lifeline

1:When the media ask George W. Bush a question, he answers, &

2:This is my endlessly recurrent temptation: to go down to that Sea, and there neither dive nor swim nor float, but only dabble and splash, careful not to get out of my depth and holding on to the lifeline which connects me with my things temporal. ~ c-s-lewis, @wisdomtrove

3:Even if there were two of me, I still couldn't do all that has to be done. No matter what, though, I keep up my running. Running every day is a kind of lifeline for me, so I'm not going to lay off or quit just because I'm busy. If I used being busy as an excuse not to run, I'd never run again. I have only a few reasons to keep on running, and a truckload of them to quit. All I can do is keep those few reasons nicely polished. ~ haruki-murakami, @wisdomtrove

4:Befriending the life in others is sometimes a complex matter. There are times when we offer our strength and protection, but these are usually only temporary measures. The greatest blessing we offer others may be the belief we have in their struggle for freedom, the courage to support and accompany them as they determine for themselves the strength that will become their refuge and the foundation for their lives. I think it is especially important to believe in someone at a time when they cannot yet believe in themselves. Then your belief will become their lifeline. ~ rachel-naomi-remen, @wisdomtrove

* NEWFULLDB 2.4M *

1:Love is my only lifeline. ~ Yasunari Kawabata,

2:Your waistline is your lifeline ~ Jack LaLanne,

3:You are my goodness. My redemption. My lifeline. ~ Tijan,

4:I want to be your lifeline, not your anchor. ~ Jewel E Ann,

5:My cell phone is my best friend. It's my lifeline to the outside world. ~ Carrie Underwood,

6:People talk about books being an escape...this one feels more like a lifeline. ~ Jennifer E Smith,

7:When the media ask George W. Bush a question, he answers, 'Can I use a lifeline?' ~ Robin Williams,

8:my love isn't a weapon, it's a lifeline, reach out and take hold, and don't let go! ~ Francine Rivers,

9:Even in the darkest darkness, hope was a lifeline, though sometimes as thin as a thread. ~ Dean Koontz,

10:No matter what happens, we'll find each other again. You're my lifeline. You always will be. ~ A G Howard,

11:She had become my lifeline. I wanted to be hers. I wanted her to feel this way about me, too. ~ Abbi Glines,

12:You're my lifeline," he whispers, and he kisses my knuckles before pressing my palm against his. ~ E L James,

13:The spine is the lifeline. A lot of people should go to a chiropractor but they don't know it. ~ Jack LaLanne,

14:The shared secret of our second lives hangs between us, not like a weight, but like a lifeline. ~ Victoria Schwab,

15:Take away a young person’s tech and you’ve taken away her lifeline to everything that matters to her. ~ Gary Vaynerchuk,

16:In the land of Cheerios, dirty diapers, fleeting naps and interrupted sleep, other mothers are a lifeline. ~ Susan Chira,

17:We have to appreciate that we are part of nature, we must work with nature; the environment is our lifeline. ~ Lewis Pugh,

18:You feel like the lifeline I lost. Don’t tell me you’re weak. Don’t tell me your flaws aren’t my blessings. ~ Jessica Hawkins,

19:That night I wasn't reading your palm...I was monogramming my fingerprints on the sidewalks of your lifeline. ~ Brandi L Bates,

20:Your lifeline…oh, the burning stick. Right.” Leo resisted the urge to set his hand ablaze and yell: Bwah ha ha! ~ Rick Riordan,

21:Ariella was silent, and I reached out to take her hand, squeezing as if it were a lifeline, holding me to sanity. ~ Julie Kagawa,

22:Your lifeline...oh, the burning stick. Right." Leo resisted the urge to set his hand ablaze and yell: BWAH HA HA! ~ Rick Riordan,

23:People don’t mind doing CPR on a crisis victim, but no person is equipped to be the constant lifeline to another. ~ Lysa TerKeurst,

24:There’s no way to help a man who doesn’t want to be saved. In the end, it was me who needed the lifeline. Seeing ~ Corinne Michaels,

25:He showed me that prayer and faith are the antidote for despair, the only true lifeline for hope to which we can cling ~ Julie Lessman,

26:Online learning can be a lifeline to those who have obstacles, such as geographical distances or physical disabilities. ~ Paul Levinson,

27:That lifeline thing goes both ways, you know? Use it. Use him. He won’t break if you do … but you just might if you don’t. ~ K Bromberg,

28:When a lifeline comes, you don’t evaluate whether it’s the right one. You just grab for it, and hold on. ~ Alexandria Marzano Lesnevich,

29:Put your hope in the right thing, and it would be a lifeline. Put your hope in the wrong thing, and it would be a noose. ~ Gena Showalter,

30:Here is a magic lifeline you can use if you notice yourself thinking or saying something negative. Stop immediately, and say: ~ Rhonda Byrne,

31:Reading" had always been my lifeline-- an escape to that imaginary world where hurts were fictional and endings happy... ~ Phyllis A Whitney,

32:Art, its completeness, its formedness, its finishedness, had no power to console. Words, on the other hand, were a lifeline. ~ Diane Setterfield,

33:Stupid. Put your hope in the right thing, and it would be a lifeline. Put your hope in the wrong thing, and it would be a noose. ~ Gena Showalter,

34:With the best of intentions you toss me a lifeline. Failing to see how a piece of rope will do me any good, I ignore it and drown. ~ Richelle E Goodrich,

35:I really think [William] Burroughs was onto something here, when he said, "Dreams are a biologic necessity and your lifeline into space." ~ Quentin S Crisp,

36:It was a backwards memory of an event in his future so terrifying that it had generated harmonics of fear all the way along his lifeline. ~ Terry Pratchett,

37:Young people must be included from birth. A society that cuts itself off from its youth severs its lifeline; it is condemned to bleed to death. ~ Kofi Annan,

38:I thought I'd broken you."
"Broken? Me? Oh no, Ana. Just the opposite."
He reaches out and takes my hand. "You're my lifeline'" he whispers. ~ E L James,

39:...No small amount of schadenfreude. Do you know what that means?"

"Dad, it's the lifeline of gossip. Of course I know what it means. ~ Cristina Garc a,

40:It was a backward memory of an event in his future so terrifying that it had generated harmonics of fear all the way along his lifeline). This ~ Terry Pratchett,

41:The Persian Gulf is our lifeline ... We will respect international navigation, for us, freedom of navigation in the Persian Gulf is a must. ~ Mohammad Javad Zarif,

42:A hope of something beyond our place and time. This is what books - the best books - give us: a lifeline, a reason to believe, a way to breathe more freely. ~ Blake Morrison,

43:Your lifeline…oh, the burning stick. Right.” Leo resisted the urge to set his hand ablaze and yell: Bwah ha ha! The idea was sort of funny, but he wasn’t that cruel. ~ Rick Riordan,

44:You were my lifeline, and you didn’t even know … and then you took the broken in me and mended me … My lifeline became my salvation … And my salvation became love. ~ Natasha Madison,

45:He unknowingly throws me a lifeline with those words. I am not drowning in worry anymore. I am neck deep and it still washes over me in cold waves, but now I can breathe. ~ Ally Condie,

46:China spends a lot of resources and effort on gaining soft power over culture. The hope is that it can be the last lifeline for the Party's survival. Obviously, the idea will fail. ~ Ai Weiwei,

47:I think I was his lifeline too. We were both adrift in New Your City. We were both surrounded by so many people, but ultimately we were terribly alone. Until we found each other. ~ Lauren Blakely,

48:I have always kept a stack of library books next to my bed as a lifeline. If I ever woke in the middle of the night too scared to move or too sad to roll over, the books were my saviors. ~ Julie Halpern,

49:There's no point in comforting words, in telling her she'll be all right. She's no fool. Her hand reaches out and I clutch it like a lifeline. As if it's me who's dying instead of Rue. ~ Suzanne Collins,

50:standing next to him. “Your lifeline…oh, the burning stick. Right.” Leo resisted the urge to set his hand ablaze and yell: Bwah ha ha! The idea was sort of funny, but he wasn’t that cruel. ~ Rick Riordan,

51:Yes, older drivers are more likely to injure themselves and others when they get behind the wheel. But if you take that away, that is really the last lifeline a lot of elderly people have. ~ Tucker Carlson,

52:I was reading some complex books in my own youth-and no, I didnt always understand every word, let alone every concept-but I got the main thrust, which was like a lifeline in a fluctuating world. ~ Tanith Lee,

53:I remember Chap saying Jesus was a lifeline. And I needed one. Had needed one for a long time, I guess. So I prayed for the first time in my life and let Jesus rescue my soul from the depths. ~ Jessica R Patch,

54:But how do you throw a lifeline when you yourself don’t even have a rope to hold on to? I might have been able to keep her afloat for another day, but I’d never have been able to pull her back to me. ~ Aly Martinez,

55:In times of change and danger, when there is a quicksand of fear under one's reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present. John Dos Passos ~ George F Will,

56:When there was pain or hurt, or bad memories crowded in, work could be a literal lifeline, taking your mind away from what you couldn't deal with and channeling it into something good, something tangible. ~ Alice Clayton,

57:His hand touched my leg and I grabbed it. I held it with both of mine, like he was a lifeline and I needed saving. Or maybe I was the lifeline and he needed saving.
Was it possible we could save each other? ~ Molly O Keefe,

58:Victimless crimes are the lifeline of the RIGHT virus. And there is a growing recognition, even in official quarters, that victimless crimes should be removed from the books or subject to minimal penalties. ~ William S Burroughs,

59:But I have to say that I am really grateful for . Finish the rest of the sentence with something – anything – that you’re grateful for. Take this magic lifeline with you, and grab a hold of it whenever you need it. ~ Rhonda Byrne,

60:horses and ride them,” he told Jobs. “You guys are the ones I’m betting on, so you figure it out.” Perot brought to NeXT something that was almost as valuable as his $20 million lifeline: He was a quotable, spirited ~ Walter Isaacson,

61:He hadn't realized how much it could mean, having someone to talk to like that; he hadn't realized that it could be a kind of lifeline, and that without it, there would be nobody to save you if you started to drown. ~ Jennifer E Smith,

62:Growing up, books were my lifeline, and I owe a debt to those writers that can never be repaid. They saved my sanity and gave me a world I could escape to. If I can pay that forward to another person, that's all I ask. ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon,

63:I'm addicted to email, but other than that, there are practical things - being able to buy a book on the internet that you can't find in your local bookshop. This could be a lifeline if you live further from the sources. ~ Marilyn Hacker,

64:Art, its completeness, its formedness, its finishedness, had no power to console. Words on the other hand, were a lifeline. They left their hushed rhythm behind, a counter to the slow in and out of Emmeline's breathing. ~ Diane Setterfield,

65:No one is born a good citizen; no nation is born a democracy. Rather, both are processes that continue to evolve over a lifetime. Young people must be included from birth. A society that cuts off from its youth severs its lifeline. ~ Kofi Annan,

66:By the way of connecting with subject, with theme, I was able to find a kind of lifeline. Writing's like a lifeline. You have to get the right way in. Otherwise the material just lies there, and you can't do anything with it. ~ Joyce Carol Oates,

67:Sometimes she felt that her heart would ssurely break. But she knew that hearts did not literally break because their owners were unhappy - and foolish. How dreadfully foolish she had been. Yet she clung to the memories as to a lifeline. ~ Mary Balogh,

68:People who won't help others in trouble "because they got into trouble through their own fault" would probably not throw a lifeline to a drowning person until they learned whether that person fell in through his or her own fault or not. ~ Sydney J Harris,

69:But due to some strange lack of neural coordination between the faculties of thinking and speaking, or perhaps to the crucial lifeline that lucidity once in a while tosses to us when we are at the edge of a precipice, the words that came out ~ Mar a Due as,

70:This is my endlessly recurrent temptation: to go down to that Sea, and there neither dive nor swim nor float, but only dabble and splash, careful not to get out of my depth and holding on to the lifeline which connects me with my things temporal. ~ C S Lewis,

71:If you know that children have certain people in their lives who are their connection and their lifeline or attachment, then it is essential to keep those attachments intact for them. Repeated emotional disconnection is devastating and irreparable. ~ Joyce Maguire Pavao,

72:BRING ME YOUR MIND for rest and renewal. Let Me infuse My Presence into your thoughts. As your mind stops racing, your body relaxes and you regain awareness of Me. This awareness is vital to your spiritual well-being; it is your lifeline, spiritually speaking. ~ Sarah Young,

73:But in reality, when faced with death and the great unknown that came after, my survival instinct snatched wildly at whatever lifeline was offered. I didn’t want to die. Even if it meant becoming something I loathed, my nature was, first and always, to survive. ~ Julie Kagawa,

74:For so many years, Lumikki had needed to find hiding places because she was afraid. Finding secret nooks and safe havens was a lifeline. These days, it wasn’t so much about fear as a desire to find some room just for her in a place that was shared by everyone. ~ Salla Simukka,

75:He was my lifeline,and I was pretty sure he will always be. There was no place I felt safer than when he held me in his arms like this. Sometimes I just want it to stay here, in his chair, and never leave.The outside worlds could melt away, and I wouldn't care. ~ Sherri Hayes,

76:Just being able to see him was reassuring in ways Zane would have avoided exploring in the past, but now he could admit why. He loved his exasperating partner beyond all reason. He saw him as a lifeline he had desperately needed, an inspiration in so many ways. Several ~ Abigail Roux,

77:Whether you find it through mediation or sighing over tea or just turning all your devices off for five minutes, listening is an ancient lifeline by which we are awakened time and again. Once reawakened, we more easily find our way to each other, and so help each other live. ~ Mark Nepo,

78:You know it with startling clarity in that moment—how there’s only a singular cord in this knotted mess of a world worth reaching for. It’s dangling right there from our impossible tangle, and it’s the one hope you need to reach for this Advent. That scarlet lifeline of Christ. ~ Ann Voskamp,

79:He was the only man who’s ever loved me-the only man willing to dedicate his life to me-the only man who’s ever made me feel like I was someone. He was the heroin in my veins, the vodka in my blood and the dance in my heart. He was my lifeline. My world. My Regg. And now, he is gone. ~ Anonymous,

80:If you’re in a dangerous place, call this number: (800) 273-8255. I didn’t have it, and I wish I had. It’s the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline. They also have live chat at suicidepreventionlifeline.org. It’s available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, in both English and Spanish. ~ Timothy Ferriss,

81:Anyone who fears, as I do, that today's public schools are dangerously close to being irrelevant must read this book. The authors provide a road map-and a lifeline-showing how schools can prosper under the most difficult conditions. It is a welcome departure from all the school bashing. ~ John Merrow,

82:People talk about books being an escape, but here on the tube, this one feels more like a lifeline...The motion of the train makes her head rattle, but her eyes lock on the words the way a figure skater might choose a focal point as she spins, and just like that, she's grounded again. ~ Jennifer E Smith,

83:This is my endlessly recurrent temptation: to go down to that Sea (I think St. John of the Cross called God a sea) and there neither dive nor swim nor float, but only dabble and splash, careful not to get out of my depth and holding on to the lifeline which connects me with my things temporal. ~ C S Lewis,

84:Daniel?”

“Tell me, sunshine.”

Inhaling his scent like a lifeline, she leaned in and spoke urgently against his ear. “Take me home. Make it better.”

His answering groan rumbled against her chest. He sank his hands into her hair. “Oh baby, I’m going to make it so much better. ~ Tessa Bailey,

85:A book feels like a thing alive in this moment, and also alive in a continuum, from the moment the thoughts about it first percolated in the writer's mind to the moment it sprang from the printing press -- a lifeline that continues as someone sits with it and marvels over it, and it continues on, ... ~ Susan Orlean,

86:He watched me in a way that made my heart speed up. “That’s not what I see.” I met his eyes. “What do you see?” “Snow. Cold and soft, the sum of an infinite number of beautiful pieces. And when the light hits just right, you shine.” I had no words, my mind blank as my eyes hung on to his like a lifeline. ~ Staci Hart,

87:I was learning, even in my brief time in England, that a cup of tea almost always helped. I didn't know whether it was the caffeine, the warmth, or the simple fact of having someone else do something kind, but a soothing cup of tea in Harriet Dalrymple's cottage was fast becoming my lifeline to sanity. ~ Beth Pattillo,

88:Cooking is not about convenience and it's not about shortcuts. Our hunger for the twenty-minute gourmet meal, for one-pot ease and prewashed, precut ingredients has severed our lifeline to the satisfactions of cooking. Take your time. Take a long time. Move slowly and deliberately and with great attention. ~ Thomas Keller,

89:Do you know what’s so great about clinging to hope? Hope is like a strong cord, a lifeline that stretches straight from God to you. The more you choose to cling to it, the more you are transferring the weight of your burdens to God. Depression and desperation vanish as you continue to cling to hope. ~ Linda Evans Shepherd,

90:Although the TV and radio work were nice supplements, the newspaper had been my lifeline, my oxygen; when I saw my stories in print each morning, I knew that, in at least one way, I was alive.
I had grown used to thinking readers somehow needed my column. I was stunned at how easily things went on without me. ~ Mitch Albom,

91:A book feels like a thing alive in the moment, and also alive on a continuum, from the moment the thoughts about it first percolated in the writer's mind to the moment it sprang off the printing press - a lifeline that continues as someone sits with it and marvels over it, and it continues on, time after time after time. ~ Susan Orlean,

92:She talked to me earlier,” Frank said abruptly. “Hazel told me you figured out about my lifeline.” Leo stirred. He’d almost forgotten Frank was standing next to him. “Your lifeline…oh, the burning stick. Right.” Leo resisted the urge to set his hand ablaze and yell: Bwah ha ha! The idea was sort of funny, but he wasn’t that cruel. ~ Rick Riordan,

93:I'd say art is with you. All around you. I'd say when there doesn't seem to be anyone else, there is art. I'd say you can love art how you wish to be loved. And I'd say art is a lifeline to the rest of us - we are out here. You are not alone. There is nothing about you that scares us. There is nothing unlovable about you, either. ~ Lidia Yuknavitch,

94:If, as an actor, you allow yourself to be cocooned from the boring pin-pricks of day-to-day existence - like standing in a queue at the butcher's or any of the other dreary little events that we all have in our daily lives - you begin to lose your lifeline to what people are. And if you lose that, you eventually lose the ability to act. ~ Glenda Jackson,

95:Books were her salvation. As a child, she’d had a shelf of childhood favorites that she loved enough to read over and over again. But after, during the hospital stay and the long voyage and the cold days in Idlewild’s dreary hallways, books became more than mere stories. They were her lifeline, the pages as essential to her as breathing. ~ Simone St James,

96:Befriending provides a valuable lifeline to many people who feel isolated in their communities often as a result of ill health or poverty. I would like to thank all those who volunteer as befrienders and I hope that your numbers will increase in coming years. Your kindness and hard work is, I know, very much appreciated by those you help. ~ Charles Kennedy,

97:Usually, when you're talking about work with other writers it's because something seriously bad is going on with your work and you've absolutely thrown out a lifeline and you're hoping that someone will help you with something. Either there's some bad feeling you have about the work, or sometimes it's not specific - just kind of solidarity. ~ Chang Rae Lee,

98:I don't expect you to believe me right now, but you can terminate your relationship and keep what it gave you," I tell her. "You reconnected with an energy, a youthfulness. I know that it feels as if in leaving him, you are severing a lifeline to all of that, but I want you to know that over time you will find that some of this also lives inside of you. ~ Esther Perel,

99:The rainforest is being cut down at alarming rates, and orangutans are losing their habitats and are being killed, as a result, faster than we can save them, but there is a solution. In Borneo, small parcels of rainforest land can be a lifeline for orangutans so long as they link together protected forests, enabling animals to move safely over greater distances. ~ Katie Cleary,

100:When the child does or says something that the parents don't like, they immediately become rejecting and critical of the child. Since the approval and support of the parent is like a psychological lifeline to the emotional health of the child, the child is immediately affected and pulls back from the behavior in order to regain the love and approval of the parents. ~ Anonymous,

101:Writers as diverse as Wordsworth and Freud, as Blake and Dickens have all hypothesized that the turbulence and intensity we feel as young children are what ultimately give us our life force as adults. Without this first madness, without being able to sustain this emotional lifeline to our childhoods--to our most passionate selves-- our lives can being to feel futile ~ Adam Phillips,

102:I saw that animals were important. I saw that plants were even more important. I was also to learn that compared to many of the other species, we weren't important at all except for the damage we do. We do not rule the natural world, despite our conspicuous position in it. On the contrary, it is our lifeline, and we do well to try to understand its rules. ~ Elizabeth Marshall Thomas,

103:I think, with music in general, people just inevitably connect with feeling. The opportunity to hear expressed feeling. That's what has always drawn me towards music. It's something where, by connecting to someone else's voice, I feel less lonely. I feel more alive. I feel more connected to the world and to the rest of humanity. Sometimes a voice can be like a lifeline. ~ Antony Hegarty,

104:Do you trust me?” [Daemon] snapped.

“Yes.” No hesitation, no doubts.

He finally stopped moving and faced her. “Do you know how desperately I love you?”

[Janelle's] voice shook when she answered, “As much as I love you?”

He held her, held on to her as his lifeline, his anchor. It would be all right. As long as he had her, it would be all right. ~ Anne Bishop,

105:I think, with music in general, people just inevitably connect with feeling. The opportunity to hear expressed feeling. And that's what has always drawn me towards music. It's something where, by connecting to someone else's voice, I feel less lonely. I feel more alive. I feel more connected to the world and to the rest of humanity. Sometimes a voice can be like a lifeline. ~ Antony Hegarty,

106:We see now why the great target of Satan is to break down our faith. He knows all too well that the righteous live by faith, so he aims at cutting our lifeline to God. Faith is like the hand that reaches up to receive what God has freely promised. If the devil can pull your hand back down to your side, then he has succeeded. All of God's intended supply will just stay where it is in heaven. ~ Jim Cymbala,

107:People had lived by the river in Swat for 3,000 years and always seen it as our lifeline, not a threat, and our valley as a haven from the outside world. Now we had become “the valley of sorrows,” said my cousin Sultan Rome. First the earthquake, then the Taliban, then the military operation, and now, just as we were starting to rebuild, devastating floods arrived to wash all our work away. ~ Malala Yousafzai,

108:You're not supposed to be here," Lillian told Westcliff when the contraction was over. She clung to his hand as if it were a lifeline. "You're supposed to be downstairs pacing and drinking."
"Good God, woman," Westcliff muttered, blotting her sweaty face with a dry cloth, "I did this to you. I'm hardly going to let you face the consequences alone."
That produced a faint smile on Lillian's dry lips. ~ Lisa Kleypas,

109:The State provides a legal, orderly, systematic channel for the predation of private property; it renders certain, secure, and relatively “peaceful” the lifeline of the parasitic caste in society. Since production must always precede predation, the free market is anterior to the State. The State has never been created by a “social contract”; it has always been born in conquest and exploitation. ~ Llewellyn H Rockwell Jr,

110:He had the face of a floating astronaut who had lost his tether and had only one chance to grab a lifeline or forever drift away into endless black. I knew that feeling, the sense of panic that stretched time, turning seconds into years, and the deep pain that came from being hurt by not one person but many, a gang of bullies that expanded into a neighborhood and then into a community, until you questioned the whole world. ~ Lissa Price,

111:Even if there were two of me, I still couldn't do all that has to be done. No matter what, though, I keep up my running. Running every day is a kind of lifeline for me, so I'm not going to lay off or quit just because I'm busy. If I used being busy as an excuse not to run, I'd never run again. I have only a few reasons to keep on running, and a truckload of them to quit. All I can do is keep those few reasons nicely polished. ~ Haruki Murakami,

112:Even if there were two of me, I still couldn’t do all that has to be done. No matter what, though, I keep up my running. Running every day is a kind of lifeline for me, so I’m not going to lay off or quit just because I’m busy. If I used being busy as an excuse not to run, I’d never run again. I have only a few reasons to keep on running, and a truckload of them to quit. All I can do is keep those few reasons nicely polished. ~ Haruki Murakami,

113:We Han worship the Dragon King, the one in charge of our agrarian lifeline—our dragon totem, the one we pay homage to, the one to whom we meekly submit. How can you expect people like that to learn from wolves, to protect them, to worship and yet kill them, like the Mongols? Only a people’s totem can truly rouse their ethnic spirit and character, whether it’s a dragon or a wolf. The differences between farming and nomadic peoples are simply too great. ~ Jiang Rong,

114:A book feels like a thing alive in this moment, and also on a continuum, from the moment the thoughts about it first percolated in the writers mind to the moment it sprang off the printing press - a lifeline that continues as someone sits with it and marvels over it. Once words and thoughts are poured into them, books are no longer just paper and ink and glue: they take on a kind of human vitality. The poet Milton called this quality in books "the potency of life. ~ Susan Orlean,

115:But once upon a time - that would be our time - a telephone cord seemed like nothing less than a lifeline.
It was your attachment to the outside world and, even more than that, your attachment to the people you loved, or wanted to love, or tried to love.
Everything about it was fitting - the way it curled in on itself, the way it got so easily tangled, the way you could pull it only so far before it kept you in place.
Twisted and knotted and essential. ~ David Levithan,

116:He was surprised to find how much he missed writing to her. For so many months, she'd been the person on the other end of all his musings, and now she was gone and his thoughts were left buzzing around inside his head like frantic fireflies in a jar. He hadn't realized how much it could mean, having someone to talk to like that; he hadn't realized that it could be a kind of lifeline, and that without it, there would be nobody to save you if you started to drown. ~ Jennifer E Smith,

117:You're my lifeline," he whispers and kisses my knuckles before pressing my palm against his. With his eyes wide and full of fear, he gently tugs my hand and places it on his chest over his heart- in the forbidden zone. His breathing quickens, his heart is beating a frantic pounding tattoo beneath my fingers. He doesn't take his eyes off mine; his jaw tense, his teeth clenched.
I gasp. Oh my Fifty! He's letting me touch him. And it's like all the air in my lungs has vaporized- gone. ~ E L James,

118:Somehow Luke understood - in a way that Lando never had, that Hand and Leia and Chewbacca had simply never grasped - just how dark a place the universe really was.
Lando guessed that was where Luke got his humility. His kindness. His gentle faith that people could change for the better. That must have been why he rarely smiled, and almost never made jokes. Because the goodness was all he rally had. It was his lifeline. The rope to which he clung, dangling over the abyss. ~ Matthew Woodring Stover,

119:If you can express something in the simplest way possible, I think there's something noble in that. It's easy to flesh stuff out and get all purple with it, being cryptic and wearing masks... I think it's a bit adolescent. I wanted to write in a way that was vulnerable. I wanted to have courage in stripping back the opaque stuff so it was just raw. I like lyrics that are a lifeline, that have a purpose to them and are not just meandering around in a masturbatory way. They cut the page. ~ Yannis Philippakis,

120:Every generation rewrites the past. In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger we are driven to the written record by a pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today.... In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men's reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking. ~ John Dos Passos,

121:Regret For Mimi Bailin
Regret is the young girl who sits in the snow
& stares at her hands.
They are bluer than shadows in snow.
They are bloodless as fear.
Her fingernail moons are white.
She wants to crawl into the palm
of her own hand.
She wants extra fingers to cover
the shame of her eyes.
She wants to follow her lifeline where it leads
but it plunges deeper
than the Grand Canyon.
She stands on the edge
still hoping
she can fly.
~ Erica Jong,

122:Rincewind occasionally had nightmares about teetering on some intangible but enormously high place, and seeing a blue-distanced, cloud punctuated landscape reeling away below him (this usually woke him up with his ankles sweating; he would have been even more worried had he known that the nightmare was not, as he thought, just the usual Discworld vertigo. It was a backward memory of an event in his future so terrifying that it had generated harmonics of fear all the way along his lifeline). ~ Terry Pratchett,

123:And sometimes then he sat with us for an hour or so, sharing our limbo, listening while I read. Books from any shelf, opened at any page, in which I would start and finish anywhere, mid-sentence sometimes. Wuthering Heights ran into Emma, which gave way to The Eustace Diamonds, which faded into Hard Times, which ceded to The Woman in White. Fragments. It didn't matter. Art, its completeness, its formedness, its finishedness, had no power to console. Words, on the other hand, were a lifeline. ~ Diane Setterfield,

124:I knew that feeling, the sense of panic that stretched time, turning seconds into years, and the deep pain that came from being hurt by not one person but many, a gang of bullies that expanded into a neighborhood and then into a community, until you questioned the whole world. And your last thought, as you stretch your arm until your fingers are inches from that lifeline, is how if you survive, you'll find a way to help fix what was broken, so you can say that yes, you want to be part of the world again. ~ Lissa Price,

125:The pain was as unexpected as a thunderclap in a clear sky. Eddis's chest tightened, as something closed around her heart. A deep breath might have calmed her, but she couldn't draw one. She wondered if she was ill, and she even thought briefly that she might have been poisoned. She felt Attolia reach out and take her hand. To the court it was unexceptional, hardly noticed, but to Eddis it was an anchor, and she held on to it as if to a lifeline. Sounis was looking at her with concern. Her responding smile was artificial. ~ Megan Whalen Turner,

126:On one occasion, Daniel Day-Lewis, Jeremy Irons and myself were due to appear at the Sarajevo film festival and were turned off a UN plane on orders from Geneva. We had to get local journalists to transport the films in for us. I tell you this only to demonstrate that festivals can be a lifeline. But, after all the difficulties I'd had in getting there, in 1996 I found myself being flown in on a four-seater RAF plane as an official guest, endorsed by the British Embassy. Ironically, the film I was to present was Mission: Impossible. ~ Vanessa Redgrave,

127:India is not shining—at least, not yet. The notion is an image, a façade built up by the powerful elite, who hope that if they shout it loudly and long enough it will drown out everything else, grab enough headlines and start to be true. A country’s greatness cannot be measured by its size, but by the standard of living of every individual. Pockets of the country are aglow, bathed in the light of gated mansions, malls and Mercedes headlamps, but like the passengers on the Lifeline Express, hundreds of millions still stand in the shadows, waiting for the clouds to part. ~ Monisha Rajesh,

128:Befriending the life in others is sometimes a complex matter. There are times when we offer our strength and protection, but these are usually only temporary measures. The greatest blessing we offer others may be the belief we have in their struggle for freedom, the courage to support and accompany them as they determine for themselves the strength that will become their refuge and the foundation for their lives. I think it is especially important to believe in someone at a time when they cannot yet believe in themselves. Then your belief will become their lifeline. ~ Rachel Naomi Remen,

129:Look, I control a large part of this barrio because I control one thing, credit. That’s right, it’s that simple. Credit is the lifeline, the blood that turns the wheels. In Barelas I control it, but out there, well, out there are bigger animals, and they in turn control my credit. It doesn’t matter how good a businessman I am, if they cut off my credit I am dead, the barrio’s dead, nothing grows without the green blood of the dollar. Now, how long do you think it would take the banks to cut off my credit if I joined a group of communists like you? They’d do it like this! ~ Rudolfo Anaya,

130:People talk about books being an escape, but here on the tube, this one feels more like a lifeline. As she leafs through the pages, the rest of it fades away: the flurry of elbows and purses, the woman in a tunic biting her fingernails, the two teenagers with blaring headphones, even the man playing the violin at the other end of the car, its reedy tune working its way through the crowd. The motion of the train makes her head rattle, but her eyes lock on the words the way a figure skater might choose a focal point as she spins, and just like that, she’s grounded again. ~ Jennifer E Smith,

131:Education is the lifeline of the city of Boston in a lot of ways, as far as preparing and educating young people for the future. So when we think about that - I would love to have the $25 million dollar investment we made up to close the gap on charter schools. I'd love to make that investment in a different part of the school system if we could. The money that we're trying to adjust on transportation, I would love to, if we can save money in transportation - that's not going to be a savings, that's going to come into the general fund, that's going to be reinvested in the school. ~ Marty Walsh,

132:I had always been no more than a hermit, straying from one shell—one shelter—to another, looking at life only as a constant battle for survival. I barely got by; I succeeded by no other means than sheer luck. I found food when I needed it and I found health when sickness became my leech. There was nothing I did or earned that sustained my lifeline; I was simply a manifestation of mass that consumed and expelled mass. I had no hopes and therefore I was never disappointed. I was a wayfarer through time and knowledge, a companion to their works as they to me were my only friends. ~ M Amanuensis Sharkchild,

133:The earth had granted me a lifeline, by letting me siphon off some of the water that was on its way somewhere else. Because of me, there would be less water flowing into the Chattahoochee River: less for the speckled trout, less for the wood ducks, less for the mountain laurel that drop their white petals into the river every fall. There would be more water flowing into my septic tank, laced with laundry detergent, dish soap, and human waste. At that moment of high awareness, I promised the land that I would go easy on the water. I would remember where it came from. I would remain grateful for the sacrifice. ~ Barbara Brown Taylor,

134:Children Are Like Kites
You spend years trying to get them off the ground.
You run with them until you are both breathless. They crash ... they hit the roof ... you patch, comfort and assure them that someday they will fly.
Finally, they are airborne.
They need more string, and you keep letting it out.
They tug, and with each twist of the twine, there is sadness that goes with joy.
The kite becomes more distant, and you know it won't be long before that beautiful creature will snap the lifeline that binds you together and will soar as meant to soar ... free and alone.
Only then do you know that you have done your job. ~ Erma Bombeck,

135:It was a fossilized path: the will which had cut this gash out of these solitary places so that the blood and sap would flow there was long since dead - and dead too were the circumstances which had guided this will. A whitish and indurated scar remained, gradually gnawed away by the earth like a flesh that heals itself, yet its direction was still vaguely cut into the horizon; a language and crepuscular sign rather than a way forward - a worn-out lifeline which still vegetated through the fallow land as it does on the palm of a hand. It was so old that, since it had been constructed, the very configuration of the land must have changed imperceptibly. ~ Julien Gracq,

136:You have the freedom to be who you should be, not some man’s ego boost, not your children’s lifeline, not your parents’ keeper. You have the freedom to work anywhere you dream, date whomever you wish, experience anything you desire. I’m locked in now, Willow. T. R. A. P. P. E. D.” “You don’t like being a mother?” “Being a mother is who I was meant to be, Willow. I don’t regret a second of being a mother. My point is, that until you become a mother or take over the responsibilities of your family, you’re free. You have no debt: financial, familial, or emotional.” “Willow,” I say sharply to gain her attention. “Don’t shit on the freedom I’m giving you. ~ Erica Chilson,

137:I boarded the plane and kept writing, unable to stop. the ink flowing to the blank pages to the book were my lifeline. My IV, my only escape from collapsing. In that moment I understood something about my writer husband, that i had never understood before: i had a small glimpse on the act of writing something down as a direct, very viable escape from pain. I had no desire to publish this writing, I wasn´t thinking about an audience. I just needed to do it. Or else I´d weep and not being able to stop weeping. For the first time I experienced the physical truth of what was it like to dwell in the act of creation as an escape hatch from an unbearable reality. ~ Amanda Palmer,

138:Fields and more fields on either side of the road.From where they are it looks as if the whole world were green.But from higher up,from a hill-if there were a hill in this flat country-or from a pyramid(one of the many that two thousand years ago lined this route from Thebes to Memphis,from the Delta to the Cataract)or from an aeroplane today,you would be able to see how narrow the strip green was,how closely it clung to the winding river.The river like a lifeline thrown across the desert, the villages and the town hanging on to it, clustering together, glancing over their shoulders at the desert always behind them.Appeasing it,finally,by making it the dwelling of their head. ~ Ahdaf Soueif,

139:Miss Giles got up, walked to the window and opened it, so that the spring air flooded into the stuffy room. "Why didn't I do that before?" she wondered. "Because Mrs. Belling always keeps the window shut I forgot it could open. It's a lovely day."

She stood by the window, looking at the day with astonished recognition, as though she had not seen an English spring for twenty years. John thought that possibly she hadn't. Beauty awakened such intolerable longing that people often shut their eyes to it, unaware that the longing was the greatest treasure that they had, their very lifeline, uniting the country of their lost innocence with the heavenly country for which their sails were set. ~ Elizabeth Goudge,

140:the phantom of the man-who-would-understand,
the lost brother, the twin ---

for him did we leave our mothers,
deny our sisters, over and over?

did we invent him, conjure him
over the charring log,

nights, late, in the snowbound cabin
did we dream or scry his face

in the liquid embers,
the man-who-would-dare-to-know-us?

It was never the rapist:
it was the brother, lost,

the comrade/twin whose palm
would bear a lifeline like our own:

decisive, arrowy,
forked-lightning of insatiate desire

It was never the crude pestle, the blind
ramrod we were after:

merely a fellow-creature
with natural resources equal to our own. ~ Adrienne Rich,

141:All the whackjob psychologists out there will tell you that grief is a process. Some say it has five stages. Others say that grief should only last two years at the lost, otherwise it's "abnormal". Putting an expiration date of grief though is like putting out the flame on a burning candle. It might stop the candle from melting down and falling apart, but in the long run the candle goes solid, freezes in a catatonic state. Take away a person's grief and guaranteed they'll only be a frozen shell of a human being afterwards. Grief is only love, it's nothing to hide or send away with happy pills and mother's little helpers. Grief is a lifeline connecting two people who are in different realms together, and it's a sign of loyalty and hope. ~ Rebecca McNutt,

142:Any citizen following any faith has the fundamental right to live happily. No one has the right to endanger the unity of minds, because unity of minds is the lifeline of our country, and makes our country truly unique. After all what is justice, what is democracy? Every citizen in the country has a right to live with dignity; every citizen has a right to aspire for distinction. To access the large number of opportunities, through just and fair means, in order to attain that dignity and distinction is what democracy is all about. That is what our Constitution is all about. And that is what makes life wholesome and worth living in a true and vibrant democracy, the essence of which is tolerance for people’s belief systems and lifestyles. ~ A P J Abdul Kalam,

143:Dean coughed helpfully. Somewhere in the cough was the word “persuasion.” He was throwing Mo a lifeline.
Mo preferred to go down. “I haven’t actually read any Austen. I’m more into mysteries, crime fiction, courtroom stuff.” This was disappointing, but not damning. On the other hand it was a failing; on the other, manfully owned up to. If only Mo had stopped there.
“I don’t read much women’s stuff. I like a good plot,” he said.
Prudie finished her drink and set her glass down so hard you could hear it hit. “Austen can plot like a son of a bitch,” she said. “Bernadette, I believe you were telling us about your first husband.”
“I could start with my second. Or the one after that,” Bernadette offered. Down with plot! Down with Mo! ~ Karen Joy Fowler,

144:That was enough dialogue for a few pages - he had to get into some fast, red-hot action.

There weren't any more hitches now. The story flowed like a torrent. The margin bell chimed almost staccato, the roller turned with almost piston-like continuity, the pages sprang up almost like blobs of batter from a pancake skillet. The beer kept rising in the glass and, contradictorily, steadily falling lower. The cigarettes gave up their ghosts, long thin gray ghosts, in a good cause; the mortality rate was terrible.

His train of thought, the story's lifeline, beer-lubricated but no whit impeded, flashed and sputtered and coursed ahead like lightning in a topaz mist, and the loose fingers and hiccuping keys followed as fast as they could. ("The Penny-A-Worder") ~ Cornell Woolrich,

145:Before she could think better of it, she grabbed Darling’s arm as he went for Giran again. He turned around, his hand raised to strike her, too. Just as she thought he’d put her through the wall behind her, he caught himself. His breathing ragged, he stared at her and lowered his hand. The agony on his beautiful face hit her like a blow. He cupped her head in the palm of his hand, then gently pulled her into his arms. She hugged him close as his heart pounded fiercely against her breasts. He continued to cradle her head and hold on to her like she was his lifeline. Maris approached them slowly. “Are you better?” he whispered to Darling. His eyes started jerking. “No. I didn’t get a chance to kill the bastard.” He turned in Giran’s direction. “No one insults my lady. No one.” Nykyrian ~ Sherrilyn Kenyon,

146:Do you know anything about hearts, Jona? The Senta know hearts. Hearts are not one organ. Inside a mother's womb, two pulsing bags of blood seek their eternal mate."
Her hand reached out to his. She opened his palm, and traced a finger down his lifeline, then his loveline. She lifted it up to her own face. She placed it on her cheek.
"Lungs are fine apart," she said, "Hands do not need another but to clap. Brains gnarl like roots in the nothing of soul, and guts spin in knots around the nothing of hunger. But hearts are made by two complete parts merging together. Once the two pieces sense each other in the blood flow, they cross every bloody cliff inside of us. The arteries bind the halves close. The veins make love to each other in the life pulse that makes all life from love entwined. ~ J M McDermott,

147:The idea was women on boats. Lifeline Cruises pitched itself to women seeking adventure, whether a daylong adventure in the waters of the San Francisco Bay or a twelve-day adventure from San Francisco to Alaska and back. Passengers did not have to be survivors of breast cancer or domestic abuse, nor was any of the profit of Lifeline Cruises given to such causes, but the language of its radio ads, slippery and clear, managed to convey that this might be so. 'Empowerment' was one of the words. It's daylong cruise boat was named The Wild Lady, from a poem by Emily Dickinson that Lifeline Cruises had made up. Tote bags sold on board broadcast the words of the ad—

The wild lady may seem—
adrift to those who cannot dream—
but within her uncharted wand'ring eyes—
a heart beats healthy, strong and wise!

—and below this were the words 'Emily Dickinson. ~ Daniel Handler,

148:Lifeline
wedged in the top branches, rain still sighing
to earth as a dissolute sky dissolves,
a mozambican woman turns mother,
her water breaking loose to pool with the flood
licking the trunk below, a country-sized
puddle calls forth the child whose name, the mother
vowed, would not be drowned, no matter how
high she had to climb. my mother's water
washed her bare yellow bathroom tile many
years ago, a diluvial warning
of my struggle to arrive. we fought to
get me out, and have been tugging at each
other ever since, tethered by a cord
that simply thickens when it's cut. we
descended then, thirsting, churning, not into
the waters that hound the mozambican
mother, baying her and her baby in
the tree, but into that enduring ocean
in which—as mother, daughter, or both—a
woman's only choices are drink or swim.
~ Evie Shockley,

149:If you saw humanity as I can see it, Uncle Jem said, a whisper in his mind, a lifeline. There is very little brightness and warmth in the world for me. I am very distant from you all. There are only four points of warmth and brightness, in the whole world, that burn fiercely enough for me to feel something like the person I was. Your mother, your father, Lucie, and you. You love, and tremble, and burn. Do not let any of them tell you who you are. You are the flame that cannot be put out. You are the star that cannot be lost. You are who you have always been, and that is enough and more than enough. Anyone who looks at you and sees darkness is blind.

"Blinder than a Silent Brother?" James asked, and hiccupped.

There was a laugh in James’s mind. They would have to be even blinder than a Silent Brother, Uncle Jem agreed. Because I can see you, James. I will always look to you for light. ~ Cassandra Clare,

150:His eyes drifted shut. without opening them, he murmured, "I like the sound of your laugh. It's real and genuine. A lot of girls have this fake laugh. Not you."
"I like your laugh, too." I whispered, feeling pulled in, cozy in the cacoon of his bed.
"Yeah?"
I flattened my palm over his chest, enjoying the sensation of the firm flesh, even warm as it was. He sighed, like my cool hand offered him some relief.
"I laugh more since you came around," he said quietly, his lips barely forming the words.
He did? I frowned. He must not have laughed at all before, then, because I didn't think he was particularly jovial.
I held him through the night. And he held me back, tucking my head beneath his chin. His arms surrounded me and kept me close to his overly warm body. Almost like I was some kind of lifeline. I felt the moment his fever broke around one in the morning. I finally relaxed and fell asleep. ~ Sophie Jordan,

151:But the real reasons why scientists promote accommodationism are more self-serving. To a large extent, American scientists depend for their support on the American public, which is largely religious, and on the U.S. Congress, which is equally religious. (It’s a given that it’s nearly impossible for an open atheist to be elected to Congress, and at election time candidates vie with one another to parade their religious belief.) Most researchers are supported by federal grants from agencies like the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health, whose budgets are set annually by Congress. To a working scientist, such grants are a lifeline, for research is expensive, and if you don’t do it you could lose tenure, promotions, or raises. Any claim that science is somehow in conflict with religion might lead to cuts in the science budget, or so scientists believe, thus endangering their professional welfare. ~ Jerry A Coyne,

152:The cord, a familiar voice said. Remember your lifeline, dummy!
Suddenly there was a tug in my lower back. The current pulled at me, but it wasn't carrying me away anymore. I imagined the string in my back keeping me tied to the shore.
"Hold on, Seaweed Brain." It was Annabeth's voice, much clearer now. "You're not getting away from me that easily."
The cord strengthened.
I could see Annabeth now- standing barefoot above me on the canoe lake pier. I'd fallen out of my canoe. That was it. She was reaching out her hand to haul me up, and she was trying not to laugh. She wore her orange camp T-shirt and jeans. Her hair was tucked up in her Yankees cap, which was strange because that should have made her invisible.
"You are such an idiot sometimes." She smiled. "Come on. Take my hand."
Memories came flooding back to me- sharper and more colorful. I stopped dissolving. My name was Percy Jackson. I reached up and took Annabeth's hand. ~ Rick Riordan,

153:How’s work?’ Martin asked. Behrouz was now a correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, which these days seemed to mean as much video journalism as prose.
‘Not bad.’ Behrouz smiled slightly. ‘Business people might be the last paying market left for real news. If they’re convinced that they’re getting fearlessly objective information, they’ll keep shelling out for it – while everyone else gives up caring and buries their head inside their favourite consensual reality.’
Martin laughed softly, self-conscious but grateful for a few words of real conversation, a lifeline out of the pit. ‘You’re not a fan of News Five Point Oh, then?’
‘Don’t get me started. HigherTribe is worse, but they’re all pathological. What isn’t filtered and spun is just invented out of whole cloth.’
‘Yeah.’ The replacement of journalism by rumour aggregators and group-think salons was a serious matter, but Martin’s enthusiasm for talking shop was already beginning to falter. ~ Greg Egan,

154:Germany’s gamble of early 1917 was to declare unlimited submarine warfare, making fair game almost any vessel headed for Allied ports—including those from a neutral country. Cutting off the Atlantic supply lines so crucial to the British and French war effort, the Germans hoped, would force the Allies to sue for peace. The danger of unlimited submarine warfare, of course, was that it was certain to sink American ships and kill American sailors, therefore sooner or later drawing the United States, the world’s largest economy, into the war. As reckless as this might seem, the German high command calculated that, even if the United States declared war, severing the Atlantic lifeline would strangle Britain and France into surrender in less than six months, long before a substantial number of American troops could be trained and sent to Europe. Despite its size the United States had a standing army that ranked only seventeenth in the world. In any case, how would American soldiers cross the ocean? German naval commanders were confident that U.S. troopships and merchant vessels alike would fall victim to U-boats, because Allied technology for locating submarines underwater was still so primitive as to be almost useless. ~ Adam Hochschild,

155:Winter turns my mind to journeys those taken and those never done. Especially to a fantasy one I have always wanted to make: along the Grand Trunk Road from Calcutta to Peshawar. For the Road is a river. It may not be as sacred as the Ganga, which it greets at Kanpur and Varanasi, but it is just as permanent. It’s a river of life, an unending stream of humanity going places, intent on arriving and getting there most of the time. A long day’s journey into night that’s how I would describe the saga of the truck driver, that knight errant, or rather errant knight, of India’s Via Appia. Undervalued, underpaid and often disparaged, he drives all day and sometimes all night, carrying the country’s goods and produce for hundreds of miles, across state borders, through lawless tracts, at all seasons and in all weathers. We blame him for hogging the middle of the road, but he is usually overloaded and if he veers too much to the left or right he is quite likely to topple over, burying himself and crew under bricks or gas cylinders, sugarcane or TV sets. More than the railwayman, the truck driver is modern India’s lifeline, and yet his life is held cheap. He drinks, he swears, occasionally he picks up HIV, and frequently he is killed or badly injured. And we hate him for hogging the road. But we cannot do without him. ~ Ruskin Bond,

156:You know when I first met you, you scared the shit out of me.” She pulls a “whoops” face and glances at the minister, who sighs because he knows us well enough to know this is just how we talk. Then she returns her focus to me and clears her throat. “You were so intense and determined to get to know me and I couldn’t understand why you would want to, for a lot of reasons, reasons that you know about because you know me better than anyone.” Her voice wobbles a little and she lets go of the paper and wipes her sweaty palm on her jacket. “But eventually you sort of wore on me.” Her lips quirk and it makes me grin. “You became my light in my dark life and you made me feel so loved that I’d forget how to breathe. You were the only one who could make me laugh, smile, have fun, not give up. You were always there for me and somehow, through the crazy, intense years, you fought your way into my soul and ended up becoming my everything. You became my lifeline, the one person I could rely on no matter what, whether I was upset or pushing you away—you were always there for me. And I love you for it and for the amazing person that you are, for writing me songs and tattooing them on your skin, for wearing a ridiculous O ring on your finger,” she says, trying to smile but I can tell she’s getting overwhelmed by her emotions. “And for loving me enough not to let me give up, not matter how hard I fought. ~ Jessica Sorensen,

157:Getting There
You take a final step and, look, suddenly
You're there. You've arrived
At the one place all your drudgery was aimed for:
This common ground
Where you stretch out, pressing your cheek to sandstone.
What did you want
To be? You'll remember soon. You feel like tinder
Under a burning glass,
A luminous point of change. The sky is pulsing
Against the cracked horizon,
Holding it firm till the arrival of stars
In time with your heartbeats.
Like wind etching rock, you've made a lasting impression
On the self you were
By having come all this way through all this welter
Under your own power
Though your traces on a map would make an unpromising
Meandering lifeline.
What have you learned so far? You'll find out later,
Telling it haltingly
Like a dream, that lost traveller's dream
Under the last bill
Where through the night you'll take your time out of mind
To unburden yourself
Of elements along elementary paths
By the break of morning.
You've earned this worn-down, hard, incredible sight
Called Here and Now.
Now, what you make of it means everything,
Means starting over:
The life in your hands is neither here nor there
But getting there,
So you're standing again and breathing, beginning another journey without
regret
Forever, being your own unpeaceable kingdom,
The end of endings. ~ David Wagoner

from In Broken Country
~ David Wagoner,

158:The door suddenly jerks open. A wide-eyed teenager bursts out. She stares at me in dazed horror. In a strange way, I both know and don’t know what has just happened. As the fragments begin to converge, they convey a horrible reality: I must have been hit by this car as I entered the crosswalk. In confused disbelief, I sink back into a hazy twilight. I find that I am unable to think clearly or to will myself awake from this nightmare.

A man rushes to my side and drops to his knees. He announces himself as an off-duty paramedic. When I try to see where the voice is coming from, he sternly orders, “Don’t move your head.” The contradiction between his sharp command and what my body naturally wants—to turn toward his voice—frightens and stuns me into a sort of paralysis. My awareness strangely splits, and I experience an uncanny “dislocation.” It’s as if I’m floating above my body, looking down on the unfolding scene.

I am snapped back when he roughly grabs my wrist and takes my pulse. He then shifts his position, directly above me. Awkwardly, he grasps my head with both of his hands, trapping it and keeping it from moving. His abrupt actions and the stinging ring of his command panic me; they immobilize me further. Dread seeps into my dazed, foggy consciousness: Maybe I have a broken neck, I think. I have a compelling impulse to find someone else to focus on. Simply, I need to have someone’s comforting gaze, a lifeline to hold onto. But I’m too terrified to move and feel helplessly frozen. ~ Peter A Levine,

159:Saving Lives and Protecting Rights in Translation It is said that life and death are under the power of language. —Hélène Cixous, French author and philosopher Lifeline The phone rings, jolting me to attention. It’s almost midnight on a Friday night. I didn’t want to work the late shift, but the need for my work never sleeps. Most of the calls I get at this late hour are from emergency dispatchers for police, fire, and ambulance. They often consist of misdials, hang-ups, and other nonemergencies. I’ve been working since early this morning, and I’m just not in the mood tonight to hear someone complain about a neighbor’s television being turned up too loud. But someone has got to take the call. I pick up before it rings a second time. “Interpreter three nine four zero speaking, how may I help you?” The dispatcher wastes no time with pleasantries. “Find out what’s wrong,” he barks in English. He didn’t ask me to confirm the address, so I assume he must already have police officers headed to the scene. I ask the Spanish speaker how we can help. I wait for a response. Silence. I ask the question again. No answer, but I can hear that there’s someone on the line. We wait, but we don’t hear any response. It’s probably just another child playing with the phone, accidentally dialing 911. I imagine the little guy looking curiously at the phone and pressing the buttons, then staring at it as a voice comes out of the other end. This happens all the time. I turn up the volume on my headset, just in case it might help me pick up the scolding words of a parent in the background. Then suddenly, I hear a timid female voice speaking so quietly that I can barely make out the words. “Me va a matar,” she whispers. ~ Nataly Kelly,

160:The essence of the suicides consisted not of sadness or mystery but simple selfishness. The girls took into their own hands decisions better left to God. They became too powerful to live among us, too self-concerned, too visionary, too blind. What lingered after them was not life, which always overcomes natural death, but the most trivial list of mundane facts: a clock ticking on a wall, a room dim at noon, and the outrageousness of a human being thinking only of herself. Her brain going dim to all else, but flaming up in precise points of pain, personal injury, lost dreams. Every other loved one receding as though across a vast ice floe, shrinking to black dots waving tiny arms, out ofhearing. Then the rope thrown over the beam, the sleeping pill dropped in the palm with the long, lying lifeline, the window thrown open, the oven turned on, whatever. They made us participate in their own madness, because we couldn't help but retrace their steps, rethink their thoughts, and see that none of them led to us. We couldn't imagine the emptiness of a creature who put a razor to her wrists and opened her veins, the emptiness and the calm. And we had to smear our muzzles in their last traces, of mud marks on the floor, trunks kicked out from under them, we had to breathe forever the air of the rooms in which they killed themselves. It didn't matter in the end how old they had been, or that they were girls, but only that we had loved them, and that they hadn't heard us calling, still do not hear us, up here in the tree house, with our thinning hair and soft bellies, calling them out ofthose rooms where they went to be alone for all time, alone in suicide, which is deeper than death, and where we will. ~ Jeffrey Eugenides,

161:She shrieked his name, threw her arms around his neck and hugged him so fiercely he took a step back and started to laugh. He put his arms around her and held her off the floor in her excitement. She kissed him on both cheeks, several times, making loud smacking noises. He laughed at her, hanging on, hating the thought of letting her go. He had to put her down too soon. Large, liquid green eyes stared up at him, overcome, and on her lips a phenomenal smile. “How did you do this?” she asked in a breath. “It was easy,” he said. “I need to show you how to work that computer. I can’t believe you didn’t use a computer before.” She just shook her head and stared at the paper. Wes wouldn’t allow her use of his computer; it would have put her in touch with the outside world too much. “Go on,” he said. “Call ’em. Use the phone in my place instead of in here. Have a little time alone with the girlfriends.” She got up on her toes and kissed his cheek again, laying her small hand against the other cheek. She looked at him with such gratitude, it melted his heart. Then she whirled and ran to his apartment, gripping that paper like a lifeline. “Yeah,” he said to himself, under his breath, nodding. “Bet there’s lots of little things I can look up for her. Yeah.” And he went back to chopping. Jack came into the kitchen, looked at Preacher and frowned. “What are you grinning about?” he asked. “I’m not grinning,” Preacher said. “Preacher, I didn’t know you had that many teeth.” “Aw, Paige. I looked up something for her, got her all excited. That’s all.” “Kind of looks like it got you a little excited, too. I think you’re flushed. And Jesus, you sure have a mouthful. You never showed me a grin like that.” Yeah, he thought—big mystery. You put your arms around me and kiss all over me like that, I’ll show you a mouthful—of fist. But he couldn’t stop grinning. He could feel it and couldn’t stop it. Jack just shook his head and left the kitchen. There ~ Robyn Carr,

162:Wordlessly, he took a long step closer. She drew in a sharp breath of anticipation. It was so hard to resist him when he looked at her that way. Those bright eyes and half-grin melted her insides. She found herself actually swaying.
"Y-you must be tired," she stammered, as she gripped the curtain even tighter. The brocade dug its pattern into her palm, but she worried it was the only thing keeping her upright at the moment. The only thing grounding her.
"I'm hungry," he whispered in that gravelly voice that touched her very core.
She grasped at the lifeline his words offered. "Yes, well I could ring and see where the food is. Or we could go down and explore our new dining room." She flinched at the desperation in her voice.
He cut her off with a wicked grin. "I wasn't talking about food. I'm hungry for you."
Her knees buckled, but she managed to stay upright with a stunning show of self-control. A voice in her head screamed at her to resist, but her body didn't seem capable of listening. Everything tingled like he had already touched her, and her lips throbbed for his kiss.
"I- I will perform my 'wifely duty' if I must," she said shakily, hoping her use of the term would put him off.
His eyes lit up, but he chuckled rather than turn away. She cursed herself. Obviously he could see how much she wanted him, despite her protestations. She turned to face the window so he could no longer read the need in her eyes.
"Was last night so terrible, then?" he asked.
Suddenly, he was at her back, his breath caressing her neck before his lips descended to claim the skin left uncovered by her gown. She stiffened as hot sensation rushed through her, enveloping her in a web of desire.
"I-it was fine." She fought to breathe as he unfastened one button at the back of her gown and flicked his tongue across the flesh he revealed. "If you like that sort of thing."
He responded with a low laugh that reverberated across her skin. Her eyes fluttered shut as she barely held back her answering moan. ~ Jenna Petersen,

163:When you’re in the middle and stuck, you need to know when to back out and call for help. If that person is someone you live with, set up your signals as Molly and her husband did. Use expressions or words that clearly signify “I need your help now!” It is imperative that parents of spirited children work together. It is not a sign of failure to let others assist you. It is a recognition and acceptance of your own intensity and limits. Blaming or ridiculing only fuels the intensity levels. Teamwork is essential. You have to talk about how you react when your child is upset. You have to decide how you can help and support each other. By working together, you take the sting out of your child’s strong responses. You create a lifeline that keeps you from falling into the abyss of the red zone. If it seems impossible for you and your partner to work together, seek counseling, and make weekly dates a priority so that you can work together. Researchers at the Gottman Institute have found that children of unhappily married parents are chronically aroused physiologically and it takes them much longer to recover from emotional arousal. Your children need you to work together so that they can stay in the green zone, where they are calm and open to your guidance. If you are a single parent, you might think that you can’t ask someone else for help. Single parents often say, “What if I call and interrupt their meal or family time?” Or, “I don’t want to bother anyone.” But good friends don’t mind being bothered. They appreciate the opportunity to help and the joy of giving. Look for someone you know who likes your child and won’t be critical of him or you. You have to be able to trust that they’ll support you, and then feel free to call. As the parent of a spirited child, you have to know and use your resources well. Step Away from It Of course there are times when your kids are plummeting into the red zone and you are all alone, with no one to help. If you realize you’re going over the edge with them, give yourself permission to step out of the fire. It’s much better to take a breather than to have two bulls charging head to head into each other. ~ Mary Sheedy Kurcinka,

164:Do you remember that I said I have something to show you?"
Back when they were entering the house. Before she'd seen Hugh. Before their argument. "Yes?"
He pushed open the door to her bedroom. "Look."
She went inside and saw Valente sitting on the floor in front of her fireplace with a basket. He had a silly grin on his face.
She glanced over her shoulder to Raphael. "What-?"
Her husband tilted his chin toward Valente and the basket. "Go and see."
At the same time she heard an animal whimper.
Her lips parted and she picked up her skirts to hurry to the basket. It was lined with a soft blanket and inside was the sweetest little blond puppy, looking very sorry for itself.
Iris stared, torn. Did Raphael think a 'puppy' would be an adequate substitution for him?
The moment the puppy saw her it began whimpering and yipping, trying to climb from its wicker prison, but its legs were too short to make the attempt and it ended by falling backward, revealing that it was female.
It was hardly the puppy's fault that she was angry with Raphael.
"Oh," Iris breathed, sinking to her knees on the carpet opposite Valente. "She's perfect."
Somehow the words made tears start in her eyes again.
She picked up the puppy, which wriggled in Iris's hands until she held the small animal against her chest. The puppy promptly began licking Iris's chin with a tiny pink tongue.
Iris looked up at Raphael through her tears. "What is her name?"
He shook his head. "She has none that I know of. You must give her one."
Iris stood, cradling the still-squirming puppy carefully, and went to her husband. "Thank you."
She stood on tiptoe and kissed him on the lips, trying to convey all she'd said before. All he'd pushed aside.
'Stay. Stay. Stay.'
Raphael took her arms gently and kissed her, angling his face over hers. He embraced her as if she were a lifeline.
As if he wished to remain with her forever.
The puppy yelped and he took a step back, breaking the kiss.
Drawing away from her without effort.
He walked out of the bedroom.
Iris closed her eyes to keep her sorrow and tears in. She kissed the top of the puppy's silky head and whispered in her ear, "Tansy. ~ Elizabeth Hoyt,

165:Paint in several colors was squeezed out of tubes and mixed and applied to woven fabric stretched on a wooden frame so artfully we say we see a woman hanging out a sheet rather than oil on canvas. Ana Teresa Fernandez’s image on that canvas is six feet tall, five feet wide, the figure almost life-size. Though it is untitled, the series it’s in has a title: Telaraña. Spiderweb. The spiderweb of gender and history in which the painted woman is caught; the spiderweb of her own power that she is weaving in this painting dominated by a sheet that was woven. Woven now by a machine, but before the industrial revolution by women whose spinning and weaving linked them to spiders and made spiders feminine in the old stories. In this part of the world, in the creation stories of the Hopi, Pueblo, Navajo, Choctaw, and Cherokee peoples, Spider Grandmother is the principal creator of the universe. Ancient Greek stories included an unfortunate spinning woman who was famously turned into a spider as well as the more powerful Greek fates, who spun, wove, and cut each person’s lifeline, who ensured that those lives would be linear narratives that end. Spiderwebs are images of the nonlinear, of the many directions in which something might go, the many sources for it; of the grandmothers as well as the strings of begats. There’s a German painting from the nineteenth century of women processing the flax from which linen is made. They wear wooden shoes, dark dresses, demure white caps, and stand at various distances from a wall, where the hanks of raw material are being wound up as thread. From each of them, a single thread extends across the room, as though they were spiders, as though it came right out of their bellies. Or as though they were tethered to the wall by the fine, slim threads that are invisible in other kinds of light. They are spinning, they are caught in the web. To spin the web and not be caught in it, to create the world, to create your own life, to rule your fate, to name the grandmothers as well as the fathers, to draw nets and not just straight lines, to be a maker as well as a cleaner, to be able to sing and not be silenced, to take down the veil and appear: all these are the banners on the laundry line I hang out. ~ Rebecca Solnit,

166:Saving Lives and Protecting Rights in Translation It is said that life and death are under the power of language. —Hélène Cixous, French author and philosopher Lifeline The phone rings, jolting me to attention. It’s almost midnight on a Friday night. I didn’t want to work the late shift, but the need for my work never sleeps. Most of the calls I get at this late hour are from emergency dispatchers for police, fire, and ambulance. They often consist of misdials, hang-ups, and other nonemergencies. I’ve been working since early this morning, and I’m just not in the mood tonight to hear someone complain about a neighbor’s television being turned up too loud. But someone has got to take the call. I pick up before it rings a second time. “Interpreter three nine four zero speaking, how may I help you?” The dispatcher wastes no time with pleasantries. “Find out what’s wrong,” he barks in English. He didn’t ask me to confirm the address, so I assume he must already have police officers headed to the scene. I ask the Spanish speaker how we can help. I wait for a response. Silence. I ask the question again. No answer, but I can hear that there’s someone on the line. We wait, but we don’t hear any response. It’s probably just another child playing with the phone, accidentally dialing 911. I imagine the little guy looking curiously at the phone and pressing the buttons, then staring at it as a voice comes out of the other end. This happens all the time. I turn up the volume on my headset, just in case it might help me pick up the scolding words of a parent in the background. Then suddenly, I hear a timid female voice speaking so quietly that I can barely make out the words. “Me va a matar,” she whispers. The tiny hairs on my arm stand up on end. I swiftly render her words into English: “He’s going to kill me.” Not missing a beat, the dispatcher asks, “Where is he now?” “Outside. I saw him through the window,” I state, after listening to the Spanish version. I’m trying to stay calm and focused, but the fear in the caller’s voice is not only contagious, but essential to the meaning I have to convey. For what seems like an eternity (but is probably just a few seconds), I hear only the beeps of the recorded line and the dispatcher clicking away at his keyboard. I feel impatient. He’s most likely looking to see how far the nearest police officer is from the scene. “Interpreter, find out where she is. ~ Nataly Kelly,

167:Closing her eyes, she fit the violin under her chin, and set the bow to the strings. Faith had never been as blind as this.
The first thing that came to mind was the sound of her fingers breaking. Her life, as she knew it, dying. The shock and the pain of it, and the utter devastation.
They’ve killed me, she thought.
So she played it.
Next came the memory of warm, strong hands reaching for hers in the darkness. The unknown clasping her fingers, healing her, lending her strength and reassurance. It was the only thing in the world when she had nothing. It had been her lifeline.
And she played it.
Then came trust, the tentative unfurling, when she believed against all evidence that the person who came to her in the darkness would help her in any way he could. The impossibly intense adventure of his arm, sliding around her shoulders. The miracle of warmth when she had known nothing but coldness.
That first kiss, oh, the surprise of it! The agonizing uncertainty… was it all right to allow this? How could it feel so incredibly good?
Could she possibly kiss him again?
Oh, when could she kiss him again?
The burning that took hold, the incandescent light that shone despite all the shadows stacked around them. The unbearable, delicious hunger that was the sweetest pain… that she would give anything, anything, if only she could feel it again…
Always before, when she had played, she’d had the awareness of the violin and the bow as instruments in her craft. Her music had been self-conscious, aware.
Now, as she played, she went somewhere she had never gone before. She lost awareness of the violin altogether.
She became the music.
She was the story, the vibration.
She became the story of love, the notes written in kisses and caresses on her skin. She felt the symphony, the swelling highs in the lifts, and the terrible lows in the falls, and hope was the cruelest note of all, the devastation that came afterward, utterly intolerable.
She poured it all out, all the emotion, the experience, the exquisite delight along with the terror. There was no hiding any of it from a god anyway. The only other being she had been so naked with was Morgan, and he was gone.
Gone, while the love she felt for him had become the very breath of life to her.
Give him back to me, she begged with her music.
Give him back.
When the last note speared through the air, she had nothing left to give. ~ Thea Harrison,

168:I was autographing books at one of those little rattan tables in the bookstore when I found myself looking into the saddest eyes I had ever seen. “The doctor wanted me to buy something that would make me laugh,” she said. I hesitated about signing the book. It would have taken corrective surgery to make that woman laugh. “Is it a big problem?” I asked. The whole line of people was eavesdropping. “Yes. My daughter is getting married.” The line cheered. “Is she twelve or something?” “She’s twenty-four,” said the woman, biting her lip. “And he’s a wonderful man. It’s just that she could have stayed home a few more years.” The woman behind her looked wistful. “We’ve moved three times, and our son keeps finding us. Some women have all the luck.” Isn’t it curious how some mothers don’t know when they’ve done a good job or when it’s basically finished? They figure the longer the kids hang around, the better parents they are. I guess it all depends on how you regard children in the first place. How do you regard yours? Are they like an appliance? The more you have, the more status you command? They’re under warranty to perform at your whim for the first 18 years; then, when they start costing money, you get rid of them? Are they like a used car? You maintain it for years, and when you’re ready to sell it to someone else, you feel a great responsibility to keep it running or it reflects on you? (That’s why some parents never let their children marry good friends.) Are they like an endowment policy? You invest in them for 18 or 20 years, and then for the next 20 years they return dividends that support you in your declining years or they suffer from terminal guilt? Are they like a finely gilded mirror that reflects the image of its owner in every way? On the day the owner looks in and sees a flaw, a crack, a distortion, one tiny idea or attitude that is different from his own, he casts it aside and declares himself a failure? I see children as kites. You spend a lifetime trying to get them off the ground. You run with them until you’re both breathless...they crash...you add a longer tail...they hit the rooftop...you pluck them out of the spout. You patch and comfort, adjust and teach. You watch them lifted by the wind and assure them that someday they’ll fly. Finally they are airborne, but they need more string so you keep letting it out. With each twist of the ball of twine there is a sadness that goes with the joy, because the kite becomes more distant, and somehow you know it won’t be long before that beautiful creature will snap the lifeline that bound you together and soar as it was meant to soar—free and alone. Only then do you know that you did your job. ~ Erma Bombeck,

169:It kind of freaked me out. Because I don’t know if I’m ready for that kind of thing yet.” Or maybe the problem was that I wasn’t prepared for how ready I was…
“Ready for-?” He broke off, and then frowned as if it had all become clear. “Wait.” He dropped his arms from around my waist and took a step away from me. “You think I spent the night wit you?”
“Didn’t you?” I blinked back at him. “There’s only the one bed. And…well, you were in it when I woke up.”
Thunder boomed overhead. It wasn’t as loud as the violent cracks that had occurred in my dream. Although the rumbles were long enough-and intense enough-that the silverware on the table began to make an eerie tinkling sound.
And my bird, who’d been calmly cleaning herself on the back of my chair, suddenly took off, seeing shelter on the highest bookshelf against the far wall.
I realized I’d just insulted my host, and no joke was going to get me out of it this time.
“For your information, Pierce,” John said, his tone almost disturbingly calm-but his eyes flashed the same shade as the stone around my neck, which had gone the color of the metal studs at his wrists-“I spent most of last night on the couch. Until one point early this morning, when I heard you call my name. You were crying in your sleep.”
The salt water I’d tasted on my lips. Not due to rain from a violent hurricane, but from the tears I’d shed, watching him die in front of me.
“Oh,” I said uncomfortably. “John, I’m so-“
It turned out he wasn’t finished.
“I put my arms around you to try to comfort you, because I know what this place can be like, at least at first. It’s not exactly hell, but it’s the next closest place to it. You wouldn’t let go of me. You held on to me like you were drowning, and I was your only lifeline.”
I swallowed, astonished at how close he’d come to describing my dream…except it had been the other way around. I’d been his lifeline; only he’d let go of me, sacrificing himself so that I could live.
“Right,” I said. “Of course. I’m sorry.” I couldn’t believe how stupid I’d been, especially since my mother had always worried so much about my talking in my sleep. On the other hand, I had been upfront with him about my lack of experience when it came to men. “But this is good, see?” I reached out to take his hand. “I told you I could never hate you-“
He pulled his hand away, exactly like in my dream. Well, not exactly, because he wasn’t being sucked from my grasp by a giant ocean swell. Instead, he’d dropped my fingers because he was leaving to go sort the souls of the dead.
“You will,” he assured me, bitterly. “You’re already regretting your decision to-what was it you called it? Oh, right-cohabitate with me.”
“No,” I insisted. “I’m not. All I said was that I want to take things more slowly-“
That had nothing to do with him-it had to do with me and my fear of not being able to control myself when he was kissing me. It was too humiliating to admit that out loud, however. ~ Meg Cabot,

170:Well, what happened to your scruples in the woodcutter’s cottage? You knew I thought you’d already left when I went inside.”
“Why did you stay,” he countered smoothly, “when you realized I was still there?”
In confused distress Elizabeth raked her hair off her forehead. “I knew I shouldn’t do it,” she admitted. “I don’t know why I remained.”
“You stayed for the same reason I did,” he informed her bluntly. “We wanted each other.”
“I was wrong,” she protested a little wildly. “Dangerous and-foolish!”
“Foolish or not,” he said grimly, “I wanted you. I want you now.” Elizabeth made the mistake of looking at him, and his amber eyes captured hers against her will, holding them imprisoned. The shawl she’d been clutching as if it was a lifeline to safety slid from her nerveless hand and dangled at her side, but Elizabeth didn’t notice.
“Neither of us has anything to gain by continuing this pretense that the weekend in England is over and forgotten,” he said bluntly. “Yesterday proved that it wasn’t over, if it proved nothing else, and it’s never been forgotten-I’ve remembered you all this time, and I know damn well you’ve remembered me.”
Elizabeth wanted to deny it; she sensed that if she did, he’d be so disgusted with her deceit that he’d turn on his heel and leave her. She lifted her chin, unable to tear her gaze from his, but she was too affected by the things he’d just admitted to her to lie to him. “All right,” she said shakily, “you win. I’ve never forgotten you or that weekend. How could I?” she added defensively.
He smiled at her angry retort, and his voice gentled to the timbre of rough velvet. “Come here, Elizabeth.”
“Why?” she whispered shakily.
“So that we can finish what we began that weekend.”
Elizabeth stared at him in paralyzed terror mixed with violet excitement and shook her head in a jerky refusal.
“I’ll not force you,” he said quietly, “nor will I force you to do anything you don’t want to do once you’re in my arms. Think carefully about that,” he warned, “because if you come to me now, you won’t be able to tell yourself in the morning that I made you do this against your will-or that you didn’t know what was going to happen. Yesterday neither of us knew what was going to happen. Now we do.”
Some small, insidious voice in her mind urged her to obey, reminded her that after the public punishment she’d taken for the last time they were together she was entitled to some stolen passionate kisses, if she wanted them. Another voice warned her not to break the rules again. “I-I can’t,” she said in a soft cry.
“There are four steps separating us and a year and a half of wanting drawing us together,” he said.
Elizabeth swallowed. “Couldn’t you meet me halfway?”
The sweetness of the question was almost Ian’s undoing, but he managed to shake his head. “Not this time. I want you, but I’ll not have you looking at me like a monster in the morning. If you want me, all you have to do is walk into my arms.”
“I don’t know what I want,” Elizabeth cried, looking a little wildly at the valley below, as if she were thinking of leaping off the path.
“Come here,” he invited huskily, “and I’ll show you.”
It was his tone, not his words, that conquered her. As if drawn by a will stronger than her own, Elizabeth walked forward and straight into his arms that closed around her with stunning force. “I didn’t think you were going to do it,” he whispered gruffly against her hair. ~ Judith McNaught,

171:They won’t do it, Ian,” Jordan Townsende said the night after Ian was released on his own recognizance. Pacing back and forth across Ian’s drawing room, he said again, “They will not do it.”
“They’ll do it,” Ian said dispassionately. The words were devoid of concern; not even his eyes showed interest. Days ago Ian had passed the point of caring about the investigation. Elizabeth was gone; there had been no ransom note, nothing whatever-no reason in the world to continue believing that she’d been taken against her will. Since Ian knew damned well he hadn’t killed her or had her abducted, the only remaining conclusion was that Elizabeth had left him for someone else.
The authorities were still vacillating about the other man she’d allegedly met in the arbor because the gardener’s eyesight had been proven to be extremely poor, and even he admitted that it “might have been tree limbs moving around her in the dim light, instead of a man’s arms.” Ian, however, did not doubt it. The existence of a lover was the only thing that made sense; he had even suspected it the night before she disappeared. She hadn’t wanted him in her bed; if anything but a lover had been worrying her that night, she’d have sought the protection of his arms, even if she didn’t confide in him. But he had been the last thing she’d wanted.
No, he hadn’t actually suspected it-that would have been more pain than he could have endured then. Now, however, he not only suspected it, he knew it, and the pain was beyond anything he’d ever imagined existed.
“I tell you they won’t bring you to trial,” Jordan repeated. “Do you honestly think they will?” he demanded, looking first to Duncan and then to the Duke of Stanhope, who were seated in the drawing room. In answer, both men raised dazed, pain-filled eyes to Jordan’s, shook their heads in an effort to seem decisive, then looked back down at their hands.
Under English law Ian was entitled to a trial before his peers; since he was a British lord, that meant he could only be tried in the House of Lords, and Jordan was clinging to that as if it were Ian’s lifeline.
“You aren’t the first man among us to have a spoiled wife turn missish on him and vanish for a while in hopes of bringing him to heel,” Jordan continued, desperately trying to make it seem as if Elizabeth were merely sulking somewhere-no doubt unaware that her husband’s reputation had been demolished and that his very life was going to be in jeopardy. “They aren’t going to convene the whole damn House of Lords just to try a beleaguered husband whose wife has taken a start,” he continued fiercely. “Hell, half the lords in the House can’t control their wives. Why should you be any different?”
Alexandra looked up at him, her eyes filled with misery and disbelief. Like Ian, she knew Elizabeth wasn’t indulging in a fit of the sullens. Unlike Ian, however, she could not and would not believe her friend had taken a lover and run away.
Ian’s butler appeared in the doorway, a sealed message in his hand, which he handed to Jordan. “Who knows?” Jordan tried to joke as he opened it. “Maybe this is from Elizabeth-a note asking me to intercede with you before she dares present herself to you.”
His smile faded abruptly.
“What is it?” Alex cried, seeing his haggard expression.
Jordan crumpled the summons in his hand and turned to Ian with angry regret. “They’re convening the House of Lords.”
“It’s good to know,” Ian said with cold indifference as he pushed out of his chair and started for his study, “that I’ll have one friend and one relative there. ~ Judith McNaught,

172:My interest in comics was scribbled over with a revived, energized passion for clothes, records, and music. I'd wandered in late to the punk party in 1978, when it was already over and the Sex Pistols were history.

I'd kept my distance during the first flush of the new paradigm, when the walls of the sixth-form common room shed their suburban-surreal Roger Dean Yes album covers and grew a fresh new skin of Sex Pistols pictures, Blondie pinups, Buzzcocks collages, Clash radical chic. As a committed outsider, I refused to jump on the bandwagon of this new musical fad,
which I'd written off as some kind of Nazi thing after seeing a photograph of Sid Vicious sporting a swastika armband. I hated the boys who'd cut their long hair and binned their crappy prog albums in an attempt to join in. I hated pretty much everybody without discrimination, in one way or another, and punk rockers were just something else to add to the shit list.

But as we all know, it's zealots who make the best converts. One Thursday night, I was sprawled on the settee with Top of the Pops on the telly when Poly Styrene and her band X-Ray Spex turned up to play their latest single: an exhilarating sherbet storm of raw punk psychedelia entitled "The Day the World Turned Day-Glo" By the time the last incandescent chorus played out, I was a punk. I had always been a punk. I would always be a punk. Punk brought it all together in one place for me: Michael Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius novels were punk. Peter Barnes's The Ruling Class, Dennis Potter, and The Prisoner were punk too. A Clockwork Orange was punk. Lindsay Anderson's If ... was punk. Monty Python was punk. Photographer Bob Carlos Clarke's fetish girls were punk. Comics were punk. Even Richmal Crompton's William books were punk. In fact, as it turned out, pretty much everything I liked was punk.

The world started to make sense for the first time since Mosspark Primary. New and glorious constellations aligned in my inner firmament. I felt born again. The do-your-own-thing ethos had returned with a spit and a sneer in all those amateurish records I bought and treasured-even
though I had no record player. Singles by bands who could often barely play or sing but still wrote beautiful, furious songs and poured all their young hearts, experiences, and inspirations onto records they paid for with their dole money. If these glorious fuckups could do it, so could a fuckup like me. When Jilted John, the alter ego of actor and comedian Graham Fellows, made an appearance on Top of the Pops singing about bus stops, failed romance, and sexual identity crisis, I was enthralled by his shameless amateurism, his reduction of pop music's great themes to playground name calling, his deconstruction of the macho rock voice into the effeminate whimper of a softie from Sheffield.

This music reflected my experience of teenage life as a series of brutal setbacks and disappointments that could in the end be redeemed into art and music with humor, intelligence, and a modicum of talent. This, for me, was the real punk, the genuine anticool, and I felt empowered. The losers, the rejected, and the formerly voiceless were being offered an opportunity to show what they could do to enliven a stagnant culture. History was on our side, and I had nothing to lose. I was eighteen and still hadn't kissed a girl, but perhaps I had potential. I knew I had a lot to say, and punk threw me the lifeline of a creed and a vocabulary-a soundtrack to my mission as a comic artist, a rough validation. Ugly kids, shy kids, weird kids: It was okay to be different. In fact, it was mandatory. ~ Grant Morrison,

173:Passage To America
I.
On the day of the feast
death had its celebration
the teevees and the movies
told us the same story
death in the morning death in the evening
death in the cellar death in the alley
death on the highway the boy returning from the rally
death in the cornfield the girl going to the grocer's
death in the valley and high on the mountain
death from pollution and great disillusion
death in the mind in the womb in the cradle
death from belief and its comic relief
the winds from the north and the winds from the south
sowed the seeds of death and waited for the harvest
death was riding nightmares
on the streets of civilization
someone had coughed in the women's room
and kleenex caught her vaginal sneeze
while history knocked at the door
and waited in the winter outside
the computer counted the errors
and discounted others
a woman had died but it was a mistake
someone wanted to undo it
learned it was too late
and walked to the seashore
and watched the tidal waves
death was riding the receding waves
death was roaring in the generation gap
and lying in history's lap
was sucking on its sap
on the day of the feast
death had its celebration
knocked out of sleep by the casualty list
someone was still groping in daylight
but it's christmas and new year
time to stop worrying over those that are dead
time to start thinking of living yet
24
while the sun is still hot and the day not done
perhaps a mistake to suppose it so
it's easy enough to suppose it so
and it's easy enough to die in these circumstances
but think of the horror and the glory of having to live
II.
My sitar
my guitar
from east or west
i do not care
whatever i dare
is for the best
fingers of the left
tripping on nipples
fingers of the right
strumming the ripples
around the lotus bud
as we set on the bed
each petal quakes
as the raga awakes
raises in dizzy spirals
towers and gyres
steeples and spires
domes and minarets
pagodas pyramids
fabled hoofs
trot on gabled roofs
as the tala quickens
we rocket to the heavens
to gather the starlust
and then we fall
falter and fall
like flakes of feathered snow
sprinkled with stardust
o my guitar
o my sitar
III.
Having learnt
in a short lifetime
that chalk doesn't write on chalk
25
he turned
to look
for sunflowers
in beds
of roses
IV.
Twice-punctured silver belle
suspended in the cerulean
her sea of tranquility
disturbed by hymen penetration
her darkness filmed and douched
unable to recover her cherry nights
fears yet longs for
the next assault
in sweet dread of periodic stress
her bashful beams dreaming downward
for a metallic man-thrust
V.
The poet chews the afternoon like his moustache
he drones on about a new civilization
his mystic beard points to the seed of time
his tongue trips on the syllables of a sutra
my girl she sleeps
and slides on to my shoulder
her breasts rise and fall
where the words of the poet rebound
her dark green shirt exudes the smell of sweat
her golden hair the sinuous oily flesh of hair
curves creeps and curls into my veins
words wary sliders reveal their mystery
my girl she stirs turns around
her bellybutton shows a foetus face
a snake tongue smacks her swollen lips
the soft hairs on her upper lip
now moist and alive
a dog walks in and lies down at my feet
he listens to the poet
reading chanting enchanting
like a dream called off in the middle
the poet pauses poised for breath between the mantras
the tangled thighs of minutes
26
the dog gets up stretches himself walks away
wagging his tail in total agreement
soft nervous fingers touch me from the side
they keep me from the poet
a dog is dignified by his tail
i wish i had one
VI.
Time to say farewell
Pale faces
after a nightlong wake
do not need to kiss
Before another nightfall
sometime during the day
we have to say farewell
How shall we part then
Write an autograph
and put a period after it
Take a long walk
and sigh in the wind
Recite a few verses
and smile at the end
Perhaps a last smutty story
to leave a scratch on the memory
Look how the spring sun
Struggles with the rain!
VII.
It's as if i suddenly meet you on the way
when i go for my usual walk in the evening
the earth that begins at your feet
seems to end at mine
the air you breathe out
enters into my lungs
and the light that escapes from your eyes
focuses on mine
america
i see your map
like the palm of a hand stretched out on my lap
mississippi traces your lifeline to the south
while the great lakes draw circles
along the st lawrence headline
27
but where is your heartline
on the mount of jupiter
new england cocks its eyes at europe
your venus is still in heat
in the far south of florida
and the mount of moon
shimmers on the california beach
but america
where has vanished your heartline
has some test explosion
sucked it underground
i remember river phalgun
that goes dry in summer defying our prayers
where once the buddha got enlightenment
and learned to take the earth for a begging bowl
but here the fission and the fusion
your scientists envision
offer your palmist nothing but confusion
sailing back from mescalin to marijuana
someone said
there never was such a line
in this ancient newborn land
where we grow corn and PL 480
and make cover tv sets in plenty
till our chests are nearly empty
and brains spout tons of TNT
it's christmas again
the shape of a heart neatly pinned to a cross
that stands on a hill we have set up with skill
(Translated by the author, with the help of J.O. Perry, Dakshinamoorthy, K.
Satchidanandan, and Esther Y. Smith.)
~ Ayyappa Paniker,

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