#The Orange River Sovereignty

[yarpiebrit]

Stealing Republics, gold, diamonds and other myths!

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#Alfred Milner #Cecil John Rhodes #Jan Smuts #Louis Botha #Paul Kruger #the 1st Anglo-Boer War #The 2nd Anglo-Boer War #The Battle of Majuba #The Boer War #The Jameson Raid #The Orange River Sovereignty #The South African Republic #The South African Union #The South African War

[catkittens]

Glyn Frewer: Tyto and Brila

The following dusk Tyto glided from the pines, eager for food. His flight had used a lot of energy and he was ravenous. He had not reached the foot of the hill before he heard the challenging cry of another male barn owl. Startled, Tyto turned towards the sound. Never in the previous time he had spent in the area had his sovereignty been put to the test by another of his species. Tyto swept around the hill with his facial disc feathers puffed out to give him his most fearsome look. As he rounded the fir trees in the half light, a barn owl crossed the gap on the hillside. Tyto veered towards it, then turned and circled, puzzled. The owl was a female and not the owl that had voiced the challenge. This put the situation in a different light. Far from sovereign of the area, Tyto was the trespasser, for a pair of his own kind had settled here. Tyto glided towards the tree where he could see the female perched. She far, he had not glimpsed the male.

The female was a yearling like himself, with prominent dark flecks on her breast feathers giving her a speckled look more like that of a tawny owl. Her head swivelled to look at him, her eyes luminescent in the shadow. Tyto flew to the branch above her and her head flexed around so that she was looking directly behind her. Tyto's grunts were answered by a soft mewing that sent a strange, unfamiliar tremble through his body. In that second of time, Tyto's maleness asserted itself in every cell of his body, and his purpose in life was never again that of a young owl seeking only to hunt and survive.

When the challenging cry of the male rang through the pine-black shadows, it was a different Tyto who screeched his answer. No longer trespasser, no longer immature, no longer undecided, Tyto flew out to combat for a mate as well as territory.

*  *  *  * 

The two owls knew each other instantly. Tyto recognized the bright orange facial colouring and the thick tarsal tufts of the owl he had fought on the boathouse roof. And Gar recognized the young owl he had already chased and dismissed. With a confident screech, he swept towards Tyto, eager to repeat his earlier success. 

The initial confrontation was a testing. Both birds, now well matched in size, flew headlong on a straight collision course, stalling within inches of each other at the last split second so that only their wing tips met. But the second stoop was in deadly earnest, and they collided in mid-air, judging the impact to a nicety, each seeking with claw and beak to injure the other. The air was filled with the thudding of wing-beats, harsh angry cries and a storm-burst of feathers. Locked in combat, the two birds tumbled over and over in the night air down to the long wet grass where they rolled and squawked, stabbed and scratched, sending up a spray of silver dew.

Then, as suddenly as the fight began, it was over. Tyto's flailing claw found a hold on the flank of his enemy and Gar's skin was lacerated deeply. Letting out a croak of pain  and chattering with rage and defeat, Gar broke free of Tyto and, blood running down his leg, the older owl beat a hasty retreat over the field. Relentlessly Tyto pursued him, but his aerial buffeting was mocking more than damaging. Behind him, a silent witness to the rout, the female, Brila, flew on a wavering course, anxious to keep both owls within sight and sound.

The river was the natural boundary. Gar, diving and swooping to avoid Tyto's stronger pursuit, flew low over the rushes seeking cover under the hanging willows on the far bank. With a final sharp screech of victory, Tyto turned away and winged slowly back to the shelling Brila. When he reached her he acknowledged her with a low cry, then both birds returned to the pines. Tyto landed heavily, exhausted but unhurt, while Brila swooped below the tree to snatch an incautious shrew. She took it to the next tree and devour it.

For two hours Tyto did not move, except to preen his ruffled feathers. Then his hunger drove him out again across the field. The sight of the river earlier had sparked a memory of successful hunting, and he headed there again, registering familiar landmarks. He reached the willows and the reeds. There was no sign of Gar. Two male water voles squeaked in angry combat as they fought, writhing in the water-filled cattle hoofprints on the mud-bank. Tyto dived and lifted both animals in his talons. One, struggling, fell back into midstream, where it dived immediately. Tyto landed on the water tower and smashed the skull of the other with his beak. He swallowed it partially and sat with the tail limp from his mouth. Minutes later, it was gone. A lift of his wings and he was off again, sealing the fate of a field mouse at the foot of the tower.

Long before dawn, Tyto's hunger was appeased. His last catch, a young rabbit, was left half eaten in the lane. Brila had already returned to the roost in the water tower which she had shared for several nights with Gar. Although the two had shared, the season had not been ripe, the winter cold too recent, for Brila to have responded to Gar's half-hearted attempts at courtship. No doubt, if Tyto's arrival had not disturbed things, she and Gar would have mated.

For Brila and Tyto, the mating urge which grew stronger as the spring nights passed was outside their experience. Both birds being young, their courtship owed nothing to mimicry or imitation of their elders. The unfamiliar urgings awakenings in Tyto were from the dawn of Time. Through him, Nature took its course, haltingly experimental, unhelped by confidence.

His awkward posturings whenever he approached Brila were rebuffed with sharp pecks, and her feathers rose aggressively. Yet Tyto would not accept these signs of antagonism from her as he would have done from any other barn owl. When on one occasion he approached her and she retaliated by fluttering and sparring with her talons, he did not retreat. Instead, he responded by acting aggressively himself. lowering his head, dilating his facial feathers and thrusting at her with his bill. Since Brila was an inch or so bigger than he was, he would have come off badly had a real combat developed, but apart from angry clacking of her mandibles as she parried his thrusts, the hen bird made no attempt to attack.

The two owls shared several roosts, sometimes the tower, sometimes the hole Tyto had used before in the dead Scots pine, and one very warm night they roosted in the canopy of ivy in the fork of a giant elm. Each night they quartered the countryside within a two-mile radius. There was no need to seek further since the food supply was plentiful. Gradually, it seemed to Tyto that Brila's rejection of his attention was becoming less determined.

Tyto persevered in his immature courtship. In the peak of condition, he was handsome, though his first real adult molt was yet to come. His breast, exceptionally pale even as a fledgling, was now snowy white with none of the usual buff shading. His wings and back, amber-yellow shaded with ash grey, were flecked with a striking pattern of brown and white markings. His broken pinion feather had fallen away, soon to be replaced by a perfect one, but the small dislocation would be with him for life and the gap was still there between the feathers. The broad soft feathers of his tail were again more white than yellow, barred with tawny brown. Grey and yellow featherlets formed a heart shape around the startlingly white down of his face, and his black eyes contrasted dramatically. He spent more time preening now, and was clearly conscious of his fine appearance, for his posturing in front of Brila took on a swagger of natural pride.

Brila, in contrast, was by nature less handsome. She was bigger than Tyto, but her plumage lacked the sheen of her male suitor. The whiteness was much less apparent, and her pale cram breast was edged by noticeable black flecks. Her back and wings were deeper in colour, too, a rich buff with darker grey. To Tyto she was everything desirable, but already he had noticed her strange hunched posture and the fits of violent trembling to which she was subject.

Then on a night when the air was rich with the scent of pine and insects danced in frenetic clouds over field and river, the youthful courtship took another turn.

The quarter moon had risen when Tyto returned to the pine with a water vole in his bill. Brila was in the hole, huddled and silent. She gave a low cry as Tyto arrived. Tyto approached her step by step, and his  time she made no move of rejection. Motionless, she waiting until Tyto was beside her. His head made quick bowing motions and he shook himself, ruffling his feathers. He turned his face and rubbed it against the side of her head. She responded, bowing with him so that their faces stayed pressed together. Brila made a halfhearted peck at the vole but did not take it. Side by side, they sat uttering low cries, Tyto still with the vole in his beak. Then he stepped away, deposited the carcass on the branch outside and flew off, renewing the hunt.

The next night, Tyto repeated the performance, this time with no offering. Again Brila responded, snapping her bill and uttering a bubbling, chattering sound. Tyto, too, clicked his beak while he stretched his neck up and down as though trying hard to swallow. Both birds ruffled out their feathers as if putting on a display of aggression, and when Tyto began to sway his whole body from side to side, Brila followed suit. Now she was the one to edge closer to Tyto and the clacking sound turned into a churring snore. As on the previous night, the rubbed their heads, together, lowering and rising themselves while clicking their bills. Finally, Tyto did something he had not done before: he stretched forward and seized Brila by her neck feathers, shaking her from side to side. A loud squawk from the hen owl softened quickly to a chatter of acceptance. Well pleased with his reception, Tyto released her and the two birds stayed together. When Tyto stretched out his wings to fly, Brila followed immediately and the two soared over the pines, scattering the midges, their shadows freezing the shrew foraging among the pine needles into petrified immobility.

Five nights later, as the fierce March gale blew itself out, Brila flew back from the river after an unsuccessful foray and settled in the tower roost. Tyto followed minutes later with a filed vole in his claws. He flew into the crevice where she was waiting. For the eighth night in succession, Tyto repeated his ritual display. Tonight he added something new. He raised and ruffled his feathers, then compressed them again, repeating this many times. His manner too, was more aggressive, just as Brila's was more submissive. When he stretched to rub heads, she took the vole from his beak. Pinning it with a claw she began to devour it. Suddenly, after loud bill clapping, Tyto seized her neck feathers and shoo her as though savaging a prey. When he released her, Brila raised and lowered herself, uttering soft plaintive calls. She was begging Tyto to mount her, and Tyto did so. For several seconds the confined space echoed with the loud beat of mewing, in total submission as the two owls attempted to couple. But the coupling, doomed before it started, failed not only because of immaturity. There was a more deadly reason.

When Tyto stumblingly dismounted, he immediately began to preen his ruffled feathers as though nothing had happened. Brila's behaviour was the opposite. She stretched her neck and preened Tyto's head feathers with her bill. Pressed side to side, the two owls mutually groomed each other, uttering soft cries. Tyto departed only because Brila was overtaken by a violent fit of trembling. Tyto always left her when she suffered these attacks, as though he could tell there was nothing he could do. Brila was slowly dying of poison.

Brila had been born in a cow shed, eight miles north of Merford. The shed was on the land of a farmer who had taken every possible precaution to safeguard his crops and his livelihood. He had liberally dressed the seed with dieldrin before the spring sowing, and when the crops were through, he had sprayed them with a solution containing DDT. Insect pests on his farm, the farmer intended, would never stand a chance. Unwittingly, he was meting out destruction to more than insects.

A small proportion of the spring seed was eaten by the usual seed-eaters, birds and rodents alike; the ground-feeders flocked, sparrows, chaffinches, greenfinches, linnets and pigeons; mice and voles scratched their way to some of the grain. Small quantities of poison went into the bodies of all these creatures. But when the young green shoots showed their heads and the crop spray was applied, much more damage was done. This deadlier poison, though it dispersed gradually in the soil, stayed as a protective coat on the plants. Every bud swallowed by the birds and rodents had poison still on it, a poison that stayed a very long time in all living tissue, scarcely dispersing at all. Every meal, every grain, added one more minute dose of poison to the amount already built up in their systems. To some it brought death, but to most of  them it simply slowed their reactions so that they were the first to fall prey to the hawks and the owls. Poisoned rodents and birds, by the  score night after night, week after week, were fed to Brila and her sister chick. The parent owls themselves were doomed to sterility and death. Now, a year later, the poison absorbed by Brila had spread throughout her body, finally reaching her  brain, causing increasing convulsions. 

*  *  *  *

Once the attempt at mating had taken place, Brila's earlier suspicion of Tyto vanished on the night wind and mutual affection grew up between them. The ensuing two weeks were spent in nights of easy hunting and days of companionship and trust. Often now, as the soft rains heralded the approach of April, Tyto would return to Brila in the water tower with an offering of food--sometimes a water vole, a shrew, a mouse, a frong, even once a young grey squirrel. And Brila accepted everything eagerly, devouring it and mewing for me. She made hunting forays of her own less and less now and stayed huddled and disconsolate in the roost.

During the day, Tyto would sit close to Brila and they would groom each other with much bill-clapping and soft calls. Brila's bouts of shivering occurred more frequently and more severely. Sometimes she seemed to lose her balance and staggered, other times her whole body would shake in a spasm of pain.

There was one dawn, however, when their troubles were forgotten. Tyto returned from devouring a newly hatched coot he had discovered in the reeds to find Brila clucking in the corner of  the crevice with unfamiliar excitement. Her first egg was laid. She nodded rapidly, drawing Tyto's attention to it, a small white sphere, sterile in any event, but now smashed beneath her tail where she had dropped it. The poison in Brila's system had caused an abnormality to the calcium formation of the eggshell so that it was paper-thin- With the yellow yolk of the life that ws never to be spreading beneath her feet, Brila chittered proudly while Tyto hopped to and fro in excited satisfaction at the greatest feeling of fulfilment he had ever known.

For a night and another day, the two birds cherished the pathetic white object beneath the shivering, dull-eyed Brila. She laid a second egg, but this ws  even thinner-shelled and broke on emerging. Even Brila took no pride in this, for she clawed the mess away with desultory scratching. In doing so, she utterly crushed the first egg, and now the situation was apparent to both birds.

That night, the two owls left the nest and the broken remains, though neither bird felt any strong inclination to hunt. That part of Tyto which had been so completely fulfilled was now empty and frustrated. As he listlessly scoured the edge of the wood, it was as though he was hunting from habit more than the need to survive. Eventually, a snuffling shrew crossed a bare patch of ground and was snatched, killed and eaten in seconds.

Brila, too, caught a shrew, then a field vole, but this she left of the branch where she took it. Crying plaintively, she flew to where Tyto was quartering  the filed and followed him. 

For the next week the two birds went through the motions of their natural routine, roosting by day, hunting by night, in a lacklustre and benumbed fashion. But as spring turned into summer, and the drawn-out evenings proffered plump pickings from the season's crop of new-grown creatures, the two owls responded to Nature's reassuring mood. At least, Tyto responded. Brila, whose shivering bouts had increased in spite of her recent renewal of appetite, began to get worse. In July, the birds tried mating again but Brila, in spite of Tyto's elaborate overtures, this time did not respond. She rejected him savagely, her instinct telling her she would never brood another clutch of eggs, and Tyto quickly dropped his attentions. As the summer wore on, she hunted less, until by August she was eating only the offerings that Tyto brought to her. Day by day Brila grew weaker, barely eating at all.

Towards the end of July, both birds went into the moult which owls and most birds undergo once the breeding season is over. The once-bright feathers,, which had become worn and bedraggled from the ardours of raising their broods, needed replacing with new. In Tyto's case, true to his kind, the feathers fell in regular sequence over the next three weeks, his large wing feathers going first, not pushed out by the new growths as with some birds, but dropping like dead hair as fresh plumes grew alongside. At the same time as his wing feathers changed, so did his tail, the outside feathers falling first, the others going in sequence to the centre until all the old had been replaced. Next, from rump to head, his body feathers dropped as new ones appeared. Bedraggled and half-plucked in appearance, Tyto's spirits were low during his time, and he spent the long days hunched unhappily and the nights embarrassed by his own imperfect flight.

The moult took even more out of Brila, weakened as she already was. For days she had not even eaten the prey that Tyto brought her. On a night in early September, when the first wisps of autumn drifted from the river at dusk, Brila did something she had not done for weeks. When Tyto flew from the tower to hung, she followed at once, as though she knew that this night would be different. Taking off from the ledge, she spiralled almost to the ground before she could coordinate her muscles. Only at the last split second did she stall above the grass and soar in pursuit of Tyto's white form. 

Tyto reached the river and found his favourite reed bed. Brila stopped, exhausted, in the willow. She perched on a branch above the flowing streat, her breath a hoarse croak in her throat. As Tyto swooped at--and missed--a diving water vole, a severe convulsion  shook the whole of Brila's body. She died as she sat there, toppling slowly as her talons loosened their grip. Her fluttering form fell into the water. Tyto, thinking it another vole diving for its life, did not even turn his head. He never saw the sodden bundle of feathers swirl past the reeds and out of his life. Instead, his keen eyes stayed riveted on a young rabbit in the middle of the field and he winged silently to it. S scream, a second's frenzied kicking and the white wings rose and beat their way back to the tower.

There was no answering cry as he landed. Leaving the rabbin on the ledge outside, for it had been intended as a gift, Tyto called softly. He rose and circled the pines, then flew back to the river. Up and down, the white shape, now silver in the moon's light, now black against the stars, quartered the riverbanks for a mile each way. Back and forth to the silent tower, only the distant yap of a fox mocked his calls. He returned to the willow where the leaves whispered in secret, and across the black rippling water his screech echoed like a soul in torment.

[nellygwyn]

BOOK RECS

Okay, so lots of people wanted this and so, I am compiling a list of my favourite books (both fiction and non-fiction), books that I recommend you read as soon as humanly possible. In the meantime, I’ll be pinning this post to the top of my blog (once I work out how to do that lmao) so it will be accessible for old and new followers. I’m going to order this list thematically, I think, just to keep everything tidy and orderly. Of course, a lot of this list will consist of historical fiction and historical non-fiction because that’s what I read primarily and thus, that’s where my bias is, but I promise to try and spice it up just a little bit. 

Favourite fiction books of all time:

The Mermaid and Mrs Hancock // Imogen Hermes Gowar

Sense and Sensibility // Jane Austen

Slammerkin // Emma Donoghue 

Remarkable Creatures // Tracy Chevalier

Life Mask // Emma Donoghue

His Dark Materials // Philip Pullman (this includes the follow-up series The Book of Dust)

Emma // Jane Austen

The Miniaturist // Jessie Burton

Girl, Woman, Other // Bernadine Evaristo 

Jane Eyre // Charlotte Brontë

Persuasion // Jane Austen

Girl with a Pearl Earring // Tracy Chevalier

The Silent Companions // Laura Purcell

Tess of the d’Urbervilles // Thomas Hardy

Northanger Abbey // Jane Austen

The Chronicles of Narnia // C.S. Lewis

Pride and Prejudice // Jane Austen

Goodnight, Mr Tom // Michelle Magorian

The French Lieutenant’s Woman // John Fowles 

The Butcher’s Hook // Janet Ellis 

Mansfield Park // Jane Austen

The All Souls Trilogy // Deborah Harkness

The Railway Children // Edith Nesbit

Favourite non-fiction books of all time

Catherine the Great: Portrait of a Woman // Robert Massie

Love and Louis XIV: The Women in the Life of the Sun King // Antonia Fraser

Madame de Pompadour // Nancy Mitford

The First Iron Lady: A Life of Caroline of Ansbach // Matthew Dennison 

Black and British: A Forgotten History // David Olusoga

Courtiers: The Secret History of the Georgian Court // Lucy Worsley 

Young and Damned and Fair: The Life of Katherine Howard, the Fifth Wife of Henry VIII // Gareth Russell

King Charles II // Antonia Fraser

Casanova’s Women // Judith Summers

Marie Antoinette: The Journey // Antonia Fraser

Mrs. Jordan’s Profession: The Story of a Great Actress and a Future King // Claire Tomalin

Jane Austen at Home // Lucy Worsley

Mudlarking: Lost and Found on the River Thames // Lara Maiklem

The Last Royal Rebel: The Life and Death of James, Duke of Monmouth // Anna Keay

The Marlboroughs: John and Sarah Churchill // Christopher Hibbert

Nell Gwynn: A Biography // Charles Beauclerk

Jurassic Mary: Mary Anning and the Primeval Monsters // Patricia Pierce

Georgian London: Into the Streets // Lucy Inglis

The Prince Who Would Be King: The Life and Death of Henry Stuart // Sarah Fraser

Wedlock: How Georgian Britain’s Worst Husband Met His Match // Wendy Moore

Dead Famous: An Unexpected History of Celebrity from the Stone Age to the Silver Screen // Greg Jenner

Victorians Undone: Tales of the Flesh in the Age of Decorum // Kathryn Hughes

Crown of Blood: The Deadly Inheritance of Lady Jane Grey // Nicola Tallis

Favourite books about the history of sex and/or sex work

The Origins of Sex: A History of First Sexual Revolution // Faramerz Dabhoiwala 

Erotic Exchanges: The World of Elite Prostitution in Eighteenth-Century Paris // Nina Kushner

Peg Plunkett: Memoirs of a Whore // Julie Peakman

Courtesans // Katie Hickman

The Other Victorians: A Study of Sexuality and Pornography in mid-Nineteenth Century England

Madams, Bawds, and Brothel Keepers // Fergus Linnane

The Secret History of Georgian London: How the Wages of Sin Shaped the Capital // Dan Cruickshank 

A Curious History of Sex // Kate Lister

Sex and Punishment: 4000 Years of Judging Desire // Eric Berkowitz

Queen of the Courtesans: Fanny Murray // Barbara White

Rent Boys: A History from Ancient Times to Present // Michael Hone

Celeste // Roland Perry

Sex and the Gender Revolution // Randolph Trumbach

The Pleasure’s All Mine: A History of Perverse Sex // Julie Peakman

LGBT+ fiction I love*

The Confessions of the Fox // Jordy Rosenberg 

As Meat Loves Salt // Maria Mccann

Bone China // Laura Purcell

Brideshead Revisited // Evelyn Waugh

The Confessions of Frannie Langton // Sara Collins

The Intoxicating Mr Lavelle // Neil Blackmore

Orlando // Virginia Woolf

Tipping the Velvet // Sarah Waters

She Rises // Kate Worsley

The Mercies // Kiran Millwood Hargrave

Oranges are Not the Only Fruit // Jeanette Winterson

Maurice // E.M Forster

Frankisstein: A Love Story // Jeanette Winterson

If I Was Your Girl // Meredith Russo 

The Well of Loneliness // Radclyffe Hall 

* fyi, Life Mask and Girl, Woman, Other are also LGBT+ fiction

Classics I haven’t already mentioned (including children’s classics)

Far From the Madding Crowd // Thomas Hardy 

I Capture the Castle // Dodie Smith 

Vanity Fair // William Makepeace Thackeray 

Wuthering Heights // Emily Brontë

The Blazing World // Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle

Murder on the Orient Express // Agatha Christie 

Great Expectations // Charles Dickens

North and South // Elizabeth Gaskell

Evelina // Frances Burney

Death on the Nile // Agatha Christie

The Monk // Matthew Lewis

Frankenstein // Mary Shelley

Vilette // Charlotte Brontë

The Mayor of Casterbridge // Thomas Hardy

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall // Anne Brontë

Vile Bodies // Evelyn Waugh

Beloved // Toni Morrison 

The Murder of Roger Ackroyd // Agatha Christie

The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling // Henry Fielding

A Room With a View // E.M. Forster

Silas Marner // George Eliot 

Jude the Obscure // Thomas Hardy

My Man Jeeves // P.G. Wodehouse

Lady Audley’s Secret // Mary Elizabeth Braddon

Middlemarch // George Eliot

Little Women // Louisa May Alcott

Children of the New Forest // Frederick Marryat

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings // Maya Angelou 

Rebecca // Daphne du Maurier

Alice in Wonderland // Lewis Carroll

The Wind in the Willows // Kenneth Grahame

Anna Karenina // Leo Tolstoy

Howard’s End // E.M. Forster

The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 3/4 // Sue Townsend

Even more fiction recommendations

The Darling Strumpet // Gillian Bagwell

The Wolf Hall trilogy // Hilary Mantel

The Illumination of Ursula Flight // Anne-Marie Crowhurst

Queenie // Candace Carty-Williams

Forever Amber // Kathleen Winsor

The Corset // Laura Purcell

Love in Colour // Bolu Babalola

Artemisia // Alexandra Lapierre

Blackberry and Wild Rose // Sonia Velton

The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories // Angela Carter

The Languedoc trilogy // Kate Mosse

Longbourn // Jo Baker

A Skinful of Shadows // Frances Hardinge

The Black Moth // Georgette Heyer

The Far Pavilions // M.M Kaye

The Essex Serpent // Sarah Perry

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo // Taylor Jenkins Reid

Cavalier Queen // Fiona Mountain 

The Winter Palace // Eva Stachniak

Friday’s Child // Georgette Heyer

Falling Angels // Tracy Chevalier

Little // Edward Carey

Chocolat // Joanne Harris 

The Watchmaker of Filigree Street // Natasha Pulley 

My Sister, the Serial Killer // Oyinkan Braithwaite

The Convenient Marriage // Georgette Heyer

Katie Mulholland // Catherine Cookson

Restoration // Rose Tremain

Meat Market // Juno Dawson

Lady on the Coin // Margaret Campbell Bowes

In the Company of the Courtesan // Sarah Dunant

The Crimson Petal and the White // Michel Faber

A Place of Greater Safety // Hilary Mantel 

The Little Shop of Found Things // Paula Brackston

The Improbability of Love // Hannah Rothschild

The Murder Most Unladylike series // Robin Stevens

Dark Angels // Karleen Koen

The Words in My Hand // Guinevere Glasfurd

Time’s Convert // Deborah Harkness

The Collector // John Fowles

Vivaldi’s Virgins // Barbara Quick

The Foundling // Stacey Halls

The Phantom Tree // Nicola Cornick

The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle // Stuart Turton

Golden Hill // Francis Spufford

Assorted non-fiction not yet mentioned

The Dinosaur Hunters: A True Story of Scientific Rivalry and the Discovery of the Prehistoric World // Deborah Cadbury

The Beauty and the Terror: An Alternative History to the Italian Renaissance // Catherine Fletcher

All the King's Women: Love, Sex, and Politics in the life of Charles II // Derek Jackson

Mozart’s Women // Jane Glover

Scandalous Liaisons: Charles II and His Court // R.E. Pritchard

Matilda: Queen, Empress, Warrior // Catherine Hanley 

Black Tudors // Miranda Kaufman 

To Catch a King: Charles II's Great Escape // Charles Spencer

1666: Plague, War and Hellfire // Rebecca Rideal

Henrietta Maria: Charles I's Indomitable Queen // Alison Plowden

Catherine of Braganza: Charles II's Restoration Queen // Sarah-Beth Watkins

Four Sisters: The Lost Lives of the Romanov Grand Duchesses // Helen Rappaport

Aristocrats: Caroline, Emily, Louisa and Sarah Lennox, 1740-1832 // Stella Tillyard 

The Fortunes of Francis Barber: The True Story of the Jamaican Slave who Became Samuel Johnson’s Heir // Michael Bundock

Black London: Life Before Emancipation // Gretchen Gerzina

In These Times: Living in Britain Through Napoleon’s Wars, 1793-1815

The King’s Mistress: Scandal, Intrigue and the True Story of the Woman who Stole the Heart of George I // Claudia Gold

Perdita: The Life of Mary Robinson // Paula Byrne

The Gentleman’s Daughter: Women’s Lives in Georgian England // Amanda Vickery

Terms and Conditions: Life in Girls’ Boarding School, 1939-1979 // Ysenda Maxtone Graham 

Fanny Burney: A Biography // Claire Harman

Aphra Behn: A Secret Life // Janet Todd

The Imperial Harem: Women and the Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire // Leslie Peirce

The Fall of the House of Byron // Emily Brand

The Favourite: Sarah, Duchess of Marlborough // Ophelia Field

Night-Walking: A Nocturnal History of London // Matthew Beaumont, Will Self

Jane Austen: A Life // Claire Tomalin

Beloved Emma: The Life of Emma, Lady Hamilton // Flora Fraser

Sentimental Murder: Love and Madness in the 18th Century // John Brewer

Henrietta Howard: King’s Mistress, Queen’s Servant // Tracy Borman

City of Beasts: How Animals Shaped Georgian London // Tom Almeroth-Williams

Queen Anne: The Politics of Passion // Anne Somerset 

Charlotte Brontë: A Life // Claire Harman 

Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe // Anthony Summers

Queer City: Gay London from the Romans to the Present Day // Peter Ackroyd 

Elizabeth I and Her Circle // Susan Doran

African Europeans: An Untold History // Olivette Otele 

Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron, and Other Tangled Lives // Daisy Hay

How to Create the Perfect Wife // Wendy Moore

The Sphinx: The Life of Gladys Deacon, Duchess of Marlborough // Hugo Vickers

The Life and Death of Anne Boleyn // Eric Ives

Dancing in the Streets: A History of Collective Joy // Barbara Ehrenreich

A is for Arsenic: The Poisons of Agatha Christie // Kathryn Harkup 

Mistresses: Sex and Scandal at the Court of Charles II // Linda Porter

Female Husbands: A Trans History // Jen Manion

Ladies in Waiting: From the Tudors to the Present Day // Anne Somerset

Ghostland: In Search of a Haunted Country // Edward Parnell 

A Cheesemonger’s History of the British Isles // Ned Palmer

The Butchering Art: Joseph Lister’s Quest to Transform the Grisly World of Victorian Medicine // Lindsey Fitzharris

Medieval Woman: Village Life in the Middle Ages // Ann Baer

The Husband Hunters: Social Climbing in London and New York // Anne de Courcy

The Voices of Nîmes: Women, Sex, and Marriage in Reformation Languedoc // Suzannah Lipscomb

The Daughters of the Winter Queen // Nancy Goldstone

Mad and Bad: Real Heroines of the Regency // Bea Koch

Bess of Hardwick // Mary S. Lovell

The Royal Art of Poison // Eleanor Herman 

The Strangest Family: The Private Lives of George III, Queen Charlotte, and the Hanoverians // Janice Hadlow

Palaces of Pleasure: From Music Halls to the Seaside to Football; How the Victorians Invented Mass Entertainment // Lee Jackson

Favourite books about current social/political issues (?? for lack of a better term)

Feminism, Interrupted: Disrupting Power // Lola Olufemi

Revolting Prostitutes: The Fight for Sex Worker Rights // Molly Smith, Juno Mac

Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race // Reni Eddo-Lodge

Trans Britain: Our Journey from the Shadows // Christine Burns

Me, Not You: The Trouble with Mainstream Feminism // Alison Phipps

Trans Like Me: A Journey For All Of Us // C.N Lester

Brit(Ish): On Race, Identity, and Belonging // Afua Hirsch 

The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence, and Cultural Restitution // Dan Hicks

Things No One Will Tell Fat Girls: A Handbook for Unapologetic Living // Jes M. Baker

Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women White Feminists Forgot // Mikki Kendall

Denial: Holocaust History on Trial // Deborah Lipstadt

Yes Means Yes: Visions of Female Sexual Power and a World Without Rape // Jessica Valenti, Jaclyn Friedman

Don’t Touch My Hair // Emma Dabiri

Sister Outsider // Audre Lorde 

Unicorn: The Memoir of a Muslim Drag Queen // Amrou Al-Kadhi

Trans Power // Juno Roche

Breathe: A Letter to My Sons // Imani Perry

The Windrush Betrayal: Exposing the Hostile Environment // Amelia Gentleman

Happy Fat: Taking Up Space in a World That Wants to Shrink You // Sofie Hagen

Diaries, memoirs & letters

The Diary of a Young Girl // Anne Frank

Renia’s Diary: A Young Girl’s Life in the Shadow of the Holocaust // Renia Spiegel 

Writing Home // Alan Bennett

The Diary of Samuel Pepys // Samuel Pepys

Histoire de Ma Vie // Giacomo Casanova

Toast: The Story of a Boy’s Hunger // Nigel Slater

London Journal, 1762-1763 // James Boswell

The Diary of a Bookseller // Shaun Blythell 

Jane Austen’s Letters // edited by Deidre la Faye

H is for Hawk // Helen Mcdonald 

The Salt Path // Raynor Winn

The Glitter and the Gold // Consuelo Vanderbilt, Duchess of Marlborough

Journals and Letters // Fanny Burney

Educated // Tara Westover

Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading // Lucy Mangan

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? // Jeanette Winterson

A Dutiful Boy // Mohsin Zaidi

Secrets and Lies: The Trials of Christine Keeler // Christine Keeler

800 Years of Women’s Letters // edited by Olga Kenyon

Istanbul // Orhan Pamuk

Henry and June // Anaïs Nin

Historical romance (this is a short list because I’m still fairly new to this genre)

The Bridgerton series // Julia Quinn

One Good Earl Deserves a Lover // Sarah Mclean

Nine Rules to Break When Romancing a Rake // Sarah Mclean

The Lady’s Guide to Celestial Mechanics // Olivia Waite

That Could Be Enough // Alyssa Cole

Unveiled // Courtney Milan

The Craft of Love // EE Ottoman

The Maiden Lane series // Elizabeth Hoyt

An Extraordinary Union // Alyssa Cole

Slightly Dangerous // Mary Balogh

Dangerous Alliance: An Austentacious Romance // Jennieke Cohen

A Fashionable Indulgence // KJ Charles

#the only categories not on here are plays and poetry #just bc this post would be even longer! #you can ask me for my favourite playwrights/poets separately tho

[ottomanladies]

Is it true that Suleiman wrote poems under the name Muhibbi? Did he write any for Hurrem or his children or other people? Is there a diwan of it? Was it common for Sultans to write poetry? Were concubines or daughters educated like that- to compose poetry or play instruments?

I don't want to sound rude but if you google Muhibbi Süleyman the Magnificent comes up. And it seems to me that if you know what a divan is, then you also know the answer to your own questions (and if you don't: I assure you the first google result of "Suleyman the Magnificent poet" is a link to buy a selection of his works). Lastly, this is a blog about women and I am contemplating whether to stop answering asks about men or not.

In any case 

Süleyman was a great poet, as Talat S. Helman says:

Divan poetry, as the Turkish elite poetry that was influenced by Arabic and Persian literature is often called, found favor at the court and at the coffeehouse, satisfying the aesthetic needs of both the elite and the man in the street. Significantly, two-thirds of the sultans were poets—some, in particular Mehmed “the Conqueror” (1432–81) and Süleyman the Magnificent (1494–1566), were first rate.

His poems were mostly about love: 

Kanuni Süleyman (better known in the West as Süleyman the Magnificent), like many other sultan-poets, including Selim I, Ahmed I, Mustafa III, and Selim III, denigrated worldly power, choosing to glorify the supremacy of love: What they call reigning is nothing but worldly quarrel; There is no greater throne on the earth than the love of God

The one he penned for Hürrem is quite famous (and was sent to her as a letter):

My very own queen, my everything, my beloved, my bright moon; My intimate companion, my one and all, sovereign of all beauties, my sultan. My life, the gift I own, my be-all, my elixir of Paradise, my Eden, My spring, my joy, my glittering day, my exquisite one who smiles on and on. My sheer delight, my revelry, my feast, my torch, my sunshine, my sun in heaven; My orange, my pomegranate, the flaming candle that lights up my pavilion. My plant, my candy, my treasure who gives no sorrow but the world’s purest pleasure; Dearest, my turtledove, my all, the ruler of my heart’s Egyptian dominion. My Istanbul, my Karaman, and all the Anatolian lands that are mine; My Bedakhshan and my Kipchak territories, my Baghdad and my Khorasan. My darling with that lovely hair, brows curved like a bow, eyes that ravish: I am ill. If I die, yours is the guilt. Help, I beg you, my love from a different religion. I am at your door to glorify you. Singing your praises, I go on and on: My heart is filled with sorrow, my eyes with tears. I am the Lover—this joy is mine. Muhibbi (Sultan Süleyman’s pen name), sixteenth century

These are other poems that Halman translated in English: 

I am the Sultan of Love: a glass of wine will do for a crown on my head, and the brigade of my sigh might well serve as the dragon's fire-breathing troops. This bedroom that's best for you, my love, is a bed of roses, for me, a bed and a pillow carved out of rock will do. My love, take a golden cup in your hand and drink wine in the rose-garden; as for me, to sip blood from my heart, it is enough to have the goblets of your eyes. If, my beloved, you ride the horse of coyness and trot in the polo grounds, this head of mine will do as a ball for your mallet. Come, don't let the army of sorrow crush the heart's soldiers; if it is my life you demand just send those looks of yours— that should be enough. The heart can no longer reach the district where you live, but it yearns for reunion with you: don't think Paradise and its rivers can satisfy the lover of the adorable face. Lover, I have enough tears to sprinkle over the ground you walk on— and my own pallid face will do for me as silver and gold.

Listen, my heart, don't crave silver and gold like a highwayman; Don't spruce yourself up with satin and trinkets like a woman... Don't stand there, stiff, chest puffed up, like a wrestler's lion. Never cherish wealth or high office. Don't brag: "I'm better than anyone!" Others have their own rights: Don't stick out your tongue at them like an iris. You might conquer far-flung lands and seas and rule them as their sovereign king: Even if your reign on the imperial throne becomes everlasting. Don't be taken in: One day, a hostile wind is bound to blow and bring To your land of beauty heaven's misfortune and worst suffering. Don't blow up your chest like a proud sail; shun arrogance and malice.

Friends, in my eyes, life has no meaning without the loved one; To the nightingale, the world is a cage if it has no rose-garden. I languish on sorrow's mountain where night and day I sigh and moan: Wondering what fate awaits me with my beloved gone. Beware the consuming fire of my groan, for you are a tender sapling. My bosom is engulfed in flames that will rage if I cannot find my darling. What good is her province to me if I am not to see her? This Lover will not accept Paradise without the loved one.

This one was written for Bayezid and I thought it was very interesting:

Oh you! There were times you engaged in tumultuous rebellion, my son;  You did not carry around your neck the pendant of ferman, my son. Oh, would I ever put you in death's throes, my own Bayezid Khan, my son? But at least don't say "I am without guilt." Repent, my dearest one, my son. 

As Halman says in his introduction to Süleyman the Magnificent Poet: The Sultan's Selected Poems, Süleyman mostly wrote about love and private matters.

Concubines and daughters were not educated to write poetry. Indeed, there are very few of them:

Afife Hatun (or Kadın) was a consort of Mehmed IV who used to exchange verses with him and who also wrote a poem about Emetullah Rabia Gulnus pining inside the Old Palace after his deposition

Adile Sultan was a daughter of Mahmud II known as the only Ottoman princess who composed poems.

Musical instruments were another thing entirely.

Angiolello, who lived as a page in Mehmed II's palace said about this:

"[T]he most senior [women[, who are trained, teach the new and unrefined to speak and read and instruct them in the Muhammadan law, and also teach them to sew and embroider, and to play the harp and to sing, and instruct them in all their ceremonies and customs, to the degree that [these girls] have the inclination to learn." — Leslie P. Peirce, The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire

Women who made their way up the harem hierarchy by appointment to the training/service divisions or to the suites of high-ranking family or household staff members presumably spent their time acquiring and perfecting the skills and manners appropriate to their new station. Those who showed an aptitude for instrumental music, singing, or dance were trained in these arts. The valide sultan selected the most talented and beautiful of these more highly trained women for her own suite. — Leslie P. Peirce, The Imperial Harem: Women and Sovereignty in the Ottoman Empire

#anon #ask post #ask: ottoman history #suleyman i #sehzade bayezid son of suleyman i #haseki hurrem sultan #afife kadin #adile sultan daughter of mahmud ii #Anonymous

[m0r1bund]

[Image: A banner depicting 6 different vertical compositions, each modeled after a color in the rainbow pride flag. From left to right:

In red: A graphic designer at a highway margin, overlooking the Senqu (Orange) river near Quthing, Lesotho. In her laptop display is one of many butch pride flags.

In orange: A photographer and his husband hiking the Verde river in Sedona, Arizona, in the U.S.. Reflected in his shutter is the rainbow pride flag.

In yellow: A writer at Treasure Hill, on the Xindian river in Taipei, Taiwan. Depicted in their typewriter is the agender pride flag.

In green: A wildlife artist and her partner at the cliffs of Cruachán, Ireland. A selection from her sketchbook depicts the rainbow pride flag.

In blue: Two lovers singing and strumming under the aurora at Iqaluit, in Nunavut, Canada. Depicted in the interior of the guitarist's instrument is the bi pride flag.

In purple: A Chilean weaver at the loom, with her grandchild, somewhere in northern Chile. Half-woven is the trans pride flag. ]

◆

whew. Surreal.

I was approached back in May to do banner artwork for dA's pride event (you can check out the journal here.) This piece was a challenge for a lot of reasons, emotional and compositional, but I think I like what I arrived at. I wanted to try to capture the joy i've experienced in connecting with others in the LGBT+ community, worldwide. To that end, I tried to select places I had at least some, small connection to, by way of the folks I've met over the years.

I hope you find something that looks familiar in it! : -)

To close, some songs that helped rear this to completion, and which make my heart full:

Love is Love, Pt. 2 by Quantum Tangle. If you know me in any personal capacity I've probably rec'd it at some point, because it makes me really emotional. To be terribly honest-- probably the only manifestation of the phrase “love is love” that made me cry.

Colors by June LaLonde, a beautiful little pride flag anthem. I love that she draws on natural imagery to describe the flags... And I dare you to find a song that rhymes “chromatic aberration” so artfully x-)

Les Fleurs by Ivy Sole. I am very new to Ivy Sole's full discography, but Les Fleurs hits hard and cuts deep, in the best way. Very “bring me flowers when I am living” energy.

◆

A final acknowledgement that I want to make, in the spirit of transparency and out of respect for my own feelings about monetizing this part of my identity... I was paid 500$ for this piece, which I intend to put away so that I can hire a diversity editor for my webcomic, Ghost River. Barring disaster, any remaining amount will be donated to an indigenous sovereignty effort (in the spirit of GR) and a LGBT+ nonprofit-- I haven't decided which organizations, yet, but I'm eyeballing the Black Visions Collective. Suggestions always welcome : -)

[disparition]

 FREYAM DREAMS OF DUST - https://disparition.bandcamp.com/album/3-freyam-dreams-of-dust

I.

How much do you remember? Temple under the mountain Limetree in a shaft of light Gray robe on the edge of shadow Bare forearm dragging a branch along the floor The river of stones, the sound of their shells clicking together

II.

I remember. It was the same day they were captured out near Anchorstore. I was in my office, deep in the corridors of the High Marengo’s palacia. We didn’t know, of course, we couldn’t have and yet, all the same, there was a shift in the light, in the weight of the air.

My office was windowless, lit by two candles, but there were times in between Bells when I could move quietly along the outer edges of fasing departments and make my way to a forgotten balcony facing the arroyo. I had never seen anyone on or near this balcony except for the occasional fellow low ranking shirker from down the hall. I knew and was on good terms with all of my counterparts.

But that day there was someone else. I don’t. I still don’t know who.  Couldn’t see them, but their voice was close. The only word they said was “Freyam” – a name I had not heard in decades and was forbidden from using myself. An old trap – and yet I nodded. And then nothing, and then nothing. And then that shift in the air again, a breeze trapped on the balcony, a piece of paper trapped in the breeze.

Like my ancient name, I had not seen or felt a piece of paper in a very long time. I still wonder what might have seent me out there, frantically chasing and flailing my arms. Luckily this scene was short lived. I stuffed the thing into my robes.

I backed into the maze of corridors, disoriented. Faces turned towards me, anonymous colleagues who’d ignored my passage all these years wore masks of suspicion, my gait altered by their weight of their eyes on me. By the time I was back within my own domains I was limping, my robe stuck to me with sweat.

Watcer stood in my door frame, long arm reaching inward, spindle fingers just beginning to wrap around one of my candles.  Turning without moving, wearing my face – stale tricks – watchers finger retracted, grin wider than I’ve ever worn it, now limping to mimic my own movement.

I couldn’t take it. And before I knew it in my conscious mind was undoing the watcher. Pulling back into myself and unmaking.

Watchers, you know, they’re just us. That’s no secret. We’re conditioned to forget, but some part of me didn’t forget – I fell back in my mind to the making of my watcher and I pulled and pulled at the threads until the whole process had been undone, and there was nothing left to darken my door frame except remnants of my own doubts and guilt, pooling on the floor, streaming back into my toes.

This act, while not a violation of any written law, was all the same a breech – and one that would leave unwanted resonance far and wide. I could not linger in the office.

I took an old shirt out of a drawer and quickly wove a half vial of dust into it. Propping it over the desk with light finger and shadow work - cheap but it would last a few hours - I backed into the corridors and began my descent. We were pressing up against the Bell of Pink Light, and the air was already orange.

On top of everything else, I was behind in my work. In those days the Auric Coast was coated with a thick film of overlapping microempires, petty kingdoms, experimental societies, agricultural collectives, nomadic bands, and other forms of human organization to ephemeral to be contained by any terminology. The majority of these entities armed themselves with the usual aray of symbol, sign, and anthem. The realm of Pasaedian was no exception and in my days of relevance I worked directly under the High Marengo; for seven years I wove anthems of gilded synthesis and vast ambient cloud at the behest of the crown, performing far across this valley and the next for purposes of solace, sport, and war.

But that was years and years ago – we all fade. My work had become clerical in nature.  Cataloging, analyzing, decoding the anthems, chants, and worksongs of our hundreds of neighbors. In this capacity I had memorized everything from the churning dances of Neomassilia to the piercing wail of Astoria, the plastic shining anthem of the Mouselands, the whispered hopesongs of the mountain witches.

So, I was behind in my work. These were the days of bitter rivalry between Pasaedian and Citadel, the High Marengo and High Priestess in constant skirmishes over scraps of the valley. The Ziggurat employed weavers and singers not only from the coast but from all across the rim, and I was barely able to keep up. Now I was thinking this encounter on the balcony – did it even happen? Yes I could still feel the paper within my robes – I was thinking it seemed more and more a trap, some Commersean snare. It would not be the first time I had fallen under suspicion.

Amid shifting tides of colleagues anticipating the next Bell I threaded my way through corridors and courtyards of marble, out into the Marengo’s garden. A green and violet iris in the ojo of the palacia, this garden contained the last living jacaranda trees on the coast. It was the middle of Sivan and they were in the full of their brightness, the ground thickly carpeted in purple and buzzing with sacred travellers. Stepping carefully to avoid them, looking down, I almost missed the clearing until I was at its edge, and then stopped. At the center, in a column of salmon light, lay Dmina, fourth under the name, High Marengo of Pasaedian, motionless, naked, and closeyed under a sheer gold cloth. Upon the cloth crawled sacred travellers, at least fifty, more than I had seen in this lifeline. It is.. difficult to think now of the age of paper, when they numbered in the millions, when one might see a hundred or two on any summer afternoon. In this garden the travellers were named and numbered, carefully tracked, each lived in its own glass. But their keeper was nowhere to be found. Three of the Marengian guard stood on the far edge of the clearing, intently seeing nothing.

I felt a pull, I felt it coming from beneath the ground, I felt the coldness in my tailbone and the heels of my feet, and the sense of forceful, patient inevitability – it was the pull of watersource. I shifted back into the trees, sinking deeper into the soft earth with each step.  The little travellers were everywhere, their hum filled my ears.

The sky was darkening, streaked with lavender, and the Bell would be upon me soon. The gardens ran up against the southwestern gates of Pasaedian. I was out and among the free buildings before the ring reached me.

In those fractured days the formal sovereignty and firstlayr powers of a petty realm like Pasaedian would extend only so far as the physical walls of the palacia itself. The majority of the valley’s residents lived in freestanding apartment blocks and houses. Their legience – to Pasaedian, to Citadel, to Mouse or to Rome – marked by a small shield affixed to the right side of the doorframe. This shield could be scanned, the level of one’s legiency determining everything from their healthcare and conflict resolution to their business rights and miliia duties and the sources of their water and light.

Almost all of the doors in my building bore the same crest on their shield as mine – the dark horse forcene of the Marengo adorned with the rose of Pasaedian.  But when I reached my door, it was gone. Nothing but a shield-shaped spot of unbleached paint on the frame.

When I was a child I had recurring dreams in which I was struck by lightning. I would die but I would not wake up; changed, I would drift through a photonegative world. In middle age, watcher over a corner of the valley, my dreams were stalked by columns of smoke steadily encroaching, inexplicable formations of machines overhead. Now in old age it was this cutting of lines that haunted my dreamlife, this sudden statelessness – even though I’d dreamed of statelessness all throughout the age of paper, argued for it, pulled for it. This was different. Living in this sea of shifting states, in this age they were no more a part of one’s identity than what used to be called brand loyalty – in fact they were the same thing. But in this valley of no particular consequence there were only two, and they took and took back, block by block by block. This was not the desert nor the vale of Joaquin – to be unlined in this place was death.

I did not touch the door. The lights in the hallway were already dimming. Out on the street I stayed under leafshadow, robes pulled close and matching the tone of the darkening air. Only then did I remember the paper, folded and curled in one of my pockets.

I kept moving until I was south enough and west enough that I could slip into a small park far from sound and light. Unseen, hopefully unfelt, I threw myself beneath a young pepper tree and drew a circle around myself in the rich soil. The velvet sky was lowering itself onto all of us. I pulled the paper from my robe.

It was an airplane ticket. Made not of paper after all, but a very thin plastic. A kind no one had seen for forty years, and the two ports noted on the ticket were less than half an hour apart by car – even in the days when flights existed, this flight did not exist. Even in the thin light of this moment the aged ink – suddenly exposed to it – began to run. In spite of my care, my hands were soon smudged with indigo.

Looking out from under the branches, I realized the ground had begun to tilt. Leaves and pebbles rolled down the street, followed by a pair of Commersean guard, yelling and chasing after some lost piece of equipment. Then, nearly silent and just against the edge of the park, a smooth and darkglassed van, door sliding open, driver unseen. A concentrated light shown suddenly on me, focused on the paper, or the stains on my hands, or both. The pull, when it came, was around the wrists and gently on the back of the neck, with a sense of urgent departure. This time, I let it take me, found myself lowered gently onto ancient cushioned seats. It felt as though the van never stopped moving during this process, and there was no sound of machine within it. Rather, I fell into it, and it fell down the street, along with everything else, as though the world had been wrapped into the shape of a funnel.

III.

A simple square of asphalt, wide and clear A ring of structures, facades of towers A defensible inheritance from an earlier time Fill in the gaps with cargo containers, trailers, and soil Dig up the center and plant

In our fear of each other and our pasts we will put up walls, Only to become restless, bound too close together, fractuous and Uncontainable.

Awake to the flows, these are days of liquid light Symbols of the previous age still wrapped around us in confusing patterns, False eyes to ward off predators As the old state falls apart, the hands of gold that owned it remain strong and grasping, seperated and naked, ever pulling, pulling through blood or tear, carving sigils into the raw stone

But Others, Others take to the mountains and the sands to undo their work, unthread their branding fromt the minds it holds.

The walled cities glow in the night, hundreds of different colours fill our hills and valleys, their webs reaching into the darkness in between

Beyond the reach of their light we still have ink and paper – and so into those bright spaces where we dare not show ourselves, we can still toss messages that will be delivered by the wind.

IV.

With concentration, the feeling subsided, and my internal tides regained their balance. With even greater concentration, the tint on the window began to clear, and I could see that we were rolling into Subcontractor City.

Already, low towers of glass and pale blue light surrounded us. Subcontractor City was an exclave of the Bubblestate hundreds of miles to the north. In this place, emotion was muted, the churning flows of life and death were distant, inaccessible. Somewhere inside the ancient walls of the van an engine sputtered to life and the whole thing shook, only to come to a stop minutes later.

The door was pulled open as if by human hands but when I stepped out there was no one. The nearest glass tower was identical to the others except the door was open, the sigil 3172A6 marked in clearscript on the glass panel above. On my way to the entrance I passed through a sort of courtyard - benches on which no one had ever sat ringed around a sculpture – three arcing, unpainted pieces of metal spanned by a tensionless spring. Whatever feeling it might have held for its creator had been stripped, it stood now as a monument to nonmeaning, a warning to all who passed.

Inside, the age of the place filled my nostrils. Very little had changed inside this structure for nearly a hundred years except for the accumulation of dust as the automated filters died one by one. A low ceiling of dirty white squares, occasionally out of place revealing darkness and clutter above. Outside and in the van I had felt alone, but in here I was increasingly accompanied by some unseen presence, a group of figures walking just behind me and in the periphery, heavy, moving fast, burdened with gear – and then the feeling of a finger pressed hard into the center of my back. In this manner I was escorted through warrens of cubicle walls, snaking cables, caved in CRT monitors, all sporadically seen under distant flickering tubelights, past darkened conference rooms and up several broad staircases. It was in these kinds of places the secret work of the valley was done. While there were no longer custodians or air purifiers, the stilling remained in place. Sympathy and resonance fell dead here. Only ambition and bitterness were allowed through the seive, in dull and muted form. Nothing here could take hold or pull and so tracking became difficult, remembering a near impossibility. The walls were covered with notes, details of the most insignifigant kind. I looked down and my hands were still covered in the ink.

As we approached a glowing door I was reminded of the other reason secret work was done here. A large conference table was covered in devices shining under the blue light. Portals to oceans of madness, full of the eyes of manufacturers in the rim states. Long since banned in the valley realms and most of the rest of the coast besides, we had rendered them dysfunctional. If you tried to bring one within the walls of the palacia it would turn to ash in your hand. But in Subcontractor City, they still worked.

One entire wall was covered in a screen, all the imagery in shades of blue, the room was drowning. A dizzying succession of scenes overlapped – singers of the mountain havens, lost in their visions, faces twitching and fingers wrapped chaotically but artfully around their instruments, a spinning map of the city of Avalon and the temple of salt below, the famous scene of the General Mia Marisol smashing through the fascist barricade on the Bridge of Mateo, the subject of thousands of murals and tapestries along the coast, her column of delivery trucks converted into tanks, chariots, once even a dragon, the face of the general herself fifteen years ago and now in her exile, a diagram of the old Grapevine wall, the coats of arms of realms and familias known and unknown, all colours stripped but shades of blue.

I was so entranced by this wall of shifting images that I didn’t see the shadowed figures seated around the table. As soon as I did, the wall went dark and the white tublights in the ceiling shifted into fullness. There were twelve others in the room. I recognized the High Marengo, two of the crowns of Neomassilia, an ambassador from the collective of Joaquin as well as one of their healers and, surprisingly, the High Priestess of Citadel. As far as I knew, the rulers of Pasaedian and Citadel had not been in the same room in a generation, but clearly I didn’t know what went on in Subcontractor City.  

In the center of the table was a broad area cleared of all the devices – in it’s center, an empty glass, a small jar holding a tiny sacred traveller, and a translucent pitcher filled halfway with a clear viscous fluid. Voices came from everywhere but from none of them: “we just want you to taste”

From the centers of my feet through my fingertips, the pull was a creature of pure lines within me, a burning wire bent into the shape of my core, drove me as I poured the liquid into the glass, the glass to my self – a slow process, and then slower again – the lights began to fade, as did the presence of my observors. Only the little sacred traveller remained, buzzing in their jar, until the droning of the wings became all there was of reality – my self a loose knot of vibrations held together by pure feeling, falling further apart. The spaces in between the fragments filled with petal and vine, fractal windows into possible worlds. And I could feel all those eyes in the room again, pouring through me, tracking branches, looking for patterns, faces, signs. Cloud formations over the Sea of Cortez. Marisol, a general again, older, returned from exile on the Island of Qatal. Page after page of of flowing prophetic script from the Thinkers under the rock of Morro. A vine, thick and implausible, growing on the outside of the Bubblestate, living on the glass and radiation beneath. The sign of three moons glowing deep beneath the waters of the central Pacific, their light coming up from the depths and shining through blue wave after blue wave, flooding into the room.

The table was empty except for an old coffestain and broken telephone. The wall a loop of static. The corridors and rooms had filled with a pale gray light, subcontractors sat at their terminals, eyes half closed, processing. The scratchings on the wall were no longer visible. In silence, amid a world of machines, I made my way out into the natural light. When I held up my hand to see if the ink remained, it was on fire.

V.

All these years later I still carry a vial of dust That dust

In my memory, dust waiting to fall took the form of vast rectangular structures clustured on the edges of ivers and the junctions of arteries, sparkling with hours

O it waited and waited And you know, what we called, opening the eye

For a lot of people, really just a matter of knowing what was made of dust.  A matter of tasting it. Feeling it.

#freyam dreams of dust #in a walled city #jacaranda #narrative #podcast #ambient #magick #future #wtnv #Welcome to Night Vale #alice isnt dead

[cincinnatusvirtue]

Anglo-Zulu War of 1879: British imperialism in South Africa and Zulu resistance.

In the midst of the Victorian Era in January 1879, British imperialism was literally on the march in South Africa, its goal to conquer the native African Zulu Kingdom and continue fitting together the many jigsaw pieces of the continent of Africa into yet another of Britain’s domains.  What followed in January 1879 was anticipated to be a relatively easy conquest for the British, what followed in the opening engagements of the war was a surprise defeat that would be the worst the British Empire would face at the hands of a native force and within 24 hours of that defeat, a harrowing tale of survival and victory against great odds, enough to both stir the British public and the world at large.

British interest in the Southern tip of Africa stemmed out of its rivalry with France in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.  Since the mid 1600′s the Dutch East India Company had made the South African coast a colony of its own, initially as a way station to its more lucrative colonial markets in India and the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia).  During the ensuring 150 years, a number of Dutch, German, Scandinavian and French Huguenot settlers migrated here, working for the colony, farming, importing slaves from Indonesia and interacting with the native San and Khoikhoi peoples, interactions ranged from violent wars, employment and intermarriage.  Out of this community developed the daughter language of the Dutch authorities, known today as Afrikaans and still spoken among the Dutch descended community of South African Europeans, known as Afrikaners. 

In 1795, amidst the French Revolutionary Wars, the Dutch Republic, ally of France was subject to British attacks.  The Dutch Cape Colony, built at the Cape of Good Hope was attacked in 1795 and taken over by the British and occupied until 1803 as part of the Treaty of Amiens which made peace with Napoleonic France.  However, war struck again by 1806 and the British won the Battle of Blaauwberg near Cape Town.  Thereafter the British established Cape Colony and ruled this corner of South Africa.  The Dutch settlers came to resent British rule and rules.  In the early 19th century many ventured out into the wilds of the South African interior, on the so called Great Trek.  The community that undertook this pioneer movement were known as the Trekboer or Boer for short, meaning “farmer” in Dutch which was their primary occupation.  Their goal was to establish communities for themselves where they could farm under their own laws, practice their strict Dutch Reformed brand of Calvinism and engage in slavery as they had under Dutch colonial rule and practice their brand of rugged individualism.  The Boer came into contact and eventual conflict with many native African peoples in the interior they had not previously encountered.  Namely, the Bantu speaking peoples, one tribe of which had coalesced into the Zulus.

The Bantu speaking peoples has migrated western and central Africa to South Africa and displaced or assimilated many of the original native Khoisan natives that had inhabited all of South Africa previously.  Out of these displacements the Bantu speaking peoples became the predominant native tribes, which formed into distinct kingdoms, one of which was the Zulu Kingdom with origins in the 18th century that completely forged into a unified kingdom in around 1818 under Shaka.  Under his rule the Zulu expanded their power and territory through a series of military reforms and war pushing some tribes further east into contact with the fellow Bantus, the Xhosa and the Europeans pushing west.

The Boers encountered the Zulus by the late 1830′s having crossed the Orange river.  A massacre of Boer pioneers  and their Khoikhoi servants by the Zulu which killed roughly Boer 250 men, women and children and 250 of their servants and known as the Weenen Massacre, solidified the tensions between the Boers and the Zulu.  The Boers thought God had entitled them to their own land and the Zulu saw themselves as defending against potential encroachment.  This was followed up with the Battle of Blood River in December 1838 in which the Boers numbering 464 plus a couple hundred servants were attacked by 10,000-15,000 Zulu warriors.  What followed was a very one sided victory for the Boers, they found an effective way to defend themselves against the Zulu charge armed mostly with spears, form their pioneer wagon trains into a protective interlocked circle called a laager.  The Boers were expert shots with rifles and muskets, spending their whole life hunting for food in the South African veldt or prairie, they developed a deep gun culture of necessity and made every shot count.  As the Zulus rushed in armed with their short stabbing spears they were gunned down by the Boer’s muskets and improvised cannons.  3,000 Zulu were dead and only 3 Boers wounded.  The lopsided victory was hailed as a miracle by the religious Boers and in time their developed their own republics known as the Boer Republics of Natalia, Orange Free State and the Transvaal (South African Republic).  These lands were developed in part on lands that removed the Zulu threat for now, though tensions persisted off and on for decades.

Meanwhile, the British were not content to stay on the coast and also saw the establishment of the Boer Republics as geopolitical obstacles to the overall European colonization of the African continent, of which Britain sought to be the leader.  So by the mid 19th century, modern South Africa was a hodgepodge of European colonies officially under British rule and the semi-independent Boer Republics as well as African kingdoms such as the Zulu.  The British claimed leadership over the Boer Republics even though they were beyond official British territory, their justification was that Boers originated in the British Cape Colony and were therefore still British nationals despite their Dutch origins, distinct culture language and religion.  Natalia was officially annexed in 1843 and the Boers pushed even further west giving rise to the still nominally British but more or less independent Orange Free State and Transvaal Republics.  Furthermore, the British made treaties with a number of African tribes on land the Boers settled which recognized tribal sovereignty, the Boers resented this as they sought either independence or at the very least more sovereignty than the African natives whom they regarded as inferior in terms of racial views prevalent at the time.

In 1854, the British government recognized the sovereignty of the Orange Free State though not the Transvaal and these tensions along with discoveries of gold and diamonds and the establishment of mines making the Boers rich would lead to increasing tensions between the British and the Boer Republics.  However, the British post 1867 sought to confederate South Africa into a unified set of colonies under British dominion as they had in Canada.  Sir Bartle Frere was named High Commissioner of South Africa for Britain and he was to oversee the confederation, one obstacle to this was the Zulu Kingdom.  The British saw the Zulu as a potentially dangerous threat that would resist confederation and their goal, at least Frere’s was to initiate a war that would justify its conquest and pacification.

1877 saw the British annex the Boer Republic of Transvaal which the Boers objected to but lingering tension with the Zulus was seen as the more immediate threat and for the time being tolerated the British annexation.  The British justification was in part to oversee the decrease of tensions between the Boers and Zulu and they felt they were empowered to do so.  The Zulu King at this time was named Cetshwayo.  He upheld the traditions of military doctrine established under Shaka, including the use of the short stabbing spear known as the assegai.  Zulu warriors also used cowhide shields and had a few old muskets but their marksmanship was considered overall quite poor.  Their regiments were known as impi.  Their preferred tactic was the “buffalo horn” tactic, a variation of a pincer movement.  The idea was to overwhelm the enemy with massive numbers and charge them from two sides, the “horns” which pinned the enemy while the center or “chest” of the buffalo finished the enemy off supported by reserve or “loins” of the buffalo.

Frere gave an ultimatum in late 1878 to the Zulu Kingdom following incidents on the border between the Natal Colony and Zululand.  Effectively Cetshwayo was ordered to make certain payments to the British, disband the Zulu military system and most importantly allow a British agent or “resident” serve as de facto governor approving all decisions of Cetshwayo’s and ensuring compliance with terms of the treating.  Cetshwayo would essentially be giving up his right to rule in all but name, some terms he could agree to but giving up Zulu independence was not one, he did not reply in time as Frere had expected.  This gave him the opportunity to launch an invasion of Zululand, without actual authorization from London which had other international commitments namely in India and in Europe’s Balkans which distracted it’s attention away from South Africa.  Nevertheless, January 1879 saw the start of the Anglo-Zulu War.

The war commenced on January 11th with three British columns attacking Zululand at once.  The goal was to meet the Zulu, defeat them and take their capital, Ulundi.  Command was given to Lord Chelmsford who marched his troops past the Buffalo River at an old trading station called Rorke’ Drift.  The British would leave some troops here to control as a supply depot and hospital.  While the rest of the columns (Numbers 2 and.3 Column) marched into the open veldt country of Zululand, a mix of European troops and native African auxiliaries.  The British regulars still wore their signature red wool coats which stood out against the yellow and khaki countryside of the open grasslands of South Africa.  The British used modern Matini-Henry rifles, some field gun cannons and a rocket brigade for support along with wagon trains for supplies.  On January 20th, the British pitched camp at Isandlwana, a rocky formation that rose out of the otherwise grassy veldt.  On the 21st and 22nd Chelmsford got reports of Zulu in the area and went off to pursue, thinking the main body of the Zulu army was nearby.  Chelmsford was lead on a wild goose chase.  The British had vastly underestimated the Zulu’s strategy, divide the British, isolate and attack them out in the open.  Despite, Boer warnings not to underestimate the Zulu for their tactics the British were far too convinced victory was a given after demonstration of modern firepower.  On the 22nd as Chelmsfords’s main force was a away roughly 1,800 British and native allied troops were still encamped at Isandlwana, a few scouts ventured to nearby hills only to see 20,000 Zulu on the opposite side lying in silent wait.  The scouts retreated but it was too late.  The British hadn’t circled their wagons in a laager formation as the Boers had suggested, leaving them open and exposed and scattered.  The Zulu began forming the horns of their pincer movement on the crest of hills nearby.  The British tried to form up lines and fire on the advancing Zulu, indeed they inflicted many casualties but the Zulu were far too numerous and a sort of fighting retreat ensued by the British trying to rally north and west back to Rorke’s Drift and anywhere else.  The British were simply overwhelmed and killed in grouped or individual last stands.  The Zulu’s assegai had an advantage up close they disemboweled the British regulars with their spears, according to ritual this was to release the spirit of their enemy.  The British were defeated at Isandlwana with  1,300 dead.  The Zulu lost roughly 2,000 of their own. Chelmsford would arrive to a horrid disaster of great shock.

Meanwhile, at nearby Rorke’s Drift on the 22nd and into the 23rd 140 British troops were surrounded by 3,000-4,000 Zulu who marched from their earlier victory at Isandlwana in pursuit of British stragglers.  What ensued was effectively a siege to overrun the hospital and supply depot.  However, despite repeated Zulu attempts to overwhelm the British, the massed volleys of rifle fire and improvised defenses of corn bags stacked up along with a stone wall at the premises gave the British some measure of defense they lacked at Isandlwana.  The British would survive and emerge victorious at Rorke’s Drift.  The British would suffer 17 killed and roughly equal numbers wounded while the Zulu’s suffered around 350 killed and 500 wounded.  The British were low on ammo and could have been overwhelmed had the casualties for the Zulu not been high and their exhaustion due to fighting all day at Isandlwana and then marching further without rest and no food only to fight further sap them of their strength.  The Zulu retreated and the British angry over the attack and news from Isandlwana’s earlier disaster lead to patrols to march out among the wounded Zulu and kill them without mercy shooting, bayoneting and beating the wounded to death.

In 24 hours disaster had shocked the British with news of the defeat and scale of the massacre at Isandlwana, meanwhile the propaganda machine also played up the heroic defense of Rorke’s Drift from which some survivors were awarded the Victoria’s Cross, Britain highest military decoration.  Chelmsford would return home somewhat in disgrace.

Isandlwana and the reaction to it was somewhat akin to American defeat in June,1876 at the Battle of Little Bighorn, where a smaller force armed with modern weapons underestimated their native enemy which outnumbered them and overwhelmed them.  Though in both cases the initial defeat only prompted public outcry for revenge and jingoistic war fever increased.  The Americans would come to defeat the Sioux in the Great Sioux War of 1876 and likewise in six months time the British re-invaded Zululand and despite a spirited resistance, a change in tactics along with overwhelming force and the destruction of their capital Ulundi by July 1879, victory was achieved and the Zulu were conquered.  Cetshwayo was imprisoned for sometime, became a celebrity and eventually died once returned to the Zulu.  The Zulu threat was no more, though Isandlwana resonates among their descendants as a great victory.  While for the British it was a cautionary tale of not underestimating your enemy, no matter the superiority of your technology. 

By 1880-1881 however, a renewed tension with the Boers was the pressing issue in South Africa.  With the Zulu threat neutralized, the Boers of the Transvaal planned to assert their independence.  Again the British underestimated their opponent, seeing the Boer as backwards Dutch speaking farmers, only forgetting these farmers like the Zulu knew the land they grew up in and unlike the Zulu were armed with the same modern guns the British were and were in many cases better individual shots than the British.  A brief war (First Boer War 1880-1881) would see the Transvaal gain its independence giving the British their first unfavorable treaty since the American Revolution a century before.  Boer independence would last a further two decades where an economic boom of gold and diamond mines on their territory would lead to further tensions and the bigger scale Second Boer War (1899-1902) which saw early heavy British defeats until a policy of scorched earth tactics and concentration camps against the Boer populace would lead to final British victory though at great economic and material cost.  This would eventually unite all of South Africa into the South African Union, completing Frere’s long sought after project of British confederation in the South of Africa.

#victorian era #british imperialism #19th century #zulu #south africa #boers #africa #anglo zulu war #boer wars #isandlwana #rorke's drift #britain #afrikaner #afrikaans #bantu #dutch #dutch east india company #voortrekker

[brooklynislandgirl]

Fig: Something my muse sees as forbidden but still desires Grapes: What would my muse want as a reward for hard work?Lemon: Something in my muses life that went sour Orange: What small things in life make my muse happy? Peach: If my muse was immortal what would they do with their time?Pear: Something my muse wouldn’t want to be separated from. Pineapple: How does my muse handle long-term relationships?Plum: What are five things that make my muse happy?

Fruit Basket || Accepting

Fig: Something my muse sees as forbidden but still desires?“Wan my faddah in law’s head spitted on a pike an’ put on display at da foot of Zeus’s throne itself, an’ I’ll bloody well pu’i’ dere m’self.”

Her friend is a goddess in her own right, and must understand how she feels about these sorts of things. She feels Ares has earned every ounce of Beth’s spite, every ounce of her minimal blood-thirst. For every scar he allowed to be put on Zarek’s body, every one he inflicted himself. For every time he’d failed to be a father, just like her own. Some day she will find her way to Olympus or wherever it is that they all reside and she will find a way to burn it all down to the ground, those fires slaked only by rivers of divine blood…from everyone who has ever failed her husband.Zarek’s wife is a gentle soul, it’s true, but she would be nothing if not vengeful when she ascends.

Grapes: What would my muse want as a reward for hard work?

“Don’ need a reward, nevah been a materialistic person in my whole life…but mebbe…mebbe some day I’ll see sovereignty restore t’ my islands. By dat I mean put a Kanaka Maoli king or queen back in dere rightful place, give back da land dat was stolen from us, let da land an’ her people’s be free like she was only a few hun’red year ago. Same wi’ Ireland too, come t’ t’ink of it.”

Lemon: Something in my muses life that went sour?

“My relationship wi’ my braddah. We use’ t’ be so close, we migh’ as well have been twins. Aftah da acciden’ when he lost his leg, everyt’ing between us changed an…we went bittah wi’ each oddah. I miss dat. I miss him.”

Orange: What small things in life make my muse happy?

“Seein’ people be kind t’ demselves, t’ oddahs less fortunate. T’ see dem treat da earth an’ all of its creatures wi’ gentility, without fear or greed. Children laughin’ an’ playin’. Ocean waves against da shore. Sound of da gators callin’ across da bayou. Butterflies. Grill cheese san’wiches. Very sharp knives.”

Peach: If my muse was immortal what would they do with their time?

She laughs at this because, well… “Work as a doctah in any an’ alla places dat need medical care an’ don’ have adequate access t’ it. Like Africa, Sout’ America. Parts of Asia. Anywhere I was needed.It’s all about keepin’ balance, yeah? My husband is very good at da darker aspects of nature, an’ mine are about growth an’ life. So dere’s dat. But also get more time t’ read, an’ travel, an’ jus’ about any kine we wanna do.”

Pear: Something my muse wouldn’t want to be separated from?

 “Par’ of me…always t’ought if I no were Awakened…if I could go back t’ Sleep an’ nevah remembah wha’ it was like t’ have dis magick inside me, t’ jus’ be one normal person…dat I’d have been happier somehow. Different. But since dis lil shark came along…”Beth fondly lays a hand on the rounded swell of her growing son, and gave the bump an easy, gentle rub.“….I’m no gonna lie…bein’ cut off from certain aspects of dat magick…is like losing one of my senses. It’s really strange not to feel life all around me. Not bein’ able to look a’ someone an’ see what’s goin’ on inside dem. Not hearin’ da earth whisper t’ me. An’ I dunno if it’s evah gonna come back.”Pineapple: How does my muse handle long-term relationships?

“Surprisinly…it’s a struggle, ya know? It was terrible a’ first. I didn’ know how t’ be wi’ him. I didn’ know how t’ lissen t’ not wha’ he was sayin’ but more wha’ he meant. I dunno how f’ explain it, but it was very rough startin’. But once I came to a certain understandin’…da kine start t’ smooth out. Bein’ able t’ show him I’m faithful. Dat I’m loyal. Dat I always wan’ what’s best f’ him, even when sometimes dat’s not me or my involvement. I do know dat I’m a damn sight mo’ beddah for him dan any of his previous women.” 

Plum: What are five things that make my muse happy?

“My husband. My son. Surfin’. Music. Dancin’. I’m a real easy person t’ get along wi’ an’ my pleasures are simple.”

#Mahalo!P <33 #Bouno Dia|Astrid #The Goddess and the Witch|Astrid and Beth #A Little South of Heaven #Hello Darkness|Zarek Morrians {Honourable Mention} #Baby!Shark|Styxx Morrians {Honourable Mention} #Sibling Rivalry|Andrew Riley {Honourable Mention} #theholyandthedamned

[tlatollotl]

Relief with Enthroned Ruler

Artist: Chakalte' (Guatemalan or Mexican, active ca. A.D. 750–800)

Date: late 8th century

Geography: Guatemala or Mexico, La Pasadita

Culture: Maya

This Maya landmark was likely the carved lintel of a doorway from the site of La Pasadita in northwestern Guatemala carved in the early A.D. 770s. The relief panel would have been installed parallel to the floor of the entrance of a temple at La Pasadita. Visitors to the building were thus forced to look upward to view the monument, and perhaps even had to light the surface with raking torchlight in order to read the image and the text. The Metropolitan lintel is striking for the amount of pigment preserved on the surface. A variety of red, yellow-orange, and blue-green pigment remains to give clues about the original brightly colored appearance of the lintels. The jade jewels of the main characters and the details on the ruler’s throne glisten in blue-green, a color that symbolized the ‘first/newest’ and most precious materials. In the 8th century, the small hilltop site La Pasadita was caught between the power struggles of the self-proclaimed divine kings of the river kingdoms of Yaxchilan (modern-day Chiapas, Mexico), and Piedras Negras (Guatemala). During the Classic Maya period (ca. A.D. 250-900), the two major royal courts vied for power, paid tribute to one another, intermarried, and engaged in conflict with subsidiary local lords. Loyalties sometimes shifted, boundaries between the two city-states were often fortified, and artistic programs sponsored by the lords and ladies served as propaganda to stake claims on the contested landscape. The Yaxchilan kings and queens favored elaborate sculpted doorway lintels at the royal capital, and they made sure their local allies marked their palaces in the same way. At least a dozen related lintel reliefs are known from subsidiary sites around Yaxchilan. Likely commissioned by the Yaxchilan rulers themselves, most show the ruler from Yaxchilan in the company of the local lord in a supporting role in some ritual, making an overt statement of political sovereignty. The Met’s lintel depicts three protagonists: the figure seated on the right is faced by two standing ones to the left. The main figure offering an elaborate headdress to the seated leader is the La Pasadita ruler named Tiloom (ti-lo-ma), who ruled from approximately A.D. 750s-770s, using the title of sajal, a title for subsidiary regional governors. Tiloom is represented on at least three other known doorway sculptures: one in the Ethnologisches Museum in Berlin (IV Ca 45530), one in the collection of the Museum of Ethnology in Leiden (3939-1), and one in an unknown private collection. The Berlin lintel dates to A.D. 759, and the Leiden monument dates to A.D. 766; the private collection lintel dates to A.D. 771. Based on the known sculptures of Tiloom, the Metropolitan lintel is contemporaneous with the private collection lintel, probably carved between 769 and the early 780s. Tiloom was a loyal provincial ruler to the final two major kings of Yaxchilan, the father and son rulers of Bird Jaguar IV and Shield Jaguar IV. Bird Jaguar IV ruled from A.D. 752-768, and Shield Jaguar IV from 769 to around the turn of the 9th century. Bird Jaguar IV dominates the Berlin and Leiden lintels, in which Tiloom assists in a captive presentation and a scattering of incense, respectively. The ‘Sun Lord’ captive depicted in the Berlin Lintel is likely from Piedras Negras, and is the final portrayal of the many war victories of Bird Jaguar IV, who referred to himself as ‘he of 20 captives.’ In the Leiden panel, commemorating an event that occurred seven years after the Berlin captive presentation scene, Tiloom assists Bird Jaguar IV with a ‘scattering’ ritual in which the king drops blood or incense into a basket. The lintel from 771 in which Tiloom dances in a bird costume alone perhaps signals a shift in authority from one overlord to the other; Tiloom celebrated his own right to rule rather than his supporting role to the Yaxchilan king. The Metropolitan Lintel also dates from the early 770s; in fact, the same sculptor carved the two lintels, an individual by the name of Chakalte’. Sculptors’ signatures are relatively rare in Maya art, though many are known from the area around Yaxchilan and Piedras Negras. Chakalte’ was probably a sculptor who worked under the patronage of Shield Jaguar IV. That leader was known to send out sculptors to the other provincial lords, such as the rulers of the well-known site of Bonampak. Sculptors were sometimes important members of the royal courts; at Piedras Negras it seems that a master sculptor oversaw an atelier of apprentices who all signed the same works. Many hands thus crafted these royal portraits. Chakalte’ composed the Met’s lintel scene so that the visitor would be first greeted by the enthroned ruler, Shield Jaguar IV, facing the interior of the structure. The king leans forward towards his visitors, wearing an elaborate feathered hair ornament, a feathered nose plug, and a beaded jade necklace with bar pendant. Tiloom then stands proudly presenting the Yaxchilan holy lord with a headdress and what could be packets of incense or a plate of tamales. Tiloom wears a jaded headband and human head pectoral, with an elaborate woven skirt with a geometric pattern. A third personage stands behind Tiloom in a similar outfit but with a type of sombrero associated in other scenes with travelers or merchants. The text names the Yaxchilan "divine" lord with his pre-accession name of Chel Te’ Chan K’inich, which he changed to Shield Jaguar early in his reign because it was a namesake of ancestral rulers of the kingdom. The text naming Tiloom as the sajal, provincial lord, is squeezed in next to the ruler’s arm and the offertory headdress, almost as if Chakalte’ had not originally planned to include it. A bowl of sliced fruit with seeds visible sits under the throne, presumably part of the offering brought to the seated ruler. La Pasadita was visited in the 1970s by renowned explorer and monument recorder Ian Graham, but subsequently became dangerous for scholarly visits because of border conflicts during the decades-long civil conflict in Guatemala. Land mines and security problems prevented archaeological work until 1998, when Charles Golden and colleagues performed reconnaissance in the area. Even today the site lies within a troubled zone suffering the effects of narcotrafficking and illegal settlements within the national parks in the Usumacinta River drainage. The Metropolitan lintel provides key information for the understanding of Classic Maya politics on the eve of institutional collapse at the end of the 8th century. It shows the final major Yaxchilan lord receiving tribute in the form of food and regalia from a lord loyal to his warlord father, known as "he of 20 captives." But by the beginning of the 9th century, the dynasty at Yaxchilan ceased to build temples or commission monuments, silencing the voices of La Pasadita lord Tiloom and his sculptor of choice, Chakalte’. James Doyle, 2015 Resources and Additional Reading Bussel, G. W., and T. J. J. Leyenaar. 1991. Maya of Mexico. Leiden, The National Museum of Ethnology. Freidel, David, and Linda Schele 1990. Forest of Kings: The Untold Story of the Ancient Maya. New York, William Morrow. Golden, Charles, Andrew K. Scherer, A. René Muñoz, and Rosaura Vásquez. 2008. Piedras Negras and Yaxchilan: Divergent Political Trajectories in Adjacent Maya Polities. Latin American Antiquity 19(3): 249-274. Golden, Charles, and Andrew K. Scherer. 2013. Territory, Trust, Growth, and Collapse in Classic Period Maya Kingdoms. Current Anthropology 54(4): 397-435. "Border problems: recent archaeological research along the Usumacinta River." PARI Journal 7(2):1–16. Golden, Charles W. 2010. Frayed at the edges: the re-creation of histories and memories on the frontiers of Classic period Maya polities. Ancient Mesoamerica21(2): 373–384. "The politics of warfare in the Usumacinta Basin: La Pasadita and the realm of Bird Jaguar." In Ancient Mesoamerican Warfare. M. Kathryn Brown and Travis W. Stanton, eds. pp. 31–48. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira. Grube, Nikolai, and Marie Gaida. 2006 Die Maya: Schrift und Kunst. Berline, SMB-Dumont. Houston, Stephen. 2013. Carving Credit: Authorship among Classic Maya Sculptors. Paper presented at Making Value, Making Meaning: Techné in the Pre-columbian World, a Symposium at Dumbarton Oaks. Martin, Simon, and Nikolai Grube. Chronicle of the Maya Kings and Queens. New York, Thames & Hudson, 2000. Mathews, Peter. Tilom, in Who’s Who in the Classic Maya World, Foundation for the Advancement of Mesoamerican Studies, Inc., 2005, http://research.famsi.org/whos_who/people.php?mathewsnumber=PSD%20001 Schele, Linda, and Mary Ellen Miller. The Blood of Kings: Dynasty and Ritual in Maya Art. Fort Worth, Kimbell Art Museum, 1986. Simpson, Jon Erik. The New York Relief Panel and Some Associations with Reliefs at Palenque and Elsewhere, Part 1, in Segunda Mesa Redonda de Palenque, edited by Merle Greene Robertson, Pebble Beach, Pre-Columbian Art Research Institute, 1976, pp. 95-105.

The Met

#archaeology #arqueologia #maya #mesoamerica #mexico #guatemala #art #arte #history #historia #la pasadita #yaxchilan

[crowcronut]

Lessons from the river 10/20/20

I put some mini pumpkins on my alter on Mabon as offerings. In the last few days the biggest one started to rot. Took that as the offering had been taken, and took all 3 down to the river behind my house - a border between two towns, and tossed them in to be consumed by the birds and fish and the like. Part of my druidic practice is leaving my offerings in nature for animals or fungus to consume. (as such, I like to make sure that whatever I offer wont be damaging to the local wildlife. Pumpkins are something that animals would regularly eat from people’s porches this time of year anyways so they seem to be a good bet.) Offered my intentions to the Morrigan and Brighid, and watched the pumpkins float for a bit. I threw them in at a sort of spot that i think is technically my neighbor’s property, but is right on the property lines. Its a good spot to stand close to the water because theres a bit of concrete and stone there, as opposed to my own parents’ property which is mostly an awkward thicket of trees where you cant get too close. The current of the river would bring them past our entire property and i decided to watch them until they had completely passed us. Behind my other neighbor’s house the current speeds up a little and the water has more rocks and debris in it. I decided I would go back inside when they all got to that point.  The river is really small and pretty slow and i probably watched them for 10-15 minutes. At first they landed in a triangular pattern, the large, rotten one in the lead, then the small one with the tall stem that sat on top of the rotten one on my alter, and then the medium sized one was in the back. after a few minutes they stretched out more in a line, the large/rotten one still in the lead, but after a bit the medium one passed the small one with the tall stem, which fell far behind the others. It was really a matter of luck and what part of the current the pumpkins fell into. Maybe size played a small factor, but i’m no physicist. After a bit i found myself somewhat rooting for the little pumpkin.  Eventually, I somewhat lost track of the largest pumpkin but saw up in the rocky/faster current part of the river a bright orange thing that was approximately the size of the pumpkin stuck against a rock. Shortly after, I saw the medium pumpkin also get stuck on another rock not far behind the big one. eventually the little pumpkin caught up to the other two, the medium pumpkin managed to be freed from it’s rock as the small one passed and they moved upstream together, but the large one remained stuck. Obviously, the fable of the tortoise and the hare came to mind: slow and steady wins the race. 

This seemed to reassure me of 2 things. 

1. I’ve been out of school for a year and a half now and have had limited luck with finding work in my career field. I’ve seen my peers go on to be hired by major studios i’d love to work with, while i have been struggling with job applications while working freelance with a small, indie, company (which i do genuinely love and I am thankful for this job, but it doesnt pay the bills and isn’t giving me much of an opportunity to move out of my parents house and have some sovereignty). I’ve been outpaced by my peers, and it really often feels like i’m going to be left behind and have to eventually give up on my dreams. But it also reminds me of my cousin and her roommate - both ballerina/o’s at the same company. Her roommate at the beginning of his career was offered promotion after promotion and even now is one of the company’s soloist dancers. He does have the advantage of being a talented ballerino, and male dancers are far more scarce than female ones, and as such are more often considered for promotions/lead roles. at the same time, at the beginning of her career she sustained a good few injuries and for a while it looked like she would have to retire in her mid-20s. She stuck with it, however, and ended up getting promoted to soloist as well. Pre-covid, she really started to thrive in her career (covid also gave her a much needed break so she could get a much needed surgery that would add a few years to her career). I might be reading to much into it, but it felt like the universe was telling me that just because my career isnt moving at the speed i wish it was, as long as i dont get caught in the branches and weeds on the side, I will get to a place I want to go, and even surpass the people whose careers accelerated before mine did. 

2. taking things at your own pace isnt a bad thing. Going too fast might get you stuck later. burnout is real, and it will inhibit your ability to move forward. Dont move faster than you are able to. The slow current is taking you to where you need to be. The fast current might just kill you. 

-

I did follow the pumpkins along the river from one edge of the property to the next. at the other edge of the property theres another sort of clearing that does actually belong to my family. Unlike the other one that lies on the property line, I couldnt get close to the water, but i could get a very good view of it. Where i stood, the ground was soft, and beside me was an almost completely decomposed stump of a tree. I think the one that had been there was either dead or dying when we moved in, and my parents cut it down to reduce the risk of it falling on the house in a storm. The soil looked and felt rich, like it was waiting for something to be planted there, and I imagined roots extending from my body into that soil and growing into the earth, Imagining what it would be like to be a tree on that river - watching leaves pass down the stream every day, watching ducklings hatch in the banks in the spring, and maturing in the summer. 

I really love druidic paganism for that reason. I love that feeling of being connected to the nature around you. Standing by the water and among the trees is such a calming, meditative experience, and I always feel so focused and refreshed afterwards. 

[12-99-30]

Looking back in January

This is my personal space; to write and share tidbits of my life to those who are curious, caring, and willing to read through an assortment of memories and emotions. I'm a person of cliches and metaphors. Brevity is not my forte, so please do not roll your eyes and laugh at my words. I ask that you respect my invitation into a place where I will expose myself, for I have trusted you a great deal to even give you the link to this blog (quite an honor honestly).

The idea of starting 2020 felt exciting. There was a surge of energy from those around me believing this was going to be the year. A fresh decade. The first year we'd be entering our 20's, where the media has portrayed it as the "best years of our lives" filled with uncertainty, possibility, and growth.

Oh, how quickly God has humbled me into realizing His sovereignty over us, and how my 20's will be far from conventional.

2-4 Days into the New Year

The New Year started off with a weekend trip to New York with C—, J— A—, and A—. It was an unforeseen group that confused many people, myself included. God is so creative in how he brings together an unlikely group of individuals for the first time in an unknown city. We walked along the Brooklyn Promenade after a day of bussing and transporting. I saw the orange hues of the sunset peek through the horizon, minutes before the night started to take over. The city skyline glimmered with empty office buildings as local boats laid still near Lady Liberty. The gentle ripples of the East River seemed to harmonize with the jazz performer's saxophone and New York's traffic. We all stood silently as we let our senses take over. There was liberating peace in knowing I was a stranger in this city. 

Food seemed to be the centralized theme of our trip. We indulged in the most decadent foods. The savory tastes of Ichiran Ramen and Joe's Pizza. Smoky flavors of Joe's Shanghai Szechuan fish. And always making sure we made room for at least one dessert a day - (Magnolia's Banana pudding wins for best dessert). I enjoyed the moments when we slowed down, gathered around the table, and generously shared food with each other. Our voices fell silent when we took our first bites in a saporous dish and our laughters grew loud as we would recount stories and bickering ideas — staying a little longer at the table, even though the check is paid. 

Smaller Moments:

I talked with J— about friendships and community. Community will look so different in each stage of life. We'll have our college friends, our work friends, our church friends, and maybe even no friends at all - just the family you've selected and created. Everybody came in unity after a pianist captivated the attention of strangers at a busy subway station, playing Chopin Waltz. When people say, "it's the little things", I think of this moment. Community is created in such beautiful ways.

I realized how much I love learning. I want to know and understand more. A talk with A— made me realize that if it weren't for money and time commitment, I would love to become a doctor. I want to learn about the body and I want to be a problem solver. But relationships are the center of my being, so I think I'll stick to nursing.

I spent most of the subway rides staring out into apartment building windows. In short glimpses, I saw golden "2020" balloons, week-old Christmas trees, and lights decorating the windows sill. Somebody would be coming home to these things. I saw pieces into strangers' homes, something that is private and personal. It made me wonder who they were. How did they celebrate New Years? Did they have resolutions? Do you think they're coming home to somebody special? I do this often; I look at people and places around me and remember that everyone is living their own life -- living on their own agenda. I'm excited to think I'll have a place one day where I can invite people into my space to share community with them.

9 days into the New Year

I was close to cancelling a 5AM trip to Leesylvania State Park to see the sunrise, but remembered that it takes discomfort to make good memories. I warmed myself up in 3 layers of clothing, wrapped in a blanket, and drove while the full moon was still bright against the night sky. After 40 minutes of letting the morning, winter wind take all sensation from my body, I saw the golden sun rise against the horizon. J— thanked the sun for its warmth, light, nutrients, and speechless view. I thanked God for reminding me to be patient and still, for the reward is always worth it.

I learned how to be present with a friend. Grabbing lunch isn't always the medium to get to know each other. Sometimes all you need is an open mind and dry grass by a lake.

20 days into the New Year 

K— and I took a trip to Georgetown. Our last adventure before she went back to school. We sat by the waterfront, where the air was cold but we buried our hands into our pockets and endured it anyway. We talked about love and relationships, never once looking into each other's eyes. We could hear the way we felt through our voices. No one talks about the heartbreak of moving on from something you know isn't right for you at this time. Part of you wants to hold on, afraid of missing your chance on something great. Will it ever be as great as you imagined? We both knew our hearts were jumbled, but there was something beautiful in seeing exactly where each of us were. In a place that is headed towards healing. Georgetown was a place that both of us fell in love. It's a place that reminds us of what we were and where we are now — we reminisce knowing that one day, this will just be a place. 

28 days into the New Year

I'm in the process of letting go of someone I've wanted in my life forever. I don't want to uncover it all in this post. My heart is tired of writing about it and I think it's better saved for another day. Post-Women's Retreat left me feeling broken, lost, and fearful. I felt forced to confront His truth and the emotions I've been harboring since losing my beloved friend. These days I feel like I'm just existing, but God reminds me that part of faith is having hope in the future. Each one of our problems is rooted at sin, but God made a promise. His promise was Jesus, and Jesus graciously gave his gift to us because he loved us so much that he wanted to save us. The world isn't just moving. The world is pushing to finish His promise but He's just waiting for more people to come to faith.

Romans 5:1 - "We have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ"

Not happiness, but peace. I'm a baby throwing a tantrum because of my circumstances. The Father wants to hold me and let me rest. He wants me to give up my control.

This month I lost so many wars. The more space I give by submitting to God, the more space He has to work in my life. He's untwisting me and mending me. I’m in need in grace through it all. 

I'm ending January trying to get out of this funk of existence. To live life fervently with hope knowing God is making this world turn. It's hard. I feel like I'm tired of fighting for life and my faith. Thankfully, I've seen the sweet sight of sisterhood from Blacksburg to Charlottesville to Fairfax. Sisters who are fighting and praying for me when I am weak. The world keeps circling, and I want to circle around God and the loved ones around me. It is them who ground me. 

#posts

[tipsycad147]

Cauldron Magick (Vessel Magick)

By Ardriana Cahill

“Every hollow holds a hallow.”

This essay began as an essay on cauldron magick but it was impossible for me to not see the comparison of certain kinds of magick and divination that can also be done where chalices or bowls are employed, such as in my family magickal tradition. So although it is primarily regarding cauldron magick, I will touch on other vessels.

The cauldron’s life began as a simple cook pot. It was a practical well of nourishment to a family. To the herbal wise woman or man, that definition was extended as a vessel for boiling healing brews and poultices. To the witch, its use moved a step away from the practical to the magickal where potions were brewed. The lines over the centuries have blurred trying to define when it took on magickal properties.

At its very essence the cauldron is made of metallic earth, heated by fire, cooled by air and tempered by water. It is a vessel of the elements. In contemporary Witchcraft, a cauldron will be a pot made of cast iron which stands on three legs and has a handle. For safety’s sake, it should also have a lid.

In modern witchcraft, the very shape of a vessel evokes the feminine divine, the sacred womb and the origins of life. This tradition is evoked and repeated from many cultures.

“This nine-fold power of the goddess, known as the Toradh of Ana, is especially potent in wells, springs and sacred vessels, such as cauldrons. The specific components of the Toradh are described in:

“Nine Gifts of the Cauldron”

The Cauldron of Life-Work gives and is replenished, promotes and is enlarged, nourishes and is given life, ennobles and is exalted, requests and is filled with answers, sings and is filled with song, preserves and is made strong, arranges and receives arrangements, maintains and is maintained. Good is the well of measure.”

Cauldron Lore

More than just a symbol of the goddess, the cauldron and its contents have specifically represented abundance, poetic inspiration (i.e. knowledge, wisdom and eloquence), physical restoration, regeneration, alchemical transformation, spiritual or psychic awakening or vision and the ability to discern truth.

In Celtic mythology, these abilities were gained from being near or in the cauldron or eating or drinking the contents mixed in a cauldron. Similar stories can be found using a chalice, a bowl or a horn.

The most commonly known stories of the cauldron can be found in Celtic mythology. In Irish lore, Eochaid Ollathair, also known as the Dagda, possessed a cauldron that was one of the four sacred objects brought to Ireland by the Tuatha De Danaan. Its name was Undry and it had the magical capability of providing infinite sustenance doled out by each man’s merit. In Tara, the home of the High Kings of Ireland, this was used to magically grant a royal claimant the authority of divine kingship after eating a meal prepared within it. Sacred vessels of the goddess often bestow sovereignty and kingship in the myths of Irish High Kings.

In Welsh lore, Cerridwen’s cauldron, Amen, bestowed knowledge and inspiration. Bran the Blessed had the Cauldron of Rebirth which resurrected slain warriors. His legend may be the forerunner to the Keeper of the Holy Grail, the chalice of Jesus. On the Gundestrup cauldron, a Celtic horned God popularly believed to be Cernunnos, is depicted being reborn after having been torn apart and boiled in a cauldron. In Norse mythology, a draught which bestowed poetic inspiration and knowledge was brewed in the kettle/cauldron, Odhroerir. In Greece, even today, every four years the modern Olympic flame is lit in a cauldron during a ritual at the site where the Greek temple of Hera used to stand. The great flame that oversees the games is carried by a torch but the vessel that holds that overseeing flame is called a cauldron.

The Gundestrup Cauldron is thought to have been crafted in Gaul circa. 100 BCE. It was discovered in a peat bog in Denmark in 1891 where scholars suggest the Druids may have placed it as an offering to the deities of Nature. One of the cauldron's 13 panels clearly shows the Celtic horned God known as Cernunnos.

Other forms of a cauldron with identical or similar lore include fire pots which have historically symbolised the god himself and were special pots made for the protection of a sacred flame. Censors are another form of cauldron used as a fire pot or bowl to hold either sacred fire or sacred incense.

Magickal Vessel uses:

The modern use of a witch’s cauldron is to represent the God on an altar or on the ground representing the element of Fire within the ritual circle. Placed on an altar or on the grass one must make sure it sits on a fireproof ceramic tile or hotplate.

Pour rubbing alcohol over the salts until the alcohol is about an inch higher than the salts. Hold a lighted match just above the alcohol. The liquid will light and produce a strong orange flame. The flame burns cool, unlike a wood fire, and is difficult to burn things in. When the flame gets low, cover to snuff out completely. Add more rubbing alcohol to the cauldron and relight carefully. The warmer the rubbing alcohol, the quicker it ignites. This fire recipe leaves a significant amount of sediment in the cauldron.

Other times the cauldron is filled with soil or sand to hold a small charcoal brick which is lit for loose incense to be burned upon. Cone incense can also be simply placed on the sand or stick incense is stuck into the sand and burned that way.

Letters to the divine or the ancestors, burnt spells and burnt offerings are often lit and place in the cauldron to burn.

Divination is one of the key uses for the cauldron given its historical nature to impart vision and truth. Several forms of cauldron divination can be done with fire or dry ice. Create the cool alcohol fire as above and look into the flames for images and their symbolic meaning.

In a cauldron filled with sand, (or as in my tradition use a sand-filled ceramic bowl) we do smoke divination. We judge the curl of the smoke from dried herbs or incense burnt on a charcoal brick placed in sand. Blow the smoke softly away from you as you concentrate on a question. Smoke twisting deasil (clockwise) means NO. Smoke twisting widdershins (counter or anti-clockwise) means YES. Burn dried Rose or Cherry blossoms for divinations of love. Use Pecan for questions of employment. Burn Mugwort to ask about prophetic dreams and Lilac for questions concerning the ancestors. Use Mint, Clove or Basil for money questions. Use Cinnamon or Sandalwood for questions of success. Try Carnation, Apple, Bayberry or Cedar for insights into health issues.

You can also fill the cauldron or a bowl with warm water and, with a pair of tongs, drop many small pieces of dry ice into it. (Dry ice can be purchased from a grocery store.) Keep adding warm water and more ice as needed to create a steady rise of mist. As the mist rises, look for images and their symbolic significance that may reflect your hidden desires.

Scrying with a cauldron or bowl filled with water or wine is an ancient practice. It is a meditation device whereby, if you can relax your mind and eyes, you may see images or get impressions of those things you need to attend to or might be calling to you to investigate further. If meditation is more difficult for you, add a teaspoon of olive oil or other sacred oil to the water. Stir with you finger and watch how the oil merges and separates to mesmerise or form symbolic pictures.

In my tradition, we never used a cauldron. We use a ceramic bowl on the altar for sympathetic or small burnt offerings such as herbs or flower petals. (Cauldrons were way too witchly for witches in hiding. A magickal bowl could be left on a table unnoticed.) I often place glass enclosed spell candles dressed with oils in the bowl then surround them with stones and sprinkle appropriate herbs. Here, I place written spells under the candle at the beginning of a spell or burn them before or after the completion of the spell. The bowl becomes a magickal altar unto itself, much like the cauldron which is used for many sacred purposes with or without an altar. Like the cauldron, the bowl is feminine in nature but is largely used with element of Fire in the tradition of Helios, the sun god, who completed his daily rounds “floating” back to his Eastern palace in a golden bowl.

Bowls called Phiales were also used by the ancient Greeks for oil or wine libations, poured into the ground or river to honour the dead or the gods. The Patera, a broad, shallow dish was used for ritual drinking and was thought to impart blessing. Much like the food or drink from the sacred cauldron, these vessels were first designed for material sustenance and later interpreted for use in spiritual sustenance. The cauldron or bowl can also be used filled with water for a floral offering to celebrate joy or to burn flowers in to denote sorrow.

Chalices of oil were burned on ancient Greek and Roman altars. In modern witchcraft, the chalice is another vessel of the goddess or feminine divine and not often used with the element of fire, but it could be with the same precautions of sand and fireproofing that metal cauldrons and ceramic bowls use. However, never try this with glass chalices. Chalices may also be placed on an altar or on ritual ground as a symbol of the element Water. Magickal chalices evolved in history much the same way cauldrons did, imparting the gifts of transformation, healing and immortality.

Ardagh Chalice, c. 800-899 AD.  Found in 1847 by a small boy digging for potatoes

The most famous chalice is the cup of Christ as told in Authurian lore which bestows immortality to anyone who drinks from it. The Cup of Jamshid, was a cup of divination and also bestowed immortality in Persian mythology. In Greek mythology, the cup of Circe brings Ulysses under her control. Apollo had a magickal cup called Crater. And Dionysus had a magickal cup called a kantharos, that like so many magickal vessels, would never empty.

What is stated in James Joyces’ Finnegan’s Wake is a long established tradition that “every hollow hold a hallow.” These “hollows”, be they cauldron, bowl or cup, have been used throughout mythology as magickal tools for divination, transformation and rejuvenation. Let these serve you this Samhain, to evoke abundance, poetic inspiration, restoration, regeneration, transformation, spiritual or psychic awakening or vision or the ability to discern truth. Or if not these, use them to connect you to the history of your magickal heritage.

© 2009 Ardriana Cahill

Sources:

Finnegan's Wake, James Joyce p.25 The Encyclopedia of Celtic Wisdom ~ By Caitlin Matthews, and Matthews John, p. 229 Circle Round: Raising Children in the Goddess Tradition ~ by Starhawk, Anne Hille and Diane Baker  

Other References:

Wikipedia Celtic Religion in Roman Britain ~ By Graham Webster Giants, monsters, and dragons: an encyclopedia of folklore, legend, and myth ~ By Carol Rose The Sacred Bee in Ancient Times and Folklore ~ By Hilda M. Ransome Wake Rites: The Ancient Irish Rituals of Finnegan’s Wake ~ by George Cinclair Gibson

Ardriana Cahill lives in Western USA and is a Hereditary Witch, den of Clan McCormick and a Kell of Brighid since 1998.

www.ArdrianaCahill.com

https://www.controverscial.com/Cauldron%20Magick.htm

Picture https://www.merriam-webster.com

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Image taken from page 356 of 'History of the Colony of Natal; South Africa. To which is added an appendix, containing a brief history of the Orange River Sovereignty and of the Various Races inhabiting it, etc'

Image taken from: Title: "History of the Colony of Natal; South Africa. To which is added an appendix, containing a brief history of the Orange River Sovereignty and of the Various Races inhabiting it, etc" Author: HOLDEN, William Clifford. Shelfmark: "British Library HMNTS 9061.c.30." Page: 356 Place of Publishing: London Date of Publishing: 1855 Issuance: monographic Identifier: 001711119 Explore: Find this item in the British Library catalogue, 'Explore'. Download the PDF for this book (volume: 0) Image found on book scan 356 (NB not necessarily a page number) Download the OCR-derived text for this volume: (plain text) or (json) Click here to see all the illustrations in this book and click here to browse other illustrations published in books in the same year. Order a higher quality version from here. from BLPromptBot https://ift.tt/2QgE0QT

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[anakbayaneastbay]

Stand with Standing Rock: Resist Imperialist Attack on Environment & Indigenous Sovereignty

For Immediate Release March 10, 2017 References: Megan Zapanta, Anakbayan East Bay, [email protected] Shina Robinson, Anakbayan East Bay, [email protected]

Oakland, CA - On February 7, the US Army Corps of Engineers granted an easement to allow the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline underneath the Missouri River. If built, this pipeline will endanger not only the water of millions, but also the ancestral land and way of life of the Sioux tribe who have been fighting colonialism, genocide, and dishonored treaties for over 500 years.

This January, five Anakbayan East Bay members travelled through the Philippines on a solidarity mission with the International Coalition for Human Rights in the Philippines (ICHRP) Northern California Chapter. An objective of our trip was connecting movements resisting state repression. Everywhere we shared stories from Standing Rock and the solidarity delegations that many of our members and allies went on to defend indigenous land from oil corporations. This was an important point of connection to make with the Talaingod Manobo people, who are indigenous to the Pantaron Mountains of the Southern Mindanao Region of the Philippines.

We spent about a week with the Talaingod Manobo people at the Salupongan International School for indigenous youth in Nasilaban. Companies involved in extractive industries, like mining and lumber, have ravaged the natural resources of Mindanao. Since the 1990s, Alcantara & Sons, a lumber company, bolstered by private security, paramilitary groups and the Armed Forces of the Philippines (AFP) have devastated the rainforests around the Talaingod Manobo communities. Since then, the Talaingod Manobos have engaged in armed conflict to defend their land. Every few years, the intensity of military attacks have forced them to evacuate to Davao, the capital city of Mindanao. They most recently evacuated in March of 2014 and are just now beginning to re-settle their villages. Some of the communities that had fled are still living in the Bakwit, an evacuation center in United Church of Christ of the Philippines Haran in Davao.

Most of our delegation returned home the week after the US president's inauguration. The same week, among a slew of other oppressive directives, the current administration issued an executive order to expedite approval of the Dakota Access Pipeline and reopen the approval process of the Keystone XL Pipeline. Both pipeline projects would not only endanger water sources that millions of people rely on, but would bulldoze sacred ancestral burial sites and devastate ancestral land of the area’s First Nations peoples. Bringing only a few temporary jobs in a polluting and dying industry, the mostly male workers living in the “man camps” commit extreme sexual violence against indigenous women and girls. It’s fitting that the resistance that has inspired thousands to physically join the sacred camps in stopping the pipeline is being led by indigenous women and youth. From creating incredibly organized camps grounded in ceremony, which drew representatives from 300 native tribes and coordinated 10,000 volunteers, organizing en masse all over the country, to fierce and innovative multimedia documentation projects, vibrant indigenous leadership is showing us the way to defend the sacred.

Like the native people who started the encampments at Standing Rock, the Talaingod Manobo people are on the frontlines of defending the natural resources of the Southern Mindanao region. They keep returning to live on land where they have been under attack—refusing to cede their ancestral home to corporate greed and plunder. They are investing in the land and its stewardship by creating Salupongan International, a network of indigenous communities organized in defense of the ancestral land. Salupongan International have started schools in communities like Nasilaban to train their youth as the next generation of leaders and caretakers of the land. Now they are on their way to building a health center so they can live and thrive despite the continuing military aggression.

The Army Corps of Engineers may have granted the easement. President Agent Orange and his appointees, directly tied to fossil fuel money, want to continue their abuse of people and planet. But we are learning from our indigenous relatives around the world how to resist and divest from the capitalist system. More importantly, we are learning to honor each other and the sacred and start creating for ourselves outside of these corrupt systems. Whether it is the Lakota Sioux in the heart of empire or the Talaingod Manobo fighting US imperialism’s global grabs for resources, Indigenous People continue to be the main front of resistance against the crises of climate and capitalism. They are caretakers of radically caring, connected, life-affirming cultures antithetical to the greed and materialism tearing societies apart and devastating the environment.

Anakbayan East Bay stands with the Indigenous Peoples of the Philippines, the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, and indigenous peoples of the world in the fight for self-determination and to defend the sacred. We stand with the Native Nations Rising as they confront imperialist hate mongers and fossil fuel puppet politicians in Washington DC this week. We stand united for collective liberation.

[networkingdefinition]

Virginia State Quotes

Official Website: Virginia State Quotes

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• A [desire] to abolish slavery prevails in North America, many of the Pennsylvanians have set their slaves at liberty, and [Virginia legislators] have petitioned the King for permission to make a law for preventing the importation of more [slaves] into that colony. This request, however, will probably not be granted, as their former laws of that kind have always been repealed. – Benjamin Franklin • A declaration of the independence of America, and the sovereignty of the United STates was drawn by the ingenious and philosophic pen of Thomas Jefferson, Esquire, a delegate from the state of Virginia – Mercy Otis Warren • A lot of good things start in Virginia; a lot of good things have started in Virginia. We’re no strangers to firsts. – Robert Hurt • A lot of West Virginia is untouched. It doesn’t have as many strip malls, it has these old towns that feel like it used to be how it looked. Charleston has this river that runs through it, and it’s really beautiful. – Sam Trammell • A middle-aged woman who looked like someone’s cleaning lady, a shrieking adolescent lunatic and a talkshow host with an orange face… It didn’t add up. Suicide wasn’t invented for people like this. It was invented for people like Virginia Woolf and Nick Drake. And Me. Suicide was supposed to be cool. – Nick Hornby • A new report shows that, in Virginia, gun violence has fallen as the sale of firearms has soared to a new record. In other news, a recent study shows that most criminals don’t like getting shot at. – Fred Thompson • Ah. In my experience, when people say they don’t know whether they love someone, they usually mean no. – Michael Scott

• All I ever wanted was a Virginia farm, no end of cream and fresh butter and fried chicken – not one fried chicken, or two, but unlimited fried chicken. – Robert E. Lee • An otherwise happily married couple may turn a mixed doubles game into a scene from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. – Rod Laver • And later, if I ever felt that I was getting swept away by the craziness of being in a band, well, I’d go back to Virginia. – Dave Grohl • Any part of the piggy Is quite all right with me Ham from Westphalia, ham from Parma Ham as lean as the Dalai Lama Ham from Virginia, ham from York, Trotters Sausages, hot roast pork. Crackling crisp for my teeth to grind on Bacon with or without the rind on Though humanitarian I’m not a vegetarian. I’m neither crank nor prude nor prig And though it may sound infra dig Any part of the darling pig Is perfectly fine with me. – Noel Coward • Any time you burn a cross in Virginia, it’s a crime? – Anthony Kennedy • Are we going to New Orleans?” “No”, she said, backing out of the spot. “We’re going to West Virginia.” “I assume by ‘West Virginia,’ you actually mean ‘Hawaii,'” I said. “Or some place equally exciting. – Richelle Mead • As editor of the largest newspaper in West Virginia, I scan hundreds of reports daily . . . and I am amazed by the frequency with which religion causes people to kill each other. It is a nearly universal pattern, undercutting the common assumption that religion makes people kind and tolerant. – James A. Haught • As my father wrote, one’s courage, hope, and spirit can be severely tried by the happenstance of life. But as I learned on this Virginia mountain, so long as one never loses faith, it is impossible to ever truly be alone. – David Baldacci • At Princeton I wrote my junior paper on Virginia Woolf, and for my senior thesis I wrote on Samuel Beckett. I wrote some about “Between the Acts” and “Mrs. Dalloway” but mostly about “To the Lighthouse.” With Beckett I focused, perversely, on his novels, “Molloy,” “Malone Dies,” and “The Unnamable.” That’s when I decided I should never write again. – David Duchovny • At the risk of sounding like Virginia Woolf, I could live on £700 a year. – Ian Mcewan

jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'Virginia', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '68', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_virginia').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_virginia img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); ); • Because finally, ‘the equal right of every citizen to the free exercise of his religion according to the dictates of conscience’ is held by the same tenure with all his other rights. If we recur to its origin, it is equally the gift of nature; if we weigh its importance, it cannot be less dear to us; if we consider the ‘Declaration of those rights which pertain to the good people of Virginia, as the basis and foundation of government,’ it is enumerated with equal solemnity, or rather studied emphasis. – James Madison• Because I’m Irish, I’ve always done an accent. Not doing an accent is off-putting because I sound like me. I love doing an accent. Doing the accent from West Virginia was great, and we had to get specific with it. – Eve Hewson • Being blunt with your feelings is very American. In this big country, I can be as brash as New York, as hedonistic as Los Angeles, as sensuous as San Francisco, as brainy as Boston, as proper as Philadelphia, as brawny as Chicago, as warm as Palm Springs, as friendly as my adopted home town of Dallas, Fort Worth, and as peaceful as the inland waterway that rubs up against my former home in Virginia Beach. – Martina Navratilova • Both my parents came from North Carolina, in Warren County. My mother had a feeling that there was greater culture in North Carolina than obtained in Norfolk, Virginia, plus the fact she just didn’t like the lowland-lying climate there. – Ella Baker • But perhaps God’s purpose in the world (I am only thinking aloud here) is to draw his creatures to him. And you have to admit that tragedies like this one at Virginia Tech help to do that! – Dinesh D’Souza • But under the beaming, constant and almost vertical sun of Virginia, shade is our Elysium. In the absence of this no beauty of the eye can be enjoyed. – Thomas Jefferson • But, sir, the great cause of complaint now is the slavery question, and the questions growing out of it. If there is any other cause of complaint which has been influential in any quarter, to bring about the crisis which is now upon us; if any State or any people have made the troubles growing out of this question, a pretext for agitation instead of a cause of honest complaint, Virginia can have no sympathy whatever, in any such feeling, in any such policy, in any such attempt. It is the slavery question. Is it not so? – John Brown Baldwin • By natural means, as the Lord always operates for the accomplishment of his purposes, means so simple that the thoughtless and unbelieving do not see the manifestation of his power, he brought the Puritans from the old world to New England, the Dutch to New York, the English Cavaliers to Virginia and the French to New Orleans, a combination of races which, paradoxical as it may appear, was just calculated to give us the composite America who made the United States of America what it is, the greatest nation of the world today. – Anthony W. Ivins

[clickbank-storefront-bestselling] • Cause I’m carryin’ your love with me From West Virginia down to Tennessee I’ll be movin’ with the good lord speed, carryin’ your love with me It’s my strength for holdin’ on Every minute that I have to be gone I’ll have everything I’ll ever need Carryin’ your love with me – George Strait • Come to West Virginia and we’ll show you how to live… how to treat people. We’re open for business. West Virginia is truly on the move. – Joe Manchin • Deep down, I’m just a West Virginia hillbilly. – Brad Paisley • Donald Trump didn’t know the [Democratic] vice presidential candidate he was running against: Tim Kaine [Senator] of Virginia, Donald! Not Thomas Kean, Republican [former Governor] of New Jersey, you moron! And his answer to absolutely every question is so simplistic and grand: “Oh, I’ll fix it. Trust me. I’m the best fixer. I love to fix!!! Look at everything I’ve fixed before!!!!”. – Chrissy Teigen • Donald Trump singled out three particular states where he claimed there was, quote, “serious voter fraud” – Virginia, New Hampshire and California. Trump lost all three of those states. – Audie Cornish • Don’t take me for a fool!” Dee interrupted angrily, but then had to lean over the boat as another bout of nausea gripped him. Virginia grinned and winked at Josh. “It’s hard to sound masterful when you’re throwing up, isn’t it?” “I hate you, Virginia Dare,” Dee mumbled. “I know you don’t really mean that,” she said lightly. “I do,” he croaked. – Michael Scott • Each had his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart; and his friends could only read the title. – Virginia Woolf, from Jacob’s Room Television is chewing gum for the eyes. – Frank Lloyd Wright • Each time I undertake to reread Virginia Woolf, I am somewhat baffled by the signature breathlessness and relentlessly “poetic” tone, the shimmering impressionism, so very different from the vivid, precise, magisterial (and often very funny) prose of her contemporary James Joyce. – Joyce Carol Oates • Earlier this week Donald Trump gave an interview with CNN at a winery he owns in Virginia. It turns out Trump’s winery makes two different kinds of wine: white wine and not-white wine. – Jimmy Fallon • Five states – Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Illinois and North Carolina – have been identified by the EPA as contributing significantly to Rhode Island pollution. As of 2010, 284 tall smokestacks – stacks over 500 feet – were operating in the United States: needles injecting poison into the atmosphere. – Sheldon Whitehouse • For a mile up and down the open fields before us the splendid lines of the veterans of the Army of Northern Virginia swept down upon us. Their bearing was magnificent. They came forward with a rush, and how our men did yell, ‘Come on, Johnny, come on!’ – Rufus Dawes • For in Virginia, a plaine Souldier that can use a Pick-axe and spade, is better than five Knights. – John Smit • For me, I was born in the Bronx, and I moved to Virginia Beach, Virginia at a very young age. I had the luxury of going back to New York, visiting my grandmother who would spoil me endlessly, and I could buy whatever was the hot kicks in the summertime of 1990. Being able to shop and then going back to Virginia Beach, where they weren’t as fast in regards to fashion, I had that luxury. – Pusha T • For pain words are lacking. There should be cries, cracks, fissures, whiteness passing over chintz covers, interference with the sense of time, of space ; the sense also of extreme fixity in passing objects ; and sounds very remote and then very close ; flesh being gashed and blood sparting, a joint suddenly twisted – beneath all of which appears something very important, yet remote, to be just held in solitude.” — Virginia Woolf, The Waves – Virginia Woolf • For while this year it may be a Catholic against whom the finger of suspicion is pointed, in other years it has been, and may someday be again, a Jew— or a Quaker or a Unitarian or a Baptist. It was Virginia’s harassment of Baptist preachers, for example, that helped lead to Jefferson’s statute of religious freedom. Today I may be the victim, but tomorrow it may be you — until the whole fabric of our harmonious society is ripped at a time of great national peril. – John F. Kennedy • Growing up in the church in West Virginia, faith is always there. It’s part of the fabric of the culture. – DeVon Franklin • Gun-free zones don’t deter criminals-they help them by providing a guarantee that they will not face any armed resistance. But they do deter the law-abiding. A faculty member with a concealed-handgun permit who breaks the campus gun ban would be fired and likely find it impossible to get admitted to another school. Bringing a firearm into a gun-free zone can have serious adverse consequences for law-abiding people. But for someone like the Virginia Tech killer, the threat of expulsion is no deterrent at all. – Glenn Beck • Had you or I been born at the Bay of Soldania, possibly our Thoughts, and Notions, had not exceeded those brutish ones of the Hotentots that inhabit there: And had the Virginia King Apochancana, been educated in England, he had, perhaps been as knowing a Divine, and as good a Mathematician as any in it. The difference between him, and a more improved English-man, lying barely in this, That the exercise of his Facilities was bounded within the Ways, Modes, and Notions of his own Country, and never directed to any other or farther Enquiries. – John Locke • Having undertaken, for the glory of God, and advancement of the Christian faith, and honor of our King and Country, a voyage to plant the first colony in the northern parts of Virginia, do by these presents solemnly and mutually, in the presence of God, and one of another, covenant and combine our selves together. – William Bradford • Home. One place is just like another, really. Maybe not. But truth is it’s all just rock and dirt and people are roughly the same. I was born up there but I’m no stranger here. Have always felt at home everywhere, even in Virginia, where they hate me. Everywhere you go there’s nothing but the same rock and dirt and houses and people and deer and birds. They give it all names, but I’m at home everywhere. Odd thing: unpatriotic. I was at home in England. I would be at home in the desert. In Afghanistan or far Typee. All mine, it all belongs to me. My world. – Michael Shaara • How did Madison get separation through Virginia and later Congress? The Baptists, the Presbyterians, and the smaller sects hated Jefferson; to them he was a secularist of the worst kind. But Madison could get Jefferson’s bill passed because the Baptists, the Presbyterians, and smaller sects who were excluded in New England and in the South got together for their own protection. – John Rawls • I am a former Kleagie of the Klu Klux Klan in Raleigh County and adjoining counties of the state, having been appainted to this office [by] Mr. J. L. Baskin of Arlington, Virginia, in 1942… It is necessary that the order be promoted immediately and in every state in the union. – Robert Byrd • I am happy to be a regional writer. My region is the American West, old Mexico, West Virginia, New York, Europe, Australia, the human heart, and the male groin. – Edward Abbey • I am not of Virginia blood; she is of mine. – Joshua Chamberlain • I am of Virginia and all my professional life I have studied of Lee and Jackson – Douglas MacArthur • I came from Mechanicsville, Virginia, where you have four seasons. – Jason Mraz • I can assure you that my wife and I – every penny of income we’ve ever had, our taxes were paid in West Virginia. – Joe Manchin • I can’t imagine otherwise – I guess Virginia Woolf could write wonderful novels where the women never have sex, and her novels work. But for me, I don’t think I could write a plot without sex happening somewhere. – Shirley Geok-lin Lim • I can’t think of a better place to be than Scottsville, Virginia. – Robert Hurt • I considered 4 of these bills [of the revised code of Virginia] as forming a system by which every fibre would be eradicated of antient or future aristocracy; and a foundation laid for a government truly republican. – Thomas Jefferson • I fully expect to be able to complete one more campaign goal – and that is to proudly report that signs have been erected as you enter our great state that say ‘Welcome to Wild, Wonderful West Virginia: Open for Business!’ – Joe Manchin • I grew up down in the hills of Virginia. I can be in Kentucky in 20 minutes, Tennessee in 20 minutes or in the state of West Virginia in 20 minutes. And it’s down in the Appalachian Mountains, down there. And it’s sort of a poorer country. Most of the livelihood is coal mining and logging, working in the woods and things like that. Most people has a hard life down that way. – Ralph Stanley • I grew up in Palestine, West Virginia, which is mostly a farming community; there aren’t a lot of jobs. – Jessica Lynch • I grew up in southwestern Virginia. I was born in South Carolina, but only because my parents had a vacation cabin or something there on the beach. I was like a summer baby. But I did grow up in the South. I grew up in serious, serious Appalachia, in a very small town. – William Gibson • I grew up in the segregated South, right here in Lynchburg, Virginia. – Jerry Falwell • I had been reading a lot about pioneers in Australia and the colonization of Australia, and pioneers in Virginia and the early settlers in the United States, and I was fascinated by those communities and how they grew, how their politics developed, and the actual suffering of those people and the tribulations they went through. – Ben Richards • I knew that the wall was the main thing in Quebec, and had cost a great deal of money…. In fact, these are the only remarkable walls we have in North America, though we have a good deal of Virginia fence, it is true. – Henry David Thoreau • I know the Virginia players are smart because you need a 1500 SAT to get in. I have to drop bread crumbs to get our players to and from class – George Raveling • I like reading… French, Russian classics – Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Flaubert. I also like Hemingway, Virginia Woolf. – Andrea Bocelli • I live in a rural part of Virginia surrounded by farms and farmers. – Barbara Kingsolver • I look upon Virginia as a rib taken from Britain’s side… While they both proceed as living under the marriage-compact, this Eve might thrive so long as her Adam flourishes. Whatever serpent shall tempt her to go astray etc [will only cause] her husband to rule more strictly over her. – Alexander Spotswood • I love going to black churches, and I love some of these black preachers. The best preacher I ever saw in my life was a 93-year-old in a black church in Hamilton, Virginia. What a preacher! – Robert Duvall • I love to smoke. I love to eat red meat. I’ll only eat red meat that comes from cows who smoke, ok!? Special cows they grow in Virginia with voice boxes in their necks. “Moo” – Denis Leary • I loved languages, and loved learning languages. It was fantastic. But I was alone there. I remember that time as a real Virginia Woolf time. More than any language it was her language that influenced me. – Lily King • I made a fairly bold pledge that I wanted Virginia to be the energy capital of the East Coast. – Bob McDonnell • I mean my mother migrated from Georgia -Rome, Georgia, to Washington, D.C., where she then met my father, who was a Tuskegee Airman who was from Southern Virginia. They migrated to Washington and I wouldn’t even exist if it were not for that migration. And I brought her back to Georgia, both my parents, actually. – Isabel Wilkerson • I never had a hat, never wore one, but recently was given a brown suede duck-hunting hat. The moment I put it on I realized I was starved for a hat. I kept it warm by putting it on my head. I made plans to wear it especially when I was going to do any thinking. Somewhere in Virginia, I lost my hat. – John Cage • I never wanted to fight against the Union, but could not turn my back on Virginia. – John Brown • I now teach at American University and the University of Virginia – Julian Bond • I say, then, that viewed from that standpoint, there is but one single subject of complaint which Virginia has to make against the government under which we live; a complaint made by the whole South, and that is on the subject of African slavery. – John Brown Baldwin • I served with General Washington in die Legislature of Virginia…and…with Doctor Franklin in Congress. I never heard neither of them speak ten minutes at a time, nor to any but the main point. – Thomas Jefferson • I spent my first two years at a small all-male college in Virginia called Hampden-Sydney. That was like going to college 120 years ago. The languages, a year of rhetoric, all of the great books, Western Man courses, stuff like that. – Stephen Colbert • I tell you what Hispanics in Virginia tell me they want. They want access to the American dream. Thats why they come here to Virginia and to America, so they want more opportunities to start small business, better schools. – Bob McDonnell • I then wrought at my trade as a tailor; carefully attended meetings for worship and discipline; and found an enlargement of gospel love in my mind, and therein a concern to visit Friends in some of the back settlements of Pennsylvania and Virginia. – John Woolman • I think family is very important in West Virginia and has long been so because the mountains made travel difficult in the past, and family members had to depend on each other. – David Selby • I think George Allen from Virginia was a distinguished governor, he’s a distinguished senator and head of the Senatorial Campaign Committee and won some significant victories. He is a very attractive guy and would make a tremendous president. – Pat Robertson • I think that we need more economic-based solutions to the problems afflicting the Black community, and I think that that’s a way to redefine affirmative action. I grew up with poor white people in West Virginia, and I know there’s a culture of poverty. I know that I’ve seen white people perform exactly the same pathological forms of behavior as Black people do when they’re systematically deprived, whether it’s getting pregnant, doing drugs, dropping out of school, whatever we’re talking about. I think that we should have affirmative action for poor white people too. – Henry Louis Gates • I think the kind of unexpected I really love is when you open books and the actual way of writing is different and interesting. Like reading Virginia Woolf for the first time or Lawrence Durrell for the first time. – Lalla Ward • I think, to be honest, sort of emanated from the initial work of somebody else instead of SCLC. If you take Albany; I don’t know whether you recall how Albany got started. There were two little guys who went up there first. One was Cordell Hull who was then in his teens – not Cordell Hull – Cordell Reagan, who came out of the Nashville movement, and Charles Sherrod, who came out of the Richmond, Virginia, movement. – Ella Baker • I usually have more than one thing I’m working on at once — I’ve been working on three different novels. When I get stuck on one, I hop back and forth. It’s sort of freeing: I can say I’m abandoning this thing that I hate forever and I’m moving on to something that’s good. I’ll find that I’ll go back to [the other project] in a day or a week and like it again. But that moment of wanting to trash something — that Virginia Woolf moment when you have to be stopped from filling your pocket with stones — comes pretty regularly for me. Switching is probably a good thing. – Dan Chaon • I want to talk about jobs and health care and pension security and what we’re going to do to stop the brain drain in Ohio and make it possible for our young people to stay here and build a life in Ohio rather than in Pennsylvania or West Virginia or God knows where. – Ted Strickland • I was a tomboy growing up and then fell into the world of theatre and musical theatre. A girlfriend introduced me to yoga in college and I was hooked. I didn’t really know anything about it except that it was the highlight of my week. I ended up graduating from the University of Virginia and moving to Los Angeles where I could continue acting and do a yoga teacher training. I went from practicing once or twice a week to several hours everyday. I loved it. – Kathryn Budig • I was able to go over [Saxophone Competition] and work a little more in Europe. I’m thankful that those of kinds of things. Simultaneously, some nice things did come in. I got a nice festival that came in, in Virginia through that. There was a club that opened in DC in the famous Willard Hotel near the White House. And the club was called The Nest. I played there a few nights. Some musicians in Philly and D.C. kind of brought me down and got me on a couple things. So things opened up a little bit. – Jon Gordon • I was born and raised in Richmond, Virginia, the capital of the confederacy. – Corey Reynolds • I was born Feb. 12, 1809, in Hardin County, Kentucky. My parents were both born in Virginia, of undistinguished families–second families, perhaps I should say. My mother, who died in my tenth year, was of a family of the name of Hanks…. My father … removed from Kentucky to … Indiana, in my eighth year…. It was a wild region, with many bears and other wild animals still in the woods. There I grew up…. Of course when I came of age I did not know much. Still somehow, I could read, write, and cipher … but that was all. – Abraham Lincoln • I was born in Norfolk, Virginia. I began school there, the first year of public school. When I was 7, the family shifted back to North Carolina. I grew up in North Carolina; had my schooling through the college level in North Carolina. – Ella Baker • I was into Virginia Woolf and James Joyce [at university] and I think we all thought that [Charles] Dickens wasn’t that cool. – Felicity Jones • I was recruited by a number of schools including Miami University, University of Kentucky, University of Cincinnati, Indiana university, West Virginia University as well as others. – Graham Taylor • I was stationed in Norfolk, Virginia, for a while, about which the less said the better, and then I was in the Mediterranean, about which the more said the better. – Harry Mathews • I woke up full of hate and fear the day before the most recent peace march in San Francisco. This was disappointing: I’d hoped to wake up feeling somewhere between Virginia Woolf and Wavy Gravy. – Anne Lamott • I would say country is the one type of music I’ve spent the least amount of time with in my life. I grew up in Virginia, where there was a lot of it, but I was more interested in rock and roll. Southern rock. – Connie Britton • I, for one, despite being a pretty solid climate hawk, I am extremely sympathetic to West Virginia and its coal-country needs. I lived there for a year. I’ve seen it. And the same for Wyoming, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kentucky. They all have parts of their state where that really matters. And I think that home-state constituency issue is a pretty constant one. And I think the problem of extreme lobbying by the corporate sector, which runs about $30-to-$1 compared to everybody else in the world, and the constituent aspect combines to give those industries a consistent advantage. – Sheldon Whitehouse • If any doubt has arisen as to me, my country [Virginia] will have my political creed in the form of a “Declaration &c.” which I was lately directed to draw. This will give decisive proof that my own sentiment concurred with the vote they instructed us to give. – Thomas Jefferson • If our legislature does not heartily push our University [of Virginia] we must send our children for education to Kentucky [Transylvania College] or Cambridge [Harvard College]. The latter will return them to us as fanatics and tories, the former will keep them to add to their population. – Thomas Jefferson • If she Hillary Clinton win just two of the three big battleground states – North Carolina, Florida and Virginia – she will have shut off Trump’s path to 270 electoral votes, even if he wins the other toss-up states. – Mara Liasson • If the federal government has the exclusive right to judge the extent of its own powers, warned the Kentucky and Virginia resolutions’ authors (James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, respectively), it will continue to grow – regardless of elections, the separation of powers, and other much-touted limits on government power. – Thomas Woods • If we had to take a million immigrants in, say Zulus, next year, or Englishmen, and put them up in Virginia, what group would be easier to assimilate and would cause less problems for the people of Virginia? – Pat Buchanan • If you think of all the publicity about the terrible tragedy of Virginia Tech, we have a Virginia Tech in this country every day. It’s just spread across 50 states. – Michael Bloomberg • If you’re writing an opinion piece, it’s your job to write your opinion. If, on the other hand, you wrote a novel, as Virginia Woolf tells us, it would be inappropriate if you let your novel be influenced by your political opinions. – David Mamet • I’ll carry on, carry over, carry forward, Cary Grant, cash and carry, carry me back to Old Virginia, I’ll even ‘hari-kari’ if you show me how, but I will not carry a gun! – Alan Alda • I’m from Middlesboro, Ky., a little town on the Tennessee and Virginia border. – Lee Majors • I’m from West Virginia. If you didn’t know what was happening in NASCAR, you were on the outside. NASCAR is a big league sport, but it’s still also country and redneck. – Randy Moss • I’m going to come back to West Virginia when this is over. There’s something ancient and deeply-rooted in my soul. I like to think that I have left my ghost up one of those hollows, and I’ll never really be able to leave for good until I find it. And I don’t want to look for it, because I might find it and have to leave.” – from a letter to his mother Helen Pancake that Breece wrote in Charlottesville, where he was studying writing. – Breece D’J Pancake • I’m like a little boy from Virginia. I’m a backpacker. In my head, I’m left of centre. I come from the pool of weirdoes. – Pharrell Williams • I’m projected as an ambulance chaser, but I’m more the ambulance. People call me because they know I will come…. I have never fought a case where they didn’t ask me to come. People have this picture like I’m sitting up in bed at night with a walkie-talkie. “You hear anything? Oh, let’s run! It’s Virginia today!”… Every victim calls us…. “Who put Sharpton in charge?” The victim! – Al Sharpton • Imposing excessive new regulations, or closing coal-fired power plants, would produce few health or environmental benefits. But it would exact huge costs on society – and bring factories, offices and economies to a screeching halt in states that are 80-98% dependent on coal: Indiana, Kentucky, Missouri, North Dakota, Ohio, Utah, West Virginia and Wyoming. – Paul Driessen • In “Virginia Woolf” I had a thing which the grips called the paraplegic which was a wheelchair thing that I had made up years before where I could stand on this bicycle-like device and be pushed down the hall, and then step off it with a handheld camera. – Haskell Wexler • In all her history, from the formation of the federal government until the hour of secession, no year stands out more prominently than the year 1858 as evidencing the national patriotism of Virginia. – John Sergeant Wise • In his scintillating new novel, Matt Bondurant explores a crucial period in the history of Virginia and of his family. His gorgeous, precise prose brings to life an amazing cast of characters, including Sherwood Anderson, and the often deadly battles of Prohibition. The Wettest County in the World is a remarkably compelling, highly intelligent, and deeply moving novel. – Margot Livesey • In other words, [ H.P. Lovecraft] was areligious, asexual, neurasthenic, he just didn’t want to react to the world. Like Virginia Woolf, who considered religion the ultimate obscenity. – Paul Laffoley • In Seattle, I soon found that my radical ideas and aesthetic explorations – ideas and explorations that in Richmond, Virginia, might have gotten me stoned to death with hush puppies – were not only accepted but occasionally applauded. – Tom Robbins • In the end I created a career of my own, concentrating on my writing and lecturing, reaching larger audiences than I would had I ended up with tenure and a full teaching load. It was Virginia Woolf who said that it is terrible to be frozen out of a sacred tradition – but even more terrible to be frozen into it. – Michael Parenti • In the great city of San Francisco, where I used to live, at 2 in the morning every other Victorian house has somebody who is writing the great American novel. And the city is not loaded with James Joyces or Virginia Woolfs. But entrepreneurship is about distorted views of reality. – Tom Peters • In the recent Virginia election, the black vote diminished. Now why was that? I think a lot of black folks are wondering what this guy is really going to do, not only for them but for the country. If the country is injured, they will be injured. That may be sinking in. – Nat Hentoff • In the sense of media saying this about themselves, I drive to my kids’ school in upstate New York through rural Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York; [Donald] Trump signs everywhere. – Mary Matalin • In West Virginia yesterday, a man was arrested for stealing several blow-up dolls. Reportedly, police didn’t have any trouble catching the man because he was completely out of breath. – Conan O’Brien • In West Virginia, we’re all family. We know how firefighters and policemen honor their own and we feel our miners deserve to be honored in a similar way. – Ginger Baker • It costs a hell of a lot more money to put somebody in jail than send them to the University of Virginia. – Bernie Sanders • It is in Virginia and Georgia that the war now rages and where it will continue for at these points – Richmond and Atlanta – the enemy’s main strength is concentrated. • It is to them I look, to the rising generation, and not to the one now in power, for these great reformations i.e., emancipation of slaves and settlement of the Virginia constitution on a firmer and more permanent basis. – Thomas Jefferson • It’s ironic that the Bible belt is the killing belt – Texas, Florida, Alabama, Virginia, and so forth, Georgia. Chief executioners. – Joseph Lowery • It’s quite clear that Virginia Wade is thriving on the pressure now that the pressure on her to do well is off . – Harry Carpenter • It’s rather splendid to think of all those great men and women who appear to have presented symptoms that allow us to describe them as bipolar. Whether it’s Hemingway, Van Gogh… Robert Schumann has been mentioned… Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath… some of them with rather grim ends. – Stephen Fry • I’ve always loved my own little office spaces no matter what they were like. It’s the Virginia Woolf, room of one’s own concept, it’s really important. – Lena Dunham • Lee tells his troops. After four years of arduous service marked by unsurpassed courage and fortitude the Army of Northern Virginia has been compelled to yield to overwhelming numbers and resources. – Robert E. Lee • Like the amazing story of Anthony Johnson. This man was a slave, then became free, accumulated 250 acres, and even had his own slave, a black man who took him to court in Virginia in 1654.That man argued that he should be freed like an indentured servant. But Johnson, who we believe was a pure African from Angola, said, “No way, you’re my slave.” And the court agreed. – Henry Louis Gates • My father was in the coal business in West Virginia. Both dad and mother were, however, originally from Massachusetts; New England, to them, meant the place to go if you really wanted an education. – John Knowles • My father’s family came from Virginia and Philadelphia. He wasn’t a brother who talked a lot. He was a working man, a quiet, blue-collar dude. – Ice T • My father’s people… are from Fairfax in northern Virginia, just across the Mason-Dixon line. So it was an honour to play Lee, he was a great general. – Robert Duvall • My first job was at an amusement park in Virginia. It was the worst. I loved the park but once I’d worked there all the magic was gone from it. It just turned into a place I hated and I’ve never been there since. • My great-great-great-grandmother walked as a slave from Virginia to Eatonton, Georgia… It is in memory of this walk that I chose to keep and to embrace my “maiden” name, Walker. – Alice Walker • My inspiration is my hometown. I feel that because I’m representing my very overlooked region of Virginia, I have to keep accomplishing my goals to show everyone there that you can truly become whatever you believe with hard work and dedication. – Thomas Jones • My mother was a public school teacher in Virginia, and we didn’t have any money, we just survived on happiness, on being a happy family.- Dave Grohl • My off-the-cuff remarks at the University of Virginia were with regard to global macro traders, who are on-call 24/7 and of whom there are likely only a few thousand successful practitioners in the world today. Macro trading requires a high degree of skill, focus and repetition. Life events, such as birth, divorce, death of a loved one and other emotional highs and lows are obstacles to success in this specific field of finance. – Paul Tudor Jones • My older sister Nikki went to Hampton music school in Virginia, then to another school later in New York. – Debra Wilson • My role models were childless: Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, George Eliot, the Brontes. – Joyce Carol Oates • My swag is always capital and live in north Virginia. – Donald Glover • My ‘thing’ is that I just lie in my immense bed and look out the window at the skyline over Virginia and the sky and the airplanes coming into Reagan. I really love doing that. – Ben Stein • Needless to say, the business of living interferes with the solitude so needed for any work of the imagination. Here’s what Virginia Woolf said in her diary about the sticky issue: “I’ve shirked two parties, and another Frenchman, and buying a hat, and tea with Hilda Trevelyan, for I really can’t combine all this with keeping all my imaginary people going. – Virginia Woolf • New Jersey boasts the highest percentage of passport holders (68%); Delaware (67%), Alaska (65%), Massachusetts (63%), New York (62%), and California (60%) are close behind. At the opposite end of the spectrum, less than one in five residents of Mississippi are passport holders, and just one in four residents of West Virginia, Kentucky, Alabama, and Arkansas. – Richard Florida • Next Monday the Convention in Virginia will assemble; we have still good hopes of its adoption here: though by no great plurality of votes. South Carolina has probably decided favourably before this time. The plot thickens fast. A few short weeks will determine the political fate of America for the present generation, and probably produce no small influence on the happiness of society through a long succession of ages to come. – George Washington • No couples in Virginia can adopt other than a married couple – that’s the right policy. – Tim Kaine • Not only is the day waning, but the year. The low sun is fiery and yet cold behind the monastery ruin, and the Virginia creeper on the Cathedral wall has showered half its deep-red leaves down on the pavement. There has been rain this afternoon, and a wintry shudder goes among the little pools on the cracked, uneven flag-stones, and through the giant elm-trees as they shed a gust of tears. – Charles Dickens • Obviously, everything has always been defined by the dominant ideology. But the dominant ideology has been able to accept women’s literature as well as men’s literature. I would say that women have been hindered from creating for a variety of reasons, as Virginia Woolf so admirably explained in A Room of One’s Own. When they have created, on the whole they have been recognized. In literature it hasn’t been nearly as oppressive as in, say, painting, where even the existence of so many women painters has always been denied. – Simone de Beauvoir • Of Virginia Woolf: The talent of this generation which is most certain of survival. – Rebecca West • Okay, so. You, Belikov, the Alchemist, Sonya Karp, Victor Dashkov, and Robert Doru are all hanging out in West Virginia together.” “No,” I said. “No?” “We’re, uh, not in West Virginia. – Richelle Mead • On most things except witch trials, Virginia will always have been first. – Morgan Griffith • On the last morning of Virginia’s bloodiest year since the Civil War, I built a fire and sat facing a window of darkness where at sunrise I knew I would find the sea. – Patricia Cornwell • Once we had a rail station in Montgomery that connected to Columbus and went all the way up to Virginia, slave traders could transport thousands of slaves at a fraction of the cost than they could transport by boat, and certainly by foot. And that’s how Montgomery became such an active slave-trading space. – Bryan Stevenson • Our [Virginia’s] act for freedom of religion is extremely applauded. The Ambassadors and ministers of the several nations of Europe resident at this court have asked me copies of it to send to their sovereigns, and it is inserted at full length in several books now in the press; among others, in the new Encyclopédie. I think it will produce considerable good even in those countries where ignorance, superstition, poverty and oppression of body and mind in every form, are so firmly settled on the mass of the people, that their redemption from them can never be hoped. – Thomas Jefferson • Our neighbors in Virginia are just as responsible for these killings as the criminals are because they won’t pass strong gun [control] legislation. – Marion Barry • Our workers comp debt is the Achilles heel of our state’s economy, and I firmly believe that in order to create more good jobs in West Virginia this system must be fixed and it must be fixed now. We cannot afford to wait even one more minute. – Joe Manchin • Philip Glass, like [Virginia] Woolf, is more interested in that which continues than he is in that which begins, climaxes, and ends… Glass and Woolf have both broken out of the traditional realm of the story, whether literary or musical, in favor of something more meditative, less neatly delineated, and more true to life. For me, Glass [finds] in three repeated notes something of [a] rapture of sameness. – Michael Cunningham • Plot involves fragmentary reality, and it might involve composite reality. Fragmentary reality is the view of the individual. Composite reality is the community or state view. Fragmentary reality is always set against composite reality. Virginia Woolf did this by creating fragmentary monologues and for a while this was all the rage in literature. She was a genius. In the hands of the merely talented it came off like gibberish. – Rita Mae Brown • Pocahontas was the reason the Virginia colony didn’t disappear, unlike some earlier attempts – Brooks Robinson • Random Roles? Oh, I saw Virginia Madsen do this the other day! You see? I’m paying attention! – Rob Lowe • Receiving both the Coretta Scott King – Virginia Hamilton Award for Lifetime Achievement and the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award suggests I have succeeded, at least in terms of my own goals, in my intent to make art that moves children. – Jerry Pinkney • Science advances by trial and error. When mistakes are made, the peer-review publication process usually roots them out. Cuccinelli’s version of the scientific process would be “make an error and go to trial.” Einstein did not arrive at E=mc2 in his first attempt. If he were working in the state of Virginia under Cuccinelli today, he could be jailed for his initial mistakes and perhaps never achieve that landmark equation. – Scott Mandia • Senator Allen has long been a leader on competitiveness issues in the Senate and as governor of Virginia. His announcement of the Competitiveness Caucus comes as great news to the nation’s manufacturers. We support every item on this agenda and will work with Senator Allen and others to make it a reality. The time has come for Congress to recognize the vital role manufacturing plays in American life and do what it can to strengthen our ability to compete in the global marketplace. – John Engler • Separation of church and state in Virginia, instead of weakening Christianity, as the conservatives of the Revolution had feared, really aided it in securing a power over men far greater than it had known in the past. – H. J Eckenrode • She [Virginia Madsen] and I had a really long relationship after that movie [‘Class’] I love her, and I can imagine it was not much fun to do that big sequence with a bunch of laughing, ogling frat-boy actors. I mean, can you imagine putting up with me, [John] Cusack, Alan Ruck, and Andrew McCarthy at 18? – Rob Lowe • She pulled off Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and settled down in a comfortable leather chair by the fire to read. – Lucinda Riley • Simultaneously with the establishment of the Constitution, Virginia ceded to the United States her domain, which then extended to the Mississippi, and was even claimed to extend to the Pacific Ocean. – William H. Seward • Since the turn of the 20th century, members of the Jewish community in Upper East Tennessee and Southwest Virginia have been meeting together to celebrate and worship. – Bill Jenkins • So this judge in Virginia rules that a lesbian wasn’t fit to raise her own daughter because she might grow up to be a lesbian, and gives custody to the lesbian’s mother. And I’m thinking, “She’s already raised one lesbian.” – Chris Cannon • So you should be able to see them clearly in your imagination. We always find it easier to visualize what we fear; it’s what keeps us afraid of the dark. – Michael Scott • So, in Kennedy’s case, he was a Catholic. And people thought after the Al Smith election and so forth that a Catholic couldn’t win in the United States. But when he was able to win in West Virginia, he proved that a Catholic could win, even in a heavily Protestant state. – Geoffrey Cowan • Some of my favorite poems are “confessional” poems written in the voices of aliens (“Southbound on the Freeway” by May Swenson” and “Report from the Surface” by Anthony McCann), sheep (“Snow Line” by John Berryman) or a yak (“The Only Yak in Batesville, Virginia” by Oni Buchanan). – Matthea Harvey • Teresa Lewis, the only woman on death row in Virginia, says she doesn’t deserve the death penalty because she only hired the killers of her husband and stepson, she didn’t actually pull the trigger herself. You know, she has a point. I think we should let her be able to hire the person who executes her, and not do yourself in! How’s that, doll? Yeah! Get it over with quick, maybe Charlize Theron will sign up to play you. – Dennis Miller • That was Sydney Sage,” said Lissa. “I thought they were all in West Virginia. Why isn’t she with Rose?” “That,” said Abe darkly, “is an excellent question.” “Because they were apparently kidnapping Jill Mastrano in Detroit,” said Christian. “Which is weird. But not the craziest thing I can think of Rose doing. – Richelle Mead • That we can come here today and in the presence of thousands and tens of thousands of the survivors of the gallant army of Northern Virginia and their descendants, establish such an enduring monument by their hospitable welcome and acclaim, is conclusive proof of the uniting of the sections, and a universal confession that all that was done was well done, that the battle had to be fought, that the sections had to be tried, but that in the end, the result has inured to the common benefit of all. – William Howard Taft • The application requisite to the duties of the office I hold [governor of Virginia] is so excessive, and the execution of them after all so imperfect, that I have determined to retire from it at the close of the present campaign. – Thomas Jefferson • The Army of Northern Virginia was never defeated. It merely wore itself out whipping the enemy. – Jubal Early • The British merchants represented that they received some profit indeed from Virginia and South Carolina, as well as the West Indies; but as for the rest of this continent, they were constant losers in trade. – Ezra Stiles • The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was the most sweeping civil rights legislation of its day, and included women’s rights as part of its reforms. Ironically, the section on women’s rights was added by a senator from Virginia who opposed the whole thing and was said to be sure that if he stuck something about womens’ rights into it, it would never pass. The bill passed anyway, though, much to the chagrin of a certain wiener from Virginia. – Adam Selzer • The Concord Coalition in Virginia complained about pork projects and wasteful spending in the federal budget. Consider the Senate chaplain’s salary. As occupations go, only mind readers in Los Angeles have fewer things to do all day. – Argus Hamilton • The first American ancestor of our name was a younger son of these old Devonshire people, and came to the Virginia colony in the reign of Charles the First. – John Sergeant Wise • The first presidential veto, by George Washington, was a veto of Alexander Hamilton’s formula for apportioning the House, and the one that Washington preferred was one that Thomas Jefferson produced, and that was one partisan issue. The apportionment formula that Jefferson produced gave an extra seat to Virginia. Everybody knew what that game was. Look, partisan interest in the census is simply nothing new. – Kenneth Prewitt • The first time I went to West Virginia I was surprised by how poor it was. It was like north India, there’s kids running around in bare feet. The white working class has been disenfranchised as well. It’s been disenfranchised by the liberal-left as well as the conservative-right. You really have to get people right across America and Britain and Europe and the world as a whole concentrating on the economic issues that affect them, because when you don’t have that, you have all these phony, racist and cultural wars, and sexist wars. – Irvine Welsh • The first trip I remember taking was on the train from Virginia up to New York City, watching the summertime countryside rolling past the window. They used white linen tablecloths in the dining car in those days, and real silver. I love trains to this day. Maybe that was the beginning of my fixation with leisurely modes of travel. – Billy Campbell • The George Washington Masonic National Memorial is a fitting tribute to so great a man and Mason. Its message should be as prominent in our lives as the Memorial itself in the skyline of the Federal City. Wherever we are, in Alexandria, Virginia, the District of Columbia of should be in our moral horizon, beckoning us to greater achievements as citizens and Masons. – Henry Clausen • The hardest thing I’ve had to overcome was being from my small coal-mining town of Big Stone Gap, Virginia. My mother was a coal miner for nineteen years, and the expectations of making it out of my town were slim to none. – Thomas Jones • The kiss was innocent–innocent enough–but it was also full of something not unlike what Virginia wants from London, from life; it was full of a love complex and ravenous, ancient, neither this nor that. It will serve as this afternoon’s manifestation of the central mystery itself, the elusive brightness that shines from the edges of certain dreams; the brightness which, when we awaken, is already fading from our minds, and which we rise in the hope of finding, perhaps today, this new day in which anything might happen, anything at all. – Michael Cunningham • The notion of the writer as a kind of sociological sample of a community is ludicrous. Even worse is the notion that writers should provide an example of how to live. Virginia Woolf ended her life by putting a rock in her sweater one day and walking into a lake. She is not a model of how I want to live my life. On the other hand, the bravery of her syntax, of her sentences, written during her deepest depression, is a kind of example for me. But I do not want to become Virginia Woolf. That is not why I read her. – Richard Rodriguez • The old charters of Massachusetts, Virginia, and the Carolinas had given title to strips of territory extending from the Atlantic westward to the Pacific. – Albert Bushnell Hart • The People of Virginia declare and make known that the powers granted under the Constitution being derived from the People of the United States may be resumed by them whensoever the same shall be perverted to their injury or oppression and that every. – Henry Adams • The private buildings [of Virginia] are very rarely constructed of stone or brick; much the greatest proportion being of scantlingand boards, plastered with lime. It is impossible to devise things more ugly, uncomfortable, and happily more perishable. – Thomas Jefferson • The Showdown is a great way to bring attention to these historic Virginia tracks where many NASCAR drivers cut their teeth in stock car racing, including myself. Tracks like South Boston and Langley are the heart of the sport and draw a great crowd to our Showdown events. – Denny Hamlin • There are so many things going on this week, … It’s great for Virginia Tech. – Frank Beamer • There is absolutely no reason to suspect that prohibiting same-sex couples from marrying and refusing to recognize their out-of-state marriages will cause same-sex couples to raise fewer children or impel married opposite-sex couples to raise more children. The Virginia Marriage Laws therefore do not further Virginia’s interest in channeling children into optimal families, even if we were to accept the dubious proposition that same-sex couples are less capable parents. – Henry Franklin Floyd • There was Virginia Boote, the food and restaurant critic, who had once been a great beauty but was now a grand and magnificent ruin, and who delighted in her ruination. – Neil Gaiman • There, in the middle of this mall is the Washington Monument, 555 feet high. But if we put a one in front of that 555 feet, we get 1555, the year that our first fathers landed on the shores of Jamestown, Virginia as slaves. – Louis Farrakhan • There’s a great quote about Virginia Woolf, she had the same spiritual stake in her diaries as she had in her writing. – Sam Abell • There’s a strange myth of Anglo-Saxonism. When the University of Virginia was founded by Thomas Jefferson, for example, its law school offered the study of “Anglo-Saxon Law.” And that myth of Anglo-Saxonism carries right over into the early twentieth century. – Noam Chomsky • They say that Virginia is the mother of Texas. We never knew who the father was, but we kinda suspected Tennessee. – Tex Ritter • They’re building a bridge over the Potomac for all the white liberals fleeing to Virginia. – George C. Wallace • This will be a great day in our history; the date of a New Revolution – quite as much needed as the old one. Even now as I write they are leading old John Brown to execution in Virginia for attempting to rescue slaves! This is sowing the wind to reap the whirlwind which will come soon! – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • This worked out perfectly for me in college, because what nineteen-year-old Virginia boy doesn’t want a wide-hipped, sarcastic Greek girl with short hair that’s permed on top? What’s that you say? None of them want that? You are correct. – Tina Fey • Thousand of Virginia’s are losing their coverage, facing skyrocketing insurance premiums and losing their doctors under Obamacare. Employers across the Commonwealth say that the law is preventing or slowing down hiring and growth. – Rob Wittman • Throughout much of history, women writers have capitulated to male standards, and have paid too much heed to what Virginia Woolf calls “the angel in the house.” She is that little ghost who sits on one’s shoulder while one writes and whispers, “Be nice, don’t say anything that will embarrass the family, don’t say anything your man will disapprove of …” [ellipsis in original] The “angel in the house” castrates one’s creativity because it deprives one of essential honesty, and many women writers have yet to win the freedom to be honest with themselves. – Erica Jong • Tim Kaine, in Virginia, you know he wasn’t popular?His first move as governor of Virginia was to raise taxes by 4 billion dollars. He was not popular in Virginia. – Donald Trump • Two weeks ago at the Greater Glory Gathering Virginia Beach, the Lord spoke to me about contending for a greater outpouring of his presence, signs, and wonders. During this prophetic experience I saw the Revival Healing Angel that had visited us in Lakeland, Florida. – Todd Bentley • Unusual financial activity: none, unless you count the fact that someone in the family is way too into Civil War biographies. (Can this be a possible indication of Confederate insurgents still living and working in Virginia? Must research further.) – Ally Carter • Up men to your posts! Don’t forget today that you are from old Virginia. – George Pickett • Upon the decease [of] my wife, it is my Will and desire th[at] all the Slaves which I hold in [my] own right, shall receive their free[dom] . . . . The Negroes thus bound, are (by their Masters or Mistresses) to be taught to read and write; and to be brought up to some useful occupation, agreeably to the Laws of the Commonwealth of Virginia, providing for the support of Orphan and other poor Children. And I do hereby expressly forbid the Sale, or transportation out of the said Commonwealth, of any Slave I may die possessed of, under any pretence whatsoever. – George Washington • Violence against women is not random or anonymous. In West Virginia, 88 percent of sexual-assault victims already know their attacker. In my hometown, Alicia McCormick, an advocate for our domestic-violence shelter at the YWCA, was killed in her home by a man doing handiwork in her apartment complex. That one of my greatest advocates could fall victim to something she fought against her whole life was a tragedy that moved me to action. – Shelley Moore Capito • Virginia and Maryland attorneys argued this is a national problem and needs a national solution. I’m hoping that with a federal court agreeing this is inequitable, Congress will now act and do the right thing for the District. – Walter Smith • Virginia Governor Jim Gilmore rescinded the state’s European Heritage Month proclamation for fear it would sound racist. It’s too bad. Thus ends a month of celebrating the 400-year progression of our nation’s British culture from wood to steel to graphite shafts. – Argus Hamilton • Virginia has a very sizeable collection of democrats, liberals and moonbats. (Yes, they can be separated.) – John Ringo • Virginia is the place, where, technologically speaking, they will burn people at the stake for possessing such things as toasters. – Neil Gaiman • Virginia Madsen big part in that movie [‘Class’] required her shirt to get ripped off, and looking back, it couldn’t be a more egregious, vintage, lowbrow, 1980s Porky’s-esque, shoehorned-in moment. Like, you would never have that moment in a movie that aspired to be what that movie did today. – Rob Lowe • Virginia Woolf said that writers must be androgynous. I’ll go a step further. You must be bisexual. – Rita Mae Brown • Virginia Woolf thought a lot about her own sex when she wrote. In the best sense of the word, her writing is very feminine, and by that I mean that women are supposed to be very sensitive to all the sensations of nature, much more so than men, much more contemplative. It’s this quality that marks her best works. – Simone de Beauvoir • Virginia Woolf was one example. She was called the “Lover of 100 Gangsters.” – Sergio Leone • Virginia Woolf wrote, “Across the broad continent of a woman’s life falls the shadow of a sword.” On one side of that sword, she said, there lies convention and tradition and order, where all is correct. But on the other side of that sword, if you’re crazy enough to cross it and choose a life that does not follow convention, “all is confusion.” Nothing follows a regular course. Her argument was that the crossing of the shadow of that sword may bring a more interesting existence to a woman, but you can bet it will be more perilous. – Elizabeth Gilbert • Virginia Woolf’s writing is no more than glamorous knitting. I believe she must have a pattern somewhere. – Edith Sitwell • Virginia,” Billy said urgently. “Don’t do this.” “Shut up,Billy.” “Think of the people in San Francisco.” “I don’t know any of the people in San Francisco,” Virginia answered, then paused. “Well,actually I do,and I don’t like them. But I do like you,Billy, and I’m not going to allow you to end up as lunch for some raggedy lion-monster-thingy.” “A sphinx,” Machiavelli corrected her. He was standing at the bars again. “Mistress Dare,” the Italian said carefully. “I absolutely applaud you for what you want to do for your friend. But I urge you to think of the bigger picture. – Michael Scott • Voters replaced Democratic senators with Republicans in Arkansas, Colorado, Iowa, North Carolina, Montana, South Dakota, West Virginia, and likely in Alaska, and appear on track to do so in a runoff next month in Louisiana. At the same time, voters kept Republicans in GOP seats in heavily contested races in Georgia, Kansas, and Kentucky. That is at least ten, and as many as a dozen, tough races, without a single Republican seat changing hands. Tuesday’s voting was a wave alright – a very anti-Democratic wave. – Byron York • Washington and Jefferson were both rich Virginia planters, but they were never friends. – Stephen Ambrose • We cheer the presence of an openly gay woman or man on television there are large numbers of people in Virginia and other states who see these public affirmations as another step towards the country’s oblivion. – Mel White • We have to concentrate back on: Where is the money going? Where’s it been going for the last thirty years? How do we start to redistribute the cake more evenly, and give people opportunities? That’s as much about poor white people in West Virginia as it is about poor black people on the Southside of Chicago. – Irvine Welsh • What I didn’t realize was the severity of the crime, so to speak. I think that’s important. That’s one of the lessons learned here. You move to a new area, you really need to be sure of what the laws and penalties are. You hear those things. You hear, ‘Don’t speed in Virginia’ when you get here, just in casual conversations. What’s left out is why you don’t speed in Virginia. I learned the hard way, that’s for sure. – Jayson Werth • What we’ve found is a whole new pattern of change that we hadn’t thought of before. They changed their attitude toward the colony over time – and they really adapted to the reality they found in Virginia. – William M. Kelso • When I saw Virginia Woolf, somewhere between the first and second acts, someone I had known as my mother became somebody else. – Kiefer Sutherland • When I saw what painting had done in the last thirty years, what literature had done – people like Joyce and Virginia Woolf, Faulkner and Hemingway – in France we have Nathalie Sarraute – and paintings became so strongly contemporary while cinema was just following the path of theater. I have to do something which relates with my time, and in my time, we make things differently. – Agnes Varda • When I speak to students, I tell them why we have a First Amendment. I tell them about the Committees of Correspondence. I tell them how in a secret meeting of the Raleigh Tavern in Virginia, Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry, who did not agree with each other, started a Committee of Correspondence. – Nat Hentoff • When I was incarcerated at Alderson in West Virginia for a five-month term, they had a ceramics class. – Martha Stewart • When I’m at home in Virginia, I become more hermit-like. I like my own home. – Robert Duvall • When we consider how much climate contributes to the happiness of our condition, by the fine sensation it excites, and the productions it is the parent of, we have reason to value highly the accident of birth in such a one as that of Virginia. – Thomas Jefferson • Where did she come from, and where can I find one?” “Picked this one up at a gas station in West Virginia, bargain price. Last one on the shelf, sorry. – Alexandra Bracken • Wherever there is one job on the verge of being lost, I will fight to save it. Wherever there is one company looking to grow in West Virginia, I will fight to make that growth a reality. – Joe Manchin • While I am in favor of the Government promptly enforcing the laws for the present, defending the forts and collecting the revenue,I am not in favor of a war policy with a view to the conquest of any of the slave States; except such as are needed to give us a good boundary. If Maryland attempts to go off, suppress her in order to save the Potomac and the District of Columbia. Cut a piece off of western Virginia and keep Missouri and all the Territories. – Rutherford B. Hayes • Whither shall I flee? To no country on earth that I know of where there is as much liberty as yet remains to me even in Virginia. – Robert E. Lee • Who was it who said that every virtue contains its corresponding vice? C.S. Lewis? Virginia Woolf? You forget. But it has always worried you that what the virtue of wit contained was the vice of scorn. – Kevin Brockmeier • Whoever is president, my first priority is the same – as always. I look for what’s best for West Virginia and the nation as a whole. – Joe Manchin • Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf means who’s afraid of the big bad wolf … who’s afraid of living life without false illusions. – Edward Albee • Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? – Edward Albee • Without Virginia, as we must all acknowledge–without her Patrick Henry among the people, her Lees and Jefferson in the forum, and her Washington in the field–I will not say that the cause of American liberty and American independence must have been ultimately defeated–no, no, there was no ultimate defeat for that cause in the decrees of the Most High; but it must have been delayed, postponed, perplexed, and to many eyes and hearts rendered seemingly hopeless. – Robert Charles Winthrop • Yes Virginia, There is a Santa Claus. – Francis Pharcellus Church • Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus. It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished. – Francis Pharcellus Church • Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist. – Francis Pharcellus Church • You West Virginia girls are one tough breed,” he said. You got that right,” I told him. – Jeannette Walls • You’d think if anyone could charm America into caring about the evening news, it would be Katie Couric, the Tri Delt from Virginia who became America’s sweetheart on the ‘Today’ show. But her ratings have been dismal – she comes in last place every week. – Rob Sheffield • Your little army, derided for its want of arms, derided for its lack of all the essential material of war, has met the grand army of the enemy, routed it at every point, and now it flies, inglorious in retreat before our victorious columns. We have taught them a lesson in their invasion of the sacred soil of Virginia. – Jefferson Davis

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[equitiesstocks]

Virginia State Quotes

Official Website: Virginia State Quotes

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• A [desire] to abolish slavery prevails in North America, many of the Pennsylvanians have set their slaves at liberty, and [Virginia legislators] have petitioned the King for permission to make a law for preventing the importation of more [slaves] into that colony. This request, however, will probably not be granted, as their former laws of that kind have always been repealed. – Benjamin Franklin • A declaration of the independence of America, and the sovereignty of the United STates was drawn by the ingenious and philosophic pen of Thomas Jefferson, Esquire, a delegate from the state of Virginia – Mercy Otis Warren • A lot of good things start in Virginia; a lot of good things have started in Virginia. We’re no strangers to firsts. – Robert Hurt • A lot of West Virginia is untouched. It doesn’t have as many strip malls, it has these old towns that feel like it used to be how it looked. Charleston has this river that runs through it, and it’s really beautiful. – Sam Trammell • A middle-aged woman who looked like someone’s cleaning lady, a shrieking adolescent lunatic and a talkshow host with an orange face… It didn’t add up. Suicide wasn’t invented for people like this. It was invented for people like Virginia Woolf and Nick Drake. And Me. Suicide was supposed to be cool. – Nick Hornby • A new report shows that, in Virginia, gun violence has fallen as the sale of firearms has soared to a new record. In other news, a recent study shows that most criminals don’t like getting shot at. – Fred Thompson • Ah. In my experience, when people say they don’t know whether they love someone, they usually mean no. – Michael Scott

• All I ever wanted was a Virginia farm, no end of cream and fresh butter and fried chicken – not one fried chicken, or two, but unlimited fried chicken. – Robert E. Lee • An otherwise happily married couple may turn a mixed doubles game into a scene from Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. – Rod Laver • And later, if I ever felt that I was getting swept away by the craziness of being in a band, well, I’d go back to Virginia. – Dave Grohl • Any part of the piggy Is quite all right with me Ham from Westphalia, ham from Parma Ham as lean as the Dalai Lama Ham from Virginia, ham from York, Trotters Sausages, hot roast pork. Crackling crisp for my teeth to grind on Bacon with or without the rind on Though humanitarian I’m not a vegetarian. I’m neither crank nor prude nor prig And though it may sound infra dig Any part of the darling pig Is perfectly fine with me. – Noel Coward • Any time you burn a cross in Virginia, it’s a crime? – Anthony Kennedy • Are we going to New Orleans?” “No”, she said, backing out of the spot. “We’re going to West Virginia.” “I assume by ‘West Virginia,’ you actually mean ‘Hawaii,'” I said. “Or some place equally exciting. – Richelle Mead • As editor of the largest newspaper in West Virginia, I scan hundreds of reports daily . . . and I am amazed by the frequency with which religion causes people to kill each other. It is a nearly universal pattern, undercutting the common assumption that religion makes people kind and tolerant. – James A. Haught • As my father wrote, one’s courage, hope, and spirit can be severely tried by the happenstance of life. But as I learned on this Virginia mountain, so long as one never loses faith, it is impossible to ever truly be alone. – David Baldacci • At Princeton I wrote my junior paper on Virginia Woolf, and for my senior thesis I wrote on Samuel Beckett. I wrote some about “Between the Acts” and “Mrs. Dalloway” but mostly about “To the Lighthouse.” With Beckett I focused, perversely, on his novels, “Molloy,” “Malone Dies,” and “The Unnamable.” That’s when I decided I should never write again. – David Duchovny • At the risk of sounding like Virginia Woolf, I could live on £700 a year. – Ian Mcewan

jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'Virginia', orderby: 'rand', order: 'DESC', template: '1', limit: '68', columns: '4', viewall:'Shop All', ; jQuery.post(spyr_params.ajaxurl,data, function(response) var obj = jQuery.parseJSON(response); jQuery('#thelovesof_virginia').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_virginia img.swiper-lazy:not(.swiper-lazy-loaded)' ).each(function () var img = jQuery(this); img.attr("src",img.data('src')); img.addClass( 'swiper-lazy-loaded' ); img.removeAttr('data-src'); ); ); ); • Because finally, ‘the equal right of every citizen to the free exercise of his religion according to the dictates of conscience’ is held by the same tenure with all his other rights. If we recur to its origin, it is equally the gift of nature; if we weigh its importance, it cannot be less dear to us; if we consider the ‘Declaration of those rights which pertain to the good people of Virginia, as the basis and foundation of government,’ it is enumerated with equal solemnity, or rather studied emphasis. – James Madison• Because I’m Irish, I’ve always done an accent. Not doing an accent is off-putting because I sound like me. I love doing an accent. Doing the accent from West Virginia was great, and we had to get specific with it. – Eve Hewson • Being blunt with your feelings is very American. In this big country, I can be as brash as New York, as hedonistic as Los Angeles, as sensuous as San Francisco, as brainy as Boston, as proper as Philadelphia, as brawny as Chicago, as warm as Palm Springs, as friendly as my adopted home town of Dallas, Fort Worth, and as peaceful as the inland waterway that rubs up against my former home in Virginia Beach. – Martina Navratilova • Both my parents came from North Carolina, in Warren County. My mother had a feeling that there was greater culture in North Carolina than obtained in Norfolk, Virginia, plus the fact she just didn’t like the lowland-lying climate there. – Ella Baker • But perhaps God’s purpose in the world (I am only thinking aloud here) is to draw his creatures to him. And you have to admit that tragedies like this one at Virginia Tech help to do that! – Dinesh D’Souza • But under the beaming, constant and almost vertical sun of Virginia, shade is our Elysium. In the absence of this no beauty of the eye can be enjoyed. – Thomas Jefferson • But, sir, the great cause of complaint now is the slavery question, and the questions growing out of it. If there is any other cause of complaint which has been influential in any quarter, to bring about the crisis which is now upon us; if any State or any people have made the troubles growing out of this question, a pretext for agitation instead of a cause of honest complaint, Virginia can have no sympathy whatever, in any such feeling, in any such policy, in any such attempt. It is the slavery question. Is it not so? – John Brown Baldwin • By natural means, as the Lord always operates for the accomplishment of his purposes, means so simple that the thoughtless and unbelieving do not see the manifestation of his power, he brought the Puritans from the old world to New England, the Dutch to New York, the English Cavaliers to Virginia and the French to New Orleans, a combination of races which, paradoxical as it may appear, was just calculated to give us the composite America who made the United States of America what it is, the greatest nation of the world today. – Anthony W. Ivins

[clickbank-storefront-bestselling] • Cause I’m carryin’ your love with me From West Virginia down to Tennessee I’ll be movin’ with the good lord speed, carryin’ your love with me It’s my strength for holdin’ on Every minute that I have to be gone I’ll have everything I’ll ever need Carryin’ your love with me – George Strait • Come to West Virginia and we’ll show you how to live… how to treat people. We’re open for business. West Virginia is truly on the move. – Joe Manchin • Deep down, I’m just a West Virginia hillbilly. – Brad Paisley • Donald Trump didn’t know the [Democratic] vice presidential candidate he was running against: Tim Kaine [Senator] of Virginia, Donald! Not Thomas Kean, Republican [former Governor] of New Jersey, you moron! And his answer to absolutely every question is so simplistic and grand: “Oh, I’ll fix it. Trust me. I’m the best fixer. I love to fix!!! Look at everything I’ve fixed before!!!!”. – Chrissy Teigen • Donald Trump singled out three particular states where he claimed there was, quote, “serious voter fraud” – Virginia, New Hampshire and California. Trump lost all three of those states. – Audie Cornish • Don’t take me for a fool!” Dee interrupted angrily, but then had to lean over the boat as another bout of nausea gripped him. Virginia grinned and winked at Josh. “It’s hard to sound masterful when you’re throwing up, isn’t it?” “I hate you, Virginia Dare,” Dee mumbled. “I know you don’t really mean that,” she said lightly. “I do,” he croaked. – Michael Scott • Each had his past shut in him like the leaves of a book known to him by heart; and his friends could only read the title. – Virginia Woolf, from Jacob’s Room Television is chewing gum for the eyes. – Frank Lloyd Wright • Each time I undertake to reread Virginia Woolf, I am somewhat baffled by the signature breathlessness and relentlessly “poetic” tone, the shimmering impressionism, so very different from the vivid, precise, magisterial (and often very funny) prose of her contemporary James Joyce. – Joyce Carol Oates • Earlier this week Donald Trump gave an interview with CNN at a winery he owns in Virginia. It turns out Trump’s winery makes two different kinds of wine: white wine and not-white wine. – Jimmy Fallon • Five states – Ohio, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Illinois and North Carolina – have been identified by the EPA as contributing significantly to Rhode Island pollution. As of 2010, 284 tall smokestacks – stacks over 500 feet – were operating in the United States: needles injecting poison into the atmosphere. – Sheldon Whitehouse • For a mile up and down the open fields before us the splendid lines of the veterans of the Army of Northern Virginia swept down upon us. Their bearing was magnificent. They came forward with a rush, and how our men did yell, ‘Come on, Johnny, come on!’ – Rufus Dawes • For in Virginia, a plaine Souldier that can use a Pick-axe and spade, is better than five Knights. – John Smit • For me, I was born in the Bronx, and I moved to Virginia Beach, Virginia at a very young age. I had the luxury of going back to New York, visiting my grandmother who would spoil me endlessly, and I could buy whatever was the hot kicks in the summertime of 1990. Being able to shop and then going back to Virginia Beach, where they weren’t as fast in regards to fashion, I had that luxury. – Pusha T • For pain words are lacking. There should be cries, cracks, fissures, whiteness passing over chintz covers, interference with the sense of time, of space ; the sense also of extreme fixity in passing objects ; and sounds very remote and then very close ; flesh being gashed and blood sparting, a joint suddenly twisted – beneath all of which appears something very important, yet remote, to be just held in solitude.” — Virginia Woolf, The Waves – Virginia Woolf • For while this year it may be a Catholic against whom the finger of suspicion is pointed, in other years it has been, and may someday be again, a Jew— or a Quaker or a Unitarian or a Baptist. It was Virginia’s harassment of Baptist preachers, for example, that helped lead to Jefferson’s statute of religious freedom. Today I may be the victim, but tomorrow it may be you — until the whole fabric of our harmonious society is ripped at a time of great national peril. – John F. Kennedy • Growing up in the church in West Virginia, faith is always there. It’s part of the fabric of the culture. – DeVon Franklin • Gun-free zones don’t deter criminals-they help them by providing a guarantee that they will not face any armed resistance. But they do deter the law-abiding. A faculty member with a concealed-handgun permit who breaks the campus gun ban would be fired and likely find it impossible to get admitted to another school. Bringing a firearm into a gun-free zone can have serious adverse consequences for law-abiding people. But for someone like the Virginia Tech killer, the threat of expulsion is no deterrent at all. – Glenn Beck • Had you or I been born at the Bay of Soldania, possibly our Thoughts, and Notions, had not exceeded those brutish ones of the Hotentots that inhabit there: And had the Virginia King Apochancana, been educated in England, he had, perhaps been as knowing a Divine, and as good a Mathematician as any in it. The difference between him, and a more improved English-man, lying barely in this, That the exercise of his Facilities was bounded within the Ways, Modes, and Notions of his own Country, and never directed to any other or farther Enquiries. – John Locke • Having undertaken, for the glory of God, and advancement of the Christian faith, and honor of our King and Country, a voyage to plant the first colony in the northern parts of Virginia, do by these presents solemnly and mutually, in the presence of God, and one of another, covenant and combine our selves together. – William Bradford • Home. One place is just like another, really. Maybe not. But truth is it’s all just rock and dirt and people are roughly the same. I was born up there but I’m no stranger here. Have always felt at home everywhere, even in Virginia, where they hate me. Everywhere you go there’s nothing but the same rock and dirt and houses and people and deer and birds. They give it all names, but I’m at home everywhere. Odd thing: unpatriotic. I was at home in England. I would be at home in the desert. In Afghanistan or far Typee. All mine, it all belongs to me. My world. – Michael Shaara • How did Madison get separation through Virginia and later Congress? The Baptists, the Presbyterians, and the smaller sects hated Jefferson; to them he was a secularist of the worst kind. But Madison could get Jefferson’s bill passed because the Baptists, the Presbyterians, and smaller sects who were excluded in New England and in the South got together for their own protection. – John Rawls • I am a former Kleagie of the Klu Klux Klan in Raleigh County and adjoining counties of the state, having been appainted to this office [by] Mr. J. L. Baskin of Arlington, Virginia, in 1942… It is necessary that the order be promoted immediately and in every state in the union. – Robert Byrd • I am happy to be a regional writer. My region is the American West, old Mexico, West Virginia, New York, Europe, Australia, the human heart, and the male groin. – Edward Abbey • I am not of Virginia blood; she is of mine. – Joshua Chamberlain • I am of Virginia and all my professional life I have studied of Lee and Jackson – Douglas MacArthur • I came from Mechanicsville, Virginia, where you have four seasons. – Jason Mraz • I can assure you that my wife and I – every penny of income we’ve ever had, our taxes were paid in West Virginia. – Joe Manchin • I can’t imagine otherwise – I guess Virginia Woolf could write wonderful novels where the women never have sex, and her novels work. But for me, I don’t think I could write a plot without sex happening somewhere. – Shirley Geok-lin Lim • I can’t think of a better place to be than Scottsville, Virginia. – Robert Hurt • I considered 4 of these bills [of the revised code of Virginia] as forming a system by which every fibre would be eradicated of antient or future aristocracy; and a foundation laid for a government truly republican. – Thomas Jefferson • I fully expect to be able to complete one more campaign goal – and that is to proudly report that signs have been erected as you enter our great state that say ‘Welcome to Wild, Wonderful West Virginia: Open for Business!’ – Joe Manchin • I grew up down in the hills of Virginia. I can be in Kentucky in 20 minutes, Tennessee in 20 minutes or in the state of West Virginia in 20 minutes. And it’s down in the Appalachian Mountains, down there. And it’s sort of a poorer country. Most of the livelihood is coal mining and logging, working in the woods and things like that. Most people has a hard life down that way. – Ralph Stanley • I grew up in Palestine, West Virginia, which is mostly a farming community; there aren’t a lot of jobs. – Jessica Lynch • I grew up in southwestern Virginia. I was born in South Carolina, but only because my parents had a vacation cabin or something there on the beach. I was like a summer baby. But I did grow up in the South. I grew up in serious, serious Appalachia, in a very small town. – William Gibson • I grew up in the segregated South, right here in Lynchburg, Virginia. – Jerry Falwell • I had been reading a lot about pioneers in Australia and the colonization of Australia, and pioneers in Virginia and the early settlers in the United States, and I was fascinated by those communities and how they grew, how their politics developed, and the actual suffering of those people and the tribulations they went through. – Ben Richards • I knew that the wall was the main thing in Quebec, and had cost a great deal of money…. In fact, these are the only remarkable walls we have in North America, though we have a good deal of Virginia fence, it is true. – Henry David Thoreau • I know the Virginia players are smart because you need a 1500 SAT to get in. I have to drop bread crumbs to get our players to and from class – George Raveling • I like reading… French, Russian classics – Gogol, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Flaubert. I also like Hemingway, Virginia Woolf. – Andrea Bocelli • I live in a rural part of Virginia surrounded by farms and farmers. – Barbara Kingsolver • I look upon Virginia as a rib taken from Britain’s side… While they both proceed as living under the marriage-compact, this Eve might thrive so long as her Adam flourishes. Whatever serpent shall tempt her to go astray etc [will only cause] her husband to rule more strictly over her. – Alexander Spotswood • I love going to black churches, and I love some of these black preachers. The best preacher I ever saw in my life was a 93-year-old in a black church in Hamilton, Virginia. What a preacher! – Robert Duvall • I love to smoke. I love to eat red meat. I’ll only eat red meat that comes from cows who smoke, ok!? Special cows they grow in Virginia with voice boxes in their necks. “Moo” – Denis Leary • I loved languages, and loved learning languages. It was fantastic. But I was alone there. I remember that time as a real Virginia Woolf time. More than any language it was her language that influenced me. – Lily King • I made a fairly bold pledge that I wanted Virginia to be the energy capital of the East Coast. – Bob McDonnell • I mean my mother migrated from Georgia -Rome, Georgia, to Washington, D.C., where she then met my father, who was a Tuskegee Airman who was from Southern Virginia. They migrated to Washington and I wouldn’t even exist if it were not for that migration. And I brought her back to Georgia, both my parents, actually. – Isabel Wilkerson • I never had a hat, never wore one, but recently was given a brown suede duck-hunting hat. The moment I put it on I realized I was starved for a hat. I kept it warm by putting it on my head. I made plans to wear it especially when I was going to do any thinking. Somewhere in Virginia, I lost my hat. – John Cage • I never wanted to fight against the Union, but could not turn my back on Virginia. – John Brown • I now teach at American University and the University of Virginia – Julian Bond • I say, then, that viewed from that standpoint, there is but one single subject of complaint which Virginia has to make against the government under which we live; a complaint made by the whole South, and that is on the subject of African slavery. – John Brown Baldwin • I served with General Washington in die Legislature of Virginia…and…with Doctor Franklin in Congress. I never heard neither of them speak ten minutes at a time, nor to any but the main point. – Thomas Jefferson • I spent my first two years at a small all-male college in Virginia called Hampden-Sydney. That was like going to college 120 years ago. The languages, a year of rhetoric, all of the great books, Western Man courses, stuff like that. – Stephen Colbert • I tell you what Hispanics in Virginia tell me they want. They want access to the American dream. Thats why they come here to Virginia and to America, so they want more opportunities to start small business, better schools. – Bob McDonnell • I then wrought at my trade as a tailor; carefully attended meetings for worship and discipline; and found an enlargement of gospel love in my mind, and therein a concern to visit Friends in some of the back settlements of Pennsylvania and Virginia. – John Woolman • I think family is very important in West Virginia and has long been so because the mountains made travel difficult in the past, and family members had to depend on each other. – David Selby • I think George Allen from Virginia was a distinguished governor, he’s a distinguished senator and head of the Senatorial Campaign Committee and won some significant victories. He is a very attractive guy and would make a tremendous president. – Pat Robertson • I think that we need more economic-based solutions to the problems afflicting the Black community, and I think that that’s a way to redefine affirmative action. I grew up with poor white people in West Virginia, and I know there’s a culture of poverty. I know that I’ve seen white people perform exactly the same pathological forms of behavior as Black people do when they’re systematically deprived, whether it’s getting pregnant, doing drugs, dropping out of school, whatever we’re talking about. I think that we should have affirmative action for poor white people too. – Henry Louis Gates • I think the kind of unexpected I really love is when you open books and the actual way of writing is different and interesting. Like reading Virginia Woolf for the first time or Lawrence Durrell for the first time. – Lalla Ward • I think, to be honest, sort of emanated from the initial work of somebody else instead of SCLC. If you take Albany; I don’t know whether you recall how Albany got started. There were two little guys who went up there first. One was Cordell Hull who was then in his teens – not Cordell Hull – Cordell Reagan, who came out of the Nashville movement, and Charles Sherrod, who came out of the Richmond, Virginia, movement. – Ella Baker • I usually have more than one thing I’m working on at once — I’ve been working on three different novels. When I get stuck on one, I hop back and forth. It’s sort of freeing: I can say I’m abandoning this thing that I hate forever and I’m moving on to something that’s good. I’ll find that I’ll go back to [the other project] in a day or a week and like it again. But that moment of wanting to trash something — that Virginia Woolf moment when you have to be stopped from filling your pocket with stones — comes pretty regularly for me. Switching is probably a good thing. – Dan Chaon • I want to talk about jobs and health care and pension security and what we’re going to do to stop the brain drain in Ohio and make it possible for our young people to stay here and build a life in Ohio rather than in Pennsylvania or West Virginia or God knows where. – Ted Strickland • I was a tomboy growing up and then fell into the world of theatre and musical theatre. A girlfriend introduced me to yoga in college and I was hooked. I didn’t really know anything about it except that it was the highlight of my week. I ended up graduating from the University of Virginia and moving to Los Angeles where I could continue acting and do a yoga teacher training. I went from practicing once or twice a week to several hours everyday. I loved it. – Kathryn Budig • I was able to go over [Saxophone Competition] and work a little more in Europe. I’m thankful that those of kinds of things. Simultaneously, some nice things did come in. I got a nice festival that came in, in Virginia through that. There was a club that opened in DC in the famous Willard Hotel near the White House. And the club was called The Nest. I played there a few nights. Some musicians in Philly and D.C. kind of brought me down and got me on a couple things. So things opened up a little bit. – Jon Gordon • I was born and raised in Richmond, Virginia, the capital of the confederacy. – Corey Reynolds • I was born Feb. 12, 1809, in Hardin County, Kentucky. My parents were both born in Virginia, of undistinguished families–second families, perhaps I should say. My mother, who died in my tenth year, was of a family of the name of Hanks…. My father … removed from Kentucky to … Indiana, in my eighth year…. It was a wild region, with many bears and other wild animals still in the woods. There I grew up…. Of course when I came of age I did not know much. Still somehow, I could read, write, and cipher … but that was all. – Abraham Lincoln • I was born in Norfolk, Virginia. I began school there, the first year of public school. When I was 7, the family shifted back to North Carolina. I grew up in North Carolina; had my schooling through the college level in North Carolina. – Ella Baker • I was into Virginia Woolf and James Joyce [at university] and I think we all thought that [Charles] Dickens wasn’t that cool. – Felicity Jones • I was recruited by a number of schools including Miami University, University of Kentucky, University of Cincinnati, Indiana university, West Virginia University as well as others. – Graham Taylor • I was stationed in Norfolk, Virginia, for a while, about which the less said the better, and then I was in the Mediterranean, about which the more said the better. – Harry Mathews • I woke up full of hate and fear the day before the most recent peace march in San Francisco. This was disappointing: I’d hoped to wake up feeling somewhere between Virginia Woolf and Wavy Gravy. – Anne Lamott • I would say country is the one type of music I’ve spent the least amount of time with in my life. I grew up in Virginia, where there was a lot of it, but I was more interested in rock and roll. Southern rock. – Connie Britton • I, for one, despite being a pretty solid climate hawk, I am extremely sympathetic to West Virginia and its coal-country needs. I lived there for a year. I’ve seen it. And the same for Wyoming, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Kentucky. They all have parts of their state where that really matters. And I think that home-state constituency issue is a pretty constant one. And I think the problem of extreme lobbying by the corporate sector, which runs about $30-to-$1 compared to everybody else in the world, and the constituent aspect combines to give those industries a consistent advantage. – Sheldon Whitehouse • If any doubt has arisen as to me, my country [Virginia] will have my political creed in the form of a “Declaration &c.” which I was lately directed to draw. This will give decisive proof that my own sentiment concurred with the vote they instructed us to give. – Thomas Jefferson • If our legislature does not heartily push our University [of Virginia] we must send our children for education to Kentucky [Transylvania College] or Cambridge [Harvard College]. The latter will return them to us as fanatics and tories, the former will keep them to add to their population. – Thomas Jefferson • If she Hillary Clinton win just two of the three big battleground states – North Carolina, Florida and Virginia – she will have shut off Trump’s path to 270 electoral votes, even if he wins the other toss-up states. – Mara Liasson • If the federal government has the exclusive right to judge the extent of its own powers, warned the Kentucky and Virginia resolutions’ authors (James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, respectively), it will continue to grow – regardless of elections, the separation of powers, and other much-touted limits on government power. – Thomas Woods • If we had to take a million immigrants in, say Zulus, next year, or Englishmen, and put them up in Virginia, what group would be easier to assimilate and would cause less problems for the people of Virginia? – Pat Buchanan • If you think of all the publicity about the terrible tragedy of Virginia Tech, we have a Virginia Tech in this country every day. It’s just spread across 50 states. – Michael Bloomberg • If you’re writing an opinion piece, it’s your job to write your opinion. If, on the other hand, you wrote a novel, as Virginia Woolf tells us, it would be inappropriate if you let your novel be influenced by your political opinions. – David Mamet • I’ll carry on, carry over, carry forward, Cary Grant, cash and carry, carry me back to Old Virginia, I’ll even ‘hari-kari’ if you show me how, but I will not carry a gun! – Alan Alda • I’m from Middlesboro, Ky., a little town on the Tennessee and Virginia border. – Lee Majors • I’m from West Virginia. If you didn’t know what was happening in NASCAR, you were on the outside. NASCAR is a big league sport, but it’s still also country and redneck. – Randy Moss • I’m going to come back to West Virginia when this is over. There’s something ancient and deeply-rooted in my soul. I like to think that I have left my ghost up one of those hollows, and I’ll never really be able to leave for good until I find it. And I don’t want to look for it, because I might find it and have to leave.” – from a letter to his mother Helen Pancake that Breece wrote in Charlottesville, where he was studying writing. – Breece D’J Pancake • I’m like a little boy from Virginia. I’m a backpacker. In my head, I’m left of centre. I come from the pool of weirdoes. – Pharrell Williams • I’m projected as an ambulance chaser, but I’m more the ambulance. People call me because they know I will come…. I have never fought a case where they didn’t ask me to come. People have this picture like I’m sitting up in bed at night with a walkie-talkie. “You hear anything? Oh, let’s run! It’s Virginia today!”… Every victim calls us…. “Who put Sharpton in charge?” The victim! – Al Sharpton • Imposing excessive new regulations, or closing coal-fired power plants, would produce few health or environmental benefits. But it would exact huge costs on society – and bring factories, offices and economies to a screeching halt in states that are 80-98% dependent on coal: Indiana, Kentucky, Missouri, North Dakota, Ohio, Utah, West Virginia and Wyoming. – Paul Driessen • In “Virginia Woolf” I had a thing which the grips called the paraplegic which was a wheelchair thing that I had made up years before where I could stand on this bicycle-like device and be pushed down the hall, and then step off it with a handheld camera. – Haskell Wexler • In all her history, from the formation of the federal government until the hour of secession, no year stands out more prominently than the year 1858 as evidencing the national patriotism of Virginia. – John Sergeant Wise • In his scintillating new novel, Matt Bondurant explores a crucial period in the history of Virginia and of his family. His gorgeous, precise prose brings to life an amazing cast of characters, including Sherwood Anderson, and the often deadly battles of Prohibition. The Wettest County in the World is a remarkably compelling, highly intelligent, and deeply moving novel. – Margot Livesey • In other words, [ H.P. Lovecraft] was areligious, asexual, neurasthenic, he just didn’t want to react to the world. Like Virginia Woolf, who considered religion the ultimate obscenity. – Paul Laffoley • In Seattle, I soon found that my radical ideas and aesthetic explorations – ideas and explorations that in Richmond, Virginia, might have gotten me stoned to death with hush puppies – were not only accepted but occasionally applauded. – Tom Robbins • In the end I created a career of my own, concentrating on my writing and lecturing, reaching larger audiences than I would had I ended up with tenure and a full teaching load. It was Virginia Woolf who said that it is terrible to be frozen out of a sacred tradition – but even more terrible to be frozen into it. – Michael Parenti • In the great city of San Francisco, where I used to live, at 2 in the morning every other Victorian house has somebody who is writing the great American novel. And the city is not loaded with James Joyces or Virginia Woolfs. But entrepreneurship is about distorted views of reality. – Tom Peters • In the recent Virginia election, the black vote diminished. Now why was that? I think a lot of black folks are wondering what this guy is really going to do, not only for them but for the country. If the country is injured, they will be injured. That may be sinking in. – Nat Hentoff • In the sense of media saying this about themselves, I drive to my kids’ school in upstate New York through rural Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, New York; [Donald] Trump signs everywhere. – Mary Matalin • In West Virginia yesterday, a man was arrested for stealing several blow-up dolls. Reportedly, police didn’t have any trouble catching the man because he was completely out of breath. – Conan O’Brien • In West Virginia, we’re all family. We know how firefighters and policemen honor their own and we feel our miners deserve to be honored in a similar way. – Ginger Baker • It costs a hell of a lot more money to put somebody in jail than send them to the University of Virginia. – Bernie Sanders • It is in Virginia and Georgia that the war now rages and where it will continue for at these points – Richmond and Atlanta – the enemy’s main strength is concentrated. • It is to them I look, to the rising generation, and not to the one now in power, for these great reformations i.e., emancipation of slaves and settlement of the Virginia constitution on a firmer and more permanent basis. – Thomas Jefferson • It’s ironic that the Bible belt is the killing belt – Texas, Florida, Alabama, Virginia, and so forth, Georgia. Chief executioners. – Joseph Lowery • It’s quite clear that Virginia Wade is thriving on the pressure now that the pressure on her to do well is off . – Harry Carpenter • It’s rather splendid to think of all those great men and women who appear to have presented symptoms that allow us to describe them as bipolar. Whether it’s Hemingway, Van Gogh… Robert Schumann has been mentioned… Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath… some of them with rather grim ends. – Stephen Fry • I’ve always loved my own little office spaces no matter what they were like. It’s the Virginia Woolf, room of one’s own concept, it’s really important. – Lena Dunham • Lee tells his troops. After four years of arduous service marked by unsurpassed courage and fortitude the Army of Northern Virginia has been compelled to yield to overwhelming numbers and resources. – Robert E. Lee • Like the amazing story of Anthony Johnson. This man was a slave, then became free, accumulated 250 acres, and even had his own slave, a black man who took him to court in Virginia in 1654.That man argued that he should be freed like an indentured servant. But Johnson, who we believe was a pure African from Angola, said, “No way, you’re my slave.” And the court agreed. – Henry Louis Gates • My father was in the coal business in West Virginia. Both dad and mother were, however, originally from Massachusetts; New England, to them, meant the place to go if you really wanted an education. – John Knowles • My father’s family came from Virginia and Philadelphia. He wasn’t a brother who talked a lot. He was a working man, a quiet, blue-collar dude. – Ice T • My father’s people… are from Fairfax in northern Virginia, just across the Mason-Dixon line. So it was an honour to play Lee, he was a great general. – Robert Duvall • My first job was at an amusement park in Virginia. It was the worst. I loved the park but once I’d worked there all the magic was gone from it. It just turned into a place I hated and I’ve never been there since. • My great-great-great-grandmother walked as a slave from Virginia to Eatonton, Georgia… It is in memory of this walk that I chose to keep and to embrace my “maiden” name, Walker. – Alice Walker • My inspiration is my hometown. I feel that because I’m representing my very overlooked region of Virginia, I have to keep accomplishing my goals to show everyone there that you can truly become whatever you believe with hard work and dedication. – Thomas Jones • My mother was a public school teacher in Virginia, and we didn’t have any money, we just survived on happiness, on being a happy family.- Dave Grohl • My off-the-cuff remarks at the University of Virginia were with regard to global macro traders, who are on-call 24/7 and of whom there are likely only a few thousand successful practitioners in the world today. Macro trading requires a high degree of skill, focus and repetition. Life events, such as birth, divorce, death of a loved one and other emotional highs and lows are obstacles to success in this specific field of finance. – Paul Tudor Jones • My older sister Nikki went to Hampton music school in Virginia, then to another school later in New York. – Debra Wilson • My role models were childless: Virginia Woolf, Jane Austen, George Eliot, the Brontes. – Joyce Carol Oates • My swag is always capital and live in north Virginia. – Donald Glover • My ‘thing’ is that I just lie in my immense bed and look out the window at the skyline over Virginia and the sky and the airplanes coming into Reagan. I really love doing that. – Ben Stein • Needless to say, the business of living interferes with the solitude so needed for any work of the imagination. Here’s what Virginia Woolf said in her diary about the sticky issue: “I’ve shirked two parties, and another Frenchman, and buying a hat, and tea with Hilda Trevelyan, for I really can’t combine all this with keeping all my imaginary people going. – Virginia Woolf • New Jersey boasts the highest percentage of passport holders (68%); Delaware (67%), Alaska (65%), Massachusetts (63%), New York (62%), and California (60%) are close behind. At the opposite end of the spectrum, less than one in five residents of Mississippi are passport holders, and just one in four residents of West Virginia, Kentucky, Alabama, and Arkansas. – Richard Florida • Next Monday the Convention in Virginia will assemble; we have still good hopes of its adoption here: though by no great plurality of votes. South Carolina has probably decided favourably before this time. The plot thickens fast. A few short weeks will determine the political fate of America for the present generation, and probably produce no small influence on the happiness of society through a long succession of ages to come. – George Washington • No couples in Virginia can adopt other than a married couple – that’s the right policy. – Tim Kaine • Not only is the day waning, but the year. The low sun is fiery and yet cold behind the monastery ruin, and the Virginia creeper on the Cathedral wall has showered half its deep-red leaves down on the pavement. There has been rain this afternoon, and a wintry shudder goes among the little pools on the cracked, uneven flag-stones, and through the giant elm-trees as they shed a gust of tears. – Charles Dickens • Obviously, everything has always been defined by the dominant ideology. But the dominant ideology has been able to accept women’s literature as well as men’s literature. I would say that women have been hindered from creating for a variety of reasons, as Virginia Woolf so admirably explained in A Room of One’s Own. When they have created, on the whole they have been recognized. In literature it hasn’t been nearly as oppressive as in, say, painting, where even the existence of so many women painters has always been denied. – Simone de Beauvoir • Of Virginia Woolf: The talent of this generation which is most certain of survival. – Rebecca West • Okay, so. You, Belikov, the Alchemist, Sonya Karp, Victor Dashkov, and Robert Doru are all hanging out in West Virginia together.” “No,” I said. “No?” “We’re, uh, not in West Virginia. – Richelle Mead • On most things except witch trials, Virginia will always have been first. – Morgan Griffith • On the last morning of Virginia’s bloodiest year since the Civil War, I built a fire and sat facing a window of darkness where at sunrise I knew I would find the sea. – Patricia Cornwell • Once we had a rail station in Montgomery that connected to Columbus and went all the way up to Virginia, slave traders could transport thousands of slaves at a fraction of the cost than they could transport by boat, and certainly by foot. And that’s how Montgomery became such an active slave-trading space. – Bryan Stevenson • Our [Virginia’s] act for freedom of religion is extremely applauded. The Ambassadors and ministers of the several nations of Europe resident at this court have asked me copies of it to send to their sovereigns, and it is inserted at full length in several books now in the press; among others, in the new Encyclopédie. I think it will produce considerable good even in those countries where ignorance, superstition, poverty and oppression of body and mind in every form, are so firmly settled on the mass of the people, that their redemption from them can never be hoped. – Thomas Jefferson • Our neighbors in Virginia are just as responsible for these killings as the criminals are because they won’t pass strong gun [control] legislation. – Marion Barry • Our workers comp debt is the Achilles heel of our state’s economy, and I firmly believe that in order to create more good jobs in West Virginia this system must be fixed and it must be fixed now. We cannot afford to wait even one more minute. – Joe Manchin • Philip Glass, like [Virginia] Woolf, is more interested in that which continues than he is in that which begins, climaxes, and ends… Glass and Woolf have both broken out of the traditional realm of the story, whether literary or musical, in favor of something more meditative, less neatly delineated, and more true to life. For me, Glass [finds] in three repeated notes something of [a] rapture of sameness. – Michael Cunningham • Plot involves fragmentary reality, and it might involve composite reality. Fragmentary reality is the view of the individual. Composite reality is the community or state view. Fragmentary reality is always set against composite reality. Virginia Woolf did this by creating fragmentary monologues and for a while this was all the rage in literature. She was a genius. In the hands of the merely talented it came off like gibberish. – Rita Mae Brown • Pocahontas was the reason the Virginia colony didn’t disappear, unlike some earlier attempts – Brooks Robinson • Random Roles? Oh, I saw Virginia Madsen do this the other day! You see? I’m paying attention! – Rob Lowe • Receiving both the Coretta Scott King – Virginia Hamilton Award for Lifetime Achievement and the Laura Ingalls Wilder Award suggests I have succeeded, at least in terms of my own goals, in my intent to make art that moves children. – Jerry Pinkney • Science advances by trial and error. When mistakes are made, the peer-review publication process usually roots them out. Cuccinelli’s version of the scientific process would be “make an error and go to trial.” Einstein did not arrive at E=mc2 in his first attempt. If he were working in the state of Virginia under Cuccinelli today, he could be jailed for his initial mistakes and perhaps never achieve that landmark equation. – Scott Mandia • Senator Allen has long been a leader on competitiveness issues in the Senate and as governor of Virginia. His announcement of the Competitiveness Caucus comes as great news to the nation’s manufacturers. We support every item on this agenda and will work with Senator Allen and others to make it a reality. The time has come for Congress to recognize the vital role manufacturing plays in American life and do what it can to strengthen our ability to compete in the global marketplace. – John Engler • Separation of church and state in Virginia, instead of weakening Christianity, as the conservatives of the Revolution had feared, really aided it in securing a power over men far greater than it had known in the past. – H. J Eckenrode • She [Virginia Madsen] and I had a really long relationship after that movie [‘Class’] I love her, and I can imagine it was not much fun to do that big sequence with a bunch of laughing, ogling frat-boy actors. I mean, can you imagine putting up with me, [John] Cusack, Alan Ruck, and Andrew McCarthy at 18? – Rob Lowe • She pulled off Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse and settled down in a comfortable leather chair by the fire to read. – Lucinda Riley • Simultaneously with the establishment of the Constitution, Virginia ceded to the United States her domain, which then extended to the Mississippi, and was even claimed to extend to the Pacific Ocean. – William H. Seward • Since the turn of the 20th century, members of the Jewish community in Upper East Tennessee and Southwest Virginia have been meeting together to celebrate and worship. – Bill Jenkins • So this judge in Virginia rules that a lesbian wasn’t fit to raise her own daughter because she might grow up to be a lesbian, and gives custody to the lesbian’s mother. And I’m thinking, “She’s already raised one lesbian.” – Chris Cannon • So you should be able to see them clearly in your imagination. We always find it easier to visualize what we fear; it’s what keeps us afraid of the dark. – Michael Scott • So, in Kennedy’s case, he was a Catholic. And people thought after the Al Smith election and so forth that a Catholic couldn’t win in the United States. But when he was able to win in West Virginia, he proved that a Catholic could win, even in a heavily Protestant state. – Geoffrey Cowan • Some of my favorite poems are “confessional” poems written in the voices of aliens (“Southbound on the Freeway” by May Swenson” and “Report from the Surface” by Anthony McCann), sheep (“Snow Line” by John Berryman) or a yak (“The Only Yak in Batesville, Virginia” by Oni Buchanan). – Matthea Harvey • Teresa Lewis, the only woman on death row in Virginia, says she doesn’t deserve the death penalty because she only hired the killers of her husband and stepson, she didn’t actually pull the trigger herself. You know, she has a point. I think we should let her be able to hire the person who executes her, and not do yourself in! How’s that, doll? Yeah! Get it over with quick, maybe Charlize Theron will sign up to play you. – Dennis Miller • That was Sydney Sage,” said Lissa. “I thought they were all in West Virginia. Why isn’t she with Rose?” “That,” said Abe darkly, “is an excellent question.” “Because they were apparently kidnapping Jill Mastrano in Detroit,” said Christian. “Which is weird. But not the craziest thing I can think of Rose doing. – Richelle Mead • That we can come here today and in the presence of thousands and tens of thousands of the survivors of the gallant army of Northern Virginia and their descendants, establish such an enduring monument by their hospitable welcome and acclaim, is conclusive proof of the uniting of the sections, and a universal confession that all that was done was well done, that the battle had to be fought, that the sections had to be tried, but that in the end, the result has inured to the common benefit of all. – William Howard Taft • The application requisite to the duties of the office I hold [governor of Virginia] is so excessive, and the execution of them after all so imperfect, that I have determined to retire from it at the close of the present campaign. – Thomas Jefferson • The Army of Northern Virginia was never defeated. It merely wore itself out whipping the enemy. – Jubal Early • The British merchants represented that they received some profit indeed from Virginia and South Carolina, as well as the West Indies; but as for the rest of this continent, they were constant losers in trade. – Ezra Stiles • The Civil Rights Act of 1964 was the most sweeping civil rights legislation of its day, and included women’s rights as part of its reforms. Ironically, the section on women’s rights was added by a senator from Virginia who opposed the whole thing and was said to be sure that if he stuck something about womens’ rights into it, it would never pass. The bill passed anyway, though, much to the chagrin of a certain wiener from Virginia. – Adam Selzer • The Concord Coalition in Virginia complained about pork projects and wasteful spending in the federal budget. Consider the Senate chaplain’s salary. As occupations go, only mind readers in Los Angeles have fewer things to do all day. – Argus Hamilton • The first American ancestor of our name was a younger son of these old Devonshire people, and came to the Virginia colony in the reign of Charles the First. – John Sergeant Wise • The first presidential veto, by George Washington, was a veto of Alexander Hamilton’s formula for apportioning the House, and the one that Washington preferred was one that Thomas Jefferson produced, and that was one partisan issue. The apportionment formula that Jefferson produced gave an extra seat to Virginia. Everybody knew what that game was. Look, partisan interest in the census is simply nothing new. – Kenneth Prewitt • The first time I went to West Virginia I was surprised by how poor it was. It was like north India, there’s kids running around in bare feet. The white working class has been disenfranchised as well. It’s been disenfranchised by the liberal-left as well as the conservative-right. You really have to get people right across America and Britain and Europe and the world as a whole concentrating on the economic issues that affect them, because when you don’t have that, you have all these phony, racist and cultural wars, and sexist wars. – Irvine Welsh • The first trip I remember taking was on the train from Virginia up to New York City, watching the summertime countryside rolling past the window. They used white linen tablecloths in the dining car in those days, and real silver. I love trains to this day. Maybe that was the beginning of my fixation with leisurely modes of travel. – Billy Campbell • The George Washington Masonic National Memorial is a fitting tribute to so great a man and Mason. Its message should be as prominent in our lives as the Memorial itself in the skyline of the Federal City. Wherever we are, in Alexandria, Virginia, the District of Columbia of should be in our moral horizon, beckoning us to greater achievements as citizens and Masons. – Henry Clausen • The hardest thing I’ve had to overcome was being from my small coal-mining town of Big Stone Gap, Virginia. My mother was a coal miner for nineteen years, and the expectations of making it out of my town were slim to none. – Thomas Jones • The kiss was innocent–innocent enough–but it was also full of something not unlike what Virginia wants from London, from life; it was full of a love complex and ravenous, ancient, neither this nor that. It will serve as this afternoon’s manifestation of the central mystery itself, the elusive brightness that shines from the edges of certain dreams; the brightness which, when we awaken, is already fading from our minds, and which we rise in the hope of finding, perhaps today, this new day in which anything might happen, anything at all. – Michael Cunningham • The notion of the writer as a kind of sociological sample of a community is ludicrous. Even worse is the notion that writers should provide an example of how to live. Virginia Woolf ended her life by putting a rock in her sweater one day and walking into a lake. She is not a model of how I want to live my life. On the other hand, the bravery of her syntax, of her sentences, written during her deepest depression, is a kind of example for me. But I do not want to become Virginia Woolf. That is not why I read her. – Richard Rodriguez • The old charters of Massachusetts, Virginia, and the Carolinas had given title to strips of territory extending from the Atlantic westward to the Pacific. – Albert Bushnell Hart • The People of Virginia declare and make known that the powers granted under the Constitution being derived from the People of the United States may be resumed by them whensoever the same shall be perverted to their injury or oppression and that every. – Henry Adams • The private buildings [of Virginia] are very rarely constructed of stone or brick; much the greatest proportion being of scantlingand boards, plastered with lime. It is impossible to devise things more ugly, uncomfortable, and happily more perishable. – Thomas Jefferson • The Showdown is a great way to bring attention to these historic Virginia tracks where many NASCAR drivers cut their teeth in stock car racing, including myself. Tracks like South Boston and Langley are the heart of the sport and draw a great crowd to our Showdown events. – Denny Hamlin • There are so many things going on this week, … It’s great for Virginia Tech. – Frank Beamer • There is absolutely no reason to suspect that prohibiting same-sex couples from marrying and refusing to recognize their out-of-state marriages will cause same-sex couples to raise fewer children or impel married opposite-sex couples to raise more children. The Virginia Marriage Laws therefore do not further Virginia’s interest in channeling children into optimal families, even if we were to accept the dubious proposition that same-sex couples are less capable parents. – Henry Franklin Floyd • There was Virginia Boote, the food and restaurant critic, who had once been a great beauty but was now a grand and magnificent ruin, and who delighted in her ruination. – Neil Gaiman • There, in the middle of this mall is the Washington Monument, 555 feet high. But if we put a one in front of that 555 feet, we get 1555, the year that our first fathers landed on the shores of Jamestown, Virginia as slaves. – Louis Farrakhan • There’s a great quote about Virginia Woolf, she had the same spiritual stake in her diaries as she had in her writing. – Sam Abell • There’s a strange myth of Anglo-Saxonism. When the University of Virginia was founded by Thomas Jefferson, for example, its law school offered the study of “Anglo-Saxon Law.” And that myth of Anglo-Saxonism carries right over into the early twentieth century. – Noam Chomsky • They say that Virginia is the mother of Texas. We never knew who the father was, but we kinda suspected Tennessee. – Tex Ritter • They’re building a bridge over the Potomac for all the white liberals fleeing to Virginia. – George C. Wallace • This will be a great day in our history; the date of a New Revolution – quite as much needed as the old one. Even now as I write they are leading old John Brown to execution in Virginia for attempting to rescue slaves! This is sowing the wind to reap the whirlwind which will come soon! – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • This worked out perfectly for me in college, because what nineteen-year-old Virginia boy doesn’t want a wide-hipped, sarcastic Greek girl with short hair that’s permed on top? What’s that you say? None of them want that? You are correct. – Tina Fey • Thousand of Virginia’s are losing their coverage, facing skyrocketing insurance premiums and losing their doctors under Obamacare. Employers across the Commonwealth say that the law is preventing or slowing down hiring and growth. – Rob Wittman • Throughout much of history, women writers have capitulated to male standards, and have paid too much heed to what Virginia Woolf calls “the angel in the house.” She is that little ghost who sits on one’s shoulder while one writes and whispers, “Be nice, don’t say anything that will embarrass the family, don’t say anything your man will disapprove of …” [ellipsis in original] The “angel in the house” castrates one’s creativity because it deprives one of essential honesty, and many women writers have yet to win the freedom to be honest with themselves. – Erica Jong • Tim Kaine, in Virginia, you know he wasn’t popular?His first move as governor of Virginia was to raise taxes by 4 billion dollars. He was not popular in Virginia. – Donald Trump • Two weeks ago at the Greater Glory Gathering Virginia Beach, the Lord spoke to me about contending for a greater outpouring of his presence, signs, and wonders. During this prophetic experience I saw the Revival Healing Angel that had visited us in Lakeland, Florida. – Todd Bentley • Unusual financial activity: none, unless you count the fact that someone in the family is way too into Civil War biographies. (Can this be a possible indication of Confederate insurgents still living and working in Virginia? Must research further.) – Ally Carter • Up men to your posts! Don’t forget today that you are from old Virginia. – George Pickett • Upon the decease [of] my wife, it is my Will and desire th[at] all the Slaves which I hold in [my] own right, shall receive their free[dom] . . . . The Negroes thus bound, are (by their Masters or Mistresses) to be taught to read and write; and to be brought up to some useful occupation, agreeably to the Laws of the Commonwealth of Virginia, providing for the support of Orphan and other poor Children. And I do hereby expressly forbid the Sale, or transportation out of the said Commonwealth, of any Slave I may die possessed of, under any pretence whatsoever. – George Washington • Violence against women is not random or anonymous. In West Virginia, 88 percent of sexual-assault victims already know their attacker. In my hometown, Alicia McCormick, an advocate for our domestic-violence shelter at the YWCA, was killed in her home by a man doing handiwork in her apartment complex. That one of my greatest advocates could fall victim to something she fought against her whole life was a tragedy that moved me to action. – Shelley Moore Capito • Virginia and Maryland attorneys argued this is a national problem and needs a national solution. I’m hoping that with a federal court agreeing this is inequitable, Congress will now act and do the right thing for the District. – Walter Smith • Virginia Governor Jim Gilmore rescinded the state’s European Heritage Month proclamation for fear it would sound racist. It’s too bad. Thus ends a month of celebrating the 400-year progression of our nation’s British culture from wood to steel to graphite shafts. – Argus Hamilton • Virginia has a very sizeable collection of democrats, liberals and moonbats. (Yes, they can be separated.) – John Ringo • Virginia is the place, where, technologically speaking, they will burn people at the stake for possessing such things as toasters. – Neil Gaiman • Virginia Madsen big part in that movie [‘Class’] required her shirt to get ripped off, and looking back, it couldn’t be a more egregious, vintage, lowbrow, 1980s Porky’s-esque, shoehorned-in moment. Like, you would never have that moment in a movie that aspired to be what that movie did today. – Rob Lowe • Virginia Woolf said that writers must be androgynous. I’ll go a step further. You must be bisexual. – Rita Mae Brown • Virginia Woolf thought a lot about her own sex when she wrote. In the best sense of the word, her writing is very feminine, and by that I mean that women are supposed to be very sensitive to all the sensations of nature, much more so than men, much more contemplative. It’s this quality that marks her best works. – Simone de Beauvoir • Virginia Woolf was one example. She was called the “Lover of 100 Gangsters.” – Sergio Leone • Virginia Woolf wrote, “Across the broad continent of a woman’s life falls the shadow of a sword.” On one side of that sword, she said, there lies convention and tradition and order, where all is correct. But on the other side of that sword, if you’re crazy enough to cross it and choose a life that does not follow convention, “all is confusion.” Nothing follows a regular course. Her argument was that the crossing of the shadow of that sword may bring a more interesting existence to a woman, but you can bet it will be more perilous. – Elizabeth Gilbert • Virginia Woolf’s writing is no more than glamorous knitting. I believe she must have a pattern somewhere. – Edith Sitwell • Virginia,” Billy said urgently. “Don’t do this.” “Shut up,Billy.” “Think of the people in San Francisco.” “I don’t know any of the people in San Francisco,” Virginia answered, then paused. “Well,actually I do,and I don’t like them. But I do like you,Billy, and I’m not going to allow you to end up as lunch for some raggedy lion-monster-thingy.” “A sphinx,” Machiavelli corrected her. He was standing at the bars again. “Mistress Dare,” the Italian said carefully. “I absolutely applaud you for what you want to do for your friend. But I urge you to think of the bigger picture. – Michael Scott • Voters replaced Democratic senators with Republicans in Arkansas, Colorado, Iowa, North Carolina, Montana, South Dakota, West Virginia, and likely in Alaska, and appear on track to do so in a runoff next month in Louisiana. At the same time, voters kept Republicans in GOP seats in heavily contested races in Georgia, Kansas, and Kentucky. That is at least ten, and as many as a dozen, tough races, without a single Republican seat changing hands. Tuesday’s voting was a wave alright – a very anti-Democratic wave. – Byron York • Washington and Jefferson were both rich Virginia planters, but they were never friends. – Stephen Ambrose • We cheer the presence of an openly gay woman or man on television there are large numbers of people in Virginia and other states who see these public affirmations as another step towards the country’s oblivion. – Mel White • We have to concentrate back on: Where is the money going? Where’s it been going for the last thirty years? How do we start to redistribute the cake more evenly, and give people opportunities? That’s as much about poor white people in West Virginia as it is about poor black people on the Southside of Chicago. – Irvine Welsh • What I didn’t realize was the severity of the crime, so to speak. I think that’s important. That’s one of the lessons learned here. You move to a new area, you really need to be sure of what the laws and penalties are. You hear those things. You hear, ‘Don’t speed in Virginia’ when you get here, just in casual conversations. What’s left out is why you don’t speed in Virginia. I learned the hard way, that’s for sure. – Jayson Werth • What we’ve found is a whole new pattern of change that we hadn’t thought of before. They changed their attitude toward the colony over time – and they really adapted to the reality they found in Virginia. – William M. Kelso • When I saw Virginia Woolf, somewhere between the first and second acts, someone I had known as my mother became somebody else. – Kiefer Sutherland • When I saw what painting had done in the last thirty years, what literature had done – people like Joyce and Virginia Woolf, Faulkner and Hemingway – in France we have Nathalie Sarraute – and paintings became so strongly contemporary while cinema was just following the path of theater. I have to do something which relates with my time, and in my time, we make things differently. – Agnes Varda • When I speak to students, I tell them why we have a First Amendment. I tell them about the Committees of Correspondence. I tell them how in a secret meeting of the Raleigh Tavern in Virginia, Thomas Jefferson and Patrick Henry, who did not agree with each other, started a Committee of Correspondence. – Nat Hentoff • When I was incarcerated at Alderson in West Virginia for a five-month term, they had a ceramics class. – Martha Stewart • When I’m at home in Virginia, I become more hermit-like. I like my own home. – Robert Duvall • When we consider how much climate contributes to the happiness of our condition, by the fine sensation it excites, and the productions it is the parent of, we have reason to value highly the accident of birth in such a one as that of Virginia. – Thomas Jefferson • Where did she come from, and where can I find one?” “Picked this one up at a gas station in West Virginia, bargain price. Last one on the shelf, sorry. – Alexandra Bracken • Wherever there is one job on the verge of being lost, I will fight to save it. Wherever there is one company looking to grow in West Virginia, I will fight to make that growth a reality. – Joe Manchin • While I am in favor of the Government promptly enforcing the laws for the present, defending the forts and collecting the revenue,I am not in favor of a war policy with a view to the conquest of any of the slave States; except such as are needed to give us a good boundary. If Maryland attempts to go off, suppress her in order to save the Potomac and the District of Columbia. Cut a piece off of western Virginia and keep Missouri and all the Territories. – Rutherford B. Hayes • Whither shall I flee? To no country on earth that I know of where there is as much liberty as yet remains to me even in Virginia. – Robert E. Lee • Who was it who said that every virtue contains its corresponding vice? C.S. Lewis? Virginia Woolf? You forget. But it has always worried you that what the virtue of wit contained was the vice of scorn. – Kevin Brockmeier • Whoever is president, my first priority is the same – as always. I look for what’s best for West Virginia and the nation as a whole. – Joe Manchin • Who’s afraid of Virginia Woolf means who’s afraid of the big bad wolf … who’s afraid of living life without false illusions. – Edward Albee • Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? – Edward Albee • Without Virginia, as we must all acknowledge–without her Patrick Henry among the people, her Lees and Jefferson in the forum, and her Washington in the field–I will not say that the cause of American liberty and American independence must have been ultimately defeated–no, no, there was no ultimate defeat for that cause in the decrees of the Most High; but it must have been delayed, postponed, perplexed, and to many eyes and hearts rendered seemingly hopeless. – Robert Charles Winthrop • Yes Virginia, There is a Santa Claus. – Francis Pharcellus Church • Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist, and you know that they abound and give to your life its highest beauty and joy. Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus. It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence. We should have no enjoyment, except in sense and sight. The eternal light with which childhood fills the world would be extinguished. – Francis Pharcellus Church • Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus. He exists as certainly as love and generosity and devotion exist. – Francis Pharcellus Church • You West Virginia girls are one tough breed,” he said. You got that right,” I told him. – Jeannette Walls • You’d think if anyone could charm America into caring about the evening news, it would be Katie Couric, the Tri Delt from Virginia who became America’s sweetheart on the ‘Today’ show. But her ratings have been dismal – she comes in last place every week. – Rob Sheffield • Your little army, derided for its want of arms, derided for its lack of all the essential material of war, has met the grand army of the enemy, routed it at every point, and now it flies, inglorious in retreat before our victorious columns. We have taught them a lesson in their invasion of the sacred soil of Virginia. – Jefferson Davis

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