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Heartbeat Quotes

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• A Dirty Shame was a crazy movie. I don’t understand that movie at all. I don’t get it, but I’d work with John Waters again in a heartbeat. He’s just a delight. – Selma Blair • A human life is just a heartbeat in heaven. – Robin Williams • A hundred hundred heartbeats…” whispered Sabriel, tears falling down her face. – Garth Nix • A scary dream makes your heart beat faster. Why doesn’t the part of your brain that controls your heartbeat realize that another part of your brain is making the whole thing up? Don’t these people communicate? – George Carlin • A sermon is no sermon in which I cannot hear the heartbeat. – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • A span of a few heartbeats can make for a greater memory than the sum of a mundane year.-Catti-brie – R. A. Salvatore • A successful song comes to sing itself inside the listener. It is cellular and seismic, a wave coalescing in the mind and in the flesh. There is a message outside and a message inside, and those messages are the same, like the pat and thud of two heartbeats, one within you, one surrounding. The message of the lullaby is that it’s okay to dim the eyes for a time, to lose sight of yourself as you sleep and as you grow: if you drift, it says, you’ll drift ashore: if you fall, you will fall into place. – Kevin Brockmeier • A weak but steady throb lay beneath Kev’s searching fingertips. Win’s heartbeat…the pulse that sustained his universe. – Lisa Kleypas • Abraham Lincoln is resolute, honest, has the best interest of the nation at heart, and he’s as ugly as homemade Sunday sin, so he is modest, too. I’d vote for that in an undead heartbeat. – Bill Oberst Jr. • Alexia gave in to his demanding touch, but only, of course, because he sounded so pathetic. It had nothing, whatsoever to do with her own quickening heartbeat. – Gail Carriger • All these weirdos, and me getting a little better every day right in the midst of them. I had never known, never even imagined for a heartbeat, that there might be a place for people like us. – Denis Johnson • And at any moment it all ends with a heartbeat…just one heartbeat, and there’s no more time. One heartbeat and the chance to be saved is gone. One heartbeat and there’s no more choosing—it’s all sealed for eternal life or eternal death. – Jonathan Cahn • And since time sets its own tempo, like a heartbeat or an ebb tide, timepieces don’t really keep time. They just keep up with it, if they’re able. – Dava Sobel • Any chance he’s turned a new leaf and taken up sailing for real?” “About as likely as me doing it.” Hadrian eyed Royce for a heartbeat. “I put him at the top of the list. – Michael J. Sullivan • Anything I’ve asked of MGM Grand, they’ve done for me in a heartbeat. They’re all about making entertainers and athletes happy. – Floyd Mayweather, Jr. • Around us, life bursts with miracles–a glass of water, a ray of sunshine, a leaf, a caterpillar, a flower, laughter, raindrops. If you live in awareness, it is easy to see miracles everywhere. Each human being is a multiplicity of miracles. Eyes that see thousands of colors, shapes, and forms; ears that hear a bee flying or a thunderclap; a brain that ponders a speck of dust as easily as the entire cosmos; a heart that beats in rhythm with the heartbeat of all beings. When we are tired and feel discouraged by life’s daily struggles, we may not notice these miracles, but they are always there. – Nhat Hanh • As he gave a sleepy, growling groan, that hand disappeared under the sheet. Arizona’s lips parted, and her heartbeat tripped up. She cleared her throat. “Spencer?” Freezing, without moving any other body part, he opened his eyes and met her gaze. She frowned at him. He didn’t look super-startled, and he said nothing. He just started at her. With his hand still under there. “Yeah…” Semi-satisfied with his frozen reaction, she nodded at his lap. “You weren’t going for a little tug, were you? Because as your spectator, I’d just as soon not see it.” -Arizona and Spencer – Lori Foster • Assured of your salvation by the unique grace of our Lord Jesus Christ” is the heartbeat of the gospel, joyful liberation from fear of the Final Outcome, a summons to self-acceptance, and freedom for a life of compassion toward others. – Brennan Manning �� Athletic ability can be taken away like that. It can all end in a heartbeat. – Tim Tebow

jQuery(document).ready(function($) var data = action: 'polyxgo_products_search', type: 'Product', keywords: 'Heartbeat', 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_heartbeat').html(obj); jQuery('#thelovesof_heartbeat 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'); ); ); ); • Basketball is a beautiful game when the five players on the court play with one heartbeat. – Dean Smith • Because it was starting to get dark, and because the streets were crowded, I bumped into a googolplex people. Who were they? Where were they going? What were they looking for? I wanted to hear their heartbeats, and I wanted them to hear mine. – Jonathan Safran Foer • Being the foundation is what I live for, some people call it being in the pocket, some people call it a groove. I think it’s the heartbeat. There’s nothing that feels better than that. – Tommy Shannon • Breath and brevity are sisters; the long-winded is an enemy who muffles your heartbeat. – Shirley Geok-lin Lim • By writing at the instant, the very heartbeat of life is caught. – Walt Whitman • Can I be blamed for wanting a real body, to put my arms around? Without it I too am disembodied. I can listen to my own heartbeat against the bedsprings…but there’s something dead about it, something deserted. – Margaret Atwood • Christ used the flesh and blood of Mary for his life on earth, the Word of love was uttered in her heartbeat. Christ used his own body to utter his love on earth; his perfectly real body, with bone and sinew and blood and tears; Christ uses our bodies to express his love on earth, our humanity. A Christian life is a sacramental life, it is not a life lived only in the mind, only by the soul… Our humanity is the substance of the sacramental life of Christ in us, like the wheat for the host, like the grape for the chalice. – Caryll Houselander • Dance is your pulse, your heartbeat, your breathing. It’s the rhythm of your life. It’s the expression in time and movement,in happiness, joy, sadness and envy. – Jacques d’Amboise • Dance is your pulse, your heartbeat, your breathing. It’s the rhythym of your life. – Jacques d’Amboise • Do I miss football in Scotland? It keeps you really alive, that’s for sure. Your heartbeat fluctuates. I’m flatlining at the moment which is actually quite nice but you need to go up and down to stay alive. – Gordon Strachan • Do not leave me, hide in my heart like a secret, wind around my head like a turban. “I come and go as I please,” you say, “swift as a heartbeat.” You can tease me as much as you like but never leave me. – Rumi • Don’t do it for the money. Follow the path to do what makes your heartbeat faster. Follow your passion. – Lynn Tilton • Even still, we run. We have not reached our average of 57.92 years without knowing that you run through it, and it hurts and you run through it some more, and if it hurts worse, you run through it even more, and when you finish, you will have broken through. In the end, when you are done, and stretching, and your heartbeat slows, and your sweat dries, if you’ve run through the hard part, you will remember no pain. – Lauren Groff • Everybody gave 100%. I mean everyone, because they all knew that the film had the bones and the heartbeat of something that could be good. And everyone was in on it and wanted it for me and wanted it for Roger and Beau. – Pierce Brosnan • Felt my heartbeat falter, hesitate, then stumble awkwardly forward, tripping on the next beat, then the next, faster and faster until each one tumbled into the other like the drumroll of dominoes crashing together. Funny how time stands still when death is imminent. – Darynda Jones • Find a guy who calls you beautiful instead of hot, who calls you back when you hang up on him, who will lie under the stars and listen to your heartbeat, or will stay awake just to watch you sleep…wait for the boy who kisses your forehead, who wants to show you off to the world when you are in sweats, who holds your hand in front of his friends, who thinks you’re just as pretty without makeup on. One who is constantly reminding you of how much he cares and how lucky his is to have you….The one who turns to his friends and says, ‘that’s her.’ – Chuck Palahniuk • Firepaw held the menacing amber gaze for few moments. Warrior and apprentice, for a heartbeat their eyes were locked as enemies. – Erin Hunter • Five is for five heartbeats, the length of time it takes to breathe in or out. For that is how quickly a life may change, for better or for ill. The time it takes to make up, or change, your mind. – Cameron Dokey • For at no time are any events predestined. There should be no such word in your vocabulary, for with every moment you change, and every heartbeat is an action, and every action changes every other action. – Seth • For God’s sake, Stiff,” he says. “You don’t have to follow me,” I say staring at the maze of bars above me. I shove my foot onto the place where two bars cross and push myself up, grabbing another bar in the process. I sway for a second, my heart beating so hard I can’t feel anything else. Every thought I have condenses into that heartbeat, moving at the same rhythm. “Yes, I do,” he says. – Veronica Roth • Genetics and beats? I feel like the drumbeat is a natural thing. Our heartbeat moves at a certain BPM. The drumbeat, being the first instrument, the platform for us, being that we all kind of come from that – it’s all beats. – Q-Tip • God had a heartbeat for 18-25 years old…the vast majority of whom don’t have a clue why they are on this planet. – Louie Giglio • God has called us into a place of tenderness, when nobody is looking, when there are no great decisions to make, when it’s just him and me in a hotel room, with no one to pray for, no one to preach to. When it is just two people in a room, that’s where you learn. That’s where you learn his heartbeat. That’s where you learn the presence. That’s where you learn the voice. It’s in the moments when nobody is watching, nobody is evaluating how good you’re doing. When it is just you and him. – Bill Johnson • He got right down in the dark between heartbeats, and rested there. And then he saw that another one wasn’t going to come. That’s it. That’s the last. He looked at the dark. I would like to take this opportunity, he said, to pray for another human being. – Denis Johnson • He had also the reputation of being a bit of a lady killer. But that probably accrued to him from his possession of a laughing, velvety voice which no girl could hear without a heartbeat, and a dangerous way of listening as if she were saying something that he had longed all his life to hear. – Lucy Maud Montgomery • He had on bunny slippers. These had fangs. They all stared at them in silence for about a heartbeat, and then Shane said, “That is impressively wicked. Crazy, but wicked. – Rachel Caine • He took both of my hands, twisting to face me more fully on the flattened box beneath us, and again the colors in his irises seemed to pulse with my heartbeat. – Rachel Vincent • He was afraid that the secrets she’d kept would always be here, inside him, an ugly malignant thing lodged near enough to his heart to upset its rhythm, and though it could be removed, cut out, there would always be scars; bits and pieces of it would remain in his blood, making it wrong somehow, so that if he accidentally sliced his skin open, his blood would–for one heartbeat–flow as black as India ink before it remembered that it should be red. – Kristin Hannah

• He’d half meant to speak but those eyes had altered the world forever in the space of a heartbeat. – Cormac McCarthy • Her heartbeat was in her hands, her heart beat the way she moved her head, her whole body was her heart beating. – Tom Spanbauer • Her mind emptied of everything but the gusting wind and how fragile Wolf looked in that heartbeat, like one movement could break him open. – Marissa Meyer • Here’s what I love: when a great writer turns me into a Jew from Chicago, a lesbian out of South Carolina, or a black woman moving into a subway entrance in Harlem. Turn me into something else, writers of the world. Make me Muslim, heretic, hermaphrodite. Put me into a crusader’s armor, a cardinal’s vestments. Let me feel the pygmy’s heartbeat, the queen’s breast, the torturer’s pleasure, the Nile’s taste, or the nomad’s thirst. Tell me everything that I must know. Hold nothing back. – Pat Conroy • His eyes search the crowd until they find my face. My heartbeat lives in my throat; lives in my cheeks. “I still don’t understand,” he says softly, “how she knew that it would work. – Veronica Roth • His gaze was a lot steadier than her heartbeat. “She’s the reason for those whispered phone calls I used to overhear, isn’t she?” “Don’t be silly. I was talking to my lover.” “She told me she lives at a place called Brookdale. After I hung up, I did a little research on the Web. Your talent for obfuscation continues to amaze me.” “Hey, I haven’t obfuscated in weeks. Makes you go blind. – Susan Elizabeth Phillips • Holding Eleanor’s hand was like holding a butterfly. Or a heartbeat. Like holding something complete, and completely alive. As soon as he touched her, he wondered how he’d gone this long without doing it. He rubbed his thumb through her palm and up her fingers, and was aware of her every breath. – Rainbow Rowell • Holding Eleanor’s hand was like holding a butterfly. Or a heartbeat. Like holding something complete, and completely alive. – Rainbow Rowell • How do you know that? (Stryker) I know everything. I feel every heartbeat in the universe. Hear every scream for mercy and feel every tear of pain. (Jared) – Sherrilyn Kenyon • How was it that, even in the common tasks of an ordinary life, Jesus drew the praise of heaven? At the core of His being, He only did those things which pleased the Father. In everything, He stayed true, heartbeat to heartbeat, with the Father’s desires. Jesus lived for God alone; God was enough for Him. Thus, even in its simplicity and moment-to-moment faithfulness, Christ’s life was an unending fragrance, a perfect offering of incomparable love to God. – Francis Frangipane • I asked Chief Justice John Roberts about this definition of life – you know, what is life? The Supreme Court can’t figure it out or doesn’t want us to figure it out; the fact that we know that there is no life if there’s no heartbeat and brainwaves. – Tom Coburn • I believe that every human has a finite number of heartbeats. I don’t intend to waste any of mine running around doing exercises. – Neil Armstrong • I believe that the Good Lord gave us a finite number of heartbeats and I’m damned if I’m going to use up mine running up and down a street. – Neil Armstrong • I can hear sweat trickling down your cheek. Your heartbeat sound like Sasquatch feet. Thundering, shaking the concrete. – The Notorious B.I.G. • I come prepared with the white suit and stethoscope, Listen to your heartbeat, delete beep beep BEEP. Your insurance is high, but my price is cheap. – Kool Keith • I could fall for you in a heartbeat – Ken Follett • I could take you down on this sidewalk and be up that skirt of yours in a heartbeat. And you wouldn’t fight me, would you? No, she probably wouldn’t. Wrath and Beth – J.R. Ward • I didn’t mean to send love letters, but that is what they became. On their way to you, my words turned into heartbeats on the page. – Lisa Kleypas • I don’t audition for “on-air” commercials – the ones where your face can be seen. I’ve auditioned for voiceover campaigns that I haven’t gotten, but I don’t really want to be seen in a commercial unless it’s a product that I really love. Like, if Adidas asked me, I would do it in a heartbeat. But I did a Reebok commercial, one for Pep Boys, one for Dunkin’ Donuts. I auditioned for commercials, but I really couldn’t stomach it. It just didn’t feel right. – Michael Showalter • I don’t have any choice any more. I am in a choiceless awareness. I don’t have to be aware. I am simply aware. Now it is just like my heartbeat or like my breathing. Even if I try not to be aware, it is not possible; the very effort will make me more aware. Awareness is not a quality, a characteristic; it is your whole being. When you become aware, there is no choice left to be otherwise. – Rajneesh • I dreamed you a field of running horses, Selah. For you, Bianca, a balloon the size of the sky, my body a kite you can throw into the air.Pull me by string and horse.Tell me everything won’t end in death. That everything doesn’t end with February. Dead wildflowers wrapped around a crying baby’s throat.I’ve slowed my heartbeat to three beats a minute. I’ve redrawn the clouds into birds, a fox chasing them into the mountains.I’m going to move my hand today.I vomit ice cubes.There’s a ghost next to me.Get up, Dad.(Light Boxes) – Shane Jones • I endorse only products I actually use. Like Wheaties keeps offering me money, but I don’t eat Wheaties, so I can’t do it. Now, if Rice Krispies or Frosted Flakes offered me a deal, I’d take it right away. Apple Jacks, I’d be on the box in a heartbeat. Apple Shaqs. Yeah. – Shaquille O’Neal • I feel his heartbeat against my cheek,as fast as my own. “Are you afraid of me, too, Tobias?” “Terrified,” he replies with a smile. – Veronica Roth • I feel like I’ve gotten an extraordinary opportunity to experience a sort of collective humanity. If you hug many people in such a short period of days you pick up on a communal energy, almost like feeling a giant heartbeat that everyone is beating together. – Rob Bell • I feel the flatline of my existence disrupting, forming heartbeat hills and valleys – Isaac Marion • I folded myself against her body, breathing in the smell of my new life and matching my heartbeat to hers” Sam, Linger – Maggie Stiefvater • I grew up among strong women so I know what it’s like to be loved and humiliated in a heartbeat. – Chris O’Dowd • I have this great fear of people – not when I’m on the runway, but backstage. In a room full of people, I really suffer. I sort of go into a tunnel and I feel very removed. I get so tense, I can’t swallow, and my heartbeat goes way up. It still happens now, although I’m better at controlling it. – Linda Evangelista • I hear my heartbeat. I have been looking at him too long, but then, he has been looking back, and I feel like we are both trying to say something the other can’t hear, though I could be imagining it. Too long – and now even longer, my heart even louder, his tranquil eyes swallowing me whole. – Veronica Roth • I knew there was only one place to go. I sank down into the center of my soul, grew still, and listened to the Rabbi’s heartbeat. – Brennan Manning • I know I hated magic for a reason,” Janco said. “Congratulations. This is the first time you’ve had a VALID reason to hate something,” Ari countered. “Remember your campaign against sand?” “Sand! Horrid little stuff. Gets everywhere. I had a perfectly good argue–” “Janco.” Ari’s voice rumbled deep in his throat. In a heartbeat, Janco switched gears. “Well, this blood magic sounds worse than sand. – Maria V. Snyder • I know there’s some poetry that sort of sounds like daisies, but most of the good poetry is also [political], you can feel the heartbeat; it’s about some situation that concerns human beings under duress. It’s suggesting a solution, or just acknowledging that [the situation] exists. Art does that. – Toni Morrison • I leapt eagerly into books. The characters’ lives were so much more interesting than the lonely heartbeat of my own. – Ruta Sepetys • I listened to the wind bury winter; and when I tasted his grace, his grace had no name; only, night became something else in his presence, as though darkness had a soul, here, swaying to heartbeats roaring. – Marjorie M. Liu • I love you,” she whispered. He stroked his hand down her back. “Yep, you do.” “You’re supposed to say it back,” she said, pretending to be offended because the silliness kept the fear/hope at bay. “Why?” He scowled down at her. “You know you’re my heartbeat. – Nalini Singh • I loved the idea that people dressed up to go to the gardens. Our work always has a utility point of view at its heartbeat and then other things come around it, so it really allowed us to use denims and suedes and gauzes, and those sorts of hard-working fabrics – workwear fabrics – and then contrast them with crepe de chine, beautiful florals and big jewelry. – Karen Walker • I measure the moment in the heartbeats I skip – David Levithan • I most resemble Benjamin Button. I evolve. I attach myself to the heartbeat of whatever is going on at that particular time, or I just chart a new path. – J. B. Smoove • I need music. It’s like my heartbeat, so to speak. It keeps me going no matter what’s going on – bad games, press, whatever! – LeBron James • I stare at him. I feel my heartbeat everywhere, even in my toes. I feel like doing something bold, but I could just as easily walk away. I am not sure which option is smarter, or better. I am not sure that I care. – Veronica Roth • I think my heartbeat might be the Morse code for ‘inappropriate.’ – Rives • I thought that you had stood up for the free will & rights of humans in this town.” “Depends on the human,” Claire said. “As far as I know, Hitler had a heartbeat, and I wouldn’t vote him to be in charge. – Rachel Caine • I try hard to hold fast to the truth that a full and thankful heart cannot entertain great conceits. When brimming with gratitude, one’s heartbeat must surely result in outgoing love, the finest emotion we can ever know. – Bill W. • I used to skip school to go there when I was growing up in Newark, … I saw the Flamingos, the Heartbeats, Jackie Wilson, Chuck Jackson. – George Clinton • I was a barmaid for my mum for years, as we lived above a pub. I still can’t hear the Heartbeat theme tune without breaking into a cold sweat, as it used to start at the same time as my shift. – Sara Cox • I work between my heartbeat. I have one-and-a-half seconds to actually move. And at the same time I have to watch I don’t inhale my own work. – Willard Wigan • I would rather have strong enemies than a world of passive individualists. In a world of passive individualists nothing seems worth anything simply because nobody stands for anything. That world has no convictions, no victories, no unions, no heroism, no absolutes, no heartbeat. That world has rigor mortis. – Criss Jami • I would’ve done it for you in a heartbeat. – Julie James • If I could be a country music star, I’d do it in a heartbeat. I’d hit the road and just jam out. – Justin Deeley • If I had to give up cheese or chocolate, I’d give up chocolate in a heartbeat. – Amanda Peet • If I have to remove one to save ten, I’ll do it in a heartbeat. If I have to waterboard somebody to save a thousand people, I’ll do it in a heartbeat. – Sean Patrick Flanery • If it came down to that, I’d protect you in a heartbeat. – Nicholas Sparks • If there was another Dr. Quinn movie, I would do it in a heartbeat. – Joe Lando • If they asked me if I wanted to go into space tomorrow, I’d do it in a heartbeat. On the other hand, if they asked me if I wanted to go into training for three years and then go into space again, I’d probably say no. – Sally Ride • If you have a heartbeat, there’s still time for your dreams. – Sean Stephenson • If you put two brigades on the ground right now with U.S. forces, they would push ISIS back into Syria in a heartbeat. – Anthony Zinni • If you want to say something profound, writing from your heartbeat is different than writing from the loud voices you get from music. If they’re rapping from noise, it’s about robbing people. It’s that simple. – Russell Simmons • If you will practice being fictional for a while, you will understand that fictional characters are sometimes more real than people with bodies and heartbeats. – Richard Bach • I’m a really athletic person – I’m not that coordinated, but I’m really athletic, so I would play a superhero doing my own stunts in a heartbeat. But hopefully not taking swings at people. That’s not a good idea for me. – Selma Blair • I’m not sure that people want to go back to the womb. People want to go back to the teats of your mother and hear your mother’s heartbeat. – Gaspar Noe • I’m on a Mission, that niggaz say is Impossible, But when I swing my swords they all choppable, I be the body dropper, the heartbeat stopper, Child educator, plus head amputator. – GZA • I’m sure you would have stopped it if you could have.” “In a heartbeat. – Kiera Cass • I’m the ruler in my kingdom and my dark seat is hot. Step into my world and your heartbeat stop! – Aaron Dontez Yates • I’m very proud to be Canadian, but I would move to New York in a heartbeat. – Lexa Doig • In a heartbeat, a thousand voices took up the chant. King Joffrey and King Robb and King Stannis were forgotten, and King Bread ruled alone. “Bread.” they clamored. “Bread, Bread! – George R. R. Martin • In order to terminate a pregnancy, you have to still a heartbeat, switch off a developing brain. – Christopher Hitchens • In the end mortals always expired before faeries. They were such finite creatures. Their first heartbeat and breath were but a blink from death. To add the weight of nourishing his insatiable court in a time of peace was to hasten that unconscionably. – Melissa Marr • In the silence between your heartbeat bides a summons. Do you hear it? Name it if you must, or leave it forever nameless, but why pretend it is not there? – Rumi • In the time just before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, when Perfidia opens, we were pre-psychologized. There were no concepts of identity, no politics of victimization. Reparation wasn’t in the language. Nobody thought about giving the great grandchildren of black slaves so much as $1.98. And all of a sudden the bombs hit, interventionism versus isolationism became a dead issue, and it was us-versus-them in a heartbeat. – James Ellroy • In this world, there are two times. There is mechanical time and there is body time.” “They do not keep clocks in their houses. Instead, they listen to their heartbeats. They feel the rhythms of their moods and desires.” “Then there are those who think their bodies don’t exist. They live by mechanical time. They rise at seven o’clock in the morning. They eat their lunch at noon and their supper at six. They arrive at their appointments on time, precisely by the clock.- Alan Lightman • In your hands The dog, the donkey, surely they know They are alive. Who would argue otherwise? But now, after years of consideration, I am getting beyond that. What about the sunflowers? What about The tulips, and the pines? Listen, all you have to do is start and There’ll be no stopping. What about mountains? What about water Slipping over rocks? And speaking of stones, what about The little ones you can Hold in your hands, their heartbeats So secret, so hidden it may take years Before, finally, you hear them? – Mary Oliver • It is a real issue, a measurement of our society, when we say it’s fine to destroy unborn life who has a heartbeat at 16 days post-conception. – Tom Coburn • It only takes one mistake,’ the Dan Banyan guy says, ‘and nothing else you ever do will matter.’ With his empty hand, he takes one of my hands. His fingers feel hot, fever-hot, and pounding with his heartbeats. He turns my hand palm-up saying, ‘No matter how hard you work or how smart you become, you’ll always be known for that one poor choice.’ He sets the blue pill on my palm, saying, ‘Do that one wrong thing- and you’ll be dead for the rest of your life.- Chuck Palahniuk • It took my breath away, that evening. If you’ve ever dreamed that you walked into your best-loved book or film or TV program, then maybe you’ve got some idea how it felt: things coming alive around you, strange and new and utterly familiar at the same time; the catch in your heartbeat as you move through the rooms that had such a vivid untouchable life in your mind, as your feet actually touch the carpet, as you breathe the air; the odd, secret glow of warmth as these people you’ve been watching for so long, from so far away, open their circle and sweep you into it. – Tana French • It’s time we put thoughts of lack behind us. It’s time for us to discover the secrets of the stars, to sail to an uncharted land, to open up a new heaven where our spirits can soar. But first we’ll have to make changes. And lasting change does not happen overnight. Lasting change happens in infinitesimal increments: a day, an hour, a minute, a heartbeat at a time… – Sarah Ban Breathnach • It’s weird how your perspective changes. At the start of your career, you think, ‘I just want to do cutting-edge work that makes people think.’ Now, I would do a blockbuster in a heartbeat. – Matthew Rhys • I’ve learned that I can’t do it all at once. So, you have to figure out your angle of attack. Coming in on the acting front, acting is a passion of mine. It’s a true love. Dancing, I kind of just fell into. Choreographing, the same thing. But making films, producing and directing, that’s the heartbeat of my existence. – Columbus Short • Laughter is the best way To make somebody’s heart beat – Robert Holden • Let me say, it’s – what a commentary it is on American media that you have to go to Russian television in order to get covered as a candidate in this election. It’s pretty outrageous. And our media could solve that in a heartbeat if they actually opened it up, you know, but they don’t. So I think that’s more commentary on the crisis in our media. – Jill Stein • Liam in Taken has been great to see. My boys love it. They love him. And there’s just the gravitas to it. It’s believable. You know the guy’s endured. You know the guy’s lived some life. Someone like Liam has lived a lot of life. Myself, I’ve lived a lot of life. There’s loss. There’s success. There’s loss. There’s doubts. And there’s some heartbeat there. – Pierce Brosnan • Lies were like acid, corrosive: They could dissolve trust in a heartbeat. – Rob Thurman • Life is a disease, brother, and death begins already at birth. Every breath, every heartbeat, is a moment of dying – a little shove toward the end. – Erich Maria Remarque • Life is more than breath and a heartbeat; meaning and purpose are the life of life. – Desmond Tutu • Life isn’t measured in minutes, but in heartbeats. – Joan Lowery Nixon • Like a heartbeat. Something inside me. Some dream. I think it’s being a dreamer as a child. Dreamy kids become actors, don’t they? – Michael Gambon • Louis-Cesare’s anger suddenly filled the small room like water, and in a heartbeat his eyes went from silver tinged to as solid as two antique coins. I sat frozen, awash in a sea of power. I was beginning to understand why Mircea had wanted him along, only Daddy had failed to mention anything about the hair-trigger temper. I guess he assumed the red hair would clue me in. – Karen Chance • Love is connected to the heart. When the Name of God Allah is synchronized with the heartbeat, it then travels through the blood to all the veins, reaches the spirits and awakens them. Then the spirits are rejuvenated and go into the Love of God. – Riaz Ahmed Gohar Shahi • Love is the heartbeat of all life. – Paramahansa Yogananda • Maybe, he said hesitantly, maybe there is a beast. The assembly cried out savagely and Ralph stood up in amazement. You, Simon? You believe in this? I don’t know, said Simon. His heartbeats were choking him. […] Ralph shouted. Hear him! He’s got the conch! What I mean is . . . maybe it’s only us. Nuts! That was from Piggy, shocked out of decorum. – William Golding • Music gets inside you, music captures you. Music becomes your heartbeat. It’s a drug and makes you feel whatever the song’s about. – Ed Westwick • music is about as physical as it gets: your essential rhythm is your heartbeat; your essential sound, the breath. We’re walking temples of noise, and when you add tender hearts to this mix, it somehow lets us meet in places we couldn’t get to any other way. – Anne Lamott • Music is the elixir of life. It can mimic the heartbeats of our bodies and heal like a magic wand… The resonance it creates in our bodies cannot be replicated by any medicine. – Walter Mikac • My heart beat Beats me senselessly Why’s everything Gotta be so intense with me. – Katy Perry • My heart is fluid and soaring. There’s no longer any space between heartbeats. – Lauren Oliver • My little dog – a heartbeat at my feet. – Edith Wharton • My loving sister Mary has always shared the pain and pleasure of my heartbeat in a unique and special way. We have sung our sad and warm songs together. – John Henrik Clarke • Namby-pamby little routines that don’t speed up your heartbeat and make you sweat aren’t worth your while. – Jane Fonda • No, there is literally nothing on the business side that I wouldn’t sacrifice in a heartbeat to have an extra couple of hours’ writing. Nothing. – J. K. Rowling • Nothing endures except change; nothing is constant except death. Every heartbeat wounds us, and life would be an eternal bleeding to death, were it not for literature. It grants us what nature does not: a golden time that doesn’t rust, a springtime that never wilts, cloudless happiness and eternal youth. [my translation] – Ludwig Borne • Oh, honey, if he swung batter-batter for my team, I’d be all over that in a heartbeat. – J. Lynn • Okay, okay.” I set my hand on top of his and guide it to my chest, so it’s right over my heart. “Feel my heartbeat. Can you feel it?” “Yes.” “Feel how steady it is?” “It’s fast.” “Yes, well, that has nothing to do with the box.” I wince as soon as I’m done speaking. I just admitted to something. Hopefully he doesn’t realize that. – Veronica Roth • Once I was lost in a forest. I was so afraid. My blood pounded in my chest and I knew my heart’s strength would soon be exhausted. I saved myself without thinking. I grasped the two syllables closest to me, and replaced my heartbeat with your name. – Anne Michaels • One has to reach to the absolute state of awareness: that is Zen. You cannot do it every morning for a few minutes or for half an hour and then forget all about it. It has to become like your heartbeat. You have to sit in it, you have to walk in it. Yes, you have even to sleep in it. – Rajneesh • One’s life story cannot be told with complete veracity. A true autobiography would have to be written in states of mind, emotions, heartbeats, smiles and tears; not in months and years, or physical events. Life is marked off on the soul by feelings, not by dates. – Helen Keller • Our breath, like our heartbeat, is the most reliable rhythm in our lives. When we become attuned to this constant rhythm, our breath can gradually teach us to come back to the original silence of the mind. – Donna Farhi • Our story opens in the mind of Luther L. (L for LeRoy) Fliegler, who is lying in his bed, not thinking of anything, but just aware of sounds, conscious of his own breathing, and sensitive to his own heartbeats. Lying beside him is his wife, lying on her right side and enjoying her sleep. – John O’Hara • Over the past year I’vediscovered if you keep on giving and giving, you end up losing yourself. I think that learning to give and receive is the trick. Perfect happiness is also a feeling, and the most amazing thing is that we were all born with the gift to make it happen in a heartbeat. Putting on certainmusic, reading something can make us feel a certain way. I think the key to happiness is allowing ourselves to not feel bad or guilty for feeling it, and letting it be contagious. And to not be dependent on other people to create your own happiness. – Brittany Murphy • Patients know in a heartbeat if they’re getting a clumsy exam. – Abraham Verghese • People who are in it for their own good are individualists. They don’t share the same heartbeat that makes a team so great. A great unit, whether it be football or any organization, shares the same heartbeat. – Bear Bryant • Perhaps the Wilderness we fear is the pause between our own heartbeats, the silence that reminds us we live by grace. – Terry Tempest Williams • Promise to my momma I’ma make it to the Top..So I’ma keep climbing til my heartbeat drop – J. Cole • Raindrops are my only reminder that clouds have a heartbeat. That I have one, too. – Tahereh Mafi • Remember that reputation and integrity are your most valuable assets – and can be lost in a heartbeat. – Charlie Munger • Remember, we could solve this in a heartbeat with ranked-choice voting. The Democrats won’t pass it. This allows you to rank your choices and eliminates the intimidation and the fear. They won’t pass it; I know because I helped file the bill. Sixteen years ago in Massachusetts they could have solved the spoiler problem. They won’t do it because they rely on fear. The fact that they rely on fear tells you something very important. They are not on your side. For that reason alone, they do not deserve your vote. – Jill Stein • Reshaping life! People who can say that have never understood a thing about life—they have never felt its breath, its heartbeat—however much they have seen or done. They look on it as a lump of raw material that needs to be processed by them, to be ennobled by their touch. But life is never a material, a substance to be molded. If you want to know, life is the principle of self-renewal, it is constantly renewing and remaking and changing and transfiguring itself, it is infinitely beyond your or my obtuse theories about it. – Boris Pasternak • Reyes, what happened?” He‘d been busy nibbling his way to my collarbone, his hot mouth evoking seismic activity at each point of contact. I really hated to interrupt, but … “Reyes, are you listening to me?” He raised his head, a sensual grin playing at the corners of his mouth, and said, “I‘m listening.” “To what? The sound of blood rushing to your nether regions?” “No,” he said with a husky chuckle that made me tingle everywhere. “To your heartbeat. – Darynda Jones • Right now there’s a man on the street outside my door with outstretched hands full of heartbeats no one can hear. He has cheeks like torn sheet music every tear-broken crescendo falling on deaf ears. At his side there’s a boy with eyes like an anthem no one stands up for. – Andrea Gibson • Sarah Palin lacked the preparation or temperament to be one heartbeat away from the presidency, but what she possessed in abundance was the ability to inflame political passions and energize the John McCain campaign with star quality. – Roger Ebert • Scientists say every action initiates an equal and opposite reaction. I say that’s just the start. I say every action initiates a most unequal and upredictable chain reaction, that every filament of living becomes part of a larger weave, while remaining identifiable. That every line of latitude requires several stripes of longitude to obtain meaning. That every universe is part of a bigger heaven, a heaven of rhythm and geometry, where a heartbeat is the apex of a triangle. – Ellen Hopkins • Sean reaches out between us and takes my wrist. He press his thumb on my pulse. My heartbeat trips and surges against his skin. I’m pinned by his touch, a sort of fearful magic. We stand and stand, and I wait for my pulse against his finger to slow, but it doesn’t Finally, he releases my wrist and says,” I’ll see you on the cliffs tomorrow. – Maggie Stiefvater • She closes the door completely, and I crouch there. I allow myself to fall forward and rest my head on the door frame. My breath bleeds. My heartbeat drowns my ears. – Markus Zusak • She moved nearer, leaned her shoulder against me — and we were one, and something flowed from her into me, and I knew: this is how it must be. I knew it with every nerve, and every hair, every heartbeat, so sweet it verged on pain. And what joy to submit to this ‘must’. A piece of iron must feel such joy as it submits to the precise, inevitable law that draws it to a magnet. Or a stone, thrown up, hesitating a moment, then plunging headlong back to earth. Or a man, after the final agony, taking a last deep breath — and dying. – Yevgeny Zamyatin • She was my dream. She made me who I am, and holding her in my arms was more natural to me than my own heartbeat. I think about her all the time. Even now, when I’m sitting here, I think about her. There could never have been another. – Nicholas Sparks • Some emotions don’t make a lot of noise. It’s hard to hear pride. Caring is real faint – like a heartbeat. And pure love – why, some days it’s so quiet, you don’t even know it’s there. – Erma Bombeck • Sometimes I heard voices muttering in my head, and a lot of the time the world seemed to smolder around its edges. but I was in a little better physical shape every day, I was getting my looks back, and my spirits were rising, and this was all in all a happy time for me. All these weirdos, and me getting a little better right in the midst of them. I had never known, never even imagined for a heartbeat, that there might be a place for people like us. – Denis Johnson • Sometimes when you are standing still and it’s snowing, you think that you hear music. You can’t tell where it’s coming from either. I wondered if we all really did have a soundtrack, but we just get so used to it that we can’t hear it anymore, the same way that we block out the sound of our own heartbeat. – Heather O’Neill • Sometimes, when a person is truly lost in this world, suffocating inside her private bubble where all she can hear is her own droning heartbeat, a touch can be enough. – Walter Kirn • Such was a poet and shall be and is -who’ll solve the depths of horror to defend a sunbeam’s architecture with his life: and carve immortal jungles of despair to hold a mountain’s heartbeat in his hand. – e. e. cummings • Tell me what it’s like. The race.” “What it’s like is a battle. A mess of horses and men and blood. The fastest and strongest of what is left from two weeks of preparation on the sand. It’s the surf in your face, the deadly magic of November on your skin, the Scorpio drums in the place of your heartbeat. It’s speed, if you’re lucky. It’s life and it’s death or it’s both, and there’s nothing like it. – Maggie Stiefvater • That he’ll never let you down. That boy’s got a heart the size of Kentucky, and he loves you. That’s important. Take it from someone who knows. My mom used to tell me that whatever you do, marry someone who loves you more than you love him. And I listened to her. Why do you think Henry and I get along so well? I’m not saying that I don’t love him, because I do. But if I ever left Henry or something, God forbid, ever happened to me, I don’t think he’ll be able to go on. And that guy would risk his life for mine in a heartbeat. – Nicholas Sparks • That is where my dearest and brightest dreams have ranged — to hear for the duration of a heartbeat the universe and the totality of life in its mysterious, innate harmony. – Hermann Hesse • That’s my favorite thing about him. I like to lie next to him when it’s late, dark, and so quiet I can hear my own heartbeat. It’s times like that when I’m sure that I’m in love. – Lauren Oliver • The difference between deafness and any other disability is that there is no way to put yourself in a position of knowing what it would be like because you can’t stop yourself from hearing your own breath or your own heartbeat. You can not remove sound entirely from your life. You can get a sense of what being blind is like by closing and covering your eyes which provides a source of empathy because we can all project ourselves to that. But people who think they can project themselves into deafness are mistaken because you can’t. – Richard Masur • The eyes of the future are looking back at us and they are praying for us to see beyond our own time. They are kneeling with hands clasped that we might act with restraint, that we might leave room for the life that is destined to come. To protect what is wild is to protect what is gentle. Perhaps the wilderness we fear is the pause between our own heartbeats, the silent space that says we live only by grace. Wilderness lives by this same grace. Wild mercy is in our hands. – Terry Tempest Williams • The final heartbeat for the Christian is not the mysterious conclusion to a meaningless existence. It is, rather, the grand beginning to a life that will never end. – James Dobson • The goal of life is to make your heartbeat match the beat of the universe, to match your nature with Nature. – Joseph Campbell • The government is a heartbeat away from nationalizing health care based on deliberate misinformation about the nation’s uninsured and despite the 100 percent failure rate of such fantastic reforms elsewhere on the globe. – David Limbaugh • The great event on Calvary . . . is an eternal reminder to a power drunk generation that love is the most durable power in the world, and that it is at bottom the heartbeat of the moral cosmos. Only through achieving this love can you expect to matriculate into the university of eternal life. – Martin Luther • The greatest attribute of God is Love. The Tree of Life is located in the very depth of our soul. The most perfect and abundant fruit that grows and ripens is Life giving Love; it is the great healing force in the world. Love never fails to meet every demand of the human heart. The Divine principal of Love may be used to eliminate every sorrow, infirmity, in-harmony, ignorance and all mistakes of mankind. Love is God; eternal, limitless, changeless, infinite. It is the pulse of the world, the heartbeat of the Universe. – Baird T. Spalding • The heartbeat of your originality is deep within a body of thought that continually wrestles with the contradictions and limitations that we’re constantly trying to overcome, the curiosities and the ignorances of the people we seek to help. – Michael Eric Dyson • The myth of this world is that the way to transformation is through power, but God choose to enter the world in a weak manner, gentle and tender through the heartbeat of a child. – Rick Dees • The phone is gonna disappear. Maybe it will be a bracelet. After the bracelet it will be a blood cell sized device that maybe gets installed. We already have people with Parkinson’s that have chips installed in their brain to control their tremors. We already see people have pacemakers to help their heartbeats. I mean we’re already putting these technologies into our bodies. It is only going to deepen. – Jason Silva • The principles of the United States Constitution are, because of Senator Byrd, still the heartbeat of the US Senate. – David C. Hardesty, Jr. • The revolution is like a vessel filled with the pulsating heartbeat of millions of working people. – Ernst Toller • The secret of it all, is to write in the gush, the throb, the flood, of the moment – to put things down without deliberation – without worrying about their style – without waiting for a fit time or place. I always worked that way. I took the first scrap of paper, the first doorstep, the first desk, and wrote – wrote, wrote…By writing at the instant the very heartbeat of life is caught. – Walt Whitman • The soundtrack in the poetry is the soundtrack from your own heartbeat. – Russell Simmons • The thing about physicists is that they tend to think that everything is physics. I don’t. That’s not what music is to me. You can explain aspects of it in physical terms, including the physics of anatomy: how our bodies move, the torsional moment of inertia, the way you move your body to a beat, the inherent periodicities of the heartbeat, the gait. That’s physics, too, I guess – maybe they’d call it biophysics. – Vijay Iyer • The truth is, we live in deeds, not days; in actions and thoughts and feelings, not heartbeats. – Michael Mullen • The type of girls that would sleep with you in a heartbeat aren’t the type of girls I’d want to take home anyway. – Niall Horan • The whole universe was stilled as if listening for a voice. For the space of one heartbeat there was peace on earth. For one fraction of a moment there was no deed of violence wrought on earth, no hatred, no fire, no whirlwind, no pain, no fear. Existence rested against the heart of God, then sighed and journeyed again. – Elizabeth Goudge • The young earth-solution to reconciling the order of creation with natural history makes good exegetical and theological sense. Indeed, the overwhelming consensus of theologians up through the Reformation held to this view. I myself would adopt it in a heartbeat except that nature seems to present such strong evidence against it. – William A. Dembski • There are people we meet in life who miss being important to us by inches, days, or heartbeats. Another place or time or a different emotional frame of mind and we would willingly fall into their arms; gladly take up their challenge or invitation. But as it is, we encounter them when we are discontent or content and they are not. Whatever they are, we are not and vice versa. Two trains going in different directions that pass for a few powerful moments at full speed, blasting noise and wind but then they are gone. Whatever serious chemistry might have been possible if, isn’t. – Jonathan Carroll • There came a moment in the middle of the song when he suddenly felt every heartbeat in the room & after that he never forgot that he was part of something much bigger – Brian Andreas • There is never a time or place for true love. It happens accidentally, in a heartbeat, in a single flashing, throbbing moment. – Sarah Dessen • There is no other closeness in human life like the closeness between a mother and her baby – chronologically, physically, and spiritually they are just a few heartbeats away from being the same person. – Susan Cheever • There was something unbearably sexy about cars at night, Ronan thought. The way the fenders twisted the light and reflected the road, the way every driver became anonymous. The sight of them knocked his heartbeat askew. – Maggie Stiefvater • There would be no chance at all of getting to know death if it happened only once. But fortunately, life is nothing but a continuing dance of birth and death, a dance of change. Every time I hear the rush of a mountain stream, or the waves crashing on the shore, or my own heartbeat, I hear the sound of impermanence. These changes, these small deaths, are our living links with death. They are death’s pulses, death’s heartbeat, prompting us to let go of all the things we cling to. – Sogyal Rinpoche • There’s no conscious thing on the face of the world that doesn’t know dread more intimately than its own heartbeat. – Clive Barker • There’s a heartbeat in any country that carries on regardless – at least in Europe. That’s what worries me about America, because I’m not sure what that heartbeat is – unless it’s the heartbeat of someone who’s just arrived, who just ran over the border two weeks ago. – Helen Mirren • There’s a moment on the arch of a jump, when you are neither rising nor falling. All you can see is the sky. All you can feel is the air and all you can hear is your heartbeat. That is all you are. Muscle and motion. It’s called the deadpoint. I live for that. – Rhianna Pratchett • Things could change so entirely, in a heartbeat; the world could be made entirely anew, because someone was kind. – Jo Baker • This body is fragile. It is just flesh. Listen to the heartbeat. Life depends on the pumping of a muscle. – Stephen Batchelor • This country will kill you in a heartbeat and still people love it. • This is my heartbeat like yours, it is a hatchet It can build a house or tear one down. – Andrea Gibson • Time becomes a stutter-the space between drumbeats, splintered into fragments, and also endlessly long, as long as soaring guitar notes that melt into one another, as full as the dark mass of bodies around me. I feel like the air downstairs has gone to liquid, to sweat and smell and sound, and I have broken apart in it. I am wave: I am pulled into the everything. I am energy and noise and a heartbeat going boom, boom, boom, echoing the drums. – Lauren Oliver • To be in a body is to hear the heartbeat of death at every moment. – Andrew Harvey • To listen to the silence is to hear the heartbeat of the Universe. – Laurence Overmire • Together, we can bring our planet’s heartbeat back. – Ian Somerhalder • True observers of nature, although they may think differently, will still agree that everything that is, everything that is observable as a phenomenon, can only exhibit itself in one of two ways. It is either a primal polarity that is able to unify, or it is a primal unity that is able to divide. The operation of nature consists of splitting the united or uniting the divided; this is the eternal movement of systole and diastole of the heartbeat, the inhalation and exhalation of the world in which we live, act, and exist. – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe • Vishous’s chest expanded. . . and his diamond stare slowly swung to Butch. There was a heartbeat of intensity. Then V reached out and repositioned the cross so it once again hung over Butch’s heart. “You did well, cop. Congratulations, true? – J.R. Ward • Vulnerability is the absolute heartbeat of innovation and creativity. There can be zero innovation without vulnerability. – Brené Brown • Waves are the voices of tides. Tides are life,” murmured Niko. “They bring new food for shore creatures, and take ships out to sea. They are the ocean’s pulse, and our own heartbeat. – Tamora Pierce • We all have music in us – your heartbeat is your drum, your voice is your sound – and music is supposed to put you in tune with nature. – Randy Weston • We are born to love as we are born to die, and between the heartbeats of these two great mysteries lies all the tangled undergrowth of our tiny lives. There is nowhere to go but through. And so we walk on, lost, and lost again, in the mapless wilderness of love. – Tim Farrington • We are tiny flames, Helikaon, and we flicker alone in the great dark for no more than a heartbeat. When we strive for wealth, glory and fame, it is meaningless. The nations we fight for will one day cease to be. Even the mountains we gaze upon will crumble to dust. To truly live we must yearn for that which does not die. – David Gemmell • We conclude that the concentration of wealth is natural and inevitable, and is periodically alleviated by violent or peaceable partial redistribution. In this view all economic history is the slow heartbeat of the social organism, a vast systole and diastole of concentrating wealth and compulsive redistribution. – Will Durant • We each have a finite number of heartbeats, a finite amount of time. But we have enough heartbeats and enough time to do what is important. – Susan L. Taylor • We have our own little heartbeat, too. We already have what I would call polyrhythms going on. – John Densmore • We left no doubt that we are one heartbeat And something like that is pretty hard to stop Once it gets going – Oscar Lua • We like to think of life as a constant … Yet it can be ended in a heartbeat. – David Gemmell • We tell stories. We talk about statistics. And in 1978, we added an element of the show that gave it its heartbeat: the long distance dedication. – Casey Kasem • What interests Sam Mendes are characters and relationships, and he was a genius at giving you the freedom to create the type of character you want, and also to explore and have fun with your fellow actors. For him, characters and relationships are really the heartbeat of the film, and then the action is the backdrop. By developing the characters, he makes you care that much more about the action and going on a journey with the characters. – Naomie Harris • What was time itself but the bloom, the sheath enfolding experience? Within time, and with time alone, there was life – the gleam, the quiver, the heartbeat, the immeasurable joy and anguish of being. – Ellen Glasgow • When I was nine, I was diagnosed with an irregular heartbeat and was prescribed beta blockers, which had the side effect of turning my skin green. Looking like Shrek’s little sister at school wasn’t the easiest thing. – Jessie J • When we have heartbeat and brain waves, we refuse to accept it as the presence of life – this lack of logic of which we approach this issue because we like and we favor convenience over ethics. We favor convenience over the hard parts of life that actually make us grow. – Tom Coburn • When you do take the home pregnancy test, it doesn’t quite seem real. But when you see the baby and the heartbeat on the ultrasound, it’s so incredible. – Danica McKellar • Yes, God wants you to do signs and wonders. But the love of God manifested through you is what people really need. So you first must see His face. You must become so close to His very heartbeat that you can feel what others feel. – Heidi Baker • You are in a place that has not been seen for tens of thousands of years, because it was so sealed off. There is such silence that when you hold your breath you can hear your own heartbeat. Everything is so fresh that you have the sensation that the painters have merely retreated deeper into the dark and that they are looking at you. – Werner Herzog • You can hear the Celtic heartbeat all over Europe and America, from Bing Crosby to Jack White, from the Smiths to My Bloody Valentine, from House of Pain to Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch. – Rob Sheffield • You can hold a secret, hold it so far in that it drives nearly every thought and every move you make- your very heartbeat, almost. – Deb Caletti • You had me tied in knots. You saved Belen’s life, and I wanted to kill and thank you all at the same time. And during those nights when we didn’t know if you’d live or die, I went from being angry, to worried to frustrated to scared all within a single heartbeat. If you had die, I would have killed you.- Maria V. Snyder • You kind of can’t help who you’ll fall in love with. I’d date someone who isn’t in the business in a heartbeat. – Selena Gomez • You know love is everything you say A whisper, a word Promises you give You feel it in the heartbeat of the day You know this is the way love is – Enya • You must learn how to hold a team together. You must lift some men up, calm others down, until finally they’ve got one heartbeat. Then you’ve got yourself a team. – Bear Bryant • You must never check for a person’s pulse using your thumb, or you’ll feel your own heartbeat. Actually, I plan on doing that if I’m the one who’s here when Ruth dies. I plan on giving her my heartbeat before I let her go. – Elizabeth Berg • You think I’d cheat on you?” I demanded with all the innocent outrage I could muster. “With another guy, no. With a cheeseburger . . . in a heartbeat. – Lisa Kleypas • You turn on the television, it’s like, “Woah is me! God almighty, we’re awful.” We are so down and out we are – name me a country in the world, name me one leader anywhere in the world who wouldn’t trade places in a heartbeat. We by far, we’re going to own the 21st century. – Joe Biden • Your mother’s heartbeat is the first sound you ever hear and your own heartbeat is the last. – Dave Brubeck

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equitiesstocks · 5 years

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Heartbeat Quotes

Official Website: Heartbeat Quotes

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• A Dirty Shame was a crazy movie. I don’t understand that movie at all. I don’t get it, but I’d work with John Waters again in a heartbeat. He’s just a delight. – Selma Blair • A human life is just a heartbeat in heaven. – Robin Williams • A hundred hundred heartbeats…” whispered Sabriel, tears falling down her face. – Garth Nix • A scary dream makes your heart beat faster. Why doesn’t the part of your brain that controls your heartbeat realize that another part of your brain is making the whole thing up? Don’t these people communicate? – George Carlin • A sermon is no sermon in which I cannot hear the heartbeat. – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow • A span of a few heartbeats can make for a greater memory than the sum of a mundane year.-Catti-brie – R. A. Salvatore • A successful song comes to sing itself inside the listener. It is cellular and seismic, a wave coalescing in the mind and in the flesh. There is a message outside and a message inside, and those messages are the same, like the pat and thud of two heartbeats, one within you, one surrounding. The message of the lullaby is that it’s okay to dim the eyes for a time, to lose sight of yourself as you sleep and as you grow: if you drift, it says, you’ll drift ashore: if you fall, you will fall into place. – Kevin Brockmeier • A weak but steady throb lay beneath Kev’s searching fingertips. Win’s heartbeat…the pulse that sustained his universe. – Lisa Kleypas • Abraham Lincoln is resolute, honest, has the best interest of the nation at heart, and he’s as ugly as homemade Sunday sin, so he is modest, too. I’d vote for that in an undead heartbeat. – Bill Oberst Jr. • Alexia gave in to his demanding touch, but only, of course, because he sounded so pathetic. It had nothing, whatsoever to do with her own quickening heartbeat. – Gail Carriger • All these weirdos, and me getting a little better every day right in the midst of them. I had never known, never even imagined for a heartbeat, that there might be a place for people like us. – Denis Johnson • And at any moment it all ends with a heartbeat…just one heartbeat, and there’s no more time. One heartbeat and the chance to be saved is gone. One heartbeat and there’s no more choosing—it’s all sealed for eternal life or eternal death. – Jonathan Cahn • And since time sets its own tempo, like a heartbeat or an ebb tide, timepieces don’t really keep time. They just keep up with it, if they’re able. – Dava Sobel • Any chance he’s turned a new leaf and taken up sailing for real?” “About as likely as me doing it.” Hadrian eyed Royce for a heartbeat. “I put him at the top of the list. – Michael J. Sullivan • Anything I’ve asked of MGM Grand, they’ve done for me in a heartbeat. They’re all about making entertainers and athletes happy. – Floyd Mayweather, Jr. • Around us, life bursts with miracles–a glass of water, a ray of sunshine, a leaf, a caterpillar, a flower, laughter, raindrops. If you live in awareness, it is easy to see miracles everywhere. Each human being is a multiplicity of miracles. Eyes that see thousands of colors, shapes, and forms; ears that hear a bee flying or a thunderclap; a brain that ponders a speck of dust as easily as the entire cosmos; a heart that beats in rhythm with the heartbeat of all beings. When we are tired and feel discouraged by life’s daily struggles, we may not notice these miracles, but they are always there. – Nhat Hanh • As he gave a sleepy, growling groan, that hand disappeared under the sheet. Arizona’s lips parted, and her heartbeat tripped up. She cleared her throat. “Spencer?” Freezing, without moving any other body part, he opened his eyes and met her gaze. She frowned at him. He didn’t look super-startled, and he said nothing. He just started at her. With his hand still under there. “Yeah…” Semi-satisfied with his frozen reaction, she nodded at his lap. “You weren’t going for a little tug, were you? Because as your spectator, I’d just as soon not see it.” -Arizona and Spencer – Lori Foster • Assured of your salvation by the unique grace of our Lord Jesus Christ” is the heartbeat of the gospel, joyful liberation from fear of the Final Outcome, a summons to self-acceptance, and freedom for a life of compassion toward others. – Brennan Manning • Athletic ability can be taken away like that. It can all end in a heartbeat. – Tim Tebow

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stein89-blog1 · 6 years

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Baupist 2018Q4 letter

"Civilization is hideously fragile . . . there’s not much between us and the horrors underneath, just about a coat of varnish.” – Charles Percy Snow, British Novelist and Chemist “All models are wrong, but some are useful.” – George E.P. Box, British Statistician “To be absolutely certain about something, one must know everything or nothing about it.” –Henry Kissinger, Former U.S. Secretary of State “But who shall dare to measure loss and gain in this wise? Defeat may be victory in disguise; The lowest ebb is the turn of the tide.” – “Loss and Gain,” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, American Poet Dear Limited Partner, The Baupost partnerships returned between roughly breakeven and a decline of less than one percent for the year ended December 31. A detailed report on our investment returns will be available on our website in early February together with a number of charts and tables displaying the largest individual position gains and losses, as well as year-end allocations to various asset classes and our 10 largest positions at December 31. As we do every January, we offer this report to share our perspectives on the year just ended, including our observations on markets and on a range of economic, political, and societal developments that may impact investors and their capital. We also offer some thoughts about investor behavior and provide an update on the Baupost team. This year’s letter has been particularly challenging to write, because so much kept changing near the end of the year as we were putting our thoughts together. In 2016, we told you that year had been a tale of two markets, declines followed suddenly by gains. This year has likewise been such a tale, though in this case it was gains followed by an abrupt reversal. 2018 is a stark reminder that on Wall Street anything can happen, as investment profits were negated in a punishing final month. While it is painful to have a reasonably successful year reversed in its last weeks, there are three bright spots that auger well for 2019 and beyond. First, we successfully protected capital in a very treacherous environment. Our event-driven holdings performed well, while our uncatalyzed public equities fluctuated more in line with the market. Our private investments posted a positive return, as did our hedging portfolio. Second, our team generally performed excellent fundamental analysis all year. During the worst moments of the fourth-quarter market carnage, we were entering buy orders and our bids were getting hit. We were adding to positions which had become cheaper, and moving into attractively priced new investments. We are particularly energized to be making new investments when other investors have pulled back, competition is subdued, and prices are in near free-fall. As this was unfolding, we also reduced several positions that seemed less attractive than other opportunities that were emerging, and we redeployed those funds. And we were preparing the groundwork to be ready for situations that seemed like they could become dislocated in the future. Third, we believe the year-end valuation of our portfolio is extremely attractive. At the end of December, many of our public equity holdings were trading at high single-digit or very low double-digit forward earnings multiples, an attractive level for companies generally expected to significantly increase their earnings and cash flows well into the future. Other holdings offer attractive returns to catalyzing events if they transpire as expected; these include announced mergers and restructurings that are progressing well and could result in relatively near-term monetizations. A number of our larger private (mostly real estate) holdings are also nearing fruition, where they may be partially or fully monetized through sales or refinancings. Needless to say, we also made mistakes in 2018. For example, our original thesis on Colony Capital, a three-way merger of real estate and investment firms, was just plain wrong, though that stock, which we continue to hold, at year-end traded at more than a 9% dividend yield and at a considerable discount to NAV. We purchased a few stocks, including Pacific Gas and Electric and Univar, right before those shares slumped badly, in the first case on tragic developments that led to financial distress and in the second on cyclical fears that we believe ignore business fundamentals. We remain holders of both. Last year once again demonstrated that markets can be confoundingly fickle. Well- known conditions and widely anticipated events, such as Federal Reserve rate hikes, ongoing trade disputes, and the unsettling behavior of an erratic president, were shrugged off by the financial markets one day and driving markets down the next. Is there a cumulative impact, where no one thing matters until the collective weight of them starts to? Is the market simply myopic, whereby it ignores signs of trouble until they become more immediate and it can ignore them no longer? It’s always hard to know why the market does what it does. That’s part of the ever-interesting challenge we face in traversing the twists and turns of fluctuating prices and evolving fundamentals. On any given day, the sheer number of players, behaviors, economic factors, and business developments defy anyone’s ability to fully grasp what is going on and why. That’s why we develop and follow a game plan that does not purport to tell us what to do moment by moment, but rather is intended to help us successfully navigate the most challenging tumult. This is the essence of value investing. At periods of maximum turbulence, stock and bond markets come to resemble commodities markets. Capital whips into stocks and out of bonds, or vice versa, as pension funds, mutual funds, hedge funds, algorithmic traders, and asset allocators rebalance their holdings. Our perpetual challenge in such markets is to rely on our acumen and analytical capabilities, while keeping our emotions under control and maintaining a long-term perspective. 2018 in Review The major U.S. stock market indices steadily gained ground for the first three quarters of 2018, before plunging in a highly volatile fourth quarter. Early in the year, those who had bet that the market would remain on a steady uptrend were briefly caught flat-footed when volatility surged higher. The most jarring example was the near complete wipeout and sudden liquidation in February of the exchange-traded note XIV, a retail product used by many traders to short volatility. (The name XIV is the reverse of VIX, the common measure of market volatility.) Since its inception in late 2010, this instrument had appreciated 14-fold into early 2018, and then it was shockingly wound down within a month after it had lost 95% of its value. By mid-April, however, volatility abated and the stock market resumed its seemingly habitual march higher. Generally rising share prices over the ensuing months more or less moved in tandem with higher corporate earnings, the result of massive fiscal stimulus, large corporate tax cuts, and historically low – albeit generally rising – interest rates. Cash continued to move into indexing strategies and out of the hands of active managers, with U.S. index fund holdings, after doubling from 2002 to 2009, nearly doubling again by 2018 (with important ramifications for market liquidity and corporate governance). Market pundits calculated that valuation multiples, with earnings assessed on a cyclically-adjusted basis, had reached the second-highest level ever (though reported earnings were more in line with historical averages). The economic expansion, clocking in at nine-and-a-half years, neared the longest on record. As usual in a bull market, the warm feelings generated by rising prices had the effect of overcoming any sense of looming danger in the hearts and minds of most investors. And as in all bull markets, skeptics lost both credibility and assets to manage. Many investors had evidently adopted the usual dubious emergency plan: Get out when the market starts to fall. In August, the bull market became the longest on record – at nearly 3,500 days and counting. It felt like forever. But in October, it was as though a trapdoor had opened under global equity markets. Widespread optimism instantly yielded to abject pessimism. Concerns arose that the Fed was increasing interest rates faster than conditions warranted, leading to growing fears of a U.S. economic slowdown or even downturn. Worries mounted as trade tensions with China escalated. As a result, stocks plunged indiscriminately – on some days, resembling a post-Thanksgiving sale with storewide markdowns. We did what we usually do amidst market turmoil, which is to re-check our analysis, prioritize our opportunities, and buy. In the fourth quarter, the market increasingly looked like what our retired Partner Brian Spector once referred to as a “tide market.” When the tide goes out, it takes everything with it, and an investor must adjust in real time to the rapidly changing prices while considering the possibility of a deterioration in fundamentals. Sometimes, prices decline unrelated to those fundamentals. But at other times, they are anticipatory of fundamental erosion and can even be reflexively linked: lower share prices can adversely impact the economy in a sort of “reverse wealth effect;” investors feel poorer when the value of their portfolio falls, so they consume less. In addition, corporate management may view the share price decline as a potential increase in their cost of equity capital, causing them to delay capital expenditures or expansion plans, again reflexively weakening the broader economy. Yet as the market sold off this fall, there were mixed indicators as to whether the U.S. economy was actually cooling. “Hard data,” such as holiday retail sales (November 1 – December 24), posted a very healthy 5% increase over the year before, even as “soft” survey and sentiment data such as consumer confidence fell from the October highs. Waves of selling swamped equity markets in the fourth quarter, as volatility surged. While in 2017 the U.S. equity market did not experience a single daily fluctuation up or down of as much as 3%, in 2018 there were 15 such days, 10 in the fourth quarter alone. The Wall Street Journal reported that by mid-November a record share of all investible assets – 90% – had posted losses on a year-to-date basis, as stock, bonds, and commodities all retreated. As news emerged of Iran sanction waivers, U.S. oil prices abruptly plunged 27% in six weeks (from $76 per barrel to less than $56 per barrel), with that commodity at one point declining a record 12 consecutive sessions in a row. The equity market plunge accelerated in December, resulting in the worst final month for the major indices since 1931. (At one point the S&P 500 had fallen 15% for the month alone.) Overall, the S&P 500 declined 4% on the year (inclusive of reinvested dividends). The NASDAQ officially entered bear market territory, down over 20% from the highs, while the S&P 500 and Dow came ever so close to bear market status before rallying. The small cap Russell 2000 index ended the year down 11%, after falling more than 20% from its August 31 record high. As equities plunged, U.S. government bonds rallied significantly, with the yield on the U.S. 10-year note declining from 3.24% on November 8 to 2.68% on December 31. Equity market weakness extended well beyond the U.S. in 2018. The major European indices posted declines ranging from 8% to 18%. Equities in Korea, Mexico, China, and Turkey all posted 2018 losses of 15% or more in local currency terms. Cryptocurrencies quietly but definitively completed their year-long collapse, with Bitcoin ending 2018 down more than 70%. Low-yielding cash was one of the few asset classes that gained ground in 2018. The challenging conditions and sudden carnage took a toll on Wall Street. No one was immune: mutual funds, hedge funds, and quant funds all suffered, and several prominent investment firms made the decision to shut their doors in the fourth quarter after decades in business. For the first time in years, technology behemoths – the so-called FAANG stocks – came under a cloud and their share prices experienced significant declines. Apple’s smartphone sales fell short of the level expected by investors, and its shares fell 38% from their highs. Large segments of the mobile phone supply chain dropped sharply on fears of slumping demand and trade tensions. Meanwhile, Facebook stock slumped as the company disclosed that it would have to spend substantial amounts to address mounting privacy concerns, costing the company significant credibility with investors as well as legislators. Amazon and Netflix shares ended the year down 26% and 36%, respectively, from their highs set earlier in 2018. The most over-extended asset class in 2018 may well have been private equity. With public equity markets expensive and yield still scarce, many investors have lately concluded that private equity is the one place where double-digit returns may be achievable. Private equity fundraising has set records, with estimates of more than a trillion dollars in capital available to be put to work. The multiples of leverage extended in private equity transactions is approaching previous peaks, as are valuations of such transactions, while the laxity of financing terms is unprecedented. Private equity investors have had the wind at their backs for a decade, the result of a steadily growing economy and sustained low interest rates, conditions that will almost certainly not prevail forever. In 2018, the Federal Reserve raised interest rates four times as it sought to get to the “neutral rate,” but late in the year it signaled it would slow the pace of rate hikes in 2019. The Fed continued the process of reducing its bloated $4.5 trillion balance sheet. In Europe, interest rates remain at historically low levels, with over $4.7 trillion of sovereigns still offering negative rates as of year-end, but the European Central Bank announced the completion of its almost four- year long program of net asset purchases in December. Even though everyone knew it was coming, the end of low rate policies and planned reduction of central bank balance sheets is far from a riskless endeavor, since these policies are unprecedented in scale, and such an unwind has never before been attempted. There should be concern about symmetry: If lowering interest rates coupled with central bank asset purchases stimulated economic expansion and a bull market in stocks and bonds, will raising rates drive a reversal? If the market’s reaction to the Fed’s December rate hike is any indication, the path to normalization of interest rates and of central bank balance sheets is going to be rocky indeed. There are also concerns that the lengthy 36-year bond bull market is nearing its end. At one point last year, rates on U.S. Treasury 10-year bonds had more than doubled from their 2016 lows. Given the length of the bond buying spree, many of today’s market participants have never experienced a bear market in bonds. The riskiness of their exposures may surprise them. And because marketplace conditions have evolved greatly over the last three decades, when we do eventually enter a fixed income bear market, neither historical correlations nor prior experience are likely to provide much guidance for how to successfully navigate this treacherous terrain. Driven by such a protracted period of near-zero interest rates, investors have stampeded into anything – bonds, loans, REITs – offering a current return, leading to a degradation in the quality of outstanding credit. The proportion of U.S. non-financial corporate investment grade bonds rated BBB – the lowest investment grade rating – has increased to 58% today compared to 48% in 2011, even as the total investment grade market has increased from roughly $2.2 trillion in 2007 to $3.8 trillion today. The proportion of total non-investment grade issuance rated B- or below is nearly 25% of the overall high yield market. And high yield plus BBB-rated bonds comprise 68% of the total U.S. corporate bond universe. The leveraged loan market, a critical funding source for lower quality issuers, has been on fire, with a record $788 billion of leveraged loans issued globally in 2017, and just below that pace of issuance in 2018. Almost 80% of the 2018 vintage was issued as “covenant-lite” – compared to about 30% in 2007. Record annual volumes of low grade bond issuance – including a 130% increase in the U.S. CLO market since 2008 – has surely created a vast future supply of distressed debt, but any calamity has seemed off in the distance. By year-end, however, it appeared to draw closer. Bank trading desks have pulled back from risk-taking, resulting in lower liquidity for bondholders and the possibility of greater price volatility. Late in the year, corporate credit spreads started to widen. The credit markets were hard hit in November, with yields on U.S. corporate debt reaching an 8 1⁄2-year high of 4.38%. Yields on the debt of fallen icon GE at one point hit 6.4%, from under 3% earlier in the year. By the end of the year, cracks had also started to appear in the leveraged loan market, and investors pulled a record $3.3 billion out of U.S. loan funds in one week in mid-December. Junk bond fund outflows also set a record in 2018. Higher interest rates will significantly burden today’s highly leveraged issuers, and the challenges will be made more severe when the next economic downturn hits. Because it is always easier for politicians to borrow rather than pursue a responsible fiscal course, there is a propensity for sovereign debts to grow over time, not only in absolute terms, but also as a percentage of GDP. Since the 2008 financial crisis, aggregate global sovereign debt has nearly doubled, and most major sovereign debtors have experienced a significant increase in their debt-to-GDP ratios. In the U.S., this ratio actually had declined for many years after wartime spending started to wind down in 1945, but then it began ramping up significantly between 1980 and today. The ratio of U.S. government debt to GDP, for example, has grown from over 74% of GDP in 2008 to 105% in 2017. For the U.K., the ratio has surged from 50% to 88%. For France, 69% to 98%. For Italy, from 102% to 132%. For Spain, from 39% to 98%. Canada has gone from 68% to 90%. China from 27% to 47%. The seeds of the next major financial crisis (or the one after that) may well be found in today’s sovereign debt levels. In 2018, the U.S. budget deficit soared to nearly $900 billion and could top one trillion dollars in 2019, a sorry consequence of the 2017 tax cuts that were funded with borrowed money. Growing deficits have ballooned the national debt, which by year-end hit a record $21.9 trillion (with potentially multiples of that in off-the-books entitlement promises), this while debt costs are suppressed by low interest rate policies. Approving massive tax cuts and generating the resultant huge deficits so late in the economic cycle while unemployment is so low seems particularly irresponsible, as there is little room for new fiscal stimulus if and when the economy softens. While the U.S. dollar maintains its de facto reserve currency status, this is a privilege (“America’s exorbitant privilege,” it was once called) never to be taken for granted. The nation’s fiscal irresponsibility jeopardizes this status, which has allowed Americans to live beyond our means for a long time without paying any price. There is no way to know how much debt is too much, but America will inevitably reach an inflection point whereupon a suddenly more skeptical debt market will refuse to continue to lend to us at rates we can afford. By the time such a crisis hits, it will likely be too late to get our house in order. Moreover, we have been increasingly worried that the U.S. financial markets are very highly leveraged not only with copious direct borrowings but also in less obvious ways – psychologically, algorithmically, and structurally – with investors vulnerable to exactly the same sort of urgent pressures that actual portfolio leverage can give rise to. As with a margin call, those pressures can include an intensely short-term orientation, extreme loss resistance, and an inability to stand apart from a panicky crowd. One factor propelling psychological leverage higher in recent years has been the relentless diminution of market volatility. Economist Hyman Minsky famously put forward the idea that stability itself could be destabilizing. Individuals, professional investors, and financiers are prone to project their own recent experiences into the future. So when adversity is absent, investors become complacent. They assume good times will continue and they grow careless about risk, perceiving it through rose colored lenses. When incurring greater risk starts to seem not only riskless but beneficial, they stretch even further. (We saw glimpses in February and December of how quickly and violently this can reverse.) As for algorithmic leverage, a growing amount of capital is today managed using model- based technologies to pick investments, many of which attempt to improve over time using artificial intelligence capabilities. (The Wall Street Journal recently estimated that 85% of all stock trading is now controlled by machines, models, or passive investing formulas.) The amount of capital invested in this way has grown massively since the last bear market, and no one can know how the various trading algorithms might respond to (or potentially even trigger) the next major selloff, especially after virtually an entire decade with low volatility. We simply cannot know how those algorithms might respond to new and unexpected conditions. Meanwhile, many stocks have become less liquid and ownership has become more concentrated; we have previously noted that index funds hold a growing fraction of their shares. Because of limited liquidity and the potential absence of index buyers or even advent of index sellers, a bear market could have a surprisingly severe impact on small cap companies, something we started to see more frequently in the fourth quarter. As for shares not incorporated in major indices or held by ETFs, some days they seem lucky to catch any bid at all. Today’s markets feel strange and enigmatic. We will not complain about this; indeed, we see it as an opportunity. While the indices remain historically expensive, many stocks – of growing, not cyclical or declining firms – recently hit 52-week lows and trade at single-digit P/Es. These are levels that traditionally occur closer to market bottoms than tops. The recent selloff likely presented a buying opportunity – you can go years without seeing such valuations – but not across the board and not one for the faint of heart. Rising Global Uncertainty As 2018 progressed, storm clouds started to gather over the global economy. While the year began with IMF proclamations of “synchronized global growth,” by the end of the year that institution was downgrading its 2018 and 2019 GDP forecasts and warning of challenges ahead. In retrospect, 2018 may be more appropriately categorized as a year of synchronized global disappointment. While some of the weaker emerging markets were the first to stumble (e.g., Argentina and Turkey), others soon followed. Japan’s economy, after eight consecutive quarters of growth (their lengthiest expansion in 28 years), contracted in the first quarter and again in the third. Europe experienced its slowest growth in over four years, with even Germany cooling. China continues to be a cause of concern, with investors focusing on the numerous deteriorating data points while trying to decipher the meaning of Communist Party pronouncements. Time will tell if the U.S. economy, which has managed to stay strong thus far despite the turmoil abroad, can remain decoupled. One thing does seem certain – the world is entering 2019 with more economic question marks than were present a year earlier. For the first three quarters of 2018, the markets more or less shrugged off a steady barrage of troubling economic and political developments, including escalating White House- driven trade feuds with, first Mexico and Canada, and then China, leading to the mutual imposition of higher tariffs. Turkey was forced to substantially devalue their currency as a result of twin deficits (trade and government) that led to an overheated economy. Argentina also devalued, the result of a widespread drought that impacted agricultural production, which triggered stagflation and a decline in dollar reserves. The U.K. continued to stumble toward some form of Brexit. Prime Minister Theresa May’s attempt to negotiate Britain’s withdrawal from the Eurozone has proved to be extremely challenging, and perhaps even fatal for her politically, while many investors are holding back from commitments to the U.K. until the details are sorted out. In Italy, a coalition government of the Northern League and Five Star took power and promised tax cuts and an exit from the Eurozone, as well as a hardline anti-immigrant policy. While they have since moderated their language, the risk is heightened that Italy could soon face even deeper political and fiscal challenges. As the post-World War II international order continued to erode, the markets ignored the longer-term implications of a more isolated America, a world increasingly adrift, and global leadership up for grabs. The post-war order relied on philosophical alignment among democratic societies, investment in international institutions, and effective diplomacy to manage competing interests across nations. American hegemony played a key role in supporting this order and the unprecedented peace and prosperity that had generally prevailed since 1945. Recently, foreign affairs pundit Walter Russell Mead wryly observed that the old system was neither liberal nor international nor an order, yet he added that its absence will surely be felt if it disintegrates. With the U.S. seemingly preoccupied by a desire to withdraw from its long-prized role as a champion of liberty and democracy across the globe, 2018 proved to be a banner year for strongmen. Vladimir Putin maintained his firm grip on power in Russia while suffering no real consequences for interfering in elections in the U.S. and elsewhere, nor for his alleged involvement in the attempted murder of expatriate Russians on British soil, or for his ongoing military encroachments in Crimea and Ukraine. Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, Viktor Orbán, and Rodrigo Duterte maintained their respective tight holds over Turkey, Hungary, and the Philippines, while constricting the freedoms allowed to their citizens. The far-right candidate, Jair Bolsonaro, won Brazil’s presidential election in October. Venezuela closed in on failed- state status. Tensions with North Korea moderated over the course of 2018 as President Trump expressed his affection for North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, although actual progress toward de-nuclearization of the Korean peninsula seems stalled, and potentially illusory. In March, China’s Central Committee eliminated term limits on China’s 65 year-old leader Xi Jinping, who could now head the country with the world’s largest population and second largest economy through the end of his life. In October, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman allegedly ordered the killing and dismemberment of American resident and Washington Post Columnist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul, leading to the imposition of sanctions on those directly involved but not on the Crown Prince. Meanwhile, in mid-December, after a phone call with Turkey’s Erdoğan, President Trump tweeted the news that U.S. troops would be leaving Syria, a development that appeared to shock the Pentagon as well as Congressional leaders on both sides of the aisle. Among world leaders, only Erdoğan and Putin (and presumably Bashar al-Assad) applauded. Days later, highly respected Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, one of the last remaining “adults in the room” in the President’s cabinet, announced his retirement in a letter that cited sharp differences of policy and principle with the President. Social frictions remain a challenge for democracies around the world, and we wonder when investors might take more notice of this. The recent “yellow vest” marches in France, which subsequently spread to Belgium, Holland, and Canada, began as a petition against fuel tax hikes, and grew through social media into a mass protest movement led by suburban commuters, small business owners, and truck drivers. The demonstrations, which appear to have broken out spontaneously throughout the country, became widespread and even violent. While the French government is clearly concerned – in December, it reversed the planned tax increases while announcing a higher minimum wage – the financial markets have taken the unrest largely in stride, as the French 10-year note at year-end yielded a meager 70 basis points. In the U.S., meanwhile, investors truly have no idea how to react to the steady dose of presidential tweets seasoned with presidential pique. America’s body politic remained inflamed in 2018. The President regularly stirred up his base with campaign-style rallies in which he endlessly warned, without evidence, of rampant voter fraud while stoking fears over the looming arrival of a caravan of Central American refugees. Claiming, also without evidence, that criminals and possible terrorists made up a significant component of this caravan, Trump sent troops to reinforce the border. Yet in the days and weeks following the midterm elections, the caravan disappeared entirely from his rhetoric, its purpose apparently served. Immigration remains a hot button issue, and whether or not to “build the wall” was the proximate issue in the prolonged partial government shutdown that started in late December. The November midterm elections became, in many ways, a referendum on the President. The result, with record turnout, was that blue states got bluer and red states even redder, as Republicans tightened their grip on the Senate while Democrats rolled to a net gain of 40 House seats and control of that body, winning by the largest midterm popular vote margin in history. Democrats did particularly well among women, minority groups, and suburbanites, groups which have largely found Trump’s policies and tone distasteful. In December, a bipartisan group of 44 former Senators signed an editorial begging today’s Senate to put country ahead of party. Yet the vast majority of Senate Republicans continued to stand resolutely by the President, despite mounting indications that special counsel Robert Mueller and other investigators are delivering not only a growing number of indictments and guilty pleas but are also uncovering damaging information regarding Donald Trump’s Presidential campaign and business interests. The chaos and consequent uncertainty emanating from Washington D.C. will likely only intensify as we approach the 2020 election. The bottom line is that leadership matters. The growing turmoil in Washington and other world capitals is taking a toll on the country. As The New York Times columnist Bret Stephens recently observed, “the problem with Trump isn’t that he’s an empty vessel. It’s that he’s a malignant one.” Amid all this turmoil, should investors simply hunker down and keep their focus on markets? That might be a challenge. By way of illustration, on December 18, on the FedEx earnings call, CEO Frederick Smith noted that “most of the issues that we're dealing with today are induced by bad political choices, I mean, making a bad decision about a new tax, creating a tremendously difficult situation with Brexit, the immigration crisis in Germany, the mercantilism and state-owned enterprise initiatives in China, the tariffs that the United States put in unilaterally. So you just go down the list, and they're all things that have created macroeconomic slowdowns.” America Entering 2019: Why We Are So Divided, and Why It Should Matter to Investors These days, Americans do not seem to agree on much of anything. Some of it is today’s politics: “Deep state” or dedicated civil servants? “Witch hunt” or legitimate investigation into crimes? “Fake news” or free press? “Alternative facts” or facts? Accomplished adversary or “lock her up?” And some of it goes beyond politics into the realms of scientific inquiry and American values. Climate change or “climate hoax?” Refugees seeking sanctuary or “caravan of foreign invaders?” Does this matter? We think it does. It’s hard for our leaders to guide us when we don’t agree on our values or even on how we decide what is true. Worse, our enemies, including but not limited to Russia’s autocratic government, are using social media and internet postings to confuse us and divide us further. They know which hot buttons to push. Moreover, our willful disbelief of facts, truth, and science increases the chance that we will fail to recognize or take seriously growing threats. In 1993, Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who famously said that “everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not to his own facts,” observed that America was “defining deviancy down.” His point was that behavior that had once been seen as deviant was now considered acceptable. To paraphrase Moynihan, today we may instead be defining reality down. This post-truth moment is quite dangerous. Imagine an incident that threatens national security. Will Americans see eye-to-eye on the seriousness of the threat? If our leaders are truth-challenged, will Americans believe the official explanation of the threat and the wisdom of the proposed response? Should they? Jonathan Rauch, an American journalist and author, has written about a Constitution of Knowledge, an objective reality of facts and truth that he believes is now under attack from President Donald Trump. The Washington Post reports a troubling escalation in the rate of Presidential lies, from an average of around six per day in 2017 to 15 per day in 2018. Former C.I.A. Director Michael Hayden recently observed that “We have in the past argued over the values to be applied to objective reality ... but never the existence or relevance of objective reality itself.” Nebraska Senator Ben Sasse notes, “we have a risk of getting to a place where we don’t have shared public facts. A republic will not work if we don’t have shared facts.” Alarmingly, technology does not necessarily contribute to the expansion of shared facts; it can actually assist in undermining them. For example, the technology now exists to create fake audio of our public figures, whereby you hear them saying in their own voices things that they never actually said. Imagine the havoc this could create in the wrong hands with a credulous public. Worse still, the technology to alter video is now upon us. You may soon watch a video of something that didn’t actually happen – such as a foreign threat or even an attack on our country – but your eyes and brain will tell you it is true. And, of course, these days you don’t need a sophisticated team of scientists to Photoshop a picture. The ramifications could be nothing short of a stolen election – or a war. We are divided in so many ways. The American dream is well-known: that hard work leads to success, that our children shall do better economically than we have, and our children’s children better still. This dream has been a reality for many (but by no means all), over the first two centuries of the republic. Unfortunately, it is a dream that a diminishing number of Americans believe will come true for their families, and for good reason. Americans have long seen our country as the land of opportunity. Wondrous things have been accomplished here: The U.S. is a democratic republic that has endured for more than two centuries, a country that reversed a legacy of slavery and healed after a Civil War, an upstart country that defeated global powers to secure democracy for Europe, an economic engine that has relentlessly driven growth, innovation, entrepreneurship, and advanced technology to improve the quality of life for its citizens and others around the world. Uniquely, people from everywhere in the world can relocate here and become Americans. And the energy and striving of immigrants has helped America grow and remain vibrant. I’m forever thankful that my father got on a boat and came here from Poland when he was 12. Like so many immigrants, he quickly adjusted to his new circumstances, making the most of them while never looking back. But lately, immigration has become one of the most divisive issues we face. Social and economic advancement in America today seems increasingly dependent on demography and geography. The economic advantages enjoyed by college graduates continues to grow. Unsurprisingly, income growth in most major metropolitan areas surpasses gains in rural areas of the country. Economic inequality continued to worsen in 2018, and for many, real wages have not increased in decades. It seems clear that economic anxiety contributed to the election of Donald Trump in 2016. The divide between Americans has been exacerbated by the echo chambers of modern- day media and the internet. Many have written of how, in only about four decades, an America of three broadcast networks has become an America of hundreds of cable channels. A few decades ago, we had less connectivity but more connection. David Brooks and others write regularly about the challenges of increased loneliness and isolation. A person today can have a thousand Facebook friends – and few, if any, actual friends. I grew up with three television channels, the Baltimore Sun newspaper (which I delivered six days a week), and the World Book Encyclopedia. The facts I digested were everyone’s facts. My news was everyone’s news. The editors of these media outlets were well-informed and pretty much down-the-middle curators who believed their job was to bring balanced perspective to what their readers or viewers should know. They knew that, even if perfect objectivity was unattainable, the constant pursuit of it, armed with humility and intellectual honesty, was the best antidote to ignorance and demagoguery. The Fairness Doctrine, until it was overturned in 1987, actually required television and radio broadcasters to present contrasting viewpoints on controversial issues of public importance. The network news anchors were among America’s most trusted figures – Walter Cronkite, Chet Huntley, and David Brinkley. But today, this commonality is lost. My news and your news may have nothing in common, and each of us must work hard if we are to experience a diversity of viewpoints and perspectives. As social psychologist Jonathan Haidt and his co-author, Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, observed in “The Coddling of the American Mind,” “both the physical and the electronic isolation from people we disagree with allow the forces of confirmation bias, groupthink, and tribalism to push us still further apart.” This is very unfortunate, because, as Haidt argued in his earlier book, “The Happiness Hypothesis,” “A good place to look for wisdom...is where you least expect to find it: in the minds of your opponents. You already know the ideas common on your own side. If you can take off the blinders...you might see some good ideas for the first time.” To perfect our own thoughts and ideas, we need to chew on and debate the ideas of others, even and especially of those with whom we disagree. Yet, it seems more and more people are choosing to only seek out information from those who share their views, and technology and social media have made it increasingly easy to do so. Virtually all of the human knowledge accumulated since the beginning of time is available instantly on our iPhones. As a society, we have never known more. But some of us choose to know less. We avoid facts and instead consume partisan media content that is largely focused on demonizing supposed adversaries. We have become increasingly tribal, choosing sides and selectively processing only the information that fits with our team’s narrative. Deliberate ignorance and denial of facts and truth are disturbing phenomena, not likely to lead to good decision-making or thoughtful voting choices. Even science is losing ground in this era. In his commencement address at Caltech in 2016, surgeon, writer, and public health scholar Atul Gawande observed that science was being left behind by increasingly popular anti-scientific beliefs. “From 1974 to 2010, despite increasing education levels, the public’s trust in the scientific community has been decreasing.” This is tragic, he argues, because “having a scientific understanding of the world is fundamentally about how you judge which information to trust.” By 2018, a growing number of Americans had become concerned about potential erosion in American democracy, a concern for which there is ample evidence. Whereas 71% of those born in the 1930s believed it was important to live in a democracy, only 29% of those born in the 1980s share the same belief. About 40% of eligible voters in the U.S. failed to cast a ballot in the 2016 elections, and tens of millions of Americans are not even registered. Because of increased gerrymandering and the influence of big money in politics, many Americans have come to feel that their votes do not matter. Moreover, as a result of the tendency of primary elections to pull parties to the political extremes, many feel that the candidates in the general elections do not reflect their own views. Yet because of the perceived threat of being “primaried,” incumbents are today less willing to reach across the aisle. It’s almost as though we are living in two countries – there are the battleground states, where the presidential candidates show up and the ads run non-stop. And there are the gerrymandered districts, where elections are effectively over before they begin. American democracy operates not just from a system of rules but also norms. Norms have provided historically valuable guardrails for proper behavior that protect the integrity of the system from possible misdeeds by the people in it. The critical importance of norms is easily dismissed, especially by those willing to pursue power and self-interest ahead of all other considerations. But norms reflect a core cultural aspiration of fairness, civility, and community that is more socially powerful, and broader in reach, than any statute or regulation. There can be a certain reckless power in violating norms, since the sanctions for doing so are neither immediate nor obvious. But the consequence is a dangerous erosion of our greatest bonds of community. Rachel Kleinfeld, senior fellow in the Democracy, Conflict, and Governance Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, sees the breakdown of democratic norms in post-election developments. She notes, “Democracy requires citizens’ votes to be counted fairly, and those votes must determine who wields power ... in Wisconsin, the Republican legislature has stripped the incoming Democratic governor of capabilities that voters assumed their leader would have when they voted.” For the great majority of American history, Supreme Court nominees needed 60 votes in the Senate for confirmation; otherwise, a filibuster could hold up a nomination indefinitely. But in 2017, the Republicans exercised the “nuclear option,” changing the required vote to a simple majority. This eliminated the need for the President to identify mutually agreeable centrist nominees and instead increased the politicization of the Court. We would argue vehemently that democracy, and the liberties and protections it provides, is not just of importance to individual citizens, but also to businesses and markets. In a democracy, businesses have the benefit of equal treatment under the law, including unbiased regulation. Yet these days, the President often singles out for criticism enterprises he finds personally objectionable or executives who disagree with him politically. These anti-democratic tendencies are extremely dangerous, particularly as the Congressional Republicans show no interest in reprimanding him, even though his behavior violates a core principle of the conservatism they claim to espouse. We would also argue that social cohesion is essential for those who have capital to invest. Businesses need a long-term horizon to plan, and social unrest makes planning more difficult. It can’t be business as usual amidst constant protests, riots, shutdowns, and escalating social tensions. It is not hard to imagine worsening social unrest among a generation that is falling behind economically and feels betrayed by a massive national debt that was incurred without any obvious benefit to them. If things get bad enough, we could see taxes once again raised to confiscatory levels. We should all be rooting for (and acting to support) social cohesion and a renewal of the American dream. David Moss, a Harvard Business School professor, teaches a course on democracy and has found that over much of American history, partisanship was cutthroat and political divides were wide and bitter. Yes, people said horrible things about each other. But when critically important issues were being decided, even while participants in the debate were intensely focused on winning, they were also focused on how their actions might affect democracy over the long run. More recently, it seems as though politics has been transformed into an intense focus on immediate victory, the system be damned. We have seen behavior in national and local politics where those in power changed the rules to the disadvantage of those out of power (or about to come into power) simply because they could. As stewards of your capital, we see these ominous and widening social divides as risks to the economy and even to the system. Politicians have been putting self-interest and party ahead of country. Absent facts, truth, and science, we expect poor governmental decisions to become the rule and not the exception. There is no hedge to such risks, other than to work together to reverse course, heal the divides, and strengthen American democracy. The Art of Portfolio Management: Balancing Risk Aversion with Risk-Taking In this world of political divisiveness, economic uncertainty, and technological disruption, what’s an investor to do? Like sailors navigating the turbulent waters between Scylla and Charybdis, investors must regularly set a course between excessive caution and excessive risk-taking. Erring in the overly cautious direction leads to potentially meager returns, missed opportunities, and a failure to compound capital. On the other hand, the pressure of never- ending performance comparisons may drive normally cautious investors to embrace greater risk. Sitting on the sidelines is not typically seen as a viable option for many investors. They share the view of a former bank CEO who, a decade ago, quipped “as long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance.” But an excessively risky course may well lead to capital destruction. No one can embrace risk with impunity; it almost always catches up with you. The obvious path to safe navigation is to balance an energetic offense with a strong defense. But in investing, there are no offensive and defensive units. There is no effective way in investing for the offense to scramble off the field and have the defense replace them; you need to excel at both, and at the same time. In investing, moreover, the nature of one’s mandate matters. Some investors expect their managers to beat the market at every measured interval. Others are willing and able to stand apart from the crowd in the short-term; their goal is to enhance net worth over longer-term (at least several year) intervals. Prudent long-term navigation has always been our focus at Baupost. We are glad to forgo some upside in order to truncate the downside. We are content to hold cash in the absence of compelling opportunity. When you try too hard to earn returns, you become tempted to ride every wave, and you are vulnerable to being seduced by the usual market sirens: soaring growth projections, trend-following zeal, an embrace of leverage, or even resorting to financial engineering. But there is another side of the coin – you can also fail to try hard enough. When you emphasize risk avoidance too strenuously, you may miss out on legitimate opportunity. You might get out of the habit of searching for new ideas, or you might imagine every potential risk to be more severe or more probable than it really is. Because investors never know when a storm may arise, or whether the higher wind gusts and ominous clouds are foretelling a brief market squall or a major financial hurricane, you have no choice but to prepare for the worst. But since the worst does not frequently happen, you cannot let the fear of a monster storm completely paralyze you. The way to build a portfolio that will prosper over the long-term, while avoiding irresponsible exposure to the fiercest storms, involves a constant commitment to fact-based decision-making, diversification, an avoidance of recourse leverage, and the analytical imperative of making conservative assumptions. In an office building project, for example, it is best to be cautious on cost estimates, time to lease-up, rents, exit cap rates, and exit timing. But not too conservative. Someone who compounds multiple extremely bearish assumptions is unlikely be the best buyer of much of anything. It is crucial not to become greedy when positions are working well (i.e., you must constantly think about when to sell). You must consistently avoid behavioral biases in decision- making. Avoiding these biases at a firm like ours involves building a culture of humility, intellectual honesty, and open debate as well as maintaining a rigorous and robust investment process, consistently applied. Hedging the greatest risks at reasonable prices is also imperative. We believe another key element in portfolio management is curtailing the duration (the weighted average life) of one’s portfolio through exposure to investments with catalysts for the realization of underlying value. Catalytic events shift the outcome of investments from a reliance on future market multiples and macroeconomic developments (which are not at all under your control) to a dependence on your assessment of the outcomes, probabilities, and implications of announced or anticipated corporate events, including mergers and acquisitions, bond maturities, debt restructurings, bankruptcies, major corporate asset sales, spinoffs, and tender offers. No strategy can avoid all risk of loss. But we believe our approach should increase the likelihood of achieving sustainable gains with limited downside risk over the long- run. To put it differently, a portfolio of near infinite duration (such as an all equity portfolio without catalysts) can trade just about anywhere. With such exposures, if stock prices plummet, the odds go up that an investor will feel pressure to do the wrong thing and sell into market weakness. A limited duration portfolio, both because of the hopefully truncated downside in a bad market as well as the beneficial cash inflows (buying power) that catalysts usually generate, is hugely advantageous in navigating through turmoil. At Baupost, we try to play to our firm’s strengths, capabilities, approach, and long-term oriented client base. That means in a world increasingly dominated by short attention spans, specialized investors and rigid investment silos, our flexible investment mandate and long-term orientation confer a huge advantage. The ability to evaluate and buy anything can be daunting, but the opportunity to look at everything confers a great advantage because it increases the takeovers to see if the merger arbitrage arena remains fertile with opportunity. But do not be surprised to see our exposures drop and even end, if and when the area becomes less attractive. The late year selloff in stocks, bonds, and commodities has increased the volume of opportunity on our radar, and, as noted earlier, we have initiated a number of new public equity positions, while both adding to and reducing others. For the first time in a number of years, the debt markets have come under stress, credit spreads are widening, and bonds are selling off. Our real estate pipeline of opportunity is strong, as a growing number of projects appear stalled or in need of rescue. Our private equity pipeline has also increased, the result of expanding that team to take advantage of the firm’s capabilities, while preparing for an increased opportunity set down the road, at a time when market conditions become more challenging. The Proper Wiring for a Long-Term Investor Consider the plight of a relief pitcher. Historically undervalued, unappreciated, often used interchangeably with other relievers, and, until recently, low on the major league pay scale. Required to be ready throughout most games at only a moment’s notice. And the role comes with the possibility of major psychological trauma. Few remember the slugger who grounds into a double play in the fourth inning, squandering a one-out, bases loaded opportunity. But everyone knows who gave up the gopher ball with the game tied in the bottom of the ninth to lose in a walk-off. And that’s only the prelude. The really hard part is psychological, and comes in that pitcher’s next outing. The only logical, yet psychologically challenging, thing for the reliever to do is let it go and forget it happened, even if his teammates, manager, and fans seem possessed by an indelible and bitter memory that flashes before their eyes as he heads in to the mound from the bullpen. In this way, a reliever has much in common with an investor. When you make an investment and the price drops, the key is to see the fall in price as not necessarily indicative of a past error or failure (no one, after all, can predict the daily meanderings of the markets), but as an opportunity. It’s not a do-over – what’s done is done – but it is a fresh chance to make another good investment, potentially an even better one now that those shares are lower in price. As we’ve said before, the key in investing is to see the market’s fluctuations not as a source of feedback, a report card if you will, but as a potential driver of opportunity. Is there information content in price fluctuations? Might the market have foresight into the future? It could, but it’s very hard to tell; we believe it’s best to think of the market as a place where hordes of buyers and sellers come together to transact and set a price. The information content largely involves what people are willing to do – volume and price – on that day. And such data rarely foretell that a downturn is coming, or a recovery, or any other macro insight. We have known many people who find the daily report card the market hands them a source of consternation and even anxiety. If the stock they recently purchased falls in price, they feel like they failed. Had they waited after all, they could buy more shares for the same capital invested. But in investing, it’s necessary to experience those price drops and see them as a source of further and greater opportunity and not as a problem. Similarly, price gains should not be experienced as a pat on the back from the market. They represent a diminution of opportunity to buy at the right price, though they do offer the potential to sell at a much fuller valuation. We wish we had perfect market timing (as well as the ability to fly). The reality is that no one does or ever will. The key is to find a way to care about one’s investment results over time, but to not feel burdened by the daily fluctuations of Mr. Market. The only way to invest, after what you purchased has fallen in price, is to be that successful relief pitcher. Put yesterday’s outcome out of your mind, get back on the mound, and make the best decision you can today with all the information at hand. Our Partnership with You We recently amended several terms in a number of our partnership agreements to create better alignment of terms across our entities and for the benefit of our clients. We also made the decision at year-end 2017 to return a portion of capital under management, remaining true to one of our founding objectives – staying focused on the generation of attractive risk adjusted investment returns for our clients, not the generation of fees for the firm. We are constantly guided by two fundamental beliefs: 1) you will know and remember forever how we treat you; and 2) we are in this for the long run, and we will only get to the long run by doing everything we can on a consistent basis to serve you, prioritize your collective interests, and position ourselves for long-term success. How do we prioritize client interests? We will not gouge on fees, go public, or sell the firm. We will reinvest in the business to build investment and operational strength that will enhance the firm’s capabilities and increase its resilience. We will be highly opportunistic in our investing, we will avoid fads, and we will remain consistently risk averse. We will be agile and alert in responding to opportunity, stoic in the face of adversity, deeply intellectually honest in our reflections and self-assessments, and unwavering in our character and values. We will be relentless in our pursuit of strong risk-adjusted investment returns for our limited partners. If there’s a golden goose in the investment business, it’s not near-term results, which will surely ebb and flow, but having the trust of clients. We will act assiduously to protect that most valuable yet fragile of assets; we know that we must constantly earn and re-earn your trust and confidence. The Baupost Team Our firm’s achievements are a direct result of the close collaboration achieved by our team of 260 exceptional contributors. Led by our partners, our investment teams worked diligently throughout 2018 to chart a course amid challenging markets, tirelessly uncovering and analyzing new investment opportunities while exiting fully-priced holdings. In a world that sometimes seems to have tilted off its axis, we continue to pride ourselves on our rationality, teamwork, and discipline. We prize collaboration and the inclusion of diverse points of view. As investors, it’s our job to gather facts, make judgments about which information to trust, develop hypotheses, and consider them objectively. It’s hard enough to make good decisions armed with data and facts. It would be absurd to attempt to do so with alternative facts and a distorted reality. Jim Mooney, Baupost’s president, oversees the management of our investment team. He continues to drive the ongoing refinement and improvement of our investment process, and his efforts regularly enhance the firm and develop our employees. In his role as head of Public Investments, Jim is ably assisted by partners Greg Ciongoli, Josh Greenhill, and Rob Bralower, and managing directors Rich Carona, James David, Jianshu Dong, and Ryan Dow, who also play key roles in our public investment effort. This group oversees and directs our analysts in their scrutiny of potentially interesting investment ideas. I’m pleased to report that Michael Sperling was promoted to partner effective January 1, 2019. Michael has been an exceptional contributor and valued teammate since he joined the firm in 2010. In addition, Jesse Downing has been promoted to principal. Partner Tom Blumenthal leads our Private Corporate team of six principals and analysts who diligently source and manage the firm’s private equity investments. George Rizk oversees U.S. Real Estate and Asset Management and Mark Tsocanos manages International Real Estate; both are partners in the firm. The real estate teams source and manage our real estate investments around the world, while building relationships to grow our network of operating partners. George and Mark are ably supported by the managing directors on the real estate teams: Nick Azrack, Hunt Doering, David Freibaum, JJ Lenhart, Bill Musto, and Brian Zilla. Sam Plimpton, partner emeritus, continues to source opportunity and provide mentorship. Managing Directors Gianpaolo Burigo and David Drubner continue to focus on development and sourcing efforts for the Real Estate and Private Corporate teams. Also effective January 1, Scott Dunn was promoted to managing director and Luca Lelli was promoted to principal. Our Trading group, led by Managing Director Scott Haig, consists of four team members who do a sterling job of executing buy and sell decisions across time zones in transactions that have become increasingly complex. During 2018, three new members joined Public Investments, five joined Real Estate and three joined Private Corporate, enhancing our already deep, talented, and hardworking investment team. In addition, four new analysts have agreed to join Baupost in 2019. During 2018, three analysts and one asset manager left the firm. We believe our ability to recruit exceptional people remains a significant competitive advantage for the firm. As previously communicated, Barbara O’Connor, partner emeritus and former CFO, transitioned in late 2018 to a senior advisory role, reporting to Jim Mooney and working closely on projects that intersect investments and operations. The implementation of our investment ideas relies heavily on the skills of our legal, operations, and administrative teams. Fred Fogel, Baupost’s general counsel and partner, leads our legal and compliance functions. Along with Fred, Chief Compliance Officer and Senior Regulatory Counsel Jack Cohen, Assistant General Counsel Rosemary McCormack, Senior Investment Counsel Collin Beecroft, and Senior Tax Counsel John Harvey provide leadership to a team of 11 people who work within our legal functions. Baupost remains deeply committed to establishing and meeting the highest standards of compliance. And Fred continues to bolster our activities in this realm in an era of increasingly complex regulatory requirements. Our exceptional operations team is led by Chief Operating Officer Elaine Mann. Our diverse and complex investment portfolio imposes a host of complicated demands on the firms’ operations departments, and our very talented and hard working group of leaders under Elaine consistently provide operational excellence. Under Elaine, our department heads are: James Conz, Information Technology; Diana DeSocio, Corporate Communications; Beth Mills, Investor Services; Lucy Tshuka, Human Resources & Administrative Services; and finally, CFO Jason Price, who oversees the firm’s complex financial operations. Jason’s team heads include: Frank Seyboth, Tax Reporting; Tim Cook, Portfolio Valuation, Accounting & Reporting; Amos Pike, Management Company Accounting & Reporting; Jen Lin, Custody & Treasury Operations; and Jason Gorer, Private & Trading Operations. These leaders work with a top notch team of strong contributors who perform a variety of complex operational tasks that help Baupost run efficiently and effectively. With Our Appreciation We remain fortunate to have access to the collective wisdom of Baupost’s astute Advisory Board: Baupost Founders Bill Poorvu and Howard Stevenson; Jay Light, dean emeritus of Harvard Business School; David Swensen, chief investment officer of the Yale University Endowment Fund; Jane Mendillo, retired president and chief executive officer of Harvard Management Company; Bill Helman, partner at Greylock Partners; and Paul Gannon, former chief operating officer of Baupost. Seth Alexander, CIO of The MIT Investment Company, which oversees that university’s endowment, and Ben Gomez, managing director of Pilot House Associates, a family investment office, have agreed to join our Advisory Board in the new year. They both know the firm well, and will undoubtedly make significant contributions to our thinking in 2019 and beyond. The board represents a substantial trove of valuable experience and expertise, and its members provide us with important insights regarding both investing and the business of running an investment firm. We also appreciate the valuable long-term relationships that Baupost enjoys with Ropes & Gray LLP, our corporate counsel; as well as with Ernst & Young LLP, our auditors and tax professionals; and with organizational consultants from Podia Consulting and the Center for Applied Research. These two firms have worked with a number of our partners and senior leaders over the past several years. It is a privilege for us at Baupost to oversee the assets of a limited number of families and institutional investors. Our limited partners are truly long-term oriented, and that makes it possible for the firm to maintain the kind of long term investment horizon that is essential to harvest attractive risk-adjusted investment returns in a challenging financial environment. The trust and support bestowed on us by our clients constantly reinforces our resolve to make sound investment decisions.’ We are pleased to express our sincere gratitude to our clients for your confidence and support. Please let us know if you have any questions or comments. We hope you have a healthy and prosperous New Year! Very truly yours, Seth A. Klarman CEO and Portfolio Manager

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