

202:Exquisite Politics
The perfect voter has a smile but no eyes,
maybe not even a nose or hair on his or her toes,
maybe not even a single sperm cell, ovum, little paramecium.
Politics is a slug copulating in a Poughkeepsie garden.
Politics is a grain of rice stuck in the mouth
of a king. I voted for a clump of cells,
anything to believe in, true as rain, sure as red wheat.
I carried my ballots around like smokes, pondered big questions,
resources and need, stars and planets, prehistoric
languages. I sat on Alice's mushroom in Central Park,
smoked longingly in the direction of the mayor's mansion.
Someday I won't politic anymore, my big heart will stop
loving America and I'll leave her as easy as a marriage,
splitting our assets, hoping to get the advantage
before the other side yells: Wow! America,
Vespucci's first name and home of free and brave, Te amo.
by ~ Denise Duhamel

and Maureen Seaton
~ Denise Duhamel,

203:It was funny how the mind takes weird, circuitous routes sometimes. Do you ever start thinking of something odd and try to trace back to what started your thought process and really, your mind is going all over the place? That was what was happening, so here was the trail my brain took: When Ema mentioned basketball, I tried to push the thought away, but the one thing that would help me escape the pain of getting thrown off the basketball team would be . . . well, playing basketball. That made me think of the last time I played basketball, which made me think about playing yesterday in Newark, which made me think about Tyrell Waters and what he might be doing, which made me think about his father, Detective Waters, which made me think about the ride home, which made me think about two things about Detective Waters: One, he was working on busting a drug ring in Kasselton. Two, he had known that Mr. Caldwell’s first name was Henry. How would he know that—and were those two things related? In ~ Harlan Coben,

204:So the rest of the summer you could see the two little girls and Tom like wrens on a wire, on Mrs. Bentley’s front porch, waiting. And when the silvery chimes of the icicle man were heard, the front door opened, Mrs. Bentley floated out with her hand deep down the gullet of her silver-mouthed purse, and for half an hour you could see them there on the porch, the children and the old lady putting coldness into warmness, eating chocolate icicles, laughing. At last they were good friends. “How old are you, Mrs. Bentley?” “Seventy-two.” “How old were you fifty years ago?” “Seventy-two.” “You weren’t ever young, were you, and never wore ribbons or dresses like these?” “No.” “Have you got a first name?” “My name is Mrs. Bentley.” “And you’ve always lived in this one house?” “Always.” “And never were pretty?” “Never.” “Never in a million trillion years?” The two girls would bend toward the old lady, and wait in the pressed silence of four o’clock on a summer afternoon. “Never,” said Mrs. Bentley, “in a million trillion years. ~ Ray Bradbury,

205:I think you're going to like these," she said, placing the stack on the table. "The whole class spent Monday and Tuesday painting them up."
Raymond and Sean lifted up the top poster and stared.
ARSE PRESENTS
SUPER HALLOWEEN PARTY
FOOD, DRINKS, GREAT MUSIC
HALLOWEEN TRAMPOLINE COSTUME CONTEST
FOR THE MYSTERY PRIZE
DON'T MISS IT!

She smiled proudly. "What do you think?"
"Nice," said Sean, wondering why Raymond had suddenly gone so silent and so pale.
Finally Raymond found his voice. "But Ashly, why does it say" —he pointed to the top line— "that?"
"That? That's us. Our initials—Ashly, Raymond, Sean, and Eckerman—I couldn't remember his first name."
"I get it," said Sean.
Raymond was positively white. "The other kids who worked on them—they didn't—say anything about the posters? The wording maybe?"
"The whole class really liked them," said Ashley. "I think everyone's favorite part was the initials thing. They thought it was clever."
Raymond looked up at the ceiling. "Oh, it was. ~ Gordon Korman,

206:Unwrapping the paper carefully so it doesn’t tear, I find a beautiful red leather
box. Cartier. It’s familiar, thanks to my second-chance earrings and my watch.
Cautiously, I open the box to discover a delicate charm bracelet of silver, or platinum
or white gold—I don’t know, but it’s absolutely enchanting. Attached to it
are several charms: the Eiffel Tower, a London black cab, a helicopter—Charlie
Tango, a glider—the soaring, a catamaran—The Grace, a bed, and an ice cream
cone? I look up at him, bemused.
“Vanilla?” He shrugs apologetically, and I can’t help but laugh. Of course.
“Christian, this is beautiful. Thank you. It’s yar.” He grins.
My favorite is the heart. It’s a locket.
“You can put a picture or whatever in that.”
“A picture of you.” I glance at him through my lashes. “Always in my heart.”
He smiles his lovely, heartbreakingly shy smile.
I fondle the last two charms: a letter C—oh yes, I was his first girlfriend to
use his first name. I smile at the thought. And finally, there’s a key.
“To my heart and soul,” he whispers. ~ E L James,

207:The first articulate explorer and to an extent even theorist of intimacy was Jean-Jacques Rousseau who, characteristically enough, is the only great author still frequently cited by his first name alone. He arrived at his discovery through a rebellion not against the oppression of the state but against society’s unbearable perversion of the human heart, its intrusion upon an innermost region in man which until then had needed no special protection. The intimacy of the heart, unlike the private household, has no objective tangible place in the world, nor can the society against which it protests and asserts itself be localized with the same certainty as the public space. To Rousseau, both the intimate and the social were, rather, subjective modes of human existence, and in his case, it was as though Jean-Jacques rebelled against a man called Rousseau. The modern individual and his endless conflicts, his inability either to be at home in society or to live outside it altogether, his ever-changing moods and the radical subjectivism of his emotional life, was born in this rebellion of the heart. ~ Hannah Arendt,

208:It is indeed a tricky name. It is often misspelt, because the eye tends to regard the "a" of the first syllable as a misprint and then tries to restore the symmetrical sequence by triplicating the "o"- filling up the row of circles, so to speak, as in a game of crosses and naughts. No-bow-cough. How ugly, how wrong. Every author whose name is fairly often mentioned in periodicals develops a bird-watcher's or caterpillar-picker's knack when scanning an article. But in my case I always get caught by the word "nobody" when capitalized at the beginning of a sentence. As to pronunciation, Frenchmen of course say Nabokoff, with the accent on the last syllable. Englishmen say Nabokov, accent on the first, and Italians say Nabokov, accent in the middle, as Russians also do. Na-bo-kov. A heavy open "o" as in "Knickerbocker". My New England ear is not offended by the long elegant middle "o" of Nabokov as delivered in American academies. The awful "Na-bah-kov" is a despicable gutterism. Well, you can make your choice now. Incidentallv, the first name is pronounced Vladeemer- rhyming with "redeemer"- not Vladimir rhyming with Faddimere (a place in England, I think). ~ Vladimir Nabokov,

209:What does it mean to love somebody? It is always to seize that person in a mass, extract him or her from a group, however small, in which he or she participates, whether it be through the family only or through something else; then to find that person's own packs, the multiplicities he or she encloses within himself or herself which may be of an entirely different nature. To join them to mine, to make them penetrate mine, and for me to penetrate the other person's. Heavenly nuptials, multiplicities of multiplicities. Every love is an exercise in depersonalization on a body without organs yet to be formed, and it is at the highest point of this depersonalization that some- one can be named, receives his or her family name or first name, acquires the most intense discernibility in the instantaneous apprehension of the multiplicities belonging to him or her, and to which he or she belongs. A pack of freckles on a face, a pack of boys speaking through the voice of a woman, a clutch of girls in Charlus's voice, a horde of wolves in somebody's throat, a multiplicity of anuses in the anus, mouth, or eye one is intent upon. We each go through so many bodies in each other. ~ Gilles Deleuze,

210:A management team brought in by George to restructure Lucasfilm seemed concerned mostly with cash flow, and as time went on, they became openly skeptical that our division would ever attract a buyer. This team was headed by two men with the same first name, whom Alvy and I nicknamed “the Dweebs” because they didn’t understand a thing about the business we were in. Those two guys threw around management consulting terms (they loved to tout their “corporate intuition” and constantly urged us to make “strategic alliances”), but they didn’t seem at all insightful about how to make us attractive to buyers or about which buyers to pursue. At one point, they called us into an office, sat us down, and said that to cut costs, we should lay off all our employees until after our division was sold—at which point we could discuss rehiring them. In addition to the emotional toll we knew this would take, what bugged us about this suggestion was that our real selling point—the thing that had attracted potential suitors thus far—was the talent we’d gathered. Without that, we had nothing. So, when our two like-minded overlords demanded a list of names of people to lay off, Alvy and I gave them two: his and mine. ~ Ed Catmull,

211:Wow,” I remarked to an older man who had just turned away from a group. “That’s what I call a birthday cake. You think someone’s going to jump out of that thing?”
“Hope not,” he said in a gravelly voice. “They might catch fire from all the candles.”
I laughed. “Yes, and all that frosting would make the stop, drop, and roll so messy.”
Turning toward him, I extended my hand. “Ella Varner, from Austin. Are you a friend of the Travises? Never mind, of course you are. They wouldn’t invite one of their enemies, would they?”
He smiled as he shook my hand. His teeth were a scrupulous shade of white I always found mildly startling in a person his age. “They would especially invite one of their enemies.”
He was a good-looking old guy, not much taller than me, his steel-colored hair cut short, his skin leathery and sun-cured. Charisma clung to him as if it had been rubbed in like sunscreen. Meeting his gaze, I was arrested by the color of his eyes, the bittersweet dark of Venezuelan chocolate. As I stared into those familiar eyes, I knew exactly who he was.
“Happy birthday, Mr. Travis,” I said with an abashed grin.
“Thank you, Miss Varner.”
“Call me Ella, please. I think my crashing your party puts us on a first-name basis, doesn’t it? ~ Lisa Kleypas,

212:Why do you always call me by my full name?”
“I don’t know. I guess that’s how I think of you in my head.”
“Oh, so you’re saying you think about me a lot?”
I laugh. “No, I’m saying that when I think about you, which isn’t very often, that’s how I think of you. On the first day of school, I always have to explain to teachers that Lara Jean is my first name and not just Lara. And then, do you remember how Mr. Chudney started calling you John Ambrose because of that? ‘Mr. John Ambrose.’”
In a fake hoity-toity English accent, John says, “Mr. John Ambrose McClaren the Third, madam.”
I giggle. I’ve never met a third before. “Are you really?”
“Yeah. It’s annoying. My dad’s a junior, so he’s JJ, but my extended family still calls me Little John.” He grimaces. “I’d much rather be John Ambrose than Little John. Sounds like a rapper or that guy from Robin Hood.”
“Your family’s so fancy.” I only ever saw John’s mom when she was picking him up. She looked younger than the other mothers, she had John’s same milky skin, and her hair was longer than the other moms’, straw-colored.
“No. My family isn’t fancy at all. My mom made Jell-O salad last night for dessert. And, like, my dad only has steak cooked well-done. We only ever take vacations we can drive to. ~ Jenny Han,

213:Beckendorf walked up with his helmet under his arm. “She likes you, man.” “Sure,” I muttered. “She likes me for target practice.” “Nah, they always do that. A girl starts trying to kill you, you know she’s into you.” “Makes a lot of sense.” Beckendorf shrugged. “I know about these things. You ought to ask her to the fireworks.” I couldn’t tell if he was serious. Beckendorf was lead counselor for Hephaestus. He was this huge dude with a permanent scowl, muscles like a pro ballplayer, and hands calloused from working in the forges. He’d just turned eighteen and was on his way to NYU in the fall. Since he was older, I usually listened to him about stuff, but the idea of asking Annabeth to the Fourth of July fireworks down at the beach—like, the biggest dating event of the summer—made my stomach do somersaults. Then Silena Beauregard, the head counselor for Aphrodite, passed by. Beckendorf had had a not-so-secret crush on her for three years. She had long black hair and big brown eyes, and when she walked, the guys tended to watch. She said, “Good luck, Charlie.” (Nobody ever calls Beckendorf by his first name.) She flashed him a brilliant smile and went to join Annabeth on the red team. “Uh . . .” Beckendorf swallowed like he’d forgotten how to breathe. I patted him on the shoulder. “Thanks for the advice, dude. Glad you’re so wise about girls and all. Come on. Let’s get to the woods. ~ Rick Riordan,

214:I said, what’s yer first name, kid?” Bumpus, backed up flat against the school wall, finally spoke up: “Delbert.” “Delbert! DELBERT!” Outraged by such a name, Dill addressed the crowd, with scorn dripping from his every word. “Delbert Bumpus! They’re letting everybody in Harding School these days! What the hell kind of a name is that? That must be some kind of hillbilly name!” It was the last time anyone at Warren G. Harding ever said, or even thought, anything like that about Delbert Bumpus. Everything happened so fast after that that no two accounts of it were the same. The way I saw it, Bumpus’ head snapped down low between his shoulder blades. He bent over from the waist, charged over the sand like a wounded wart hog insane with fury, left his feet and butted his black, furry head like a battering-ram into Dill’s rib cage, the sickening thump sounding exactly like a watermelon dropped from a second-story window. Dill, knocked backward by the charge, landed on his neck and slid for three or four feet, his face alternating green and white. His eyes, usually almost unseen behind his cobra lids, popped out like a tromped-on toad-frog’s. He lay flat, gazing paralyzed at the spring sky, one shoe wrenched off his foot by the impact. The schoolyard was hushed, except for the sound of a prolonged gurling and wheezing as Dill, now half his original size, lay retching. It was obvious that he was out of action for some time. Bumpus ~ Jean Shepherd,

215:First Name Friends
Though some may yearn for titles great, and seek the frills of fame,
I do not care to have an extra handle to my name.
I am not hungry for the pomp of life's high dignities,
I do not sigh to sit among the honored LL. D.'s.
I shall be satisfied if I can be unto the end,
To those I know and live with here, a simple, first-name friend.
There's nothing like the comradeship which warms the lives of those
Who make the glorious circle of the Jacks and Bills and Joes.
With all his majesty and power, Old Caesar never knew
The joy of first-name fellowship, as all the Eddies do.
Let them who will be 'mistered' here and raised above the rest;
I hold a first-name greeting is by far the very best.
Acquaintance calls for dignity. You never really know
The man on whom the terms of pomp you feel you must bestow.
Professor William Joseph Wise may be your friend, but still
You are not certain of the fact till you can call him Bill.
But hearts grow warm and lips grow kind, and all the shamming ends,
When you are in the company of good old first-name friends.
The happiest men on earth are not the men of highest rank;
That joy belongs to George, and Jim, to Henry and to Frank;
With them the prejudice of race and creed and wealth depart,
And men are one in fellowship and always light of heart.
So I would live and laugh and love until my sun descends,
And share the joyous comradeship of honest first-name friends.
~ Edgar Albert Guest,

216:(On choosing to write the book in third person, and using his name Norman as the nom de plume)

NOW, OUR MAN of wisdom had a vice. He wrote about himself. Not only would he describe the events he saw, but his own small effect on events. This irritated critics. They spoke of ego trips and the unattractive dimensions of his narcissism. Such criticism did not hurt too much. He had already had a love affair with himself, and it used up a good deal of love. He was no longer so pleased with his presence. His daily reactions bored him. They were becoming like everyone else’s. His mind, he noticed, was beginning to spin its wheels, sometimes seeming to repeat itself for the sheer slavishness of supporting mediocre habits. If he was now wondering what name he ought to use for his piece about the fight, it was out of no excess of literary ego. More, indeed, from concern for the reader’s attention. It would hardly be congenial to follow a long piece of prose if the narrator appeared only as an abstraction: The Writer, The Traveler, The Interviewer. That is unhappy in much the way one would not wish to live with a woman for years and think of her as The Wife.

Nonetheless, Norman was certainly feeling modest on his return to New York and thought he might as well use his first name — everybody in the fight game did. Indeed, his head was so determinedly empty that the alternative was to do a piece without a name. Never had his wisdom appeared more invisible to him and that is a fair condition for acquiring an anonymous voice. ~ Norman Mailer,

217:No. Knox got to his feet. I’ll go get her myself. He quickly ended the business call, uncaring that he’d been rude. Opening his office door, Knox indicated for Levi to follow him. “Tanner just contacted me,” said Knox. “Apparently Harper —” He cut off as a she-demon rounded the corner and came to a halt in front of him.
Belinda smiled. “Oh, Knox, I was hoping to catch you.”
For fuck’s sake. “What can I do for you, Miss Thacker?”
Her smile dimmed at his impatient tone. “It’s about the appetizers for the event.”
“I told you I want Harper to decide these things.”
Belinda’s mouth flattened. “She doesn’t find any of my suggestions suitable.”
“Then they’re not suitable.” Simple.
“Knox —”
“Miss Thacker, I didn’t invite you to call me by my first name.” Her cheeks reddened. “I gave you my orders when I hired you. They were not complicated. I specified all the details of the event that I wished to be left for Harper to decide.”
“She wants steak and potato wedges on sticks!” Belinda took a deep breath and lowered her eyes. “I apologize for my outburst.”
Steak and potato wedges on sticks? echoed Levi, a smile in his telepathic voice. That actually sounds pretty good.
“Do you remember the all-important order I gave you before sending you Harper’s way, Miss Thacker?”
She swallowed. “Yes.”
“What was it?”
Belinda met his gaze. “You told me to give her whatever she wants.”
“Then do it. Now I have somewhere I need to be…”
She straightened her blazer. “Thank you for your time, Mr Thorne,” she said stiffly. ~ Suzanne Wright,

218:I WANT YOU TO TELL ME ABOUT EVERY PERSON YOU’VE EVER BEEN IN LOVE WITH. TELL ME WHY YOU LOVED THEM, THEN TELL ME WHY THEY LOVED YOU. TELL ME ABOUT A DAY IN YOUR LIFE YOU DIDN’T THINK YOU’D LIVE THROUGH. TELL ME WHAT THE WORD “HOME” MEANS TO YOU AND TELL ME IN A WAY THAT I’LL KNOW YOUR MOTHER’S NAME JUST BY THE WAY YOU DESCRIBE YOUR BED ROOM WHEN YOU WERE 8. SEE, I WANNA KNOW THE FIRST TIME YOU FELT THE WEIGHT OF HATE AND IF THAT DAY STILL TREMBLES BENEATH YOUR BONES. DO YOU PREFER TO PLAY IN PUDDLES OF RAIN OR BOUNCE IN THE BELLIES OF SNOW? AND IF YOU WERE TO BUILD A SNOWMAN, WOULD YOU RIP TWO BRANCHES FROM A TREE TO BUILD YOUR SNOWMAN ARMS? OR WOULD YOU LEAVE THE SNOWMAN ARMLESS FOR THE SAKE OF BEING HARMLESS TO THE TREE? AND IF YOU WOULD, WOULD YOU NOTICE HOW THAT TREE WEEPS FOR YOU BECAUSE YOUR SNOWMAN HAS NO ARMS TO HUG YOU EVERY TIME YOU KISS HIM ON THE CHEEK? DO YOU KISS YOUR FRIENDS ON THE CHEEK? DO YOU SLEEP BESIDE THEM WHEN THEY’RE SAD, EVEN IF IT MAKES YOUR LOVER MAD? DO YOU THINK THAT ANGER IS A SINCERE EMOTION OR JUST THE TIMID MOTION OF A FRAGILE HEART TRYING TO BEAT AWAY ITS PAIN? SEE, I WANNA KNOW WHAT YOU THINK OF YOUR FIRST NAME. AND IF YOU OFTEN LIE AWAKE AT NIGHT AND IMAGINE YOUR MOTHER’S JOY WHEN SHE SPOKE IT FOR THE VERY FIRST TIME. I WANT YOU TELL ME ALL THE WAYS YOU’VE BEEN UNKIND. TELL ME ALL THE WAYS YOU’VE BEEN CRUEL. SEE, I WANNA KNOW MORE THAN WHAT YOU DO FOR A LIVING. I WANNA KNOW HOW MUCH OF YOUR LIFE YOU SPEND JUST GIVING. AND IF YOU LOVE YOURSELF ENOUGH TO ALSO RECEIVE SOMETIMES. I WANNA KNOW IF YOU BLEED SOMETIMES THROUGH OTHER PEOPLE’S WOUNDS. ~ Andrea Gibson,

219:There are just too many coincidences for me. Combined with too many things that don’t add up.”
“Maybe I’m just a woman of mystery,” I said.
He gave a sudden bark of laughter. “Maybe, but I doubt it. I’ll say this, though. You’re full of surprises.”
I took a step, closing the distance between us, and saw emotion flare back into his eyes. This time, surprise.
“Leave me alone, Mark,” I said, using his first name for the very first time. “Stop following me. I don’t have anything to hide.”
“Prove it,” he said.
“How?”
“Take me to the prom.”
“You have it backward,” I said, my tone condescending and patient. “You’re supposed to say, Claire, may I please take you to the prom.”
“Not the Royer prom,” Mark said impatiently. “The Beacon prom.”
“I can’t do that,” I said, giving my head a toss to cover the fact that he’d totally caught me off guard. I really liked the way Claire’s hair moved when I did that.
“I’m already going with Alex Crawford.”
For just an instant, Mark’s face became absolutely unreadable.
“I don’t mean as a date,” he said, his tone ever so slightly snide. “You’ll need a staff photographer.”
“Forget it,” I said.
Without warning, he leaned down until our faces were close. Omigod, he’s going to kiss me, I thought.
“Make me,” he said. “You want me to back off, fine. Prove to me you’re not Jo O’Connor and I’ll do whatever you say. I’ll flap my arms and fly to the moon.”
“That won’t be necessary,” I said. “The other side of the room will be just fine.”
He gave a breathy laugh, the air of it moving across my face, and eased back. ~ Cameron Dokey,

220:We don’t even know what’s going on in the rest of the world. All we can do is-is play Scooby-Doo in the cellar.”
“That’s not all we can do, Sophie,” Archer said.
Whenever Archer used my first name, I knew he was serious. “What do you mean?”
He backed up a few steps. “Look, you want the Casnoffs gone and these kids saved, or at least…well, put out of their misery, I guess. You don’t want anyone to raise demons ever again. There are other people who want those things, too.”
“Please tell me you are not talking about The Eye.”
He looked away and shoved his hands in his pockets. “I’m just saying that you and The Eye have a common goal here.”
I wasn’t sure if I was stunned, or angry, or disgusted. It was kind of a mixture of all three. “Okay, is there a gas leak down here? Or did you hit your head on the tunnel? Because that’s really the only excuse for you saying something so freaking stupid.”
“Oh, you’re right, Mercer,” he said. “The idea of a trying to fight an army of demons with a bunch of trained soldiers is beyond ridiculous. Maybe we can go get Nausicaa and see if she’ll give us some faerie dust to make the problem go away.”
“Don’t be a jackass,” I snapped.
“Then don’t be naïve,” he retorted. “This is too big for us to handle, Sophie. This is too big for Prodigium to deal with on their own. But if we could all work together, there’s a chance that-“
“What do you think, Cross? That we’ll ask The Eye to help us, and they’ll be all, ‘Sure, no problem! And once we’re done wiping out the demons, we certainly won’t kill the rest of you, even though that’s like, our mission in life! ~ Rachel Hawkins,

221:Dear patient (first name, last name)! You are presently located in our experimental state hospital. The measures taken to save your life were drastic, extremely drastic (circle one). Our finest surgeons, availing themselves of the very latest achievements of modern medicine, performed one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten operations (circle one) on you. They were forced, acting wholly in your interest to replace certain parts of your organism with parts obtained from other persons, in strict accordance with Federal Law (Rev. Stat. Comm. 1-989/0-001/89/1). The notice you are now reading was thoughtfully prepared in order to help you make the best possible adjustment to these new if somewhat unexpected circumstances in your life, which, we hasten to remind you, we have saved. Although it was found necessary to remove your arms, legs, spine, skill, lungs, stomach, kidneys, liver, other (circle one or more), rest assured that these mortal remains were disposed of in a manner fully in keeping with the dictates of your religion; they were, with the proper ritual, interred, embalmed, mummified, buried at sea, cremated with the ashes scattered in the wind—preserved in an urn—thrown in the garbage (circle one). The new form in which you will henceforth lead a happy and healthy existence may possibly occasion you some surprise, but we promise that in time you will become, as indeed all our dear patients do, quite accustomed to it We have supplemented your organism with the very best, the best, perfectly functional, adequate, the only available (circle one) organs at our disposal, and they are fully guaranteed to last a year, six months, three months, three weeks, six days (circle one). ~ Stanis aw Lem,

222:Jane passed by the library. There in a corner sat Inflexibility. He raised his eyes when he heard her footfalls.
“Oh,” said Jane, antsy with embarrassment. “Good morning, Mr. Nobley.”
“You weren’t at breakfast,” he said.
“I’m off.” She indicated her bonnet and spencer jacket. “Just saying good-bye to the house. It’s a lovely old house.”
“New, actually. Built in 1809.”
“Right.” His insistence on maintaining the charade chafed her. She had a surging and ridiculous desire to plop down beside him and shake him and make him talk to her like a real person.
“Well, since I ran into you, I can thank you in person for a great vacation. I feel sort of sheepish that it didn’t turn out differently.”
Mr. Nobley shrugged, and she was surprised to detect anger in his eyes. Still playing the jilted man? Or had she wounded his actor’s ego? Maybe he was denied a paycheck bonus for not getting engaged.
“It has been a pleasure to have you here, Miss Erstwhile. I might miss you, actually.”
“Really?”
“It is possible.”
“Hey, I’ve been wondering something…What is Mr. Nobley’s first name?”
“William. You know, you are the first person to ask.”
Any further awkwardness was cut off by the sound of an approaching carriage. Jane stepped out the front door for the last time, and she and Amelia, gratefully and mournfully, took their leave. Aunt Saffronia stood by the door, waving her handkerchief and shedding rather impressive tears. Colonel Andrews strolled out to wave good-bye with the stately line of house servants in their white caps and white wigs. Captain East smiled knowingly, his eyes earnest with whatever fake promises he and Amelia had made. Mr. Nobley didn’t bother to join the farewell. ~ Shannon Hale,

223:Have you ever noticed that the things people LOVE says a lot about them? Even random stuff like your favourite band, movie or lip gloss colour can be a reflection of YOU. The same thing can be said for your friends and other important people in your life. What “other important people” you ask? Hmmm . . . like maybe . . . your CRUSH!!! YEP! That super cute guy who gives you a severe case of RCS! So, just for fun, I’ve made a little guide about what YOUR choice in boys says about you. Enjoy!!! IF YOU LIKE EMO GUYS (Think Edward from Twilight) You like to talk about things . . . A LOT! You crush on emo boys because they’re all sensitive and stuff. Just beware; sometimes dark and brooding guys can be kind of a downer! IF YOU LIKE TROUBLE MAKERS (the boy who’s on a first name basis with the principal’s receptionist) You don’t like following the rules and you crush on boys who make their own. Let’s face it: there’s something kind of exciting about them. But a word of caution my rebel loving friends: sometimes the bad boy is BAD BAD news!! IF YOU LIKE PREPPY GUYS (think shirts, polos and a general feel of being ironed from head to toe) You’re totally organized. You probably have colour-coordinated folders for every subject, and maybe, just MAYBE, you aspire to fold sweaters at the Gap. A preppy boy makes you weak in the khaki knees!! IF YOU LIKE MUSICIAN TYPES (OK, so this one is fairly obvious, but in case you’ve just arrived on Earth, I’m talking about future Justin Biebers) You’re totally into music, and you’re probably also super creative. And (let’s be honest) you also like the attention of walking around with band boy. Everyone’s always like, “Nice set for the talent show!” or “Saw you on YouTube!” or “Would you sign my forehead?!? ~ Rachel Ren e Russell,

224:The moment Jace Calder saw his sister's face, he feared the worst. His heart sank. Emily, his troubled little sister, had been doing so well since she'd gotten the job at the Sarah Hamilton Foundation in Big Timber, Montana.

"What's wrong?" he asked as he removed his Stetson, pulled up a chair at the Big Timber Java coffee shop and sat down across from her. Tossing his hat on the seat of an adjacent chair, he braced himself for bad news.

Emily blinked her big blue eyes. Even though she was closing in on twenty-five, he often caught glimpses of the girl she'd been. Her pixie cut, once a dark brown like his own hair, was dyed black. From thirteen on, she'd been piercing anything she could. At sixteen she'd begun getting tattoos and drinking. It wasn't until she'd turned seventeen that she'd run away, taken up with a thirty-year-old biker drug-dealer thief and ended up in jail for the first time.

But while Emily still had the tattoos and the piercings, she'd changed after the birth of her daughter, and after snagging this job with Bo Hamilton.

"What's wrong is Bo," his sister said. Bo had insisted her employees at the foundation call her by her first name. "Pretty cool for a boss, huh?" his sister had said at the time. He'd been surprised. That didn't sound like the woman he knew.

But who knew what was in Bo's head lately. Four months ago her mother, Sarah, who everyone believed dead the past twenty-two years, had suddenly shown up out of nowhere. According to what he'd read in the papers, Sarah had no memory of the past twenty-two years.

He'd been worried it would hurt the foundation named for her. Not to mention what a shock it must have been for Bo.

Emily leaned toward him and whispered, "Bo's… She's gone. ~ B J Daniels,

225:I know you’ve had some bad luck recently, but there’s this guy, he plays for New York, they’re looking at trading him—”

“Buck, I don’t want to date another hockey player.” I set down my controller so I can shovel more of the sundae into my mouth, uncaring of the suffering that will follow this frozen dairy heaven.

“Not all of us are dogs, Violet. Randall’s a great guy.”

“His name is Randall. How awesome can he be?”

Buck mows down a group of people playing road hockey. “He goes by Randy.”

“Even better. His name is another word for horny. Sounds perfect for me.” I’m not sure if I should laugh or cry.

It’s not Randall’s fault his parents named him in relation to horniness. I can’t even entertain the idea of dating anyone else right now. Besides, I could never get serious with a hockey player again, or a dude named Randy. I’d make thrusting motions every time I said his name. It’d be awkward.

“Wait a minute. Didn’t Alex get suspended for kicking the shit out of some guy named Randy?” I’m almost positive this is the case.

“That was Randolph Cockburn. This is Randy Balls.”

“Are you serious?” What’s with these guys with terrible last names?

“Yeah, why?” Buck, my perverted stepbrother, doesn’t connect the outlandishly pornographic last name with the first name.

“Randy Balls?” I burst out laughing. “You want to set me up with a guy named Randy Balls? Can you even imagine what would happen if we got married? My last name would be Balls. Violet Balls!”

“Huh.” He makes a scrunchy face. “That wouldn’t be so good, would it? ’Specially if you hyphenated. Hall-Balls.”

I continue to laugh until I start crying, which turns into hysterical, desperate sobs. I don’t want to end up as Violet Balls. I wanted to be Violet Waters—it sounds so romantic—and Alex ruined it all.

My life sucks Randy’s balls. ~ Helena Hunting,

226:There was a small public library on Ninety-third and Hooper. Mrs. Stella Keaton was the librarian. We’d known each other for years. She was a white lady from Wisconsin. Her husband had a fatal heart attack in ’34 and her two children died in a fire the year after that. Her only living relative had been an older brother who was stationed in San Diego with the navy for ten years. After his discharge he moved to L.A. When Mrs. Keaton had her tragedies he invited her to live with him. One year after that her brother, Horton, took ill, and after three months he died spitting up blood, in her arms. All Mrs. Keaton had was the Ninety-third Street branch. She treated the people who came in there like her siblings and she treated the children like her own. If you were a regular at the library she’d bake you a cake on your birthday and save the books you loved under the front desk. We were on a first-name basis, Stella and I, but I was unhappy that she held that job. I was unhappy because even though Stella was nice, she was still a white woman. A white woman from a place where there were only white Christians. To her Shakespeare was a god. I didn’t mind that, but what did she know about the folk tales and riddles and stories colored folks had been telling for centuries? What did she know about the language we spoke? I always heard her correcting children’s speech. “Not ‘I is,’ she’d say. “It’s ‘I am.’” And, of course, she was right. It’s just that little colored children listening to that proper white woman would never hear their own cadence in her words. They’d come to believe that they would have to abandon their own language and stories to become a part of her educated world. They would have to forfeit Waller for Mozart and Remus for Puck. They would enter a world where only white people spoke. And no matter how articulate Dickens and Voltaire were, those children wouldn’t have their own examples in the house of learning—the library. ~ Walter Mosley,

227:Of course, I don’t remember any of this time. It is absolutely impossible to identify with the infant my parents photographed, indeed so impossible that it seems wrong to use the word “me” to describe what is lying on the changing table, for example, with unusually red skin, arms and legs spread, and a face distorted into a scream, the cause of which no one can remember, or on a sheepskin rug on the floor, wearing white pajamas, still red-faced, with large, dark eyes squinting slightly. Is this creature the same person as the one sitting here in Malmö writing? And will the forty-year-old creature who is sitting in Malmö writing this one overcast September day in a room filled with the drone of the traffic outside and the autumn wind howling through the old-fashioned ventilation system be the same as the gray, hunched geriatric who in forty years from now might be sitting dribbling and trembling in an old people’s home somewhere in the Swedish woods? Not to mention the corpse that at some point will be laid out on a bench in a morgue? Still known as Karl Ove. And isn’t it actually unbelievable that one simple name encompasses all of this? The fetus in the belly, the infant on the changing table, the forty-year-old in front of the computer, the old man in the chair, the corpse on the bench? Wouldn’t it be more natural to operate with several names since their identities and self-perceptions are so very different? Such that the fetus might be called Jens Ove, for example, and the infant Nils Ove, and the five- to ten-year-old Per Ove, the ten- to twelve-year-old Geir Ove, the twelve- to seventeen-year-old Kurt Ove, the seventeen- to twenty-three-year-old John Ove, the twenty-three- to thirty-two-year-old Tor Ove, the thirty-two- to forty-six-year-old Karl Ove — and so on and so forth? Then the first name would represent the distinctiveness of the age range, the middle name would represent continuity, and the last, family affiliation. ~ Karl Ove Knausg rd,

228:In the fall of 1990 Iraq invaded Kuwait, and in the run-up to the Gulf War, Americans were sickened by a story that emerged. On October 10, 1990, a fifteen-year-old refugee from Kuwait appeared before a congressional Human Rights Caucus.23 The girl—she would give only her first name, Nayirah—had volunteered in a hospital in Kuwait City. She tearfully testified that Iraqi soldiers had stolen incubators to ship home as plunder, leaving over three hundred premature infants to die. Our collective breath was taken away—“These people leave babies to die on the cold floor; they are hardly human.” The testimony was seen on the news by approximately 45 million Americans, was cited by seven senators when justifying their support of war (a resolution that passed by five votes), and was cited more than ten times by George H. W. Bush in arguing for U.S. military involvement. And we went to war with a 92 percent approval rating of the president’s decision. In the words of Representative John Porter (R-Illinois), who chaired the committee, after Nayirah’s testimony, “we have never heard, in all this time, in all circumstances, a record of inhumanity, and brutality, and sadism, as the ones that [Nayirah had] given us today.” Much later it emerged that the incubator story was a pseudospeciating lie. The refugee was no refugee. She was Nayirah al-Sabah, the fifteen-year-old daughter of the Kuwaiti ambassador to the United States. The incubator story was fabricated by the public relations firm Hill + Knowlton, hired by the Kuwaiti government with the help of Porter and cochair Representative Tom Lantos (D-California). Research by the firm indicated that people would be particularly responsive to stories about atrocities against babies (ya think?), so the incubator tale was concocted, the witness coached. The story was disavowed by human rights groups (Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch) and the media, and the testimony was withdrawn from the Congressional Record—long after the war. ~ Robert M Sapolsky,

229:I want you to tell me about every person you've ever been in love with. Tell me why you loved them, then tell me why they loved you. Tell me about a day in your life you didn't think you’d live through. Tell me what the word “home” means to you and tell me in a way that I’ll know your mothers name just by the way you describe your bed room when you were 8. See, I wanna know the first time you felt the weight of hate and if that day still trembles beneath your bones. Do you kiss your friends on the cheek? Do you think that anger is a sincere emotion or just the timid motion of a fragile heart trying to beat away its pain? See, I wanna know what you think of your first name. And if you often lie awake at night and imagine your mothers joy when she spoke it for the very first time. I want you tell me all the ways you've been unkind. Tell me all the ways you've been cruel.Do you believe that Mary was really a virgin? Do you believe that Moses really parted the sea? And if you don’t believe in miracles, tell me, how would you explain the miracle of my life to me? And for all the times you've knelt before the temple of yourself, have the prayers you've asked come true? And if they didn't did you feel denied? And if you felt denied, denied by who[m]? I wanna know what you see when you look in the mirror on a day you’re feeling good. I wanna know what you see in the mirror on a day a day you’re feeling bad. I wanna know the first person who ever taught you your beauty could ever be reflected on a lousy piece of glass. If you ever reach enlightenment, will you remember how to laugh? Have you ever been a song? See, I wanna know more than what you do for a living. I wanna know how much of your life you spend just giving. And if you love yourself enough to also receive sometimes. I wanna know if you bleed sometimes through other people’s wounds. And if you dream sometimes that this life is just a balloon that if you wanted to you could pop—but you never would because you’d never want it to stop. ~ Andrea Gibson,

230:It's a physical sickness. Etienne. How much I love him.
I love Etienne.
I love it when he cocks an eyebrow whenever I say something he finds clever or amusing. I love listening to his boots clomp across my bedroom ceiling. I love that the accent over his first name is called an acute accent, and that he has a cute accent.
I love that.
I love sitting beside him in physics. Brushing against him during lands. His messy handwriting on our worksheets. I love handing him his backpack when class is over,because then my fingers smell like him for the next ten minutes. And when Amanda says something lame, and he seeks me out to exchange an eye roll-I love that,too. I love his boyish laugh and his wrinkled shirts and his ridiculous knitted hat. I love his large brown eyes,and the way he bites his nails,and I love his hair so much I could die.
There's only one thing I don't love about him. Her.
If I didn't like Ellie before,it's nothing compared to how I feel now. It doesn't matter that I can count how many times we've met on one hand. It's that first image, that's what I can't shake. Under the streeplamp. Her fingers in his hair. Anytime I'm alone, my mind wanders back to that night. I take it further. She touches his chest. I take it further.His bedroom.He slips off her dress,their lips lock, their bodies press,and-oh my God-my temperature rises,and my stomach is sick.
I fantasize about their breakup. How he could hurt her,and she could hurt him,and of all the ways I could hurt her back. I want to grab her Parisian-styled hair and yank it so hard it rips from her skull. I want to sink my claws into her eyeballs and scrape.
It turns out I am not a nice person.
Etienne and I rarely discussed her before, but she's completely taboo now. Which tortures me, because since we've gotten back from winter break, they seem to be having problems again. Like an obsessed stalker,I tally the evenings he spend with me versus the evening he spends with her. I'm winning. ~ Stephanie Perkins,

231:I KNEW IT WAS OVER

when tonight you couldn't make the phone ring
when you used to make the sun rise
when trees used to throw themselves
in front of you
to be paper for love letters
that was how i knew i had to do it

swaddle the kids we never had
against january's cold slice
bundle them in winter
clothes they never needed
so i could drop them off at my mom's
even though she lives on the other side of the country
and at this late west coast hour is
assuredly east coast sleeping
peacefully

her house was lit like a candle
the way homes should be
warm and golden
and home
and the kids ran in
and jumped at the bichon frise
named lucky
that she never had
they hugged the dog
it wriggled
and the kids were happy
yours and mine
the ones we never had
and my mom was

grand maternal, which is to say, with style
that only comes when you've seen
enough to know grace

like when to pretend it's christmas or
a birthday so
she lit her voice with tiny
lights and pretended
she didn't see me crying

as i drove away
to the hotel connected to the bar
where i ordered the cheapest whisky they had

just because it shares your first name
because they don't make a whisky
called baby
and i only thought what i got
was what
i ordered

i toasted the hangover
inevitable as sun
that used to rise
in your name

i toasted the carnivals
we never went to
and the things you never won
for me
the ferris wheels we never
kissed on and all the dreams
between us
that sat there
like balloons on a carney's board
waiting to explode with passion
but slowly deflated
hung slave
under the pin-
prick of a tack

hung
heads down
like lovers
when it doesn't
work, like me
at last call
after too many cheap

too many sweet
too much
whisky makes me
sick, like the smell of cheap,

like the smell of
the dead

like the cheap, dead flowers
you never sent
that i never threw
out of the window
of a car
i never
really
owned ~ Daphne Gottlieb,

232:What’s ‘Anders’ short for?” He blinked his thoughts away and glanced to Valerie. She was looking more relaxed now that he wasn’t approaching, and her head was tipped curiously as she waited for his answer. Apparently he wasn’t quick enough answering, because she went on, “Or is it your last name like you call Justin by his last name Bricker?” “It’s a short form of my last name,” he answered. Her eyebrows rose. “Which is?” “Andronnikov.” That made her eyes widen. “What’s your first name?” He was silent for a moment, but suspected now that she knew she didn’t even know his first name, Valerie would hardly be willing to kiss him again, let alone anything else if he didn’t tell her. Women could be funny about wanting to know the name of the guy sticking their tongue down her throat while groping her. “My first name is Semen.” She blinked several times at this news, and then simply breathed, “Oh dear.” At least she wasn’t laughing, Anders thought wryly, and explained, “It’s Basque in origin. Based on the word for son.” “I see,” she murmured. “Everyone just calls me Anders.” “Yes, I can see why,” she muttered, and then cleared her throat and said, “So your father was Russian, and your mother Basque and neither of them spoke English?” “What makes you think that?” “Well it’s that or they had a sick sense of humor,” she said dryly. “That’s like naming a daughter Ova. Worse even. I’m surprised you survived high school with a name like that.” “Actually, I’ve met a couple of women named Ova over the years,” Anders said with amusement. “Dear God,” she muttered. Anders chuckled and moved sideways, not drawing any closer, but moving to grip the edge of the pool as she was doing so that they faced each other with their sides to the pool rim. Valerie smiled, and then said, “So were you raised in Basque Country or Russia or Canada?” “Russia to start,” he answered solemnly, easing a step closer in the water. She nodded, seemingly unsurprised and said, “You have a bit of an accent. Not a thick one, but a bit of it. I figured you weren’t raised here from birth.” “No, I came here later,” Anders acknowledged. Much later, but he kept that to himself for now and eased another step closer. ~ Lynsay Sands,

233:I hope I have not upset you,” Mrs. Wattlesbrook said with an innocent smile. “I pride myself on matching each client with her perfect gentleman. But one cannot anticipate a woman’s every fancy, and so our talent pool runs deep. You understand?”
“Very deep indeed.” Jane felt like a woman drowning, and she grasped for anything. And as it turned out, bald-faced lies are, temporarily anyway, impressively buoyant, so she said, “It will make the ending to my article all the more interesting.”
“Your…your article?” Mrs. Wattlesbrook peered over her spectacles as if at a bug she would like to squash.
“Mm-hm,” said Jane, lying extravagantly, outrageously, but also, she hoped, gracefully. “Surely you know I work for a magazine? The editor thought the story of my experience at Pembrook Park would be the perfect way to launch my move from graphic design to staff writer.”
She had no intention of becoming a staff writer, and in fact the artist bug was raging through her blood now more than ever, but she just had to give Mrs. Wattlesbrook a good jab before departure. She was smarting enough to crave the reprieve that comes from fighting back.
Mrs. Wattlesbrook twitched. That was satisfying.
“And I’m sure you realize that since I’m a member of the press,” Jane said, “the confidentiality agreement you made me sign doesn’t apply.”
Mrs. Wattlesbrook’s right eyebrow spasmed. Jane guessed that behind it ran her barrister’s phone number, which she would dial ASAP. Jane, of course, had been lying again. And wasn’t it fun!
Mrs. Wattlesbrook appeared to be trying to moisten her mouth and failing. “I did not know…I would have…”
“But you didn’t. The cell phone scandal, the dirty trick with Martin…You assumed that I was no one of influence. I guess I’m not. But my magazine has a circulation of over six hundred thousand. I wonder how many of those readers are in your preferred tax bracket? And I’m afraid my article won’t be glowing.”
Jane curtsied in her jeans and turned to leave.
“Oh, and, Mrs. Wattlesbrook?”
“Yes, Jane, my dear?” the proprietress responded with a shaky, fawning voice.
“What is Mr. Nobley’s first name?”
Mrs. Wattlesbrook stared at her, blinkless. “It’s J…Jonathon.”
Jane wagged her finger. “Nice try. ~ Shannon Hale,

234:I’m beginning to realize I shouldn’t have stayed away from Eversby Priory for so long,” she heard him say grimly. “The entire household is running amok.”
Unable to restrain herself any longer, Kathleen went to the open gap in the doorway and glared at him. “You were the one who hired the plumbers!” she hissed.
“The plumbers are the least of it. Someone needs to take the situation in hand.”
“If you’re foolish enough to imagine you could take me in hand--”
“Oh, I’d begin with you,” he assured her feelingly.
Kathleen would have delivered a scathing reply, but her teeth had begun to chatter. Although the Turkish towel had absorbed some of the moisture from her clothes, they were clammy.
Seeing her discomfort, Devon turned and surveyed the room, obviously hunting for something to cover her. Although his back was turned, she knew the precise moment that he spotted the shawl on the fireplace chair.
When he spoke, his tone had changed. “You didn’t dye it.”
“Give that to me.” Kathleen thrust her arm through the doorway.
Devon picked it up. A slow smile crossed his face. “Do you wear it often?”
“Hand me my shawl, please.”
Devon brought it to her, deliberately taking his time. He should have been mortified by his indecent state of undress, but he seemed entirely comfortable, the great shameless peacock.
As soon as the shawl was within reach, Kathleen snatched it from him.
Casting aside her damp towel, she pulled the shawl around herself. The garment was comforting and familiar, the soft wool warming her instantly.
“I couldn’t bring myself to ruin it,” she said grudgingly. She was tempted to tell him that even though the gift had been inappropriate…the truth was, she loved it. There were days when she wasn’t certain whether the gloomy widow’s weeds were reflecting her melancholy mood or causing it, and when she pulled the brilliant shawl over her shoulders, she felt instantly better.
No gift had ever pleased her as much.
She couldn’t tell him that, but she wanted to.
“You look beautiful in those colors, Kathleen.” His voice was low and soft.
She felt her face prickle. “Don’t use my first name.”
“By all means,” Devon mocked, glancing down at his towel-clad form, “let’s be formal. ~ Lisa Kleypas,

235:Who is America named after? Not the Italian merchant and cartographer Amerigo Vespucci, but Richard Ameryk, a Welshman and wealthy Bristol merchant. Ameryk was the chief investor in the second transatlantic voyage of John Cabot—the English name of the Italian navigator Giovanni Caboto, whose voyages in 1497 and 1498 laid the groundwork for the later British claim to Canada. He moved to London from Genoa in 1484 and was authorized by King Henry VII to search for unknown lands to the west. On his little ship Matthew, Cabot reached Labrador in May 1497 and became the first recorded European to set foot on American soil, predating Vespucci by two years. Cabot mapped the North American coastline from Nova Scotia to Newfoundland. As the chief patron of the voyage, Richard Ameryk would have expected discoveries to be named after him. There is a record in the Bristol calendar for that year: “…on Saint John the Baptist’s day [June 24], the land of America was found by the merchants of Bristowe, in a ship of Bristowe called the Mathew,” which clearly suggests this is what happened. Although the original manuscript of this calendar has not survived, there are a number of references to it in other contemporary documents. This is the first use of the term America to refer to the new continent. The earliest surviving map to use the name is Martin Waldseemüller’s great map of the world of 1507, but it only applied to South America. In his notes Waldseemüller makes the assumption that the name is derived from a Latin version of Amerigo Vespucci’s first name, because Vespucci had discovered and mapped the South American coast from 1500 to 1502. This suggests he didn’t know for sure and was trying to account for a name he had seen on other maps, possibly Cabot’s. The only place where the name “America” was known and used was Bristol—not somewhere the France-based Waldseemüller was likely to visit. Significantly, he replaced “America” with “Terra Incognita” in his world map of 1513. Vespucci never reached North America. All the early maps and trade were British. Nor did he ever use the name of America for his discovery. There’s a good reason for this. New countries or continents were never named after a person’s first name, but always after the second (as in Tasmania, Van Diemen’s Land, or the Cook Islands). America would have become Vespucci Land (or Vespuccia) if the Italian explorer had consciously given his name to it. ~ John Lloyd,

236:Don’t pack your bags just yet, stay awhile,
Don't try to run away to higher ground,
You're in my twisted clouds of sad misfortune,
And you are such an entertaining crowd!
(I’ve never had such cheerful toys to play with...)
Forget I said that – just a little natural disaster Humour,
Ha-ha-ha.

Pull up a rusty lawn chair
On the waterfront in New Orleans,
And ignore the wind that howls,
Things aren’t always as they seem.
I can smell fear in the air,
Fresh amidst the cornbread steam,
Forgive me if I sound excited,
(I’m going to be famous, you know!)
And let me take your money, please!

I’ll drown your family, hunt down your pets,
I’ve got tricks that I’ve never even tried yet,
And it’s so easy when I get the chance!
(I’ll swipe your house in just one glance!)

As the saying goes, it all comes out in the wash,
But I’m the only wash that leaves no stone unturned,
Financial devastation is my middle name,
And social degradation is my third!

You, little boy from the bayou bank,
You used to fish for pointless fun
(I can appreciate having fun),
But after I go, you’ll find your parents poor,
You’ll have eviction notices on your door,
You’ll have to sell any fish you can catch,
In a desperate grasp for money,
Although I hate to break it to you,
That bayou’s polluted, honey!
I see nothing in your future but welfare cheques!

And you there, little girl with the closet of toys,
You were born well-off with a room of your own,
You have dresses that look more like
They’re from fairy-tales,
Glittery lace on your schoolgirl gowns.

Wait ‘till murky water licks those hems,
And your family is bankrupt
And you’re homeless with them!
Accept what’s to come, won’t you please?
I’m just a carousel of wild winds
Who’ll bring you to your knees!
Hell, yeah!

Take a bow, take a bow,
Take a bow before your god…

I might just pardon you
If you’ve got magic up your sleeve!
If you’re swift and resourceful you could outrun me!
I always love a challenge!
I always love a game…
The question on your mind
Is in regards to my first name,
Right?

My name is Katrina, the witch of the skies,
A sorceress whose debut dance makes everyone die,
I know it’s not what you wanted!
(But I’m selfish through and through),
So, c’mon and make me happy!
Whether you’re ready or not… ~ Rebecca McNutt,

237:Sebastian encountered Cam in the hallway outside the reading room. “Where is he?” he demanded without preamble.
Stopping before him with an expressionless face, Cam said shortly, “He’s gone.”
“Why didn’t you follow him?” White-hot fury blazed in Sebastian’s eyes. This news, added to the frustration of his vow of celibacy, was the last straw.
Cam, who had been exposed to years of Ivo Jenner’s volcanic temper, remained unruffled. “It was unnecessary in my judgment,” he said. “He won’t return.”
“I don’t pay you to act on your own damned judgment. I pay you to act on mine! You should have dragged him here by the throat and then let me decide what was to be done with the bastard.”
Cam remained silent, sliding a quick, subtle glance at Evie, who was inwardly relieved by the turn of events. They were both aware that had Cam brought Bullard back to the club, there was a distinct possibility that Sebastian might actually have killed him— and the last thing Evie wanted was a murder charge on her husband’s head.
“I want him found,” Sebastian said vehemently, pacing back and forth across the reading room. “I want at least two men hired to look for him day and night until he is brought to me. I swear he’ll serve as an example to anyone who even thinks of lifting a finger against my wife.” He raised his arm and pointed to the doorway. “Bring me a list of names within the hour. The best detectives available— private ones. I don’t want some idiot from the New Police, who’ll foul this up as they do everything else. Go.”
Though Cam undoubtedly had a few opinions to offer on the matter, he kept them to himself. “Yes, my lord.” He left the room at once, while Sebastian glared after him.
Seeking to calm his seething temper, Evie ventured, “There is no need to take your anger out on Cam. He—”
“Don’t even try to excuse him,” Sebastian said darkly. “You and I both know that he could have caught that damned gutter rat had he wanted to. And I’ll be damned if I’ll tolerate your calling him by his first name— he is not your brother, nor is he a friend. He’s an employee, and you’ll refer to him as ‘Mr. Rohan’ from now on.”
“He is my friend,” Evie replied in outrage. “He has been for years!”
“Married women don’t have friendships with young unmarried men.”
“Y-you dare to insult my honor with the implication that… that…” Evie could hardly speak for the multitude of protests that jammed inside her. “I’ve done nothing to merit such a lack of tr-tr-trust!”
“I trust you. It’s everyone else that I hold in suspicion. ~ Lisa Kleypas,

238:Jack coughed slightly and offered his hand. “Hi, uh. I’m Jack.”
Kim took it. “Jack what?”
“Huh?”
“Your last name, silly.”
“Jackson.”
She blinked at him. “Your name is Jack Jackson?”
He blushed. “No, uh, my first name’s Rhett, but I hate it, so…”
He gestured to the chair and she sat. Her dress rode up several inches, exposing pleasing long lines of creamy skin. “Well, Jack, what’s your field of study?”
“Biological Engineering, Genetics, and Microbiology. Post-doc. I’m working on a research project at the institute.”
“Really? Oh, uh, my apple martini’s getting a little low.”
“I’ve got that, one second.” He scurried to the bar and bought her a fresh one. She sipped and managed to make it look not only seductive but graceful as well.
“What do you want to do after you’re done with the project?” Kim continued.
“Depends on what I find.”
She sent him a simmering smile. “What are you looking for?”
Immediately, Jack’s eyes lit up and his posture straightened. “I started the project with the intention of learning how to increase the reproduction of certain endangered species. I had interest in the idea of cloning, but it proved too difficult based on the research I compiled, so I went into animal genetics and cellular biology. It turns out the animals with the best potential to combine genes were reptiles because their ability to lay eggs was a smoother transition into combining the cells to create a new species, or one with a similar ancestry that could hopefully lead to rebuilding extinct animals via surrogate birth or in-vitro fertilization. We’re on the edge of breaking that code, and if we do, it would mean that we could engineer all kinds of life and reverse what damage we’ve done to the planet’s ecosystem.”
Kim stared. “Right. Would you excuse me for a second?”
She wiggled off back to her pack of friends by the bar. Judging by the sniggering and the disgusted glances he was getting, she wasn’t coming back.
Jack sighed and finished off his beer, massaging his forehead. “Yes, brilliant move. You blinded her with science. Genius, Jack.”
He ordered a second one and finished it before he felt smallish hands on his shoulders and a pair of soft lips on his cheek. He turned to find Kamala had returned, her smile unnaturally bright in the black lights glowing over the room. “So…how did it go with Kim?”
He shot her a flat look. “You notice the chair is empty.”
Kamala groaned. “You talked about the research project, didn’t you?”
“No!” She glared at him.
“…maybe…”
“You’re so useless, Jack.” She paused and then tousled his hair a bit. “Cheer up. The night’s still young. I’m not giving up on you.”
He smiled in spite of himself. “Yet.”
Her brown eyes flashed. “Never. ~ Kyoko M,

239:The traditional Roman wedding was a splendid affair designed to dramatize the bride’s transfer from the protection of her father’s household gods to those of her husband. Originally, this literally meant that she passed from the authority of her father to her husband, but at the end of the Republic women achieved a greater degree of independence, and the bride remained formally in the care of a guardian from her blood family. In the event of financial and other disagreements, this meant that her interests were more easily protected. Divorce was easy, frequent and often consensual, although husbands were obliged to repay their wives’ dowries. The bride was dressed at home in a white tunic, gathered by a special belt which her husband would later have to untie. Over this she wore a flame-colored veil. Her hair was carefully dressed with pads of artificial hair into six tufts and held together by ribbons. The groom went to her father’s house and, taking her right hand in his, confirmed his vow of fidelity. An animal (usually a ewe or a pig) was sacrificed in the atrium or a nearby shrine and an Augur was appointed to examine the entrails and declare the auspices favorable. The couple exchanged vows after this and the marriage was complete. A wedding banquet, attended by the two families, concluded with a ritual attempt to drag the bride from her mother’s arms in a pretended abduction. A procession was then formed which led the bride to her husband’s house, holding the symbols of housewifely duty, a spindle and distaff. She took the hand of a child whose parents were living, while another child, waving a hawthorn torch, walked in front to clear the way. All those in the procession laughed and made obscene jokes at the happy couple’s expense. When the bride arrived at her new home, she smeared the front door with oil and lard and decorated it with strands of wool. Her husband, who had already arrived, was waiting inside and asked for her praenomen or first name. Because Roman women did not have one and were called only by their family name, she replied in a set phrase: “Wherever you are Caius, I will be Caia.” She was then lifted over the threshold. The husband undid the girdle of his wife’s tunic, at which point the guests discreetly withdrew. On the following morning she dressed in the traditional costume of married women and made a sacrifice to her new household gods. By the late Republic this complicated ritual had lost its appeal for sophisticated Romans and could be replaced by a much simpler ceremony, much as today many people marry in a registry office. The man asked the woman if she wished to become the mistress of a household (materfamilias), to which she answered yes. In turn, she asked him if he wished to become paterfamilias, and on his saying he did the couple became husband and wife. ~ Anthony Everitt,

240:The silence stretched, and she could hear him shift his feet. The lower tones of the dancing music trembled through the walls, muffled and sad, stripped of vigor and all high prancing notes.
Surreal, Jane thought. That’s what you call this.
“Miss Erstwhile, let me impress upon you my utmost sincerity…”
“There’s no need.” She sat up straighter, smoothed her hands over her skirt. “I understand completely. But I guess I just can’t. I can’t do it anymore. I did my best, and this place was really good for me, you were really good for me. But I’ve come to the end. And it’s okay.”
Something in her tone must have caught at him. He knelt beside her, taking her hand. “Are you? Are you okay?” he asked in more honest, feeling tones than she had ever heard from him.
The change startled her. Despite his austere looks, he had an openness about his expression that she could only account for in his eyes. Dark eyes, focused on her, pleading with her. But it was all just a game.
“I don’t know you,” she said softly.
He blinked twice. He looked down. “Perhaps I spoke too soon. Forgive me. We can speak of this later.” He rose to leave.
“Mr. Nobley,” she said, and he stopped. “Thank you for thinking kindly of me. I can’t accept your proposal, and I won’t ever be able to. I’m flattered by your attentions, and I have no doubt that many a fine lady will melt under such proclamations in the future.”
“But not you.” He sounded beautifully sad.
What an actor, she thought.
“No, I guess not. I’m embarrassed that I came here at all as though begging for your tormented, lovesick proposal. Thank you for giving it to me so that I could see that it’s not what I want.”
“What do you want?” His voice nearly growled with the question.
“Excuse me?”
“I am asking sincerely,” he said, though he still sounded angry. “What do you want?”
“Something real.”
He frowned. “Does this have anything to do with a certain gardener?”
“Don’t argue with me about this. It’s none of your business.”
He scowled but said, “I truly wish you every happiness, Miss Erstwhile, whom I will never call Jane.”
“Let’s toss the pretense out the window, shall we? Go ahead and call me Jane.” He seemed saddened by that invitation, and she remembered what it meant to a Regency man to call a woman by her first name. “Except it won’t imply that we’re engaged or anything…Never mind. I’m sorry, I feel like a fool.”
“I am the fool,” he said.
“Then here’s to fools.” Jane smiled sadly. “I should return.”
Mr. Nobley bowed. “Enjoy the ball.”
She left him in the dark library, starling herself with the suddenness of yet another ending. But she’d done it. She’d said no. To Mr. Nobley, to the idea of Mr. Darcy, to everything that held her back. She felt so light, her heels barely touching the floor.
I’m done, Carolyn, I know what I want, she thought as she approached the palpable strokes of dancing music. ~ Shannon Hale,

241:Imagine that you have to break someone’s arm.

Right or left, doesn’t matter. The point is that you have to break it, because if you don’t…well, that doesn’t matter either. Let’s just say bad things will happen if you don’t.

Now, my question goes like this: do you break the arm quickly — snap, whoops, sorry, here let me help you with that improvised splint — or do you drag the whole business out for a good eight minutes, every now and then increasing the pressure in the tiniest of increments, until the pain becomes pink and green and hot and cold and altogether howlingly unbearable?

Well exactly. Of course. The right thing to do, the only thing to do, is to get it over with as quickly as possible. Break the arm, ply the brandy, be a good citizen. There can be no other answer.

Unless.

Unless unless unless.

What if you were to hate the person on the other end of the arm? I mean really, really hate them.

This was a thing I now had to consider.

I say now, meaning then, meaning the moment I am describing; the moment fractionally, oh so bloody fractionally, before my wrist reached the back of my neck and my left humerus broke into at least two, very possibly more, floppily joined-together pieces.

The arm we’ve been discussing, you see, is mine. It’s not an abstract, philosopher’s arm. The bone, the skin, the hairs, the small white scar on the point of the elbow, won from the corner of a storage heater at Gateshill Primary School — they all belong to me. And now is the moment when I must consider the possibility that the man standingbehind me, gripping my wrist and driving it up my spine with an almost sexual degree of care, hates me. I mean, really, really hates me.

He is taking for ever.

His name was Rayner. First name unknown. By me, at any rate, and therefore, presumably, by you too.

I suppose someone, somewhere, must have known his first name — must have baptised him with it, called him down to breakfast with it, taught him how to spell it — and someone else must have shouted it across a bar with an offer of a drink, or murmured it during sex, or written it in a box on a life insurance application form. I know they must have done all these things. Just hard to picture, that’s all.

Rayner, I estimated, was ten years older than me. Which was fine. Nothing wrong with that. I have good, warm, non-arm-breaking relationships with plenty of people who are ten years older than me. People who are ten years older than me are, by and large, admirable. But Rayner was also three inches taller than me, four stones heavier, and at least eight however-you-measure-violence units more violent. He was uglier than a car park, with a big, hairless skull that dipped and bulged like a balloon full of spanners, and his flattened, fighter’s nose, apparently drawn on his face by someone using their left hand, or perhaps even their left foot, spread out in a meandering, lopsided delta under the rough slab of his forehead. ~ Hugh Laurie,

242:Thanks again, sir.” Jules shook his hand again.
“You’re welcome again,” the captain said, his smile warm. “I’ll be back aboard the ship myself at around nineteen hundred. If it’s okay with you, I’ll, uh, stop in, see how you’re doing.”
Son of a bitch. Was Jules getting hit on? Max looked at Webster again. He looked like a Marine. Muscles, meticulous uniform, well-groomed hair. That didn’t make him gay. And he’d smiled warmly at Max, too. The man was friendly, personable. And yet . . .
Jules was flustered.
“Thanks,” he said. “That would be . . . That’d be nice. Would you excuse me, though, for a sec? I’ve got to speak to Max, before I, uh . . . But I’ll head over to the ship right away.”
Webster shook Max’s hand. “It was an honor meeting you, sir.” He smiled again at Jules.
Okay, he hadn’t smiled at Max like that.
Max waited until the captain and the medic both were out of earshot. “Is he—”
“Don’t ask, don’t tell.” Jules said. “But, oh my God.”
“He seems nice,” Max said.
“Yes,” Jules said. “Yes, he does.”
“So. The White House?”
“Yeah. About that . . .” Jules took a deep breath. “I need to let you know that you might be getting a call from President Bryant.”
“Might be,” Max repeated.
“Yes,” Jules said. “In a very definite way.” He spoke quickly, trying to run his words together: “I had a very interesting conversation with him in which I kind of let slip that you’d resigned again and he was unhappy about that so I told him I might be able to persuade you to come back to work if he’d order three choppers filled with Marines to Meda Island as soon as possible.”
“You called the President of the United States,” Max said. “During a time of international crisis, and basically blackmailed him into sending Marines.”
Jules thought about that. “Yeah. Yup. Although it was a pretty weird phone call, because I was talking via radio to some grunt in the CIA office. I had him put the call to the President for me, and we did this kind of relay thing.”
“You called the President,” Max repeated. “And you got through . . .?”
“Yeah, see, I had your cell phone. I’d accidently switched them, and . . . The President’s direct line was in your address book, so . . .”
Max nodded. “Okay,” he said.
“That’s it?” Jules said. “Just, okay, you’ll come back? Can I call Alan to tell him? We’re on a first-name basis now, me and the Pres.”
“No,” Max said. “There’s more. When you call your pal Alan, tell him I’m interested, but I’m looking to make a deal for a former Special Forces NCO.”
“Grady Morant,” Jules said.
“He’s got info on Heru Nusantra that the president will find interesting. In return, we want a full pardon and a new identity.”
Jules nodded. “I think I could set that up.” He started for the helicopter, but then turned back. “What’s Webster’s first name? Do you know?”
“Ben,” Max told him. “Have a nice vacation.”
“Recovering from a gunshot wound is not a vacation. You need to write that, like, on your hand or something. Jeez.”
Max laughed. “Hey, Jules?”
He turned back again. “Yes, sir?”
“Thanks for being such a good friend.”
Jules’s smile was beautiful. “You’re welcome, Max.” But that smile faded far too quickly. “Uh-oh, heads up—crying girlfriend on your six.”
Ah, God, no . . . Max turned to see Gina, running toward him.
Please God, let those be tears of joy.
“What’s the verdict?” he asked her.
Gina said the word he’d been praying for. “Benign.”
Max took her in his arms, this woman who was the love of his life, and kissed her.
Right in front of the Marines. ~ Suzanne Brockmann,

243:Hymn To Jazz And The Like
What is sound, as standing for the world and the mind of man at
any time, and in any situation?
Sound is an unknown, immeasurable reservoir which has been gone
into and used to have chants, rituals, jigs, bourrées, sonatas,
symphonies, songs, concertos: all of these show themselves,
proudly saying, I am sound, I am music.
Sound took a new form in America or somewhere, Oh, say, around
1900.
There had been Go Down, Moses, which did new, clattering,
ominous, delightful, religious, thundering, kind things with sound.
There had been Never Said a Mumblin' Word, which did things with
sound different from what occurred in Don Giovanni, Xerxes,
or The Bohemian Girl—you know, The Bohemian Girl of Balfe.
Sound is looking for new illustrations showing the might, glory,
findingness, and abandon of man.
Yah, and Oh, Lord, there was the St. Louis Blues.
Sounds were made to fall into different places in this.
Notes behaved otherwise.
Something in you expected a note here, and it was there.
Something in you expected a note to be this way and it was that.
Ha, what Jazz does to the this and that of notes, the isness and
wasness and might-be-ness of chords.
Frankie and Johnnie was notes doing different things in America,
being in front of each other and in back of each other differently,
Being large and small differently.
Ah, what a blessing in rowdy divinity Casey Jones is!
She'll Be Coming Round the Mountain helped to have notes show
more of what they could do.
And there was Alexander's Ragtime Band.
(Berlin, Irving first name, was proximate to the right wildness then.)
And Venus Anadyomene, the Beale Street Blues, with its going
down and up and around,
And its sassy tragedy.
And let's mention Memphis Blues.
East St. Louis Toodle-O, go into dark, make advanced noise there,
moan with grandeur, and come out right.
The Mooche, you come like a procession of right people at twilight
saying, This is right, not that; and you walk against walls and
the walls run.
17
In the Mood, Glenn Miller or no, you show what repetition can do
and surprise like the surprise in Beethoven's Emperor Concerto
as it changes from a hush and faintness to crash.
In the Mood, you are acclaimed.
Fletcher Henderson, when you brought scholarship to the new
joyous earth-turning in America, you did something for Jazz
and destiny's certificate.
The Music Goes Round and Round—whatever you come from,
you do something for reality as center and circumstance, sober
whirling, valve majesty, surprise and the heaven of brashness.
Jazz, you have faltered, but it was you who faltered, and there was
you.
Jazz, you show that symmetry and unsymmetry, order and
casualness are alike.
The Beatles have used you somewhat to show that the whisper
of one person can shout across land and water.
Rock and Roll, you say something of geology and man's uncertainty.
Jazz, you are amiable about Chopin's Revolutionary Etude.
Jazz, when Mozart was most vocally bold in the Don Giovanni,
you were looking on years ago, ready to be encouraged
honorably.
Jazz, you were around when the Gregorian Chant was doing things
to man somewhat after Charlemagne and after the changing of
France to a kingdom.
Jazz, you have in you Homer, Marlowe, Coleridge, Kipling,
Swinburne, Hopkins, Rimbaud, also the person who wrote
Sir Patrick Spens.
(I am not being careless.)
Jazz, you deserve another hymn.
~ Eli Siegel,

244:One," said the recording secretary.

"Jesus wept," answered Leon promptly.

There was not a sound in the church. You could almost hear the butterflies pass. Father looked down and laid his lower lip in folds with his fingers, like he did sometimes when it wouldn't behave to suit him.

"Two," said the secretary after just a breath of pause.

Leon looked over the congregation easily and then fastened his eyes on Abram Saunders, the father of Absalom, and said reprovingly: "Give not sleep to thine eyes nor slumber to thine eyelids."

Abram straightened up suddenly and blinked in astonishment, while father held fast to his lip.

"Three," called the secretary hurriedly.

Leon shifted his gaze to Betsy Alton, who hadn't spoken to her next door neighbour in five years.

"Hatred stirreth up strife," he told her softly, "but love covereth all sins."

Things were so quiet it seemed as if the air would snap.

"Four."

The mild blue eyes travelled back to the men's side and settled on Isaac Thomas, a man too lazy to plow and sow land his father had left him. They were not so mild, and the voice was touched with command: "Go to the ant, thou sluggard, consider her ways and be wise."

Still that silence.

"Five," said the secretary hurriedly, as if he wished it were over. Back came the eyes to the women's side and past all question looked straight at Hannah Dover.

"As a jewel of gold in a swine's snout, so is a fair woman without discretion."

"Six," said the secretary and looked appealingly at father, whose face was filled with dismay.

Again Leon's eyes crossed the aisle and he looked directly at the man whom everybody in the community called "Stiff-necked Johnny."

I think he was rather proud of it, he worked so hard to keep them doing it.

"Lift not up your horn on high: speak not with a stiff neck," Leon commanded him.

Toward the door some one tittered.

"Seven," called the secretary hastily.

Leon glanced around the room.

"But how good and how pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity," he announced in delighted tones as if he had found it out by himself.

"Eight," called the secretary with something like a breath of relief.

Our angel boy never had looked so angelic, and he was beaming on the Princess.

"Thou art all fair, my love; there is no spot in thee," he told her.

Laddie would thrash him for that.

Instantly after, "Nine," he recited straight at Laddie: "I made a covenant with mine eyes; why then should I think upon a maid?"

More than one giggled that time.

"Ten!" came almost sharply.

Leon looked scared for the first time. He actually seemed to shiver. Maybe he realized at last that it was a pretty serious thing he was doing. When he spoke he said these words in the most surprised voice you ever heard: "I was almost in all evil in the midst of the congregation and assembly."

"Eleven."

Perhaps these words are in the Bible. They are not there to read the way Leon repeated them, for he put a short pause after the first name, and he glanced toward our father: "Jesus Christ, the SAME, yesterday, and to-day, and forever!"

Sure as you live my mother's shoulders shook.

"Twelve."

Suddenly Leon seemed to be forsaken. He surely shrank in size and appeared abused.

"When my father and my mother forsake me, then the Lord will take me up," he announced, and looked as happy over the ending as he had seemed forlorn at the beginning.

"Thirteen."

"The Lord is on my side; I will not fear; what can man do unto me?" inquired Leon of every one in the church. Then he soberly made a bow and walked to his seat. ~ Gene Stratton Porter,

245:He looks up.
Our eyes lock,and he breaks into a slow smile. My heart beats faster and faster. Almost there.He sets down his book and stands.And then this-the moment he calls my name-is the real moment everything changes.
He is no longer St. Clair, everyone's pal, everyone's friend.
He is Etienne. Etienne,like the night we met. He is Etienne,he is my friend.
He is so much more.
Etienne.My feet trip in three syllables. E-ti-enne. E-ti-enne, E-ti-enne. His name coats my tongue like melting chocolate. He is so beautiful, so perfect.
My throat catches as he opens his arms and wraps me in a hug.My heart pounds furiously,and I'm embarrassed,because I know he feels it. We break apart, and I stagger backward. He catches me before I fall down the stairs.
"Whoa," he says. But I don't think he means me falling.
I blush and blame it on clumsiness. "Yeesh,that could've been bad."
Phew.A steady voice.
He looks dazed. "Are you all right?"
I realize his hands are still on my shoulders,and my entire body stiffens underneath his touch. "Yeah.Great. Super!"
"Hey,Anna. How was your break?"
John.I forget he was here.Etienne lets go of me carefully as I acknowledge Josh,but the whole time we're chatting, I wish he'd return to drawing and leave us alone. After a minute, he glances behind me-to where Etienne is standing-and gets a funny expression on hs face. His speech trails off,and he buries his nose in his sketchbook. I look back, but Etienne's own face has been wiped blank.
We sit on the steps together. I haven't been this nervous around him since the first week of school. My mind is tangled, my tongue tied,my stomach in knots. "Well," he says, after an excruciating minute. "Did we use up all our conversation over the holiday?"
The pressure inside me eases enough to speak. "Guess I'll go back to the dorm." I pretend to stand, and he laughs.
"I have something for you." He pulls me back down by my sleeve. "A late Christmas present."
"For me? But I didn't get you anything!"
He reaches into a coat pocket and brings out his hand in a fist, closed around something very small. "It's not much,so don't get excited."
"Ooo,what is it?"
"I saw it when I was out with Mum, and it made me think of you-"
"Etienne! Come on!"
He blinks at hearing his first name. My face turns red, and I'm filled with the overwhelming sensation that he knows exactly what I'm thinking. His expression turns to amazement as he says, "Close your eyes and hold out your hand."
Still blushing,I hold one out. His fingers brush against my palm, and my hand jerks back as if he were electrified. Something goes flying and lands with a faith dink behind us. I open my eyes. He's staring at me, equally stunned.
"Whoops," I say.
He tilts his head at me.
"I think...I think it landed back here." I scramble to my feet, but I don't even know what I'm looking for. I never felt what he placed in my hands. I only felt him. "I don't see anything! Just pebbles and pigeon droppings," I add,trying to act normal.
Where is it? What is it?
"Here." He plucks something tiny and yellow from the steps above him. I fumble back and hold out my hand again, bracing myself for the contact. Etienne pauses and then drops it from a few inches above my hand.As if he's avoiding me,too.
It's a glass bead.A banana.
He clears his throat. "I know you said Bridgette was the only one who could call you "Banana," but Mum was feeling better last weekend,so I took her to her favorite bead shop. I saw that and thought of you.I hope you don't mind someone else adding to your collection. Especially since you and Bridgette...you know..."
I close my hand around the bead. "Thank you."
"Mum wondered why I wanted it."
"What did you tell her?"
"That it was for you,of course." He says this like, duh.
I beam.The bead is so lightweight I hardly feel it, except for the teeny cold patch it leaves in my palm. ~ Stephanie Perkins,

246:I want you to tell me about every person you’ve ever been in love with.
Tell me why you loved them,
then tell me why they loved you.

Tell me about a day in your life you didn’t think you’d live through.
Tell me what the word home means to you
and tell me in a way that I’ll know your mother’s name
just by the way you describe your bedroom
when you were eight.

See, I want to know the first time you felt the weight of hate,
and if that day still trembles beneath your bones.

Do you prefer to play in puddles of rain
or bounce in the bellies of snow?
And if you were to build a snowman,
would you rip two branches from a tree to build your snowman arms
or would leave your snowman armless
for the sake of being harmless to the tree?
And if you would,
would you notice how that tree weeps for you
because your snowman has no arms to hug you
every time you kiss him on the cheek?

Do you kiss your friends on the cheek?
Do you sleep beside them when they’re sad
even if it makes your lover mad?
Do you think that anger is a sincere emotion
or just the timid motion of a fragile heart trying to beat away its pain?

See, I wanna know what you think of your first name,
and if you often lie awake at night and imagine your mother’s joy
when she spoke it for the very first time.

I want you to tell me all the ways you’ve been unkind.
Tell me all the ways you’ve been cruel.
Tell me, knowing I often picture Gandhi at ten years old
beating up little boys at school.

If you were walking by a chemical plant
where smokestacks were filling the sky with dark black clouds
would you holler “Poison! Poison! Poison!” really loud
or would you whisper
“That cloud looks like a fish,
and that cloud looks like a fairy!”

Do you believe that Mary was really a virgin?
Do you believe that Moses really parted the sea?
And if you don’t believe in miracles, tell me —
how would you explain the miracle of my life to me?

See, I wanna know if you believe in any god
or if you believe in many gods
or better yet
what gods believe in you.
And for all the times that you’ve knelt before the temple of yourself,
have the prayers you asked come true?
And if they didn’t, did you feel denied?
And if you felt denied,
denied by who?

I wanna know what you see when you look in the mirror
on a day you’re feeling good.
I wanna know what you see when you look in the mirror
on a day you’re feeling bad.
I wanna know the first person who taught you your beauty
could ever be reflected on a lousy piece of glass.

If you ever reach enlightenment
will you remember how to laugh?

Have you ever been a song?
Would you think less of me
if I told you I’ve lived my entire life a little off-key?
And I’m not nearly as smart as my poetry
I just plagiarize the thoughts of the people around me
who have learned the wisdom of silence.

Do you believe that concrete perpetuates violence?
And if you do —
I want you to tell me of a meadow
where my skateboard will soar.

See, I wanna know more than what you do for a living.
I wanna know how much of your life you spend just giving,
and if you love yourself enough to also receive sometimes.
I wanna know if you bleed sometimes
from other people’s wounds,
and if you dream sometimes
that this life is just a balloon —
that if you wanted to, you could pop,
but you never would
‘cause you’d never want it to stop.

If a tree fell in the forest
and you were the only one there to hear —
if its fall to the ground didn’t make a sound,
would you panic in fear that you didn’t exist,
or would you bask in the bliss of your nothingness?

And lastly, let me ask you this:

If you and I went for a walk
and the entire walk, we didn’t talk —
do you think eventually, we’d… kiss?

No, wait.
That’s asking too much —
after all,
this is only our first date. ~ Andrea Gibson,

*** WISDOM TROVE ***

*** NEWFULLDB 2.4M ***

WORDNET

* WISDOM TROVE *

* NEWFULLDB 2.4M *