Unit 1: Part 3 Vocabulary

But it didn’t move, and then he saw that the paper was caught firmly between a projection of the convoluted corner ornament and the ledge.

He had a sudden mental picture of his apartment on just the other side of this wall—warm, cheerful, incredibly spacious. And he saw himself striding through it, lying down on the floor on his back, arms spread wide, reveling in its unbelievable security.

There’d be a newsreel next, maybe, and then an animated cartoon, and then interminable scenes from coming pictures.

Then something clicked, as if my body had gained equilibrium.

I looked at the glaciers onshore, using the fixed points to gauge how fast the current was flowing. It was flowing at over a knot.

I managed to lift my head so that someone could place a hand under it to buffer the impact.

From disappointment, I gradually ascended the emotional ladder to haughty indignation, and finally to that state of stubbornness where the mind is locked like the jaws of an enraged bulldog.

We were firmly joined in the hypocrisy to play out the scene.

They were job application forms. She said they had to be filled in triplicate. I had little time to wonder if I had won or not, for the standard questions reminded me of the necessity for dexterous lying.

What I mean is Stop. Whatever. You’re. Doing. As in, doing with your life. Maybe it’s your job. Maybe it’s a relationship that’s curdled.

All right, so you actually looked in a fairly systematic, empirical way at baseball players.

Wow, that’s particularly poignant in my view because baseball’s one of those rare sports that doesn’t have a clock; no game is ever out of reach.

In a series of provocative new studies at the University of Pennsylvania, researchers find that the gritty are more likely to achieve success in school, work and other pursuits—perhaps because their passion and commitment help them endure the inevitable setbacks that occur in any long-term undertaking.

“Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up,” opined Thomas Edison, a man almost as famous for lauding perspiration as he is for inventing the lightbulb.

“There were certainly a fair number of people who were brilliant, ambitious and persevering,” Duckworth reports. “But there were also a lot who were not a genius in any way but were really tenacious.”

We know where the future is. It’s in front of us. Right? It lies before us—a great future lies before us—we stride forward confidently into it, every commencement, every election year.

In such fictions, space and the future are synonymous: they are a place we are going to get to, invade, colonize, exploit, and suburbanize.

Then we succumb to wishful thinking and escapism, and our science fiction gets megalomania, and thinks that instead of being fiction it’s prediction, and the Pentagon and the White House begin to believe it, and we get True Believers conquering the future by means of SDI.