people-from-sydney

"proposed as the chief gardener and William Brown as his assistant. Nelson had already 'sailed round the world in my service for the purpose of collecting plants and seeds and was eminently successful in the object of his mission,' wrote Banks."

"There is a that I will probably never send. I would not dare to. It is a cross of Jesus drawn in fresh blood from an animal sacrifice. Although slaughter for sacrifice contradicts a basic belief of Christianity, it is practiced by local Catholics, Greek Orthodox and other Christians at the in the village of , 20 miles from Jerusalem. "Around 70 to 80 lambs are sacrificed here each year," said the Roman Catholic priest, Father Raed. Similar sacrifices are also made in the towns of d, , and elsewhere in the Holy Land. Yet bloodless altars are a distinguishing feature of Christian churches. One of the tenets of the faith is that Jesus was the ultimate and final sacrifice. Christians atone for their sins without the shedding of blood. They look to Jesus as the who made the ancient belief in sacrifice obsolete. It is surely hypocritical of the churches to encourage millions of tourists and pilgrims to visit Jerusalem to see where Jesus Christ was crucified, but not halt this ritualised sacrifice."

"where George II died and where Queen Victoria was born is still used as apartments for the sovereign's relatives: Princess Margaret, the , and . The State Apartments and suite occupied by Princess Victoria are open."

"... In 1961 she trained as a newspaper reporter and was sent to London to work for the Murdoch papers on . She filed reports from all over the world and interviewed such celebrities as the Dalai Lama, Marlon Brando, Richard Burton and PG Wodehouse. The Duchess was despatched on several hazardous missions – notably to war-torn Vietnam and gave a graphic account of a strike mission she flew with the carrying . In 1963, she attended a dinner for in Miami four nights before he was assassinated in Dallas. Two years later, she returned to Vietnam, and was one of the first women to write about the effects of the bombing raids launched from Danang, the top secret centre where the US stockpiled its most deadly bombs."

"On 1 October 1918, when only sixteen, my father rode into Damascus with the , hours ahead of T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia), and the colourful . Fighting in the sane campaign were another 100,000 soldiers including the , the only armed Jewish force fighting in Palestine for nearly 2,000 years. From their first steps on the moors of in 1917, these Jewish soldiers were trained to be part of the . After fighting alongside my father on the road to Damascus, some of these fighters went underground to eventually become founding members of Israel's biggest and most effective militia, the , which in 1948 would form the 's original army with a force in mid-May of 35,000 fighters."

"Is marijuana addictive? Yes, in the sense that most of the really pleasant things in life are worth endlessly repeating."

"The pot of gold at the end of the rainbow comes first; later one decides whether the rainbow is worth having for its own sake. ... One way to a girl's mind is through her cunt."

"If the teaching of the Magisterium of the Church is seen simply as the laying down of laws, and not as the logical and often inevitable consequence of our faith, those who find themselves in these difficult pastoral situations will naturally see the Church as uncaring."

"I didn't miss much because I was having wonderful new experiences. I didn’t get home much because we went by boat back then. I found that I could fit in very well wherever I was."

"The diocese responded immediately with medical and material aid. The victims are badly traumatised and need a long period of professional counselling, besides the Sacraments. This programme will last for 3 - 5 years. The response from inside and outside Papua New Guinea was immense. The tragedy brought the churches together in an ecumenical exercise of charity. This gives hope for the future of Christianity in Papua New Guinea."

"The Mandaeans of Iraq are in terrible distress and therefore many of them left their towns and escaped because food had almost disappeared. There is no security and [civil war] skirmishing continues, leading to massacres and slaughter. The Iraqi ruler is called Saddam Hussein. Due to him, many Mandaeans have departed Iraq to settle in Australia, America and Europe. O ye ganzibras, disciples and Mandaeans. Some Iraqi disciples have [already] changed the faith (i.e., rituals and tradition) because they no longer baptize in the river."

"Sheikh Salah ... traveled there [to Australia] twice to perform rituals for the emigrated Mandaeans and to ready himself for his move. The sheikh’s travels astonished me. The risk! On his first air segment, Sheikh Salah ate nothing but stopped over in Malaysia to rest, eat, and purify himself. Coming from Ahwaz, he had entered the Tehran airport carrying two bottles of water from the river Karun, only to have one bottle rendered useless by a customs official who suspected liquor. The presence of Mandaean leaders, with their white clothes and dignified long beards, made a deep impression on the airport personnel, who whisked them through the electronic controls."

"The awareness of the greenhouse issue is probably greater amongst the general public in Australia than in any other country in the world"

"“Prediction is very difficult, especially about the future”."

"Many of 1988’s droughts and floods, heat waves and hurricanes were random events, the roll of the dice. But the dice are being weighted. In coming years they will fall hot and stormy-side uppermost more often. Hard-nosed politicians with voters to cosset, powerful vested interests to satisfy and rivals to guard against began to talk like prophets, ecologists and utopians they began to talk of a world that is frugal and fair."

"Our contemporary problem is that human actions since the Industrial Revolution have been changing the composition of the atmosphere the scientific community has been concerned for several decades. By the 1950s it was suggested that the rate of burning fuels such as coal could be changing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere."

"“for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change”"

"Unity and peace are important words in the teaching of Jesus. Events in history at times made it difficult for Christians to live in agreement. Pope John Paul II left us documents which lay the foundation for our efforts to build closer relations with one another. Pope Benedict confirms this message. If we fail to go in this direction we would ignore what the Church is proclaiming today. This pact is a call to continue our mutual activities and find new ways of involvement for the future. It is a challenge for our respective communities to enter into closer relationship with other believers in Christ."

"You can draw a curve on the paper and know immediately that it is the right one, but you can not do the same to the computer; the curve is not realized with a function or using a digital guide, it is a form that is drawn freehand."

"The body is a small universe, manifesting from the big universe, where the spirit (ruha) and soul (neshma) flow from the Creator and make the human who live in his prison (the physical body) in this world, until they get liberated through the knowledge of life."

"We can be proud of the fact that Australia is such a multicultural nation. However, if we don't interact and learn from each other, we remain exactly that – multicultural. We become intercultural when we enter into relationships of mutual respect and learning. It seems to me that, after such a long and painful wait, this is what is happening more and more in the relationships between indigenous and non-indigenous Australians – learning and respect."

"Our challenge is to move from labelling to embracing, to grow in the consciousness of our own ethnocentrism in the remarks we make, in the attitudes that we have, to try our best to understand that other people have a history, a place in the world from which they've come."

"The Church has a role to establish safe places and communities of reconciliation where the harsh truth can be told and listened to and healing can be fostered in a trusting and prayerful environment."

"I am living proof you can start bad and end good through a relationship with Jesus Christ."

"Sometimes when you're in a dark place, you think you've been buried. But you've actually been planted. Be patient... Your time to grow is coming!"

"“Faith is believing God is who He says He is, and that He will do what He said He would do.”"

"more you focus on what you are called to do, the less you become distracted by what someone else is or isn’t doing. It’s hard to run your race and your course while focusing on someone else’s race and course."

"To step into tomorrow’s possibilities you must let go of yesterday’s realities. Be careful of your choices between what was, is and will be. It is very hard to fully step into your destiny while you are still holding on to your history."

"Even if people have disappointed you or circumstances have not turned out as you had hoped or prayed, know that God is with you, cares for you, and loves you. He is working all these things together for your good right at this very moment."

"God deliberately chooses imperfect vessels — those who have been wounded, those with physical or emotional limitations. Then he prepares them to serve and sends them out with their weakness still in evidence, so that his strength can be made perfect in that weakness."

"When there is a fight between your heart and your head, experience has taught me that the best thing you can do is pick up your Bible and remind yourself of what God says."

"You know, I personally have to fight to protect my thoughts so my thinking does not spiral out of control. When my mind is full of joy and peace, I can run fast every, I can run harder, I can run further they are. So choose to think about what you're thinking about every single day. Another important aspect of running is that runners stretch and strengthen. So in order to run at optimal capacity, runners need to stretch before and after each run. I'm speaking to myself right now. So if they do not, their bodies will become rigid and inflexible. Exhibit a, that would be me. I have to admit I do need to take my own advice in this area because as we grow older we lose our flexibility and we're prone to more and more injuries. I often think I don't have time to stretch and then I wonder why I feel very very stiff the next day. Stretching actually reduces muscle tension, it promotes circulation, and it reduces the risk of injury. Stretching is a very very important practice."

"Normally, there is your life, and you turn on the television and there is news, and no matter how grave it is, of how deep in the toilet the world has fallen,, or how relevant the information might be to your own existence, your life remains a separate entity from the news. You still have to wash your underpants during a war, don't you? And don't you still have to fight with your loved ones and then apologize when you don't even mean it even when there's a hole in the sky burning everything to a crisp? Of course you do. As a rule, there's no hole big enough to interrupt this interminable business of living, but there are exceptions, grim instances in the lives of a few select unlucky bastards when the news in the papers and the news in their bedrooms intersect. I tell you, it's a daunting and appalling moment when you have to read the newspapers to find out about your own struggle."

"Democracy in crime was turning out no different from democracies everywhere: a sublime idea in theory, soiled by the reality that deep down nobody really believes that all men are created equal."

"It would be easy enough to get my hands on a gun. You only had to open a cupboard at Harry's or plunge your hand deep into the sugar bowl to find a semiautomatic. Of course, I despised guns and all the baggage that went along with them, like bullet wounds and death, but on the other hand, I liked the idea of breaking another one of the Ten Commandments, especially since I didn't honor my father either. They couldn't very well force you to suffer for two eternities, could they?"

"What followed was a period of lost time: three years, during which I felt myself circling the questions that had been circling me, though I never found the answers I needed. While searching, I went for walks. I read. I taught myself the art of reading while walking. I lay under trees and watched the clouds creep across the sky through a veil of leaves. I passed whole months thinking. I discovered more about the properties of loneliness, how it is like the slow squeeze of testicles by a hand that has just been in the refrigerator. If I could not find a way to be authentically in the world, then I would find a superior way of hiding, and to that end I tried on different masks: shy, graceful, pensive, buoyant, jovial, frail - they were the simple masks that had one defining characteristic. Other times I tried on more complicated masks, somber and buoyant, vulnerable yet cheerful, proud yet brooding. These I ultimately abandoned as they required too much upkeep on an energy level. Take it from me: complex masks eat you alive in maintenance."

"Betrayal wears a lot of different hats. You don't have to make a show of it like Brutus did, you don't have to leave anything visible jutting from the base of your best friend's spine, and afterward can stand there straining your ears for hours, but you won't hear a cock crow either. No, the most insidious betrayals are done merely by leaving the life jacket hanging in your closet while you lie to yourself that it's probably not the drowning man's size. That's how we slide, and while we slide we blame the world's problems on colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, corporatism, stupid white men, and America, but there's no need to make a brand name of blame. Individual self-interest: that's the source of our descent, and it doesn't start in the boardroom or the war rooms either. It starts in the home."

"When you withdraw from the world, the world withdraws too, in equal measure. It's a two-step, you and the world. I didn't look for trouble, and it wore me down that none found me. Doing nothing is as tumultuous for me as working on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange on the morning of a market crash. It's how I'm made. Nothing happened to me in three years and it was very, very stressful."

"Let's not beat around the bush: human feelings can be ridiculous. Thinking back to that moment, to how I felt at the realization that my stepfather was slowly murdering me, I did not feel anger. I did not feel outrage. I felt hurt. That's right. That this man who I'd lived with my whole life, the man who married my mother and was for all practical purposes my father, was maliciously poisoning me to death hurt my feelings. Ridiculous!"

"No one listened to me. Caroline and I stood together as they dragged Terry away to a mental asylum. I looked at my parents incredulously, at their inexorably tepid souls. All I could do was uselessly shake a clenched fist and think how people are so eager to become slaves that it's unbelievable. Christ. Sometimes they throw off their freedom so quickly, you'd think it was burning them."

"Let me save you some time. There is no bottom. Despair is bottomless. You'll never get there, and that's why I know you'll never kill yourself. Not you. Only those attached to the trivial things take their own lives, but you never will. You see, a person who reveres life and family and all that stuff, he'll be the first to put his neck in a noose, but those who don't think too highly of their loves and possessions, those who know too well the lack of purpose of it all, they're the ones who can't so it. Do you know what irony is? Well, you just heard one. If you believe in immortality, you can kill yourself, but if you feel that life is a brief flicker between two immense voids to which humanity is unfairly condemned, you wouldn't dare. Look, Marty, you're in an untenable situation. You don't have the resources to live a full life, yet you can't bring yourself to die. So what do you do?"

"It's so rare that people give you real, practical advice. Normally they say things like "Don't worry," and "Everything will be OK," which is not only impractical, it's exasperating, and you have to wait until they're diagnosed with a terminal disease before you can say it back to them with any pleasure."

"Whenever I'd heard anyone say "Relationships are work," I'd always scoffed, because I thought relationships should grow wild like untended gardens, but now I knew they were work, and unpaid work too - volunteer work."

"You experience life alone, you can be as intimate with another as much as you like, but there has to be always a part of you and your existence that is incommunicable; you die alone, the experience is yours alone, you might have a dozen spectators who love you, but your isolation, from birth to death, is never fully penetrated. What if death is the same aloneness, though, for eternity? An incommunicable, cruel, and infinite loneliness. We don't know what death is. Maybe it's that."

"Confronting your own assassin is a tricky business; you don't want to trigger your own murder just for the sake of getting something off your chest."

"The worst thing you can say about someone in a society like ours is that they can't hold down a job. It conjures images of unshaven losers with weak grips watching sadly as the jobs slip free and float away. There's nothing we respect more than work, and there's nothing we denigrate more than the unwillingness to work, and if someone wants to dedicate himself to painting or writing poetry, he'd better be holding down a job at a hamburger restaurant if he knows what's good for him."

"It's like Dad said: moments of cosmic consciousness could simply be a natural reaction to a sudden unconscious awareness of our own mortality. For all we know, the feeling of unity might be the greatest proof of separateness there is. Who knows? Just because they feel like genuine apprehensions of Truth doesn't mean they are. I mean, if you mistrust one sense, you must mistrust them all. There's no reason the sixth sense might not be as misleading as smell or sight. That's the lesson I've learned from my father, the headline news from the corner that he thought himself into: direct intuitions as as untrustworthy as they are potent."

"...What did I have to lose Would they really bother giving me another life sentence? I already have six!" Harry paused here a moment, reflecting, and said quietly, "I'll tell you something, Marty, there's freedom in forever."

"I took a step closer to the edge. High in the trees I could hear the sounds of birds. They weren't chirping, they were just moving around making everything rustle. Down near the earth brown beetles were rummaging in the dirt, not thinking about death. It didn't seem to me I'd be missing out on much. Existence is humiliating anyway. If Someone was watching us build, decay, create, degenerate, believe, and wither as we do, he'd never stop laughing. So why not? What do I know about suicide? Only that it is a melodramatic act, as well as an admission that the heat is too hot so I'm getting out of this crazy kitchen. And why shouldn't a fourteen-year-old commit suicide? Sixteen-year-olds do it all the time. Maybe I'm just ahead of my time. Why shouldn't I end it all?"

"No, why air every ugly, negative, loopy, idiotic thought that floats through the head? That's why when you're standing by the harbor and your lover says, in a tender embrace, "What are you thinking about?" you don't respond, "That I hate people and I wish they'd fall down and never get up." I'm telling you. You just can't say it. I don't know much about women, but I do know that."