1
" I have loved in life and I have been loved. I have drunk the bowl of poison from the hands of love as nectar, and have been raised above life's joy and sorrow. My heart, aflame in love, set afire every heart that came in touch with it. My heart has been rent and joined again; My heart has been broken and again made whole; My heart has been wounded and healed again; A thousand deaths my heart has died, and thanks be to love, it lives yet. I went through hell and saw there love's raging fire, and I entered heaven illumined with the light of love. I wept in love and made all weep with me; I mourned in love and pierced the hearts of men; And when my fiery glance fell on the rocks, the rocks burst forth as volcanoes. The whole world sank in the flood caused by my one tear; With my deep sigh the earth trembled, and when I cried aloud the name of my beloved, I shook the throne of God in heaven.I bowed my head low in humility, and on my knees I begged of love, " Disclose to me, I pray thee, O love, thy secret." She took me gently by my arms and lifted me above the earth, and spoke softly in my ear, " My dear one, thou thyself art love, art lover, and thyself art the beloved whom thou hast adored. "
3
" You're not like other Wasps." " Aren't I?" Aagen smiled, but it was a painful smile. " No doubt you've killed my kinsmen by the score." " A few," Salma allowed." Well, next time you shed my kinden's blood, think on this: we are but men, no less nor more than other men, and we strive and feel joy and fail as men have always done. We live in the darkness that is the birthright of us all, that of hurt and ignorance, only sometimes... sometimes there comes the sun." He let the bowl fall from his fingers to the floor, watching it spin and settle, unbroken. "
4
" I remember one incident which bears upon this part of the treatise. The gentleman who gave it to me had asked to see my tobacco-pipe; he examined it carefully, and when he came to the little protuberance at the bottom of the bowl he seemed much delighted, and exclaimed that it must be rudimentary. I asked him what he meant." Sir," he answered, " this organ is identical with the rim at the bottom of a cup; it is but another form of the same function. Its purposes must have been to keep the heat of the pipe from marking the table upon which it rested. You would find, if you were to look up the history of tobacco-pipes, that in early specimens this protuberance was of a different shape to what it is now. It will have been broad at the bottom, and flat, so that while the pipe was being smoked the bowl might rest upon the table without marking it. Use and disuse must have come into play and reduced the function its present rudimentary condition. I should not be surprised, sir," he continued, " if, in the course of time, it were to become modified still farther, and to assume the form of an ornamental leaf or scroll, or even a butterfly, while in some cases, it will become extinct. "
14
" Soup’s here,” Judd finally said after we watched each other for a few minutes.
As I sipped the broth, Judd pretended to ignore me. I knew he wasn’t really watching television. His face was too perfectly stoic like he was working hard to make himself seem cold.
“Do you want the rest?” I asked.
Judd frowned at me. “If I wanted soup, I’d have ordered myself some. I’m not a dog begging for scraps.”
Scowling at his ridiculous anger, I shrugged. “I don’t want to waste the rest. Can we put it in the mini fridge and I’ll eat it in the morning?”
Judd’s frown eased. “Fuck it. I’ll eat it.”
“No, it’s mine,” I said, standing up. “I offered and you got grumpy. Now, you can’t have it.”
“I’ll just eat it after you go to sleep.”
“I respect your honesty,” I said, setting the bowl into the little fridge next to the expensive treats. “It’s a rare quality in a thief.”
Judd grinned. "
― Bijou Hunter , Damaged and the Knight (Damaged, #2)
16
" World-class cereal-eating is a dance of fine compromises. The giant heaping bowl of sodden cereal, awash in milk, is the mark of the novice. Ideally one wants the bone-dry cereal nuggets and the cryogenic milk to enter the mouth with minimal contact and for the entire reaction between them to take place in the mouth. Randy has worked out a set of mental blueprints for a special cereal-eating spoon that will have a tube running down the handle and a little pump for the milk, so that you can spoon dry cereal up out of a bowl, hit a button with your thumb, and squirt milk into the bowl of the spoon even as you are introducing it into your mouth. The next best thing is to work in small increments, putting only a small amount of Cap’n Crunch in your bowl at a time and eating it all up before it becomes a pit of loathsome slime, which, in the case of Cap’n Crunch, takes about thirty seconds. "
― Neal Stephenson , Cryptonomicon