Other End Of The Line Quotes & Sayings

I dont want to sound gloomy, but, at some point of your lives, every one of you will notice that you have in your life one person, one friend whom you love and care for very much. That person is so close to you that you are able to share some things only with him. For example, you can call that friend, and from the very first maniacal laugh or some other joke you will know who is at the other end of that line. We used to do that with him so often. And then when that person is gone, there will be nothing like that in your life ever again. — Christopher Lee

We felt responsible for each other. The D-line's got to take care of that line of scrimmage, (the linebackers) have got to clean up, and the safeties and DBs take care of that back end. We felt we're a brotherhood and we just had to get it done. — Kawika Mitchell

I called my wife up on the cell phone and said baby you aint gonna believe this, i go, we just hit a deer with the airplane. and there was a silence on the other end of the line followed by.. OH MY GOD.! were you on the ground? I said nope, santa was makin one last run.. — Bill Engvall

A high upland common was this moor, two miles from end to end, and full of furze and bracken. There were no trees and not a house, nothing but a line of telegraph poles following the road, sweeping with rigidity from north to south; nailed upon one of them a small scarlet notice to stonethrowers was prominent as a wound. On so high and wide a region as Shag Moor the wind always blew, or if it did not quite blow there was a cool activity in the air. The furze was always green and growing, and, taking no account of seasons, often golden. Here in summer solitude lounged and snoozed; at other times, as now, it shivered and looked sinister. ("The Higgler") — A.E. Coppard

Actually, I'm at his place. He's cooking for me."
There was a long silence on the other end of the line.
"Really," he finally said, through what sounded like clenched teeth.
Taylor smiled into the phone. "Why, Jason - that sounds a bit like jealousy, doesn't it? — Julie James

But when the other end of the line picked up, it was his voicemail that answered, not the man himself. "I know how devastated you must be to miss me," his cheery voice said, "but leave a message, and I'll try to ease your agony as soon as possible. — Richelle Mead

Ortez sauntered over to the nearest wall intercom. "Bridge, this is the captain -- what the hell's going on up there? I didn't schedule a combat drill for today." Hell, it occurred to him -- he hadn't scheduled any kind of drill for at least four months. On the other end of the line, young 2nd lieutenant Cedric Pankow, the com officer, let it fall. — Christina Engela

If the great American people will only keep their temper, on both sides of the line, the troubles will come to an end, and the question which now distracts the country will be settled just as surely as all other difficulties of like character which have originated in this government have been adjusted. — Abraham Lincoln

The truth is that man is one individual with two aspects, just like one line with two ends. If you look at the ends, it is two. If you look at the line, it is one. One end of the line is limited, the other end of the line is unlimited. One end is man, the other end is God. — Hazrat Inayat Khan

Talking on a cell phone makes us four times as likely to have an accident - the same as a driver who has a blood alcohol content of .08 percent, which qualifies as intoxicated in most states. The risk is equal for drivers holding their phones to their ears and for those speaking through a hands-free device. In both cases, researchers suggest, the drivers generate mental images of the unseen person at the other end of the line, which conflicts with their capacity for spatial processing. "It's not that your hands aren't on the wheel," says David Strayer, the director of the Applied Cognition Laboratory at the University of Utah, "it's that your mind is not on the road. — Tony Schwartz

But then, even in the most significant details of our daily life, none of us can be said to constitute a material whole, which is the same for everyone, and need only be turned up like a page in an account-book or the record of a will; our social personality is a creation of the thoughts of other people. Even the simple act which we describe as "seeing someone we know" is to some extent an intellectual process. We pack the physical outline of the person we see with all the notions we have already formed about him, and in the total picture of him which we compose in our minds those notions have certainly the principal place. In the end they come to fill out so completely the curve of his cheeks, to follow so exactly the line of his nose, they blend so harmoniously in the sound of his voice as if it were no more than a transparent envelope, that each time we see the face or hear the voice it us these notions which we recognise and to which we listen. — Marcel Proust

Wart draggled off to the tower room, where Merlyn was busy knitting himself a woollen night-cap for the winter. "I cast off two together at every other line," said the magician, "but for some reason it seems to end too sharply. Like an onion. It is the turning of the heel that does one, every time. — T.H. White

But it became clear very quickly that I'd underestimated how much I liked him. Not him, perhaps, but the fact that I had someone on the other end of an invisible line. Someone to update and get updates from, to inform of a comic discovery, to imagine while dancing in a lonely basement, and to return to, finally, when the music stopped. — Marina Keegan

The bottom line, in the professional level, no matter where you go, there's going to be competition. That's what it is. At the end of the day, you're trying to put team first and make each other better. — Scott Tolzien

What is it which makes a man and a woman know that they, of all other men and women in the world, belong to each other? Is it no more than chance and meeting? no more than being alive together in the world at the same time? Is it only a curve of the throat, a line of the chin, the way the eyes are set, a way of speaking? Or is it something deeper and stranger, something beyond meeting, something beyond chance and fortune? Are there others, in other times of the world, whom we should have loved, who would have loved us? Is there, perhaps, one soul among all others
among all who have lived, the endless generations, from world's end to world's end
who must love us or die? And whom we must love, in turn
whom we must seek all our lives long
headlong and homesick
until the end? — Robert Nathan

Gerry?' Laurel had to strain to hear thought the noise on the other end of the line. 'Gerry? Where are you?'
'London. A phone booth on Fleet Street.'
'The city still has working phone booths?'
'It would appear so. Unless this is the Tardis, in which case I'm in serious trouble. — Kate Morton

End of Winter"

Over the still world, a bird calls
waking solitary among black boughs.

You wanted to be born; I let you be born.
When has my grief ever gotten
in the way of your pleasure?

Plunging ahead
into the dark and light at the same time
eager for sensation

as though you were some new thing, wanting
to express yourselves

all brilliance, all vivacity
never thinking
this would cost you anything,
never imagining the sound of my voice
as anything but part of you -

you won't hear it in the other world,
not clearly again,
not in birdcall or human cry,

not the clear sound, only
persistent echoing
in all sound that means good-bye, good-bye -

the one continuous line
that binds us to each other. — Louise Gluck

Wait, aren't they notoriously lusty?"
There was a pause at the other end of the line.
"Oh,you are not going to that lab again."
Lend laughed and I closed my eyes, picturing how he would look in front of me. "Trust me, there's only one paranormal I'd like to be notoriously lusty for me."
I sighed. "Okay, but I don't think I can find a hag on such short notice. — Kiersten White

The phone is an instrument of intrusion into order. It is a threat to control. Just when you think you are alone and safe, the call could come that changes your life. Or someone else's. It makes the same flat, mechanical noise for everyone and gives no clues what's waiting there on the other end of the line. You can never be too careful. — Janice Galloway

I wish i'd hurt him I didn't do any damage at all-Bella
I can fix that-edward
I was hoping you would say that-bella
there was a slight pause "that doesn't sound like you what did he do"-edward
he kissed me-bella
all i heard on the other end of the line was the sound of an engine accelerating — Stephenie Meyer

My skin feels too tight, like I might rupture. My mother must have read the end, the cards Enola keeps reading, the same thing Verona Bonn read, all the way back to Ryzhkova. They passed the cards to each other creating history, fingers touching paper, imbuing it with hope and fears, fear like a curse. Of course they wouldn't clear their cards, they were talking to their mothers, and isn't that part of why I've stayed here? The book noted a falling out between Ryzhkova and her apprentice, a falling out over the mermaid. Enola said that cards build history - what a perfect way to wound someone. The cards were hers, Ryzhkova's, then Amos and Evangeline's on down the line, each leaving themselves in the ink, each pulling from the deck, pulling in fears that work like poison. The wind blows a sheet of paper across a split board. The only paper of consequence was never in my possession - it was in Enola's. — Erika Swyler

Recalling some of the most spectacular horrors of history
the burning of heretics and witches at the stake, the wholesale massacre of "heathens," and other no less repulsive manifestations of Christian civilization in Europe and elsewhere
modern man is filled with pride in the "progress" accomplished, in one line at least, since the end of the dark ages of religious fanaticism. — Savitri Devi

Really? Only one class and you're ready to kick him out?" the woman on the other end of the line inquired. "I'm sorry, that's not why I was calling," Melanie said swiftly. "I'm calling because I wanted to know a little bit more about Mr. Styles, to see if there is a more efficient way that I can help him." "Mr. Styles has been through three anger management courses and one Hugs for Healing program in the past two weeks. His attempts at fulfilling the court order with these classes have resulted in two counselors quitting, and several restraining orders. — Kaelyn Swan

To become imperceptible oneself, to have dismantled love in order to become capable of loving. To have dismantled one's self in order finally to be alone and meet the true double at the other end of the line. A clandestine passenger on a motionless voyage. To become like everybody else; but this, precisely, is a becoming only for one who knows how to be nobody, to no longer be anybody. To paint oneself gray on gray. — Gilles Deleuze

The key activities are not to be found in books. They emerge from analysis of the specific enterprise. Two enterprises that to an outsider appear to be in an identical line of business may well end up defining their key activities quite differently. One, for instance, may put production in the centre; the other, customer service. Only two key activities are always present in any organization: there is always the management of people and there is always the management of money. The rest has to be determined by the people within looking at the enterprise and at their own jobs, values, and goals. — Peter F. Drucker

Religions emerged too early in human evolution - they set up symbols that people took literally, and they're as dead as a line of totem poles. Religions should have come later, when the human race begins to near its end. Sadly, crime is the only spur that rouses us. We're fascinated by that "other world" where everything is possible. — J.G. Ballard

You might wonder how those on the Other Side know to use my screen or my body, or even how they find me. My answer: they just know. We are tied to all those we've ever loved by cords of light. Those cords can never be broken. Think of them like a fishing line of love. If you tug on one end, the other end feels the tug. And those on the Other Side are always on the lookout for openings between the worlds. They can locate the portal they need. The most important thing for a sitter to know is that he or she doesn't need a psychic medium to communicate with loved ones who have passed. If we open our minds and our hearts, we will begin to see the signs and messages they send for us to feel their presence in our everyday lives. — Laura Lynne Jackson

A dead tree, cut into planks and read from one end to the other, is a kind of line graph, with dates down one side and height along the other, as if trees, like mathematicians, had found a way of turning time into form. — Alice Oswald

If you're now noticing a certain family resemblance among this no-successive-instant problem, Zeno's Paradoxes, and some of the Real Line crunchers described in Paragraph 2c and -e, be advised that this is not a coincidence. They are all facets of the great continuity conundrum for mathematics, which is that (Infinity)-related entities can apparently be neither handled nor eliminated. Nowhere is this more evident than with 1/(Infinity)s. They're riddled with paradox and can't be defined, but if you banish them from math you end up having to posit an infinite density to any interval, in which the idea of succession makes no sense and no ordering of points in the interval can ever be complete, since between any two points there will be not just some other points but a whole infinity of them.
Overall point: However good calculus is at quantifying motion and change, it can do nothing to solve the real paradoxes of continuity. Not without a coherent theory of (Infinity), anyway. — David Foster Wallace

The woman speaks, stops, then after what must have been a long speech by the person on the other end of the line, says, " ... just remember, darling, it is pain that changes our lives." Mirabelle cannot fathom the meaning of this sentence, as she has been in pain her whole life, and yet it remains unchanged. — Steve Martin

It had only been two days but Furi was looking forward to seeing Syn, kissing him, making love to him. Syn had called him each night and each night they'd jerked off together. When Syn had called him at two in the morning after finding the download Furi had put on his phone, he thought Syn had injured himself from coming so hard. Furi had downloaded his last masturbation video with Illustra to Syn's cell. The one in which he'd thought about his hot detective the entire time. Furi moaned into the receiver as Syn watched the video. When it got to the part where he'd looked at the camera and asked "Is this what you want?" He let Syn know that he'd been talking to him. Syn lost it right there on the other end of the line and it only took Furi a couple hard pulls to come right along with him. Furi — A.E. Via

I watched him walk behind the bamboo bars. Black stripes and sunlit white fur flashed through the slits in the dark bamboo; it was like watching the slow-down reels of an old black-and-white film. He was walking in the same line, again and again - from one end of the bamboo bars to the other, then turning around and repeating it over, at exactly the same pace, like a thing under a spell. He was hypnotizing himself by walking like this - that was the only way he could tolerate this cage — Aravind Adiga

It's basically an act of faith, hoping that a small idea will unspool into a bigger whole. Sometimes, in fact often, it doesn't and it just runs out of steam. The hope for me is that it will snowball. the best way to put it is that I have no particular method or technique per se, other than this: I plan nothing, I outline nothing, I start with an idea or an image or a line of dialogue and see where it leads me. Because I never know what the next page will contain, let alone the end of the book, I am perpetually surprised by the course that my characters take. The writing process is as full of surprises and twists for me as the reading experience is for my readers. I love the spontaneity of writing this way, the possibilities left open, the feeling that I am not constrained or committed to any given path. Every day, I am surprised by something. It may not be the most efficient way of writing, but it has served me well thus far. — Khaled Hosseini

I need not print a line, nor conjure with the painter's tools to prove myself an artist ... Whilst in other spheres of labor the greater part of our life's toil and moil will of a surety end, as the wise man predicted, in vanity and vexation of spirit, here is instant physical refreshment in the work the garden entails, and, in the end, our labor will be crowned with flowers. — J. D. Sedding

Is this Jimmy Redstone?" the male voice at the other end of the line inquired.
I couldn't identify the voice. I didn't recognize the number and the used car salesman tone didn't do anything to reduce my annoyance at being interrupted during breakfast. "Who the hell you think would be answering his phone?" I snarled. — David Harry

A thin line separates laughter and pain, comedy and tragedy, humor and hurt. Our lives constantly walk that line. When we slip off on one side or the other, we're taken by surprise. But who said there wouldn't be surprises? Knowing God just means that all the rules will be fair; at the end of our life drama, we'll see that. We never know how things will turn out, but if we know with certainty they will make sense regardless of how they turn out, we're on to something. — Barbara Johnson

In a world where nothing exists by itself, where every division of one thing from another is a misperception - or misconception - of the way things really are, there are no eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body, or mind.

We cannot, for example, draw a line around the eyes that is not necessarily arbitrary. There is no point at which the eyes begin or end, either in time or in space or conceptually. The eye bone is connected to the face bone, and the face bone is connected to the head bone, and the head bone is connected to the neck bone, and so it goes down to the toe bone, the floor bone, the earth bone, the worm bone, the dreaming butterfly bone. Thus, what we call our eyes are so many bubbles in a sea of foam. This is not only true of our eyes but of our other powers of sensation as well, including the mind. — Red Pine

You got a tattoo?" It's the third time I've asked Holder the same question, but I just don't believe it. It's out of character for him. Especially since I'm not the one who encouraged it. "Jesus, Daniel," he groans on the other end of the line. "Stop. And stop asking me why." "It's just a weird thing to tattoo on yourself. Hopeless. It's a very depressing term. But still, I'm impressed." "I gotta go. I'll call you later this week." I sigh into the phone. "God, this sucks, man. The only good thing about this entire school since you moved is fifth period. — Colleen Hoover

I looked at her without a word. She held an edge of the beach towel in each hand, pressing the edges against her cheeks. White smoke was rising from the cigarette between her fingers. With no wind to disturb it, the smoke rose straight up, like a miniature smoke signal. She was apparently having trouble deciding whether to cry or to laugh. At least she looked that way to me. She wavered atop the narrow line that divided one possibility from the other, but in the end she fell to neither side. May Kasahara pulled her expression together, put the towel on the ground, and took a drag on her cigarette. The time was nearly five o'clock, but the heat showed no sign of abating. — Haruki Murakami

tenure at Treasury was not as successful as his career at Alcoa. Almost immediately after taking office he began focusing on a couple of key issues, including worker safety, job creation, executive accountability, and fighting African poverty, among other initiatives. However, O'Neill's politics did not line up with those of President Bush, and he launched an internal fight opposing Bush's proposed tax cuts. He was asked to resign at the end of 2002. "What I thought was the right thing for economic policy was the opposite of what the White House wanted," O'Neill told me. "That's not good for a treasury secretary, so I got fired. — Charles Duhigg

This line of reasoning would seem to lead to the absurd conclusion that the world is filled with noises no one hears, colours no one sees, flavours no one tastes, textures no one feels, as well as a host of other sense experience we cannot even imagine. For there is no end in which creatures might possibly perceive the world. — Julian Baggini

But there was never any arguing with Janus, least of all from the other end of a flik-flik line. — Django Wexler

Hello?" he said, waiting out the shrill stream on the other end of the line. He smiled, "Because I'm her husband. I can answer her phone, now." He glanced at me, and then shoved open the cab door, offering his hand. "We're at the airport, America. Why don't you and Shep pick us up and you can yell at us both on the way home? Yes, the whole way home. We should arrive around three. All right, Mare. See you then." He winced with her sharp words and then handed me the phone. "You weren't kidding. She's pissed. — Jamie McGuire

When Danny finally got off his knee, he took her by surprise again. He immediately began to tap a number on his mobile. Beth knew only too well who would be on the other end of the line.
'She said yes!' Danny announced triumphantly. Beth smiled as she held the diamond under the light and took a closer look. — Jeffrey Archer

I don't want my world to be subset A such that it doesn't intersect with any others (B, C or D), a watertight shape drawn on a slate, whole but empty. I'd rather be elsewhere, following a line that leads to places where worlds communicate with each other, overlap, where the edges are permeable, where life follows a path without breaks, where things don't come to an end brutally for no reason, where important events come with instructions (level of risk, mains or batteries, expected duration) and the necessary equipment (airbags, GPS, ABS). — Delphine De Vigan

If low price is the only basis of competition with rival products, similarly produced, there ensues a cut-throat competition which can end only by taking all the profit and incentive out of the industry. The logical way out of this dilemma is for the manufacturer to develop some sales appeal other than mere cheapness, to give the product, in the public mind, some other attraction, some idea that will modify the product slightly, some element of originality that will distinguish it from products in the same line. Thus, — Edward L. Bernays

Anatole has been explaining to me the native system of government. He says the business of throwing pebbles into bowls with the most pebbles winning an election - that was Belgium's idea of fair play, but to people here it was peculiar. To the Congolese (including Anatole himself, he confessed) it seems odd that if one man gets fifty votes and the other gets forty-nine, the first one wins altogether and the second one plumb loses. That means almost half the people will be unhappy, and according to Anatole, in a village that's left halfway unhappy you haven't heard the end of it. There is sure to be trouble somewhere down the line. The — Barbara Kingsolver

Claire scraped her chair back, walked over to the cordless phone lying on the counter, and dialed from the business card still stuck to the refrigerator with a magnet. Four rings, and a cheerful voice answered on the other end and announced she'd reached Common Grounds. "Hi,'" Claire said. "Can I talk to Sam, please?'"
"Sam? Hold on.'" The phone clattered, and Claire could hear the buzz of activity in the background - milk being steamed, people chatting, the usual excitement of a busy coffee shop. She waited, jittering one leg impatiently, until the voice came back on the line. "Sorry,'" it said. "He's not here tonight. I think he went to the party.'"
"The party?'"
"You know, the zombie frat party? Epsilon Epsilon Kappa? The Dead Girls' Dance?'"
"Thanks,'" Claire said. She hung up and turned to face Michael and Eve, who were staring at her in outright surprise. She held up the phone. "The power of technology. Embrace it. — Rachel Caine

What excites us the most or likewise scares us the most is when something is exactly what it says it is. And when it comes to Christmas, we're going to end up finding ourselves on one side of that line or the other. — Craig D. Lounsbrough

On other shows when they get to the end of the scene, they yell 'Cut!' On Whose Line, we yell 'That's Enough!' — Drew Carey

I can't believe that this world can go on beyond our generation and on down to succeeding generations with this kind of weapon on both sides poised at each other without someday some fool or some maniac or some accident triggering the kind of war that is the end of the line for all of us. And I just think of what a sigh of relief would go up from everyone on this earth if someday-and this is what I have-my hope, way in the back of my head-is that if we start down the road to reduction, maybe one day in doing that, somebody will say, 'Why not all the way? Let's get rid of all these things'. — Ronald Reagan

Ahead of them lay an expressway access road. Except that there were no guardrails or markings. No road signs either. And no other vehicles at all. Yet the road, following a narrow curve, led to a broad ribbon of asphalt tracing a straight line all the way to the horizon. Again, it had no lines painted on it and there were no signs. Rosa thought there would have been space for four traffic lanes on it, but it was covered with the dust and loose soil that had blown over it.
No other sign of life. Just the two of them, the car, and a forgotten road to nowhere.
"Where does it go?"
"To the end of the world. — Kai Meyer

Paranormal experiences are just energy manifesting itself in some way: a flashlight flickering on when you haven't pressed the button; a vision during an electrical storm; your cell phone ringing, and no one on the other end of the line. A surge of energy pulsed through networks to give me a message - I just can't tell who's sent it. — Jodi Picoult

I know what you were dreaming.Everybody damn well knows what you where dreaming.Christ Almighty. What's the point in hiding you, if you're going to start to fucking advertise?"
Shadow said nothing.
There was a pause at the other end of the telephone.
" I'll be there in the morning", said Wednesday.
It sounded like the anger had died down.
"We're going to San Francisco.The flowers in your hair are optional."
And the line went dead. — Neil Gaiman

It was like fishing a swamp, where you feel the tug of something that at first seems promising and then resistant and finally hopeless as you realize that you've snagged the bottom, that you have the whole planet on the other end of your line. — Tobias Wolff

Alessandro Volta, an Italian count and the inspiration for the eponym "volt," demonstrated this back around 1800 with a clever experiment. Volta had a number of volunteers form a chain and each pinch the tongue of one neighbor. The two end people then put their fingers on battery leads. Instantly, up and down the line, people tasted each other's fingers as sour. — Sam Kean

Perhaps it's the alien equivalent of a discarded tomato can. Does a beetle know why it can enter the can only from one end as it lies across the trail to the beetle's burrow? Does the beetle understand why it is harder to climb to the left or right, inside the can, than it is to follow a straight line? Would the beetle be a fool to assume the human race put the can there to torment it - or an egomaniac to believe the can was manufactured only to mystify it? It would be best for the beetle to study the can in terms of the can's logic, to the limit of the beetle's ability. In that way, at least, the beetle can proceed intelligently. It may even grasp some hint of the can's maker. Any other approach is either folly or madness. — Algis Budrys

Most computer users by the end of the century made regular use of the Internet, a vast web of worldwide computer networks born in the late 1960s in the work done by the U.S. Department of Defense's Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and universities it commissioned. Its founders had needed to share information with researchers working on government contracts at various universities. Once computer users at these well-funded institutions realized the possibilities of an electronic network connecting them with colleagues worldwide, word of the wonder spread and the Internet blossomed. By the late 1980s, anyone with a computer equipped with a modem hooked up to a regular telephone line could send an "E-mail" message or any other electronic document to anyone similarly equipped anywhere in the world - instantaneously. By 1994, the number of people connected to the World Wide Web of computer networks had swelled to an estimated 15 million. — Douglas Brinkley

Her first week on the job a caller went silent in surprise on the other end of the line, expecting to hear Miss Jacobs' voice. Bertie's response: "Speak ass, 'cause the mouth won't! — Dawn Shamp

Rugby football is a game I can't claim absolutely to understand in all its niceties, if you know what I mean. I can follow the broad, general principles, of course. I mean to say, I know that the main scheme is to work the ball down the field somehow and deposit it over the line at the other end and that, in order to squalch this programme, each side is allowed to put in a certain amount of assault and battery and do things to its fellow man which, if done elsewhere, would result in 14 days without the option, coupled with some strong remarks from the Bench. — P.G. Wodehouse

The pain he feels in his own gut is either something to do with the caffeine, or the stress of realizing that if it's not snipers or blindness stealing your children, it's cancer coming to snipe your wife, and there's not a fucking thing a guy can do about any of it except to drop to his knees and pray, to pretend like someone or something that gives a shit is on teh other end of the line, to pretend anything, like you did when you were a kid until the pretending seems real, because without that all you've got for comfort is what's in front of your face ... — Scott Wrobel

There was more silence and Bosch pictured his partner on the other end of the line in a $900 suit and a bankrupt frown. — Michael Connelly

The finish line at the end of a career is no different from the finish line at the end of a
match. The objective is to get within reach of that finish line, because then it gives off a magnetic force. When you're close, you can feel that force pulling you, and you can use that force to get across. But just before you come within range, or just after, you feel another force, equally strong, pushing you away. It's inexplicable, mystical, these twin forces, these contradictory energies, but they both exist. I know, because I've spent much of my life seeking the one, fighting the other, and sometimes I've been stuck, suspended, bounced like a tennis ball between the two. — Andre Agassi

To leave the thread of all time
And let it make a dark line
In hopes that I can still find
The way back to the moment
I took the turn and turned to
Begin a new beginning
Still looking for the answer
I cannot find the finish
It's either this or that way
It's one way or the other
It should be one direction
It could be on reflection
The turn I have just taken
The turn that I was making
I might be just beginning
I might be near the end.


— Enya

All forms of poor communication have one thing in common: They ask the person on the other end of the line to do more work than they should have to. — Jonathan Raymond

Someone told me recently that a commentator or some sort had said, "The United States is in spiritual free-fall." When people make such remarks, such appalling judgements, they never include themselves, their friends, those with whom they agree. They have drawn, as they say, a bright line between an "us" and a "them." Those on the other side of the line are assumed to be unworthy of respect or hearing, and are in fact to be regarded as a huge problem to the "us" who presume to judge "them." This tedious pattern has repeated itself endlessly through human history and is, as I have said, the end of community and the beginning of tribalism. — Marilynne Robinson