Nell Gavin · 355 pages
Rating: (1.1K votes)
“We are all on the same road, some ahead of us and some behind. We do not always recognize ourselves as being among those who are struggling farther back, and misunderstand, scorn, and even persecute the ones who move ahead of us. History is littered with such as these: eccentrics, geniuses, idealists among those most noticeable. These change the world by force, though the change most often does not take place during their own time, they are so far ahead of it and therefore so rarely understood.”
― Nell Gavin, quote from Threads: The Reincarnation of Anne Boleyn
“What we should see is that there is none among us with nothing to give, and that giving is our purpose.”
― Nell Gavin, quote from Threads: The Reincarnation of Anne Boleyn
“The most seductive sin, I suppose, is passing judgment on others, and the next must be acting out of one's anger when one has the power to hurt the ones who wound us.”
― Nell Gavin, quote from Threads: The Reincarnation of Anne Boleyn
“Each society–each group within each society–chooses something with which to assign inferiority. In China it is the time of birth and the size of feet. In Europe it is the Jews; in England, the Irish. Among the powerful, it is the powerless; among the rich, it is the poor; among the men, it is the women. In this “new” country, that will also be true. In reverse, there is often a vehement hatred by an oppressed group toward the ones it sees as representatives of oppression. The oppressed view their own feelings of contempt as nobler than the contempt they receive, and more justified. They view their own hatred as right and pure. They nurture it, and bequeath it to their children, and sometimes see to it that it is carried on for generations.”
― Nell Gavin, quote from Threads: The Reincarnation of Anne Boleyn
“Calm yourself. Calm yourself . . . ” In time I do, and I move forward.”
― Nell Gavin, quote from Threads: The Reincarnation of Anne Boleyn
“The book doesn't preach; it just offers up another way of looking at life.”
― Nell Gavin, quote from Threads: The Reincarnation of Anne Boleyn
“Why not make cheerfulness, outrageousness, playfulness a new priority for yourself? Make feeling good your expectation. You don’t have to have a reason to feel good—you’re alive; you can feel good for no reason at all!”
― Anthony Robbins, quote from Awaken The Giant Within
“The scary part is, I don’t know what I’ll do if she says no. Let her go? I can’t—she’s mine. But there’s this new thing going on in my head where I’m not sure I can fuck her mouth if she doesn’t want it. I’m not sure I can use the soft palate of her mouth to jerk off. Not sure I can come all over her face unless she tells me it’s okay. A little fucked up, but there it is.”
― Annika Martin, quote from Prisoner
“Afterwards, go to a pub for lunch. I've got $260 in my savings account and I really want you to use it for that. Really, I mean it--lunch is on me. Make sure you have pudding--sticky toffee, chocolate fudge cake, ice-cream sundae, something really bad for you. Get drunk too if you like (but don't scare Cal). Spend all the money.
And after that, when days have gone by, keep an eye out for me. I might write on the steam in the mirror when you're having a bath, or play with the leaves on the apple tree when you're out in the garden. I might slip into a dream.
Visit my grave when you can, but don't kick yourself if you can't, or if you move house and it's suddenly too far away. It looks pretty there in the summer (check out the website). You could bring a picnic and sit with me. I'd like that.”
― Jenny Downham, quote from Now is Good
“it is not uncommon for experts in DNA analysis to testify at a criminal trial that a DNA sample taken from a crime scene matches that taken from a suspect. How certain are such matches? When DNA evidence was first introduced, a number of experts testified that false positives are impossible in DNA testing. Today DNA experts regularly testify that the odds of a random person’s matching the crime sample are less than 1 in 1 million or 1 in 1 billion. With those odds one could hardly blame a juror for thinking, throw away the key. But there is another statistic that is often not presented to the jury, one having to do with the fact that labs make errors, for instance, in collecting or handling a sample, by accidentally mixing or swapping samples, or by misinterpreting or incorrectly reporting results. Each of these errors is rare but not nearly as rare as a random match. The Philadelphia City Crime Laboratory, for instance, admitted that it had swapped the reference sample of the defendant and the victim in a rape case, and a testing firm called Cellmark Diagnostics admitted a similar error.20 Unfortunately, the power of statistics relating to DNA presented in court is such that in Oklahoma a court sentenced a man named Timothy Durham to more than 3,100 years in prison even though eleven witnesses had placed him in another state at the time of the crime. It turned out that in the initial analysis the lab had failed to completely separate the DNA of the rapist and that of the victim in the fluid they tested, and the combination of the victim’s and the rapist’s DNA produced a positive result when compared with Durham’s. A later retest turned up the error, and Durham was released after spending nearly four years in prison.21 Estimates of the error rate due to human causes vary, but many experts put it at around 1 percent. However, since the error rate of many labs has never been measured, courts often do not allow testimony on this overall statistic. Even if courts did allow testimony regarding false positives, how would jurors assess it? Most jurors assume that given the two types of error—the 1 in 1 billion accidental match and the 1 in 100 lab-error match—the overall error rate must be somewhere in between, say 1 in 500 million, which is still for most jurors beyond a reasonable doubt. But employing the laws of probability, we find a much different answer. The way to think of it is this: Since both errors are very unlikely, we can ignore the possibility that there is both an accidental match and a lab error. Therefore, we seek the probability that one error or the other occurred. That is given by our sum rule: it is the probability of a lab error (1 in 100) + the probability of an accidental match (1 in 1 billion). Since the latter is 10 million times smaller than the former, to a very good approximation the chance of both errors is the same as the chance of the more probable error—that is, the chances are 1 in 100. Given both possible causes, therefore, we should ignore the fancy expert testimony about the odds of accidental matches and focus instead on the much higher laboratory error rate—the very data courts often do not allow attorneys to present! And so the oft-repeated claims of DNA infallibility are exaggerated.”
― Leonard Mlodinow, quote from The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives
“The road that went around and between the buildings hadn’t been plowed, but Yasha didn’t let that slow him down.
He grinned at me in the rearview mirror. “No problem. Is like Siberia.”
“You’ve never been to Siberia,” Ian said, his eyes still scanning for any movement other than our own.
“True. But does not mean is not like Siberia.”
― Lisa Shearin, quote from The Grendel Affair
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