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1 " Phobologic discipline is comprised of twenty-eight exercises, each focusing upon a separate nexus of the nervous system. The five primaries are the knees and hams, lungs and heart, loins and bowels, the lower back, and the girdle of the shoulders, particularly the trapezius muscles, which yoke the shoulder to the neck. A secondary nexus, for which the Lakedaemonians have twelve more exercises, is the face, specifically the muscles of the jaw, the neck and the four ocular constrictors around the eye sockets. These nexuses are termed by the Spartans phobosynakteres, fear accumulators. Fear spawns in the body, phonologic science teaches, and must be combated there. For once the flesh is seized, a phobokyklos, or loop of fear, may commence, feeding upon itself, mounting into a “runaway” of terror. Put the body into a state of phobia, fearlessness, the Spartans believe, and the mind will follow. "
― Steven Pressfield , Gates of Fire
2 " Wyatt’s lips flatten into a serious line. His voice goes low, laced with passion. “Marrying one woman doesn’t mean spending your life with one woman, because the funny girl you fall in love with on a first date at twenty-eight eventually becomes the fascinating creature you propose to at thirty, then evolves into the stunning bride you wait for at the end of an aisle at thirty-two, and finally grows into the astounding mother to your children at thirty-four. By forty, she has blossomed into the businesswoman, the force to be reckoned with. By the time you’re fifty or sixty or seventy or a hundred, she’s been everything — your wife, your lover, your friend, your companion, your sous-chef, your travel partner, your life coach, your confidant, your cheerleader, your critic, your most stalwart advisor. She grows with you. She changes with you. She is always stable, but never stagnant. She is not one woman. She is a thousand versions of herself, a multitude of layers, an infinite ocean whose depths you plumb over a lifetime, whose many treasures and intricacies, quirks and idiosyncrasies you need an entire marriage to explore.” His voice softens. “A man should be so lucky to spend his life stuck with one woman such as that.”-Julie Johnson, " The Monday Girl "
3 " Marrying one woman doesn’t mean spending your life with one woman, because the funny girl you fall in love with on a first date at twenty-eight eventually becomes the fascinating creature you propose to at thirty, then evolves into the stunning bride you wait for at the end of an aisle at thirty-two, and finally grows into the astounding mother to your children at thirty-four. By forty, she has blossomed into the businesswoman, the force to be reckoned with. By the time you’re fifty or sixty or seventy or a hundred, she’s been everything — your wife, your lover, your friend, your companion, your sous-chef, your travel partner, your life coach, your confidant, your cheerleader, your critic, your most stalwart advisor. She grows with you. She changes with you. She is always stable, but never stagnant. She is not one woman. She is a thousand versions of herself, a multitude of layers, an infinite ocean whose depths you plumb over a lifetime, whose many treasures and intricacies, quirks and idiosyncrasies you need an entire marriage to explore.” His voice softens. “A man should be so lucky to spend his life stuck with one woman such as that. "
4 " By contrast, my wife at fifty-two yeas old seems to me just as attractive as the day I first met her. If I were to say this out loud, she would say, 'Douglas, that's just a line. No one prefers wrinkles, no one prefers grey.' To which I'd reply, 'But none of this is a surprise. I've been expecting to watch you grow older ever since we met. Why should it trouble me? It's the face itself that I love, not that face at twenty-eight or thirty-four or fourty-three. It's that face.'Perhaps she would have liked to hear this but I had never got around to saying it out loud. I had always presumed there would be time and now, sitting on the edge of the bed at four a.m., no longer listening out for burglars, it seemed that it might be too late. "
― David Nicholls , Us
5 " Grover spit expertly between his teeth. " You know, Nerburn," he said, " you're like those treaty negotiators we used to have to deal with. Always in a hurry. Sometimes there are preliminaries." " There are preliminaries and there are evasions," I said. " Look out there." I swept my hand across the blazing, parched horizon. " We've got to get moving if we want to get up there before it's a hundred and ten degrees." " Just relax. He's just doing it the Lakota way, by laying out the history. That's how we remember our history, by telling our story," " But does every story have to start with Columbus?" " Everything starts with Columbus. At least everything to do with white people." " But what's with the French fries?" " He likes to get rid of the salt." " No, the piles. First he insists on getting exactly twenty-eight, then he divides them into piles. It doesn't make any sense." A small smile crept across Grover's face. " How many piles?" he asked. " Four." He spit one more time onto the ground. It made a small puff of explosion in the dust. " Mmm. Twenty-eight French fries. Four piles of seven." He made a great charade of counting on his fingers. " Let's see. Four seasons. Four directions. Four stages of life. " Seven council fires. Seven sacred rituals. The moon lives for twenty-eight days. Yeah, I guess that doesn't make any sense." " That's crazy," I said. " What is it? Some kind of Lakota French fry rosary? "
6 " There's pathos in this familiar routine, in the sounds of homely objects touching surfaces. And in the little sigh she makes when she turns or slightly bends our unwieldy form. It's already clear to me how much of life is forgotten even as it happens. Most of it. The unregarded present spooling away from us, the soft tumble of unremarkable thoughts, the long-neglected miracle of existence. When she's no longer twenty-eight and pregnant and beautiful, or even free, she won't remember the way she set down the spoon and the sound it made on slate, the frock she wore today, the touch of her sandal's thong between her toes, the summer's warmth, the white noise of the city beyond the house walls, a short burst of birdsong by a closed window. All gone, already. "
― Ian McEwan , Nutshell
7 " Travel to CubaGenerally Tourist travel to Cuba is prohibited under U.S. law for U.S. citizens, permanent residents, and others subject to U.S. jurisdiction. The hard and fast rules have been relaxed some and exceptions are now made for certain travelers who can show an acceptable reason, to visit the Island Nation in which case a “Tourist Visa" is required and available. US Citizens must have a valid passport with two blank pages available, for entry and exit stamps, at the time of entry into Cuba.United States issued credit and debit cards do not work in Cuba so travelers should plan to bring enough cash with them to cover all the expenses they might incur during their trip. Authorized travelers to Cuba are subject to daily spending limits. See the Office of Foreign Assets Control page of the U.S. Department of the Treasury.The export of Cuban convertible pesos (CUC) is strictly prohibited, regardless of the amount. Travelers may only export the equivalent of $5000 in any currency other than the Cuban convertible peso (CUC). Anyone wishing to export more than this amount must demonstrate evidence that the currency was acquired legitimately from a Cuban bank.Cuba has many Hotels and Resort Areas, most of which are foreign owned; I counted 313 of them. Many are Canadian or European owned with Meliá Hotels International in the lead with twenty-eight hotels in Cuba alone. Being a Spanish hotel chain, it was founded in 1956 in Palma de Mallorca, Spain. The photo show the internationally known “Nacional Hotel.” Some Cruise Lines including Carnival now offer cruises to Cuba and advise guests as to the entry requirements. Follow Captain Hank Bracker, author of “The Exciting Story of Cuba” on Facebook, Goodreads and his Web Page as well as Twitter. His daily blogs and weekend commentaries are now being read by hundreds and frequrntly thousands of readers. Send suggestions and comments to PO Box 607 Elfers, FL 34680-0607. "
8 " I just made it official. I'm a twenty-eight year old married woman with a twenty-two year old boyfriend who lives twenty minutes from a husband he doesn't know exists. That God I started believing in a few minutes ago is sending me straight to Hell. "
― Chrissy Anderson , The Life List (The List Trilogy, #1)
9 " The 21st century has certainly seen the rape of women in wartime, but it has long been treated as an atrocious war crime, which most armies try to prevent and the rest deny and conceal. But for the heroes of the Iliad, female flesh was a legitimate spoil of war: women were to be enjoyed, monopolized, and disposed of at their pleasure. Menelaus launches the Trojan War when his wife, Helen, is abducted. Agamemnon brings disaster to the Greeks by refusing to return a sex slave to her father, and when he relents, he appropriates one belonging to Achilles, later compensating him with twenty-eight replacements. Achilles, for his part, offers this pithy description of his career: “I have spent many sleepless nights and bloody days in battle, fighting men for their women.”11 When Odysseus returns to his wife after twenty years away, he murders the men who courted her while everyone thought he was dead, and when he discovers that the men had consorted with the concubines of his household, he has his son execute the concubines too. "
― Steven Pinker , The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined
10 " I thought that teaching twenty-eight energetic and needy children how to read had to be the hardest job on earth. I was wrong - mothering was. Now I had to give up my right to sleep when I needed it, to a meal without interruptions, to relaxation when I wanted it, and most importantly, my right to withdraw when I felt overwhelmed. "
11 " The police, finding a corpse with twenty-eight stab wounds in a bathtub, suspected foul play. "
― Tim Kreider , We Learn Nothing
12 " Thirty days hath September April June and November All the rest have thirty-one Excepting February alone: Which hath but twenty-eight in fine Till leap year gives it twenty-nine. "