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B Quotes

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All B Quotes

“But to fly is just like swimming. You do not forget easily. I have been on the ground for more than ten years. If I close my eyes, however, I can again feel the stick in my right hand, the throttle in my left, the rudder bar beneath my feet. I can sense the freedom and the cleanliness and all the things which a pilot knows.”

“But to fully understand this concept we must actually experience it. We almost always forget that our perception of what we call the physical world is a simulation and not “reality itself.” William Blake understood the concept that we create our own reality when he stated, “That which appears without, is within.” When I had my first LSD trip at the age of 16, among other things I realized that the brain entirely creates what we experience as reality. I realized it by experiencing it. Everything that we think is the external world is actually a neurological simulation fabricated out of complex chains of sensory signals by the human brain. On that psychedelic experience it appeared to me as though all of reality was composed of points or monads, and that our perception of reality is like those connect-the-dots games that we play as children. The possible ways of connecting the dots are far more varied than I had thought, and can be done in countless different ways.”

“But, to her ultimate surprise, a tight, aching heat bloomed low in her belly, starting in her womb and reaching for the shaft of branding heat plunging and retracting from inside her. Her lips parted of their own accord, and a small sound of delighted surprise escaped. Blackwell's eyes sharpened. Questioned. Farah's body answered without thought. A lift of her hips, a press of her thighs, and a soft moan of encouragement. It was all he needed. Blackwell didn't kiss or taste her. Instead he watched her face with an intensity that abashed her. Every flutter of her eyelid, or intake of breath, the way her lips parted or pressed together. His body again became a conduit of her gratification. It shocked her how he could support his heavy frame all this time on one powerful arm, but the thought dissipated as he used his other hand to explore her, rendering her mind useless and directing her awareness like a symphony conductor. He traced the line of her jaw, the curve of her cheekbones, as though committing her to memory, or visiting one, she couldn't be sure. As the slow pressure mounted, her moans became mewls, her mewls became cries. His finger drifted along the outline of her lips, slipping past her teeth and leaving the taste of sex on her tongue. Sex and leather. She closed her lips and rolled the glove between her tongue and the roof of her mouth, feeling the hard ridge of his fingers beneath. He hissed, growled, and pulled his hand away, drawing it down to her hip and gripping the curve of her ass, spreading her wider for his accelerating thrusts. Farah's head tossed against her pillow, her eyes rolling back into their sockets, retreating from sight, as her other overwhelmed senses demanded her attention. Leather and sex. Darkness. Spice. Chilly air. Hot Blood. Textiles. Smooth, slick flesh. Wide, hard male. A mouth on hers. A tongue thrusting inside, tasting the essence of her he'd left there, lapping at it.”

“But to look back from the stony plain along the road which led one to that place is not at all the same thing as walking on the road; the perspective to say the very least, changes only with the journey; only when the road has, all abruptly and treacherously, and with an absoluteness that permits no argument, turned or dropped or risen is one able to see all that one could not have seen from any other place.”

“But to me, what the Greeks knew and what these other ancient authors, I think, tapped into is something we’re only now finding words to articulate again, which is that betrayal is the wound that cuts the deepest. You can call it whatever you want, moral distress, moral injury, but really, it’s betrayal — feeling abandoned or betrayed, or betraying oneself and one’s sense of what’s right. And so we had respiratory therapists in some of our early performances during the pandemic, who were saying, “I have 20 patients on respirators in the public hospital in the Bronx, and there’s only me, and I’m left with the guilt of not being able to attend to them all.” That’s an impossible situation. So you call that person a hero, when they’re wrestling with their own sense of betraying their own standards of care and being betrayed by the system that put them in that position, and it could actually hurt them.”

“But to measure cause and effect... you must ensure that a simple correlation, however tempting it may be, is not mistaken for a cause. In the 1990s the stork population of Germany increased and the German at-home birth rate rose as well. Shall we credit storks for airlifting the babies?”

“But to paraphrase Henry Drummond in Inherit the Wind, ignorance and mediocrity are forever busy, and the forces of mediocrity aren't content with being mediocre; they'll do everything in their power to prevent even the humblest of teachers and children from accomplishing anything extraordinary. For good work shines a light on the failures of the mediocre, and that is a light which terrifies those who conspire to keep our nation's children, like themselves, ordinary.”

“But to procrastinate and prevaricate simply because you're afraid of erring, when others - I mean our brethren in Germany - must make infinitely more difficult decisions every day, seems to me almost to run counter to love. To delay or fail to make decisions may be more sinful than to make wrong decisions out of faith and love.”

“But to read all Scripture narratives as if they were eye-witness reports in a modern newspaper, and to ignore the poetic and imaginative form in which they are sometimes couched, would be no less a violation of the canons of evangelical literalism than the allegorizing of the Scholastics was.”