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It is not your imagination, she wrote on a third. Most people are awful.
She ended every show with her signature line: “Children, set the table. Your mother needs a moment to herself.”
dibenzoselenophene
while we may be born into families, it doesn’t necessarily mean we belong to them.”
It’s a lot easier to have faith in something you can’t see, can’t touch, can’t explain, and can’t change, rather than to have faith in something you actually can.” She sighed. “One’s self, I mean.”
“Every day is new,” Calvin repeated as if he were still that child.
This theory even had a scientific name: associative interference.
She was going to do something so revolutionary, so necessary, that her name—despite a never-ending legion of naysayers—would be immortalized.
@200° C/35 min = loss of one H2O per mol. sucrose; total 4 in 55 min = C24H36O18 she wrote in a notebook. “So that’s why the biscuit batter is off.”
“Now I’m disrupting the egg’s internal bonds in order to elongate the amino acid chain,” she told him as she whisked, “which will allow the freed atoms to bond with other similarly freed atoms. Then I’ll reconstitute the mix into a loose whole, laying it on a surface of iron-carbon alloy, where I’ll subject it to precision heat, continually agitating the mix until it reaches a stage of near coagulation.”
He hadn’t mentioned crabs yet. For obvious reasons.
First, Evans didn’t remember him—rude. Second, Evans appeared to have maintained his fitness—annoying. Third, Evans told Chemistry Today that he took the position, not based on Hastings’s sterling reputation, but because he liked the fucking weather.
Sure, grit was critical, but it also took luck, and if luck wasn’t available, then help. Everyone needed help. But maybe because she’d never been offered any, she refused to believe in it.
What a mess devotion was.
Humans were strange, Six-Thirty thought, the way they constantly battled dirt in their aboveground world, but after death willingly entombed themselves in it.
But when he couldn’t back up any of his assertions with meaningful scientific explanation, they realized they were in the presence of a scientific idiot.
Idiots make it into every company. They tend to interview well.
He’d once heard someone say it was important to be reminded of one’s failures, but he didn’t know why. Failures, by their very nature, had a way of being unforgettable.
“Your days are numbered. Use them to throw open the windows of your soul to the sun,” a quote from Marcus Aurelius, but the tombstone was small and the engraver had made the first part too big and had run out of room.
According to Elizabeth, boredom was what was wrong with education today.
Sometimes the creature extended a small fist, which he found thrilling; other times he heard singing. But yesterday he’d broken the news—There’s something you should know about your father—and it began to cry.
“I’m building a laboratory.” “You mean a nursery.” “I don’t.”
“Dog Mourns Master and Saves Man’s Life,” she read out loud. “Cemetery Dog Ban Lifted.”
Your days are nu
“Your days are nu,” she read. “Nu.” She flushed, thinking of the sad night Calvin had shared with her his childhood mantra. Every day. New.
In the 1950s, abortion was out of the question. Coincidentally, so was having a baby out of wedlock.
Ever since you brought your little Satan home, I’ve told myself, Go by and check on her.
“Children are sponges,” Elizabeth explained the previous week as Harriet chided her for reading aloud to Madeline from On the Origin of Species. “I’m not about to allow Mad to dry out early.”
“Who does? Being an adult is overrated, don’t you think?” he said. “Just as you solve one problem, ten more pull up.”
“You’d be surprised how much you can tell about a baby at this stage,” Mason was saying. “They constantly reveal their future selves in the smallest of ways.
Having a baby, Elizabeth realized, was a little like living with a visitor from a distant planet. There was a certain amount of give and take as the visitor learned your ways and you learned theirs, but gradually their ways faded and your ways stuck. Which she found regrettable. Because unlike adults, her visitor never tired of even the smallest discovery; always saw the magic in the ordinary.
“Harriet has never been in love,” she’d said out of the blue during dinner last week. “Six-Thirty still feels responsible,” she’d sighed at breakfast. “Dr. Mason is sick of vaginas,” she’d mentioned at bedtime.
“Humans need reassurance,” Wakely wrote back. “They need to know others survived the hard times. And, unlike other species, which do a better job of learning from their mistakes, humans require constant threats and reminders to be nice. You know how we say, ‘People never learn?’ It’s because they never do. But religious texts try to keep them on track.”
No one had to pray to Snow White or fear the wrath of Rumpelstiltskin to understand the message.
Walter didn’t like crass people. They made him feel prudish and self-conscious, as if he were the last remaining member of the Polite People, a now-extinct tribe best known for their decorum and good table manners.
afternoon. In TV, this is referred to as the Afternoon Depression Zone. Too late to get anything meaningful done; too early to go home.
Between the hours of one thirty-one and four forty-four p.m., productive life as we know it ceases to exist. It’s a virtual death zone.”
Study the lineup and you’ll see it’s true: from one thirty p.m. to five p.m., TV is stuffed with kid shows, soap operas, and game shows. Nothing that requires actual brain activity. And it’s all by design: because TV executives recognize that between these hours, people are half dead.”
They either wanted to control her, touch her, dominate her, silence her, correct her, or tell her what to do. She didn’t understand why they couldn’t just treat her as a fellow human being, as a colleague, a friend, an equal, or even a stranger on the street, someone to whom one is automatically respectful until you find out they’ve buried a bunch of bodies in the backyard.
“Men and women are both human beings. And as humans, we’re by-products of our upbringings, victims of our lackluster educational systems, and choosers of our behaviors. In short, the reduction of women to something less than men, and the elevation of men to something more than women, is not biological: it’s cultural. And it starts with two words: pink and blue. Everything skyrockets out of control from there.”
“I mean a fairy godmother. I think you have to be a bit magical to give money to people you don’t even know.”
They both talk about their lineage as if they have a pedigree, but they don’t. Your relatives can’t make you important or smart. They can’t make you you.”
Because quite often the past belongs only in the past.” “Why?” “Because the past is the only place it makes sense.”
His goal: to learn how the enemy camp explained creation so he could refute it. But after a year of chemistry, he found himself in deep water. Thanks to his newly acquired understanding of atoms, matter, elements, and molecules, he now struggled to believe God had created anything.
“Families aren’t meant to fit on trees. Maybe because people aren’t part of the plant kingdom—we’re part of the animal kingdom.”
No matter how often he tried to sell the endowment idea, potential donors could identify the fatal flaws right off the bat: “Scholarships?” they’d scoff. The boys home wasn’t really a school in the same way a prison isn’t really a place to rehabilitate—no one tries to get in.
“I don’t have hopes,” Mad explained, studying the address. “I have faith.” He looked at her in surprise. “Well, that’s a funny word to hear coming from you.” “How come?” “Because,” he said, “well, you know. Religion is based on faith.” “But you realize,” she said carefully, as if not to embarrass him further, “that faith isn’t based on religion. Right?”
“That’s why I wanted to use Supper at Six to teach chemistry. Because when women understand chemistry, they begin to understand how things work.” Roth looked confused. “I’m referring to atoms and molecules, Roth,” she explained. “The real rules that govern the physical world. When women understand these basic concepts, they can begin to see the false limits that have been created for them.” “You mean by men.” “I mean by artificial cultural and religious policies that put men in the highly unnatural role of single-sex leadership. Even a basic understanding of chemistry reveals the danger of
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I tend to think it humbles us—teaches us our place in the world.” “Really?” she said, surprised. “I think it lets us off the hook. I think it teaches us that nothing is really our fault; that something or someone else is pulling the strings; that ultimately, we’re not to blame for the way things are; that to improve things, we should pray. But the truth is, we are very much responsible for the badness in the world. And we have the power to fix it.” “But surely you’re not suggesting that humans can fix the universe.” “I’m speaking of fixing us, Mr. Roth—our mistakes. Nature works on a higher
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“I’m an atheist, Mr. Roth,” she said, sighing heavily. “Actually, a humanist. But I have to admit, some days the human race makes me sick.”
