92
" Sirens blasted, breaking the silence and spinning me around. The shrill sound was all too familiar, and I snapped into action. Vicious excitement replaced the restlessness, and I knew just how screwed up that was, but right then? Oh yeah, I could use a fight. Yesterday in the quad had been child’s play.
Grabbing the Glock loaded with titanium bullets, I hooked it into the holster and fit it around my thigh. I snatched the daggers off the dresser and headed out the door, not even bothering with grabbing a shirt.
I came to a complete stop as Josie’s door swung open.
What in the holy fuck were Alex and Josie doing together? For just a few seconds, the three of us were literally frozen, staring at each other as the sirens blared overhead.
And then Alex broke the silence.
“Really?” she said dryly, eyeing me with a smirk. “You’re going to fight with the awesomeness of your six-pack as a weapon?”
I arched a brow. “Yeah, you know, I was going to test out the whole abs of steel theory thing. The gun attached to my thigh and the daggers in my hands are just props. Mainly for show. Don’t want to take away from the gloriousness that is my body, though.”
Her smirk flipped into a grin. “Whatever.” She started forward. Up ahead, a tall figure stepped out in the hall, and light glinted off the titanium daggers in his hands. Aiden. Of course their room had to be close to mine.
Of. Course. "
― Jennifer L. Armentrout , The Power (Titan, #2)
93
" Perhaps it is in this respect that language differs most sharply from other biologic systems for communication. Ambiguity seems to be an essential, indispensable element for the transfer of information from one place to another by words, where matters of real importance are concerned. It is often necessary, for meaning to come through, that there be an almost vague sense of strangeness and askewness. Speechless animals and cells cannot do this. The specifically locked-on antigen at the surface of a lymphocyte does not send the cell off in search of something totally different; when a bee is tracking sugar by polarized light, observing the sun as though consulting his watch, he does not veer away to discover an unimaginable marvel of a flower. Only the human mind is designed to work in this way, programmed to drift away in the presence of locked-on information, straying from each point in a hunt for a better, different point.
If it were not for the capacity for ambiguity, for the sensing of strangeness, the words in all languages provide, we would have no way of recognizing the layers of counterpoint in meaning, and we might be spending all our time sitting on stone fences, staring into the sun. To be sure, we would always have had some everyday use to make of the alphabet, and we might have reached the same capacity for small talk, but it is unlikely that we would have been able to evolve from words to Bach. The great thing about human language is that it prevents us from sticking to the matter at hand. "
― Lewis Thomas , The Lives of a Cell: Notes of a Biology Watcher
99
" Built-in shelves line my bedroom, adjacent to my Japanese platform bed, purchased for its capacious rim, the better to hold those books that must be immediately accessible. Yet still they pile on my nightstand, and the grid of shelves continues in floor-to-ceiling formation across the wall, stampeding over the doorway in disorderly fashion, political memoirs mixed in with literary essays, Victorian novels fighting for space with narrative adventure, the Penguin classics never standing together in a gracious row no matter how hard I try to impose order. The books compete for attention, assembling on the shelf above the sofa on the other side of the room, where they descend by the window, staring back at me. As I lie in bed with another book, they lie in wait. "
― Pamela Paul , My Life with Bob: Flawed Heroine Keeps Book of Books, Plot Ensues