“
You see the first thing we love is a scene. For love at first sight requires the very sign of its suddenness; and of all things, it is the scene which seems to be seen best for the first time: a curtain parts and what had not yet ever been seen is devoured by the eyes: the scene consecrates the object I am going to love. The context is the constellation of elements, harmoniously arranged that encompass the experience of the amorous subject...
Love at first sight is always spoken in the past tense. The scene is perfectly adapted to this temporal phenomenon: distinct, abrupt, framed, it is already a memory (the nature of a photograph is not to represent but to memorialize)... this scene has all the magnificence of an accident: I cannot get over having had this good fortune: to meet what matches my desire.
The gesture of the amorous embrace seems to fulfill, for a time, the subject's dream of total union with the loved being: The longing for consummation with the other... In this moment, everything is suspended: time, law, prohibition: nothing is exhausted, nothing is wanted: all desires are abolished, for they seem definitively fulfilled... A moment of affirmation; for a certain time, though a finite one, a deranged interval, something has been successful: I have been fulfilled (all my desires abolished by the plenitude of their satisfaction).
”
”
Roland Barthes (A Lover's Discourse: Fragments)
“
Don't pursue happiness!
Life is as short as a sigh.
The dust of people that were once famous
turn with the reddish clay on the wheel you are
looking at. The universe is a fata morgana;
life is a dream.
”
”
Omar Khayyám (Rubaiyat Of Omar Khayyam: English, French And German Translations Comparatively Arranged V2)
“
Someone with an obsession for arranging things in alphabetical order was an abcedist, whereas someone with an obsession for arranging them in reverse alphabetical order was a zyxedist.
”
”
Walter Moers (The City of Dreaming Books (Zamonia, #4))
“
And yet how simple it is: in one day, in one hour everything could be arranged at once! The chief thing is to love others like yourself, that’s the chief thing, and that’s everything; nothing else is wanted — you will find out at once how to arrange it all.
”
”
Fyodor Dostoevsky (The Dream of a Ridiculous Man)
“
When we are green, still half-created, we believe that our dreams are rights, that the world is disposed to act in our best interests, and that falling and dying are for quitters. We live on the innocent and monstrous assurance that we alone, of all the people ever born, have a special arrangement whereby we will be allowed to stay green forever
”
”
Tobias Wolff (This Boy's Life)
“
Soon after the completion of his college course, his whole nature was kindled into one intense and passionate effervescence of romantic passion. His hour came,—the hour that comes only once; his star rose in the horizon,—that star that rises so often in vain, to be remembered only as a thing of dreams; and it rose for him in vain. To drop the figure,—he saw and won the love of a high-minded and beautiful woman, in one of the northern states, and they were affianced. He returned south to make arrangements for their marriage, when, most unexpectedly, his letters were returned to him by mail, with a short note from her guardian, stating to him that ere this reached him the lady would be the wife of another. Stung to madness, he vainly hoped, as many another has done, to fling the whole thing from his heart by one desperate effort. Too proud to supplicate or seek explanation, he threw himself at once into a whirl of fashionable society, and in a fortnight from the time of the fatal letter was the accepted lover of the reigning belle of the season; and as soon as arrangements could be made, he became the husband of a fine figure, a pair of bright dark eyes, and a hundred thousand dollars; and, of course, everybody thought him a happy fellow.
The married couple were enjoying their honeymoon, and entertaining a brilliant circle of friends in their splendid villa, near Lake Pontchartrain, when, one day, a letter was brought to him in that well-remembered writing. It was handed to him while he was in full tide of gay and successful conversation, in a whole room-full of company. He turned deadly pale when he saw the writing, but still preserved his composure, and finished the playful warfare of badinage which he was at the moment carrying on with a lady opposite; and, a short time after, was missed from the circle. In his room,alone, he opened and read the letter, now worse than idle and useless to be read. It was from her, giving a long account of a persecution to which she had been exposed by her guardian's family, to lead her to unite herself with their son: and she related how, for a long time, his letters had ceased to arrive; how she had written time and again, till she became weary and doubtful; how her health had failed under her anxieties, and how, at last, she had discovered the whole fraud which had been practised on them both. The letter ended with expressions of hope and thankfulness, and professions of undying affection, which were more bitter than death to the unhappy young man. He wrote to her immediately:
I have received yours,—but too late. I believed all I heard. I was desperate. I am married, and all is over. Only forget,—it is all that remains for either of us."
And thus ended the whole romance and ideal of life for Augustine St. Clare. But the real remained,—the real, like the flat, bare, oozy tide-mud, when the blue sparkling wave, with all its company of gliding boats and white-winged ships, its music of oars and chiming waters, has gone down, and there it lies, flat, slimy, bare,—exceedingly real.
Of course, in a novel, people's hearts break, and they die, and that is the end of it; and in a story this is very convenient. But in real life we do not die when all that makes life bright dies to us.
”
”
Harriet Beecher Stowe (Uncle Tom’s Cabin)
“
But I hope I will never have a life that is not surrounded by books, by books that are bound in paper and cloth and glue, such perishable things for ideas have lasted thousands of years . . . I hope I am always walled in by the very weight and breadth and clumsy, inefficient, antiquated bulk of them, hope that I spend my last days on this Earth arranging and rearranging them on thrones of good, honest pine, oak, and mahogany, because I just like to look at their covers, and dream of the promise of the great stories inside.
”
”
Rick Bragg
“
For example, highly sensitive people tend to be keen observers who look before they leap. They arrange their lives in ways that limit surprises. They're often sensitive to sights, sounds, smells, pain, coffee. They have difficulty when being observed (at work, say, or performing at a music recital) or judged for general worthiness (dating, job interviews). But there are new insights. The highly sensitive tend to be philosophical or spiritual in their orientation, rather than materialistic or hedonistic. They dislike small talk. They often describe themselves as creative or intuitive (just as Aron's husband had described her). They dream vividly, and can often recall their dreams the next day. They love music, nature, art, physical beauty. They feel exceptionally strong emotions -- sometimes acute bouts of joy, but also sorrow, melancholy, and fear. Highly sensitive people also process information about their environments -- both physical and emotional -- unusually deeply. They tend to notice subtleties that others miss -- another person's shift in mood, say, or a lightbulb burning a touch too brightly.
”
”
Susan Cain (Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking)
“
Anne had no sooner uttered the phrase, "home o'dreams," than it captivated her fancy and she immediately began the erection of one of her own. It was, of course, tenanted by an ideal master, dark, proud, and melancholy; but oddly enough, Gilbert Blythe persisted in hanging about too, helping her arrange pictures, lay out gardens, and accomplish sundry other tasks which a proud and melancholy hero evidently considered beneath his dignity. Anne tried to banish Gilbert's image from her castle in Spain but, somehow, he went on being there, so Anne, being in a hurry, gave up the attempt and pursued her aerial architecture with such success that her "home o'dreams" was built and furnished before Diana spoke again.
”
”
L.M. Montgomery (Anne of Avonlea (Anne of Green Gables, #2))
“
The autumn leaves, arranged in two or three scarlet terraces among the pine-trees, have fallen like ancient dreams.
”
”
Natsume Sōseki
“
You cut me,” he said. His voice was pleasant. British. Very ordinary. He looked at his hand with critical interest. “It might be fatal.”
Tessa looked at him with wide eyes. “Are you the Magister?”
He tilted his hand to the side. Blood ran down it, spattering the floor. “Dear me, massive blood loss. Death could be imminent.”
“Are you the Magister?”
“Magister?” He looked mildly surprised by her vehemence. “That means ‘master’ in Latin, doesn’t it?”
“I…” Tessa was feeling increasingly as if she were trapped in a strange dream. “I suppose it does.”
“I’ve mastered many things in life. Navigating the streets of London, dancing the quadrille, the Japanese art of flower arranging, lying at charades, concealing a highly intoxicated state, delighting young women with my charms…”
Tessa stared.
“Alas,” he went on, “no one has ever actually referred to me as ‘the master’, or ‘the magister’, either. More’s the pity…
”
”
Cassandra Clare (Clockwork Angel (The Infernal Devices, #1))
“
Why has woman's work never been of any account? Why in every family are the mother and three or four servants obliged to spend so much time at what pertains to cooking? Because those who want to emancipate mankind have not included woman in their dream of emancipation, and consider it beneath their superior masculine dignity to think "of those kitchen arrangements," which they have put on the shoulders of that drudge—woman.
”
”
Pyotr Kropotkin (The Conquest of Bread)
“
It took me a moment. I blinked, and suddenly it swam into focus and I had to frown very hard to keep myself from giggling out loud like the schoolgirl Deb had accused me of being.
Because he had arranged the arms and legs in letters, and the letters spelled out a single small word: BOO.
The three torsos were carefully arranged below the BOO in a quarter-circle, making a cute little Halloween smile.
What a scamp.
”
”
Jeff Lindsay (Darkly Dreaming Dexter (Dexter, #1))
“
We never keep to the present. We recall the past; we anticipate the future as if we found it too slow in coming and were trying to hurry it up, or we recall the past as if to stay its too rapid flight. We are so unwise that we wander about in times that do not belong to us, and do not think of the only one that does; so vain that we dream of times that are not and blindly flee the only one that is. The fact is that the present usually hurts. We thrust it out of sight because it distresses us, and if we find it enjoyable, we are sorry to see it slip away. We try to give it the support of the future, and think how we are going to arrange things over which we have no control for a time we can never be sure of reaching.
Let each of us examine his thoughts; he will find them wholly concerned with the past or the future. We almost never think of the present, and if we do think of it, it is only to see what light it throws on our plans for the future. The present is never our end. The past and the present are our means, the future alone our end. Thus we never actually live, but hope to live, and since we are always planning how to be happy, it is inevitable that we should never be so.
”
”
Blaise Pascal (Pensées)
“
The study was slowly lit up as the candle was brought in. The familiar details came out: the stag's horns, the bookshelves, the looking-glass, the stove with its ventilator, which had long wanted mending, his father's sofa, a large table, on the table an open book, a broken ash-tray, a manuscript-book with his handwriting. As he saw all this, there came over him for an instant a doubt of the possibility of arranging this new life, of which he had been dreaming on the road. All these traces of his life seemed to clutch him, and to say to him: 'No, you're not going to get away from us, and you're not going to be different, but you're going to be the same as you've always been; with doubts, everlasting dissatisfaction with yourself, vain efforts to amend, and falls, and everlasting expectations, of a happiness which you won't get, and which isn't possible for you.
”
”
Leo Tolstoy (Anna Karenina)
“
To vary your inspiration, consider varying your inputs. Turn the sound off to watch a film, listen to the same song on repeat, read only the first word of each sentence in a short story, arrange stones by size or color, learn to lucid dream. Break habits. Look for differences. Notice connections.
”
”
Rick Rubin (The Creative Act: A Way of Being)
“
In a world of fixed future, there can be no right or wrong. Right and wrong demand freedom of choice, but if each action is already chosen, there can be no freedom of choice. In a world of fixed future, no person is responsible. The rooms are already arranged.
”
”
Alan Lightman (Einstein’s Dreams)
“
Often in the case of these sudden transformations one can prove that an archetype has been at work for a long time in the unconscious, skilfully arranging circumstances that will unavoidably lead to a crisis.
”
”
C.G. Jung (The Undiscovered Self/Symbols and the Interpretation of Dreams)
“
But I hope I will never have a life that is not surrounded by books, by books that are bound in paper and cloth and glue, such perishable things for ideas that have lasted thousands of years, or just since the most recent Harry Potter. I hope I am always walled in by the very weight and breadth and clumsy, inefficient, antiquated bulk of them, hope I spend my last days on this Earth arranging and rearranging them on thrones of good, honest pine, oak, and mahogany, because they just feel good in my hands, because I just like to look at their covers, and dream of the promise of the great stories inside.
”
”
Rick Bragg (My Southern Journey: True Stories from the Heart of the South)
“
Rebecca, always Rebecca. Wherever I walked in Manderley, wherever I sat, even in my thoughts and in my dreams, I met Rebecca. I knew her figure now, the long slim legs, the small and narrow feet. Her shoulders, broader than mine, the capable clever hands. Hands that could steer a boat, could hold a horse. Hands that arranged flowers, made the models of ships, and wrote “Max from Rebecca” on the flyleaf of a book. I knew her face too, small and oval, the clear white skin, the cloud of dark hair. I knew the scent she wore, I could guess her laughter and her smile. If I heard it, even among a thousand others, I should recognize her voice. Rebecca, always Rebecca. I should never be rid of Rebecca. Perhaps
”
”
Daphne du Maurier (Rebecca)
“
How badly arranged the world is. What is the purpose of ugliness, suffering, sadness? Why our powerless dreams? Why everything?
”
”
Gustave Flaubert (Correspondance)
“
I lay on the bed and shut my eyes, thinking that nobody really likes marriage, that it's a flawed arrangement, that people get enthusiastic and jump in for a hundred reasons and then, after the ceremony, after a few years, the whole deal turns into a concert they wouldn't have dreamed of attending.
”
”
Frederick Barthelme (Elroy Nights)
“
The hemulen woke up slowly and recognised himself and wished he had been someone he didn't know. He felt even tireder than when he went to bed, and here it was -- another day which would go on until evening and then there would be another one and another one which would be the same as all days are when they are lived by a hemulen.
He crept under the bedcover and buried his nose in the pillow, then he shifted his stomach to the edge of the bed where the sheets were cool. He took possession of the whole bed with outstretched arms and legs he was waiting for a nice dream that wouldn't come. He curled up and made himself small but it didn't help a bit. He tried being the hemulen that everybody like, he tried being the hemulen that no one liked. But however hard he tried he remained a hemulen doing his best without anything really coming off. In the end he got up and pulled on his trousers.
The Hemulen didn't like getting dressed and undressed, it gave him a feeling that the days passed without anything of importance happening. Even so, he spent the whole day arranging, organising and directing things from morning till night! All around him there were people living slipshod and aimless lives, wherever he looked there was something to be put to rights and he worked his fingers to the bone trying to get them to see how they ought to live.
It's as though they don't want to live well, the Hemulen thought sadly as he brushed his teeth. He looked at the photograph of himself with his boat which was been taken when the boat was launched. It was a beautiful picture but it made him feel even sadder.
I ought to learn how to sail, the Hemulen thought. But I've never got enough time...
Moominvalley in November
Chapter 5, THE HEMULEN
”
”
Tove Jansson (Moominvalley in November (The Moomins, #9))
“
When you know what you want you will be excited about it and give every ounce of effort to making it come true. No excuse or fear will get in your way because peace is found in focus.
”
”
Shannon L. Alder
“
For three weeks, we slept in the same bed together. We never had sex. We never kissed. We never took off more clothes than our pants. We just dreamed together.
The conversations were brief. We didn’t go on any dates. We didn’t get to know each other. It was just a sleeping arrangement. To her, I was just a stuffed animal with a heartbeat.
”
”
Carlton Mellick III (The Haunted Vagina)
“
I clap my hands together. (Where do I get the strength, the burst of energy?) To chase away the ghosts. Dispel my fears. Arrange the dream. Maintain a kind of balance
”
”
Anne Hébert (Kamouraska)
“
We never keep to the present. We recall the past; we anticipate the future as if were found it too slow in coming and were trying to hurry it up, or we recall the past as if to stay it's too rapid flight. We are so unwise that we wander about in times that do not belong to us, and do not think of the only one that does; so vain that we dream of times that are not and blindly flee the only one that is. The fact is the present usually hurts. We thrust it out of sight because it distresses us, and if we find it enjoyable, we are sorry to see it slip away. We try to give it the support of the future, and think how we are going to arrange things over which we have no control for a time we can never be sure of reaching. (Page 9)
”
”
Blaise Pascal (Great Ideas Human Happiness (Penguin Great Ideas))
“
Wine's terrible for babies." Dorian swept into the sitting room to join me, elegantly arranging himself on a love seat that displayed his purple velvet robes to best effect.
"Well of course it is. I'd never dream of giving wine to an infant! What do you take me for, a barbarian? But for you... well, it might go a long way to make you a little less jumpy. You've been positively unbearable to live around.
"I can't have it either. It affects the babies in utero.
”
”
Richelle Mead (Shadow Heir (Dark Swan, #4))
“
But there is a reason why religions insist so much on strange events in the sky, as well as on less quantifiable phenomena such as dreams and visions. All of these things cater to our inborn stupidity, and our willingness to be persuaded against all the evidence that we are indeed the center of the universe and that everything is arranged with us in mind.
”
”
Christopher Hitchens (The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever)
“
But I hope that I will never have a life that is not surrounded by books,
by books that are bound in paper and cloth and glue,
such perishable things for ideas that have lasted thousands of tears,
or just since the most recent Harry Potter.
I hope I am always walled in by the very weight and breadth
and clumsy, inefficient, antiquated bulk of them,
hope that I spend my last days on this Earth
arranging and rearranging them
on thrones of good, honest pine, oak, and mahogany,
because they just feel good in my hands,
because I just like to look at their covers,
and dream of the promise of the great stories inside.
”
”
Rick Bragg
“
I've never thought much of strictly organised and methodical study. You can't arrange a library in alphabetical order until you've collected one.
”
”
Walter Moers
“
Home had always been a place to dream of.
”
”
Mary Balogh (The Arrangement (The Survivors' Club, #2))
“
The spreading influence of the Church had affected the domestic arrangements of all, including priests and princes, setting bastard stock in a separate, inferior category to children born in wedlock.
”
”
Charles Spencer (The White Ship: The gripping Sunday Times bestselling book about the Anarchy in medieval England (Conquest, Anarchy and the Wrecking of Henry I’s Dream))
“
All these women. And Trina. Trina,” she repeated, with considerable passion as she gripped his shirt. “And gooey dessert and body things and chick-vids. All night. Slumber party. Do you know what that means?”
“I’ve had many dreams of them. Will there be pillow fights?”
She spun him around so his back hit the door. “Don’t. Leave. Me.”
“Darling.” He kissed her brow. “I must. I must.”
“No. You can bring Vegas here. Because . . . you’re you. You can do that. We’ll have Vegas here, and that’ll be good. I’ll buy you a lap dance.”
“That’s so sweet. But I’m going. I’ll be back tomorrow, and lay a cool cloth on your fevered brow.”
“Tomorrow?” She actually went light-headed. “You’re not coming back tonight?”
“You wouldn’t be in this state now if you paid attention. I’m taking a shuttle full of men to Las Vegas late this afternoon. There will be ribaldry, and a possible need to post bond. I’ve made arrangements. I’ll bring back this same shuttle full of men—hopefully—tomorrow afternoon.”
“Let me come with you.”
“Let me see your penis.”
“Oh, God! Can’t I just use yours?”
“At any other time. Now pull yourself together, and remember that when all this is over, you’ll very likely arrest a killer who’s also a dirty cop. It’s like a twofer.”
“That doesn’t make me feel better.”
“Best I have.
”
”
J.D. Robb (Promises in Death (In Death, #28))
“
Highly sensitive people tend to be keen observers who look before they leap. They arrange their lives in ways that limit surprises. They're often sensitive to sights, sounds, smells, pain, coffee. They have difficulty when being observed (at work, say, or performing at a music recital) or judged for general worthiness (dating, job interviews). But there are new insights. The highly sensitive tend to be philosophical or spiritual in their orientation, rather than materialistic or hedonistic. They dislike small talk. They often describe themselves as creative or intuitive (just as Aron's husband had described her). They dream vividly, and can often recall their dreams the next day. They love music, nature, art. They feel exceptionally strong emotions -sometimes acute bouts of joy, but also sorrow, melancholy, and fear. Highly sensitive people also process information about their environments -both physical and emotional -unusually deeply. They tend to notice subtleties that others miss - another person's shift in mood, say, or a lightbulb burning a touch too brightly.
”
”
Susan Cain (Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking)
“
People do not cry because it is the end. They cry because the end does not correspond with their imagination of it. Their first choice is always their own imagining; they refuse to be deterred by warnings. They say I choose this because although the price is high the thing itself is more precious, durable and beautiful. The light of imagined events is always so arranged that the customers do not see the flaws in what they have chosen to buy with their dreams.
”
”
Janet Frame (You Are Now Entering the Human Heart)
“
My dream, even now, is to walk for weeks with some friend that I love, leisurely wandering from place to place, with no route arranged and no object in view, with liberty to go on all day or to linger all day, as we choose; but the question of luggage, unknown to the simple pilgrim, is one of the rocks on which my plans have been shipwrecked, and the other is the certain censure of relatives, who, not fond of walking themselves, and having no taste for noonday naps under hedges, would be sure to paralyse my plans before they had grown to maturity by the honest horror of their cry, "How very unpleasant if you were to meet any one you know!" The relative of five hundred years back would have said "How Holy!
”
”
Elizabeth von Arnim (Elizabeth and Her German Garden)
“
By now you will not be surprised to learn that Gaston Bachelard had a few things to say about the element of air. In a book called "Air and Dreams". he points out that we categorize many of our emotions by their relative weight; they make us feel heavier or lighter. Perhaps because uprightness is the human quality, we imagine human emotions arranged on a vertical scale from ground to sky. So sadness is weighed down and earthbound. joy is aerial, and the sensation of freedom defies the bonds of gravity. "Air," Bachelard writes, "is the very substance of our freedom, the substance of superhuman joy." Elation, effervescence, elevation, levity, inspiration: air words all, alveolated with vowels, leavening the dough of everyday life.
”
”
Michael Pollan (Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation)
“
Instructions for Dad.
I don't want to go into a fridge at an undertaker's. I want you to keep me at home until the funeral. Please can someone sit with me in case I got lonely? I promise not to scare you.
I want to be buried in my butterfly dress, my lilac bra and knicker set and my black zip boots (all still in the suitcase that I packed for Sicily). I also want to wear the bracelet Adam gave me.
Don't put make-up on me. It looks stupid on dead people.
I do NOT want to be cremated. Cremations pollute the atmosphere with dioxins,k hydrochloric acid, hydrofluoric acid, sulphur dioxide and carbon dioxide. They also have those spooky curtains in crematoriums.
I want a biodegradable willow coffin and a woodland burial. The people at the Natural Death Centre helped me pick a site not for from where we live, and they'll help you with all the arrangements.
I want a native tree planted on or near my grave. I'd like an oak, but I don't mind a sweet chestnut or even a willow. I want a wooden plaque with my name on. I want wild plants and flowers growing on my grave.
I want the service to be simple. Tell Zoey to bring Lauren (if she's born by then). Invite Philippa and her husband Andy (if he wants to come), also James from the hospital (though he might be busy).
I don't want anyone who doesn't know my saying anything about me. THe Natural Death Centre people will stay with you, but should also stay out of it. I want the people I love to get up and speak about me, and even if you cry it'll be OK. I want you to say honest things. Say I was a monster if you like, say how I made you all run around after me. If you can think of anything good, say that too! Write it down first, because apparently people often forget what they mean to say at funerals.
Don't under any circumstances read that poem by Auden. It's been done to death (ha, ha) and it's too sad. Get someone to read Sonnet 12 by Shakespeare.
Music- "Blackbird" by the Beatles. "Plainsong" by The Cure. "Live Like You Were Dying" by Tim McGraw. "All the Trees of the Field Will Clap Their Hands" by Sufian Stevens. There may not be time for all of them, but make sure you play the last one. Zoey helped me choose them and she's got them all on her iPod (it's got speakers if you need to borrow it).
Afterwards, go to a pub for lunch. I've got £260 in my savings account and I really want you to use it for that. Really, I mean it-lunch is on me. Make sure you have pudding-sticky toffee, chocolate fudge cake, ice-cream sundae, something really bad for you. Get drunk too if you like (but don't scare Cal). Spend all the money.
And after that, when days have gone by, keep an eye out for me. I might write on the steam in the mirror when you're having a bath, or play with the leaves on the apple tree when you're out in the garden. I might slip into a dream.
Visit my grave when you can, but don't kick yourself if you can't, or if you move house and it's suddenly too far away. It looks pretty there in the summer (check out the website). You could bring a picnic and sit with me. I'd like that.
OK. That's it.
I love you.
Tessa xxx
”
”
Jenny Downham
“
He remembered suddenly, at this moment, as he looked at the squares of moonlight lying on the floor, the time when he had first realized that pain is a thing that we must face and come to terms with if life is to be lived with dignity an not merely muddled through like an evil dream... In some vague way he had understood that dark things are necessary; without them the silver moonlight would just stream away into nothingness, but with them it can be held and arranged into beautiful squares. (David Eliot, Chapter 4)
”
”
Elizabeth Goudge (The Bird in the Tree (Eliots of Damerosehay, #1))
“
its underlying principles are in such close harmony with the absolute and eternal right that they can never become obsolete. At the same time, the division and arrangement of the treatise give it, so far as I know, the precedence over all other ethical treatises ancient or modern.
”
”
Marcus Tullius Cicero (Ethical Writings of Cicero: De Officiis, De Senectute, De Amicitia, and Scipio's Dream)
“
Daisies are what boho dreams are made of. They bring to mind sun-soaked wild flower fields, spontaneous wanderings in the country air the simple joys of bundling found blooms and foliage into a worn basket. I can almost smell the sunshine when I look at these happy flowers and feel the urge to wear a flower crown and spin around barefoot! Daisies are the perfect addition to any laid back and rustic decor or shabby chic event!
”
”
Chantal Larocque (Bold & Beautiful Paper Flowers: More Than 50 Easy Paper Blooms and Gorgeous Arrangements You Can Make at Home)
“
Holly shit.
For a second, he thought he was looking at Ben's special arrangement, but because Ben knew Peter's tastes, he wouldn't have arranged for this girl. Not unless he'd reached ass deep inside of Peter and pulled out some unconscious dream he hadn't realized he had. All the attributes that Peter usually sought weren't obvious in this one. In fact, she wasn't anything like the women who usually attracted his attention. Yet here he was unable to look away.
”
”
Joey W. Hill (Honor Bound (Knights of the Board Room, #3))
“
Here’s how it works for Stephen King: There are certain things I do if I sit down to write. I have a glass of water or a cup of tea. There’s a certain time I sit down, from 8:00 to 8:30, somewhere within that half hour every morning. I have my vitamin pill and my music, sit in the same seat, and the papers are all arranged in the same places. The cumulative purpose of doing these things the same way every day seems to be a way of saying to the mind, you’re going to be dreaming soon.1
”
”
Jocelyn K. Glei (Manage Your Day-To-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus, and Sharpen Your Creative Mind)
“
If it is difficult to control the direction of your attention while in a state akin to sleep, you may find gazing fixedly into an object verN helpful. Do not look at its surface but into and beyond any plain object such as a wall, a carpet, or any other object \\ hich possesses depth. Arrange it to return as little reflection as possible. Imagine then that in this depth you are seeing and hearing what you want to see and hear until your attention is exclusively occupied by the imagined state.
”
”
Neville Goddard (Resurrection: Imagine Your Dream as Reality, Begin There and Live)
“
Her sense of artistry reached even as far as her plating and presentation...
arranging her tarts in a woven basket like a bouquet of flowers.
The sight of her bringing them to us was like a scene straight out of a fairy tale!
Yes... she too...
is like a character straight from fantasy.
A fairy godmother who casts her spells on ordinary ingredients...
... turning them into beautiful and delicious princesses of food!
All who take a bite of her apples...
... fall under her spell...
... and are transported into a land of dreams!
”
”
Yūto Tsukuda (食戟のソーマ 28 [Shokugeki no Souma 28] (Food Wars: Shokugeki no Soma, #28))
“
Either we have no dreams or our dreams are interesting. We should learn to arrange our waking life the same way: nothing or interesting.
”
”
Friedrich Nietzsche (The Gay Science: With a Prelude in Rhymes and an Appendix of Songs)
“
Levin felt more and more that all his thoughts about marriage, all his dreams of how he would arrange his life, were mere childishness, and that it was something he had not understood before, and now understood still less, though it was being accomplished over him; spasms were rising higher and higher in his breast, and disobedient tears were coming to his eyes.
”
”
Leo Tolstoy (Anna Karenina)
“
I had a system, too, though I was pretty sure I’d ever acknowledged it before, even to myself. My closet was arranged by size: Now, Not That Long Ago, Once Upon a Time, Never Again, and In Your Dreams. I didn’t even have to check the tags to verify the humiliating range of ever-increasing numerals displayed on them. I wondered what size I’d be when I’d finally had enough.
”
”
Claire Cook (Wallflower in Bloom)
“
One feels pan of a vast servitude, anonymous and unending, all of it vanishing unexpectedly with the passing image of Madame Picquet behind the glass of her office, that faintly vulgar, thrilling profile. As I think of it, there’s an ache in my chest. I cannot control these dreams in which she seems to lie in my future like a whole season of extravagant meals if only I knew how to arrange it.
”
”
James Salter (A Sport and a Pastime)
“
I need to talk to one of the Zuulaman Blood," Andulvar said.
"They are gone," Draca replied.
"From Terreille, yes. But there must be some who are demon-dead. You could arrange this."
"They are gone," she repeated. "The Dark Realm wass purged of Zuulaman Blood."
Andulvar grabbed one of the chairs that surrounded the table to keep himself upright. "You purged Hell ?"
"No."
"Then... ?"
"The Prince of the Darknesss. The High Lord of Hell." Draca stared at him. "Grief wass the hammer they ussed to break hiss control. Rage wass the forge in which he sshaped hiss power into a weapon."
"So there's no one left."
"There's no one left," Geoffrey agreed. He looked at Draca. "If Saetan did what we think he did, there isn't a shard of pottery, a scrap of cloth, or a line from a poem, story, or song left that came from the Zuulaman people. There isn't any trace of them in any of the Realms."
Including the islands they came from, Andulvar thought, feeling sick.
"It's as if they never existed," Geoffrey said.
”
”
Anne Bishop (Dreams Made Flesh (The Black Jewels, #5))
“
What is marriage, exactly, and how could we explain it to an alien anthropologist? It’s more than just a living arrangement. Is it an endeavor, a pledge, a symbol, or an affirmation? Is it a span of shared years and shared experiences? A vessel for intimacy? Or does the old joke nail it best? ‘If love is an enchanted dream, then marriage is an alarm clock.’ ” Mostly male laughter in the congregation is shushed. “Maybe marriage is difficult to define because of its array of shapes and sizes. Marriage differs between cultures, tribes, centuries, decades even, generations, and—our alien researcher might add—planets. Marriages can be dynastic, common-law, secret, shotgun, arranged, or, as is the case with Sharon and Peter”—she beams at the bride in her dress and the groom in his morning suit—“brought into being by love and respect. Any given marriage can—and will—go through rocky patches and calmer periods. Even within a single day, a marriage can be stormy in the morning, yet by evening turn calm and blue …
”
”
David Mitchell (The Bone Clocks)
“
In my dreams, I was back in Hades’ garden. The Lord of the Dead paced up and down, holding his ears while Nico followed him, waving his arms. ‘You have to!’ Nico insisted. Demeter and Persephone sat behind them at the breakfast table. Both of the goddesses looked bored. Demeter poured shredded wheat into four huge bowls. Persephone was magically changing the flower arrangement on the table, turning the blossoms from red to yellow to polka-dotted. ‘I don’t have to do anything!’ Hades’ eyes blazed. ‘I’m a god!’ ‘Father,’ Nico said, ‘if Olympus falls, your own palace’s safety doesn’t matter. You’ll fade, too.’ ‘I am not an Olympian!’ he growled. ‘My family has made that quite clear.’ ‘You are,’ Nico said. ‘Whether you like it or not.’ ‘You saw what they did to your mother,’ Hades said. ‘Zeus killed her. And you would have me help them? They deserve what they get!
”
”
Rick Riordan (The Last Olympian (Percy Jackson and the Olympians, #5))
“
All right, the universe is energy. All of it. Everything is energy that can be altered simply by willing it to be altered. It's as if we are God's waking dream, each gifted with a small piece of his consciousness; the beauty of that arrangement is that we create the dream for him. If you can understand that, if you can wrap your mind around it, then you can conjure up anything you want from out of the ether. Provided this is material enough to do it.
”
”
C. Robert Cargill (Dreams and Shadows (Dreams & Shadows, #1))
“
The autumn leaves, arranged in two or three scarlet terraces among the pine trees, have fallen like ancient dreams. The red and white sasanquas near the garden’s ornamental basin, dropping their petals, now a white and now a red one, are finally left bare. The wintry sun along the ten-foot length of the southwards-facing veranda goes down daily earlier than yesterday. Seldom a day goes by but a cold wind blows. So my snoozes have been painfully curtailed.
”
”
Natsume Sōseki (I Am A Cat (Tuttle Classics))
“
They're sitting on the floor in A Stitch in Time, surrounded on all sides by dresses of every imaginable color. Cora realizes as she glances around, her gaze flitting quickly from one wall to the next, that Etta has arranged them like the seasons: sparkling whites, grays, blacks for winter; shimmering greens and blues for spring; pinks and purples for summer; reds, oranges and yellows for autumn. Together they are breathtaking, almost too bright if stared at for too long, like falling through a rainbow lit by the sun.
”
”
Menna Van Praag (The Dress Shop of Dreams)
“
This is so funny,” said Ellen, noticing the seating arrangement. “Isn’t this funny? Tom, come sit next to Robin. Griffin, sit next to Laura.”
I stood up and sat next to Robin while Griffin brought his chair over to Laura.
“That’s better,” said Ellen. “Isn’t that better?
”
”
Daniel Amory (Minor Snobs)
“
First of all, historically, markets simply did not emerge as some autonomous domain of freedom independent of, and opposed to, state authorities. Exactly the opposite is the case. Historically, markets are generally either a side effects of government operations, especially military operations, or were directly created by government policy. This has been true at least since the invention of coinage, which was first created and promulgated as a means of provisioning soldiers; for most of Eurasian history, ordinary people used informal credit arrangements and physical money, gold, silver, bronze, and the kind of impersonal markets they made possible remained mainly an adjunct to the mobilization of legions, sacking of cities, extraction of tribute, and disposing of loot. Modern central banking systems were likewise first created to finance wars. So there's one initial problem with the conventional history. There's another even more dramatic one. While the idea that the market is somehow opposed to and independent of government has been used at least since the nineteenth century to justify laissez faire economic policies designed to lessen the role of government, they never actually have that effect. English liberalism, for instance, did not lead to a reduction of state bureaucracy, but the exact opposite: an endlessly ballooning array of legal clerks, registrars, inspectors, notaries, and police officials who made the liberal dream of a world of free contract between autonomous individuals possible. It turned out that maintaining a free market economy required a thousand times more paperwork than a Louis XIV-style absolutist monarchy. (p. 8-9)
”
”
David Graeber (The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy)
“
But that day never arrived. Danny was steady and unwavering in his affection for me. He called me on the phone just to see how I was doing and sent me flowers and gifts on special occasions. Unlike many of his counterparts, he loved my independent nature. And instead of being horrified by my interests, dreams, and aspirations, he found humor in my warding off my parents’ attempts at arranging a marriage. He thought all these qualities of mine were endearing. He was genuinely interested in me for who I was, and this feeling of acceptance was so new and refreshing for me.
”
”
Anita Moorjani (Dying To Be Me: My Journey from Cancer, to Near Death, to True Healing)
“
So, in spite of all apparent contradictions, this strange love of Hitler for Stefanie falls into the pattern of his character. Love was a field where the unforeseeable might happen, and which might become dangerous. How many men who had set out with great intentions had been forced off their path by irregular and complicated love affairs. It was imperative to be on one's guard!
Instinctively, the young Hitler found the only correct attitude in his love for Stefanie: he possessed a being whom he loved, and at the same time, he did not possess her. He arranged his whole life as though he possessed this beloved creature entirely. But as he himself avoided any personal meeting, this girl, although he could see that she walked the earth, remained nevertheless a creature of his dream world, towards whom he could project his desires, plans and ideas. And thus he kept himself from deviating from his own path; indeed, this strange relationship, through the power of love, increased his own will. He imagines Stefanie as his wife, builds the house in which they live together, surrounds it with a magnificent garden and arranges his home with Stefanie, just as, in fact, he did later on the Ober-Salzburg, though without her. This mixing of dream and reality is characteristic of the young Hitler. And whenever there is a danger that the beloved would entirely escape into the realm of fantasy, he hurries to the Schmiedtoreck and makes sure that she really walks the earth. Hitler was confirmed in the choice of his path, not by what Stefanie actually was, but by what his imagination made of her. Thus, Stefanie was two things for him, one part reality and one part wish and imagination. Be that as it may, Stefanie was the most beautiful, the most fertile and purest dream of his life.
”
”
August Kubizek (The Young Hitler I Knew)
“
By all means let us agree that we are pattern-seeking mammals and that, owing to our restless intelligence and inquisitiveness, we will still prefer a conspiracy theory to no explanation at all. Religion was our first attempt at philosophy, just as alchemy was our first attempt at chemistry and astrology our first attempt to make sense of the movements of the heavens. I myself am a strong believer in the study of religion, first because culture and education involve a respect for tradition and for origins, and also because some of the early religious texts were among our first attempts at literature. But there is a reason why religions insist so much on strange events in the sky, as well as on less quantifiable phenomena such as dreams and visions. All of these things cater to our inborn stupidity, and our willingness to be persuaded against all the evidence that we are indeed the center of the universe and that everything is arranged with us in mind.
”
”
Christopher Hitchens (The Portable Atheist: Essential Readings for the Nonbeliever)
“
DURING the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher. I know not how it was; but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. I say insufferable; for the feeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasurable, because poetic, sentiment, with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible. I looked upon the scene before me—upon the mere house, and the simple landscape features of the domain—upon the bleak walls—upon the vacant eye-like windows—upon a few rank sedges—and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees—with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveler upon opium—the bitter lapse into every-day life—the hideous dropping off of the veil. There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart—an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime. What was it—I paused to think—what was it that so unnerved me in the contemplation of the House of Usher? It was a mystery all insoluble; nor could I grapple with the shadowy fancies that crowded upon me as I pondered. I was forced to fall back upon the unsatisfactory conclusion that while, beyond doubt, there are combinations of very simple natural objects which have the power of thus affecting us, still the analysis of this power lies among considerations beyond our depth. It was possible, I reflected, that a mere different arrangement of the particulars of the scene, of the details of the picture, would be sufficient to modify, or perhaps to annihilate its capacity for sorrowful impression; and, acting upon this idea, I reined my horse to the precipitous brink of a black and lurid tarn that lay in unruffled luster by the dwelling, and gazed down—but with a shudder even more thrilling than before—upon the remodeled and inverted images of the gray sedge, and the ghastly tree stems, and the vacant and eye-like windows.
”
”
Edgar Allan Poe (The Best Short Stories of Edgar Allan Poe)
“
From birth to death and further on
As we were born and introduced into this world,
We had a gift hard to express by word
And somewhere in our continuous road,
It kind of lost it sense and turned.
There was that time we sure remember,
When everything was now and 'till forever
Children with no worries and no regrets,
The only goal was making a few friends.
But later on everything has changed,
By minds that had it all arranged
To bring the people into stress,
Into creating their own mess.
We have been slaved by our own mind,
Turned into something out of our kind
Slowly faded away from the present time,
Forced to believe in lies, in fights and crime.
They made it clearly a fight of the ego,
A never ending war that won't just go
They made it a competitive game,
To seek selfish materialistic fame.
They turned us one against eachother,
Man against man, brother against brother
Dividing us by religion and skin color,
Making us fight to death over a dollar.
Making us lose ourselves in sadly thoughts,
Wasting our days by living in the past
Depressed and haunted by the memories,
And yet still hoping to fly in our dreams.
Some of us tried learning how to dance,
Step after step, giving our soul a new chance
Some of us left our ego vanish into sounds,
Thus being aware of our natural bounce.
Some tried expressing in their rhymes,
The voice of a generation which never dies
They reached eternity through poetry
Leaving the teachings that shall fulfill the prophecy
Others have found their way through spirituality,
Becoming conscious of the human duality
Seeking the spiritual enlightenment,
Of escaping an ego-oriented fighting
Science, philosophy, religion,
Try to explain the human origin.
Maybe changes are yet to come,
And it shall be better for some
Death's for the spirit not an end,
But a relieving of the embodiment
So I believe that furthermore,
We'll understand the power of our soul
But leaving behind all we know,
And all that we might not yet know
It all resumes to that certain truth,
That we all seek to once conclude.
”
”
Virgil Kalyana Mittata Iordache
“
The man under the bed The man who has been there for years waiting The man who waits for my floating bare foot The man who is silent as dustballs riding the darkness The man whose breath is the breathing of small white butterflies The man whose breathing I hear when I pick up the phone The man in the mirror whose breath blackens silver The boneman in closets who rattles the mothballs The man at the end of the end of the line I met him tonight I always meet him He stands in the amber air of a bar When the shrimp curl like beckoning fingers ride through the air on their toothpick skewers When the ice cracks & I am about to fall through he arranges his face around its hollows he opens his pupilless eyes at me For years he has waited to drag me down & now he tells me he has only waited to take me home We waltz through the street like death & the maiden We float through the wall of the wall of my room If he’s my dream he will fold back into my body His breath writes letters of mist on the glass of my cheeks I wrap myself around him like the darkness I breathe into his mouth & make him real
”
”
Erica Jong (Fear of Flying)
“
Rebecca, always Rebecca. Wherever I walked in Manderley, wherever I sat, even in my thoughts and in my dreams, I met Rebecca. I knew her figure now, the long slim legs, the small and narrow feet. Her shoulders, broader than mine, the capable clever hands. Hands that could steer a boat, could hold a horse. Hands that arranged flowers, made the models of ships, and wrote ‘Max from Rebecca’ on the fly-leaf of a book. I knew her face too, small and oval, the clear white skin, the cloud of dark hair. I knew the scent she wore, I could guess her laughter and her smile. If I heard it, even among a thousand others, I should recognize her voice. Rebecca, always Rebecca. I should never be rid of Rebecca.
”
”
Daphne du Maurier
“
were mildly favorable. People actually showed up at the readings my publisher arranged. The sales were underwhelming. And, after a few months, I went on with the business of my life, certain that my career as an author would be short-lived, but glad to have survived the process with my dignity more or less intact. I had little time for reflection over
”
”
Barack Obama (Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance)
“
Is it always this awkward?" Sara asked. Her voice was hushed.
Derek turned to look at her, his gaze falling to the white rose in her hands. She had taken it from the arrangement of hothouse flowers. Nervously her fingers ruffled the fragile petals.
Self-consciously Sara sniffed the pale blossom and began to insert it back into the huge vase. "It's nice to have roses in January," she murmured. "Nothing in the world has such a lovely scent."
She was so innocently beautiful, with the disordered waves of her hair falling around her face. His muscles tightened in response. He would like to have her painted this way, standing by the table with her head turned toward him, the white flower caught in her fingers. "Bring it here," he said.
She obeyed, coming to him and handing him the rose. He closed his fingers around the plump head of the flower and pulled gently, freeing the petals from their tenuous moorings. Tossing aside the desecrated stem, he opened his hand over the bed. The petals scattered in a fragrant shower. Sara drew in a quick breath, staring at him as if mesmerized.
”
”
Lisa Kleypas (Dreaming of You (The Gamblers of Craven's, #2))
“
She was free in her wildness. She was a wanderess, a drop of free water. She belonged to no man and to no city. (by Roman Payne, from “The Wanderess.”
How this quote became so popular, I have no idea. I wrote it about one woman: The heroine of “The Wanderess,” Saskia; yet I wrote these lines to describe Saskia at her best—praising the qualities of a heroine that all women should strive to have, or keep if they have them. I wrote these lines to make Saskia be like a statue of Psyche or Demeter. The masculine sculptor doesn’t see rock when he carves Aphrodite. He sees before him the carving of the perfect feminine creature.
I was creating my ‘perfect feminine creature’ when I wrote about Saskia. She is completely wild and fearless in her dramatic performance of life. She knows that she may only have one life to live and that most people in her society wish to see her fail in her dream of living a fulfilled life. For if a woman acts and lives exactly as society wants her to live, she will never be truly happy, never fulfilled. For societies do not want girls and women to wander.
I am surprised that this quote became so famous, since I didn’t spend more than a few seconds writing it. It was written merely as three sentences in a novel. I didn’t write it to be a solitary poem. This quote that touches so many people is no more than an arrangement of twenty-four words in a book of three-hundred pages.
What touches me the most is when fans send me photos of tattoos they’ve had done of this quote—either a few words from it or the whole quote. The fact that these wonderful souls are willing to guard words that I’ve written on their precious skin for the rest of their lives makes me feel that what I am writing is worth something and not nothing. When I get depressed and feel the despair that haunts me from time to time, and cripples me, I look at these photos of these tattoos, and it helps me to think that what I am doing is important to some people, and it helps me to start writing again.
Am I a masculine version of the wanderess in this quote? Of course I am! I am wild and fearless, I am a wanderer who belongs to no city and to nobody; I am a drop of free water. I am—to cite one of my other quotes—“free as a bird. King of the world and laughing!
”
”
Roman Payne (The Wanderess)
“
If you went to England, it was all hand-made trousers. If you went to France, it was cheese from cows who munched away on one particular hillside. How could you possibly arrange plenty for everyone on that sort of small-scale, old-fashioned footing? You couldn’t.
But the Americans got it. Of all the capitalist countries, it was America that hand-most nearly trying to do the same thing as the Soviet Union. They shared the Soviet insight. They understood that whittling and hand-stitching belonged to the past. They understood that if ordinary people were to live the way the kings and merchants of old had lived, what would be required was a new kind of luxury, an ordinary luxury built up from goods turned out by the million so that everybody could have one.
”
”
Francis Spufford (Red Plenty: Inside the Fifties’ Soviet Dream)
“
Instead, as the crystal splinters entered Hornwrack's brain, he experienced two curious dreams of the Low City, coming so quickly one after the other that they seemed simultaneous. In the first, long shadows moved across the ceiling frescoes of the Bistro Californium, beneath which Lord Mooncarrot's clique awaited his return to make a fourth at dice. Footsteps sounded on the threshold. The women hooded their eyes and smiled, or else stifled a yawn, raising dove-grey gloves to their blue, phthisic lips. Viriconium, with all her narcissistic intimacies and equivocal invitations welcomed him again. He had hated that city, yet now it was his past and it was he had to regret...The second of these visions was of the Rue Sepile. It was dawn, in summer. Horse-chestnut flowers bobbed like white wax candles above the deserted pavements. An oblique light struck into the street - so that its long and normally profitless perspective seemed to lead straight into the heart of a younger, more ingenuous city - and fell across the fronts of the houses where he had once lived, warming up the rotten brick and imparting to it a not unpleasant pinkish colour. Up at the second-floor casement window a boy was busy with the bright red geraniums arranged along the outer still in lumpen terra-cotta pots. He looked down at Hornwrack and smiled. Before Hornwrack could speak he drew down the lower casement and turned away. The glass which no separated them reflected the morning sunlight in a silent explosion; and Hornwrack, dazzled mistaking the light for the smile, suddenly imagined an incandescence which would melt all those old streets!
Rue Sepile; the Avenue of Children; Margery Fry Court: all melted down! All the shabby dependencies of the Plaza of Unrealized Time! All slumped, sank into themselves, eroded away until nothing was left in his field of vision but an unbearable white sky above and the bright clustered points of the chestnut leaves below - and then only a depthless opacity, behind which he could detect the beat of his own blood, the vitreous humour of the eye. He imagined the old encrusted brick flowing, the glass cracking and melting from its frames even as they shrivelled awake, the sheds of paints flaring green and gold, the geraniums toppling in flames to nothing, not even white ash, under this weight of light! All had winked away like reflections in a jar of water glass, and only the medium remained, bright, viscid, vacant. He had a sense of the intolerable briefness of matter, its desperate signalling and touching, its fall; and simultaneously one of its unendurable durability
He thought, Something lies behind all the realities of the universe and is replacing them here, something less solid and more permanent. Then the world stopped haunting him forever.
”
”
M. John Harrison (Viriconium (Viriconium, #1-4))
“
The Sun King had dinner each night alone. He chose from forty dishes, served on gold and silver plate. It took a staggering 498 people to prepare each meal. He was rich because he consumed the work of other people, mainly in the form of their services. He was rich because other people did things for him. At that time, the average French family would have prepared and consumed its own meals as well as paid tax to support his servants in the palace. So it is not hard to conclude that Louis XIV was rich because others were poor.
But what about today? Consider that you are an average person, say a woman of 35, living in, for the sake of argument, Paris and earning the median wage, with a working husband and two children. You are far from poor, but in relative terms, you are immeasurably poorer than Louis was. Where he was the richest of the rich in the world’s richest city, you have no servants, no palace, no carriage, no kingdom. As you toil home from work on the crowded Metro, stopping at the shop on the way to buy a ready meal for four, you might be thinking that Louis XIV’s dining arrangements were way beyond your reach. And yet consider this. The cornucopia that greets you as you enter the supermarket dwarfs anything that Louis XIV ever experienced (and it is probably less likely to contain salmonella). You can buy a fresh, frozen, tinned, smoked or pre-prepared meal made with beef, chicken, pork, lamb, fish, prawns, scallops, eggs, potatoes, beans, carrots, cabbage, aubergine, kumquats, celeriac, okra, seven kinds of lettuce, cooked in olive, walnut, sunflower or peanut oil and flavoured with cilantro, turmeric, basil or rosemary … You may have no chefs, but you can decide on a whim to choose between scores of nearby bistros, or Italian, Chinese, Japanese or Indian restaurants, in each of which a team of skilled chefs is waiting to serve your family at less than an hour’s notice. Think of this: never before this generation has the average person been able to afford to have somebody else prepare his meals.
You employ no tailor, but you can browse the internet and instantly order from an almost infinite range of excellent, affordable clothes of cotton, silk, linen, wool and nylon made up for you in factories all over Asia. You have no carriage, but you can buy a ticket which will summon the services of a skilled pilot of a budget airline to fly you to one of hundreds of destinations that Louis never dreamed of seeing. You have no woodcutters to bring you logs for the fire, but the operators of gas rigs in Russia are clamouring to bring you clean central heating. You have no wick-trimming footman, but your light switch gives you the instant and brilliant produce of hardworking people at a grid of distant nuclear power stations. You have no runner to send messages, but even now a repairman is climbing a mobile-phone mast somewhere in the world to make sure it is working properly just in case you need to call that cell. You have no private apothecary, but your local pharmacy supplies you with the handiwork of many thousands of chemists, engineers and logistics experts. You have no government ministers, but diligent reporters are even now standing ready to tell you about a film star’s divorce if you will only switch to their channel or log on to their blogs.
My point is that you have far, far more than 498 servants at your immediate beck and call. Of course, unlike the Sun King’s servants, these people work for many other people too, but from your perspective what is the difference? That is the magic that exchange and specialisation have wrought for the human species.
”
”
Matt Ridley (The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves)
“
They dream of the happiness of stretching out one's legs and of the relief one feels after going to the toilet. In Orotukan the earth thaws only in the summer and only to the depth of three feet—and only then can they bury the bones of those who died during the winter. And you have the right to arrange your own life under the blue sky and the hot sun, to get a drink of water, to stretch, to travel wherever you like without a convoy [escort]. So what's this about unwiped feet? And what's this about a mother-in-law? What about the main thing in life, all its riddles? If you want, I'll spell it out for you right now. Do not pursue what is illusory—property and position: all that is gained at the expense of your nerves decade after decade, and is confiscated in one fell night. Live with a steady superiority over life—don't be afraid of misfortune, and do not yearn after happiness; it is, after all, all the same: the bitter doesn't last forever, and the sweet never fills the cup to overflowing. It is enough if you don't freeze in the cold and if thirst and hunger don't claw at your insides. If your back isn't broken, if your feet can walk, if both arms can bend, if both eyes see, if both ears hear, then whom should you envy? And why? Our envy of others devours us most of all. Rub your eyes and purify your heart—and prize above all else in the world those who love you and who wish you well. Do not hurt them or scold them, and never part from any of them in anger; after all, you simply do not know: it may be your last act before your arrest, and that will be how you are imprinted in their memory!
”
”
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (The Gulag Archipelago)
“
But surpassing all stupendous inventions, what sublimity of mind was his who dreamed of finding means to communicate his deepest thoughts to any other person, though distant by mighty intervals of place and time! Of talking with those who are in India; of speaking to those who are not yet born and will not be born for a thousand or ten thousand years; and with what facility, by the different arrangements of twenty characters upon a page!
”
”
Galileo Galilei (Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems: Ptolemaic and Copernican)
“
You'll be staying in your old room.'
As if she had any sort of claim on this place. On anywhere at all.
He went on, 'My room's a level above that.'
'Why would I need to know that?' The words snapped out of her.
He began walking toward the glass doors that led into the mountain's interior. 'In case you have a bad dream and need someone to read you a story,' he drawled, a half smile dancing on his face. 'Maybe one of those smutty books you like so much.
”
”
Sarah J. Maas (A Court of Silver Flames (A Court of Thorns and Roses, #4))
“
REINHOLD JOBS. Wisconsin-born Coast Guard seaman who, with his wife, Clara, adopted Steve in 1955. REED JOBS. Oldest child of Steve Jobs and Laurene Powell. RON JOHNSON. Hired by Jobs in 2000 to develop Apple’s stores. JEFFREY KATZENBERG. Head of Disney Studios, clashed with Eisner and resigned in 1994 to cofound DreamWorks SKG. ALAN KAY. Creative and colorful computer pioneer who envisioned early personal computers, helped arrange Jobs’s Xerox PARC visit and his purchase of Pixar. DANIEL KOTTKE. Jobs’s closest friend at Reed, fellow pilgrim to India, early Apple employee. JOHN LASSETER. Cofounder and creative force at Pixar. DAN’L LEWIN. Marketing exec with Jobs at Apple and then NeXT. MIKE MARKKULA. First big Apple investor and chairman, a father figure to Jobs. REGIS MCKENNA. Publicity whiz who guided Jobs early on and remained a trusted advisor. MIKE MURRAY. Early Macintosh marketing director. PAUL OTELLINI. CEO of Intel who helped switch the Macintosh to Intel chips but did not get the iPhone business. LAURENE POWELL. Savvy and good-humored Penn graduate, went to Goldman Sachs and then Stanford Business School, married Steve Jobs in 1991. GEORGE RILEY. Jobs’s Memphis-born friend and lawyer. ARTHUR ROCK. Legendary tech investor, early Apple board member, Jobs’s father figure. JONATHAN “RUBY” RUBINSTEIN. Worked with Jobs at NeXT, became chief hardware engineer at Apple in 1997. MIKE SCOTT. Brought in by Markkula to be Apple’s president in 1977 to try to manage Jobs.
”
”
Walter Isaacson (Steve Jobs)
“
Holy One, there is something I wanted to tell you, but there have been errands to run, bills to pay, arrangements to make, meetings to attend, friends to entertain, washing to do . . . and I forget what it is I wanted to say to you, and mostly I forget what I’m about or why. O God, don’t forget me, please, for the sake of Jesus Christ. Eternal One, there is something I wanted to tell you, but my mind races with worrying and watching, with weighing and planning, with rutted slights and pothole grievances, with leaky dreams and leaky plumbing and leaky relationships I keep trying to plug up; and my attention is preoccupied with loneliness, with doubt, and with things I covet; and I forget what it is I want to say to you, and how to say it honestly or how to do much of anything. O God, don’t forget me, please, for the sake of Jesus Christ. Almighty One, there is something I wanted to ask you, but I stumble along the edge of a nameless rage, haunted by a hundred floating fears of terrorists of all kinds, of losing my job, of failing, of getting sick and old, having loved ones die, of dying . . . I forget what the real question is that I wanted to ask, and I forget to listen anyway because you seem unreal and far away, and I forget what it is I have forgotten. O God, don’t forget me, please, for the sake of Jesus Christ . . . O Father . . . in Heaven, perhaps you’ve already heard what I wanted to tell you. What I wanted to ask is forgive me, heal me, increase my courage, please. Renew in me a little of love and faith, and a sense of confidence, and a vision of what it might mean to live as though you were real, and I mattered, and everyone was sister and brother. What I wanted to ask in my blundering way is don’t give up on me, don’t become too sad about me, but laugh with me, and try again with me, and I will with you, too. What I wanted to ask is for peace enough to want and work for more, for joy enough to share, and for awareness that is keen enough to sense your presence here, now, there, then, always.27
”
”
Tyler Staton (Praying Like Monks, Living Like Fools: An Invitation to the Wonder and Mystery of Prayer)
“
There were days, weeks, and months when I hated politics. And there were moments when the beauty of this country and its people so overwhelmed me that I couldn’t speak. Then it was over. Even if you see it coming, even as your final weeks are filled with emotional good-byes, the day itself is still a blur. A hand goes on a Bible; an oath gets repeated. One president’s furniture gets carried out while another’s comes in. Closets are emptied and refilled in the span of a few hours. Just like that, there are new heads on new pillows—new temperaments, new dreams. And when it ends, when you walk out the door that last time from the world’s most famous address, you’re left in many ways to find yourself again. So let me start here, with a small thing that happened not long ago. I was at home in the redbrick house that my family recently moved into. Our new house sits about two miles from our old house, on a quiet neighborhood street. We’re still settling in. In the family room, our furniture is arranged the same way it was in the White House. We’ve got mementos around the house that remind us it was all real—photos of our family time at Camp David, handmade pots given to me by Native American students, a book signed by Nelson Mandela. What was strange about this night was that everyone was gone. Barack was traveling. Sasha was out with friends. Malia’s been living and working in New York, finishing out her gap year before college. It was just me, our two dogs, and a silent, empty house like I haven’t known in eight years.
”
”
Michelle Obama (Becoming)
“
Then my mother begins to dance, re-arranging
this dream. Her love
is difficult; loving her is simple as putting raspberries
in my mouth.
On my brother’s head: not a single
gray hair, he is singing to his twelve-month-old son.
And my father is singing
to his six-year-old silence.
This is how we live on earth, a flock of sparrows.
The darkness, a magician, finds quarters
behind our ears. We don't know what life is,
who makes it, the reality is thick
with longing. We put it up to our lips
and drink.
”
”
Ilya Kaminsky (Dancing in Odessa)
“
She was the first close friend who I felt like I’d really chosen. We weren’t in each other’s lives because of any obligation to the past or convenience of the present. We had no shared history and we had no reason to spend all our time to gether. But we did. Our friendship intensified as all our friends had children – she, like me, was unconvinced about having kids. And she, like me, found herself in a relationship in her early thirties where they weren’t specifically working towards starting a family.
By the time I was thirty-four, Sarah was my only good friend who hadn’t had a baby. Every time there was another pregnancy announcement from a friend, I’d just text the words ‘And another one!’ and she’d know what I meant.
She became the person I spent most of my free time with other than Andy, because she was the only friend who had any free time. She could meet me for a drink without planning it a month in advance. Our friendship made me feel liberated as well as safe. I looked at her life choices with no sympathy or concern for her. If I could admire her decision to remain child-free, I felt encouraged to admire my own. She made me feel normal. As long as I had our friendship, I wasn’t alone and I had reason to believe I was on the right track.
We arranged to meet for dinner in Soho after work on a Friday. The waiter took our drinks order and I asked for our usual – two Dirty Vodka Martinis.
‘Er, not for me,’ she said. ‘A sparkling water, thank you.’ I was ready to make a joke about her uncharacteristic abstinence, which she sensed, so as soon as the waiter left she said: ‘I’m pregnant.’
I didn’t know what to say. I can’t imagine the expression on my face was particularly enthusiastic, but I couldn’t help it – I was shocked and felt an unwarranted but intense sense of betrayal. In a delayed reaction, I stood up and went to her side of the table to hug her, unable to find words of congratulations. I asked what had made her change her mind and she spoke in vagaries about it ‘just being the right time’ and wouldn’t elaborate any further and give me an answer. And I needed an answer. I needed an answer more than anything that night. I needed to know whether she’d had a realization that I hadn’t and, if so, I wanted to know how to get it.
When I woke up the next day, I realized the feeling I was experiencing was not anger or jealousy or bitterness – it was grief. I had no one left. They’d all gone. Of course, they hadn’t really gone, they were still my friends and I still loved them. But huge parts of them had disappeared and there was nothing they could do to change that. Unless I joined them in their spaces, on their schedules, with their families, I would barely see them.
And I started dreaming of another life, one completely removed from all of it. No more children’s birthday parties, no more christenings, no more barbecues in the suburbs. A life I hadn’t ever seriously contemplated before. I started dreaming of what it would be like to start all over again. Because as long as I was here in the only London I knew – middle-class London, corporate London, mid-thirties London, married London – I was in their world. And I knew there was a whole other world out there.
”
”
Dolly Alderton (Good Material)
“
We can supplement James’s definitions by saying that this sort of thinking does not tire us, that it leads away from reality into fantasies of the past or future. At this point thinking in verbal form ceases, image piles on image, feeling on feeling,19 and there is an ever-increasing tendency to shuffle things about and arrange them not as they are in reality but as one would like them to be. Naturally enough, the stuff of this thinking which shies away from reality can only be the past with its thousand-and-one memory images. Common speech calls this kind of thinking “dreaming.
”
”
C.G. Jung (Collected Works of C. G. Jung, Volume 5: Symbols of Transformation (The Collected Works of C. G. Jung))
“
So here’s the deal and this is what you get: The penthouse suite with world-commanding views, The banker’s bonus and the private jet, Control and ownership of all the news, An ‘in’ to that exclusive one per cent, Who know the score, who really run the show, With interest on every penny lent And sweeteners for cronies in the know. A straight arrangement between me and you, No hell below or heaven high above, You just admit it, and give me my due, And wake up from this foolish dream of love … But Jesus laughed, ‘You are not what you seem. Love is the waking life, you are the dream.
”
”
Malcolm Guite (The Word in the Wilderness)
“
I am, in large measure, the selfsame prose I write. I unroll myself in sentences and paragraphs, I punctuate myself. In my arranging and rearranging of images I’m like a child using newspaper to dress up as a king, and in the way I create rhythm with a series of words I’m like a lunatic adorning my hair with dried flowers that are still alive in his dreams. And above all I’m calm, like a rag doll that has become conscious of itself and occasionally shakes its head to make the tiny bell on top of its pointed cap (a component part of the same head) produce a sound, the jingling life of a dead man, a feeble notice to Fate.
”
”
Fernando Pessoa (The Book of Disquiet)
“
The inspired principles in the Constitution are the principles of the rule of law which, if preserved, guarantee liberty to every man. These principles are assumed in the Constitution because they had come to be assumed by Americans generally, as they struggled through several generations to find institutional safeguards for the liberty that they prized so highly. Many theoreticians of law and politics have rejected such a tenuous and fragile basis for a nation's freedom. They dream of constitutional arrangements based on clear libertarian principles which would maximize individual liberty whether or not the people understood or supported the basic principles. Their objection does raise the important secondary problem of preserving the liberty we have obtained.
The early Americans themselves recognized the necessity of "public virtue" for the continuing security of their liberty. . . .
The radicals of the left today seek freedom from social and material deprivation through the application of government power. On the right, according to your preferences in political taxonomy, we have either those libertarians who would go far beyond the classically liberal views of the Founding Fathers in restricting the role of government, or those reactionaries who would be willing to invoke arbitrarily the power of government to reshape moral society in their own image. Modern prophets seem to reject both the reactionary and radical left views. And in clearly recognizing a positive role for limited government, they refuse to join the libertarians.
”
”
Noel B. Reynolds
“
The evil stepmother is a fixture in European fairy tales because the stepmother was very much a fixture in early European society–mortality in childbirth was very high, and it wasn’t unusual for a father to suddenly find himself alone with multiple mouths to feed. So he remarried and brought another woman into the house, and eventually they had yet more children, thus changing the power dynamics of inheritance in the household in a way that had very little to do with inherent, archetypal evil and everything to do with social expectation and pressure. What was a woman to do when she remarried into a family and had to act as mother to her husband’s children as well as her own, in a time when economic prosperity was a magical dream for most? Would she think of killing her husband’s children so that her own children might therefore inherit and thrive? [...] Perhaps. Perhaps not. But the fear that stepmothers (or stepfathers) might do this kind of thing was very real, and it was that fear–fed by the socioeconomic pressures felt by the growing urban class–that fed the stories.
We see this also with the stories passed around in France–fairies who swoop in to save the day when women themselves can’t do so; romantic tales of young girls who marry beasts as a balm to those young ladies facing arranged marriages to older, distant dukes. We see this with the removal of fairies and insertion of religion into the German tales. Fairy tales, in short, are not created in a vacuum. As with all stories, they change and bend both with and in response to culture.
”
”
Amanda Leduc (Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space)
“
It’s not that human nature suddenly changed and became egalitarian; men still tried to dominate others when they could get away with it. Rather, people armed with weapons and gossip created what Boehm calls “reverse dominance hierarchies” in which the rank and file band together to dominate and restrain would-be alpha males. (It’s uncannily similar to Marx’s dream of the “dictatorship of the proletariat.”)34 The result is a fragile state of political egalitarianism achieved by cooperation among creatures who are innately predisposed to hierarchical arrangements. It’s a great example of how “innate” refers to the first draft of the mind. The final edition can look quite different, so it’s a mistake to look at today’s hunter-gatherers and say, “See, that’s what human nature really looks like!
”
”
Jonathan Haidt (The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion)
“
There is a musical instrument, one that is in fact little more than a toy, that we in Viron used to call Molpe’s dulcimer. Strings are arranged in a certain way and drawn tight above a chamber of thin wood that swells the sound when they are strummed by the wind. Horn made several for his young siblings before we went into the tunnels; when I made them, I dreamed of making a better one someday, one constructed with all the knowledge and care that a great craftsman would bring to the task, a fitting tribute to Molpe. I have never built it, as you will have guessed already. I have the craft now, perhaps; but I have never had the musical knowledge the task would require, and I never will. If I had built it, it might have sounded something like that, because I would have made it sound as much like a human voice as I could; and if I were the great craftsman I once dreamed of becoming, I would have come very near—and yet not near enough. That is how it was with the Mother’s voice. It was lovely and uncanny, like Molpe’s dulcimer; and although it was not in truth very remote as well as I could judge, there was that in it that sounded very far away indeed. I have since thought that the distance was perhaps of time, that we heard a song on that warm, calm evening that was not merely hundreds but thousands of years old, sung as it had been sung when the Short Sun of Blue was yet young, and floating to us across that lonely sea with a pain of loss and longing that my poor words cannot express. No, not even if I could whisper them aloud to you of the future, and certainly not as I am constrained to speak to you now with Oreb’s laboring black wingfeather. Nor with a quill from any other bird that ever flew. *
”
”
Gene Wolfe (On Blue's Waters (The Book of the Short Sun, #1))
“
I saw the power this respect holds in traditional cultures on our family sabbatical to Thailand and Bali. My daughter Caroline studied Balinese dance for two months with a wonderful teacher, and he proposed to stage a farewell recital for her at his school, which is also his home. When we arrived, they set up the stage, got the music ready, and then started to dress Caroline. They took a very long time dressing a six-year-old whose average attention span is about five minutes. First they draped her in a silk sarong, with a beautiful chain around her waist. Then they wrapped embroidered silk fifteen times around her chest. They put on gold armbands and bracelets. They arranged her hair and put golden flowers in it. They put on more makeup than a six-year-old could dream of. Meanwhile, I sat there getting impatient, the proud father eager to take pictures. It was getting dark. “When are they going to finish dressing her and get on with the recital?” Thirty minutes, forty-five minutes. Finally the teacher’s wife came out and took off her own golden necklace and put it around my daughter’s neck. Caroline was thrilled. When I let go of my impatience, I realized what a wonderful thing was happening. In Bali, whether a dancer is six or twenty-six, she is equally honored and respected. She is an artist who performs not for the audience but for the gods. The level of respect that Caroline was given as an artist allowed her to dance beautifully. Imagine how you would feel if you were given that respect as a child. We need to learn respect for ourselves, for one another, to value our children through valuing their bodies, their feelings, their minds. Children may be limited in what they can do, but their spirit isn’t limited.
”
”
Jack Kornfield (Bringing Home the Dharma: Awakening Right Where You Are)
“
Perhaps we may call the dream a façade, but we must remember that the fronts of most houses by no means trick or deceive us, but, on the contrary, follow the plan of the building and often betray its inner arrangement. The "manifest" dream-picture is the dream itself, and contains the "latent" meaning. If I find sugar in the urine, it is sugar, and not a façade that conceals albumen. When Freud speaks of the "dream-façade", he is really speaking, not of the dream itself, but of its obscurity, and in so doing is projecting upon the dream his own lack of understanding. We say that the dream has a false front only because we fail to see into it. We would do better to say that we are dealing with something like a text that is unintelligible, not because it has a facade, but simply because we cannot read it. We do not have to get behind such a text in the first place, but must learn to read it.
”
”
C.G. Jung (Modern Man in Search of a Soul)
“
the citizens of Oran were like the rest of the world, they thought about themselves; in other words, they were humanists: they did not believe in pestilence. A pestilence does not have human dimensions, so people tell themselves that it is unreal, that it is a bad dream which will end. But it does not always end, from one bad dream to the next, it is people who end, humanists first of all because they have not prepared themselves. The people of our town were no more guilty than anyone else, they merely forgot to be modest and thought that everything was still possible for them, which implied that pestilence was impossible. They continued with business, with making arrangements for travel and holding opinions. Why should they have thought about the plague, which negates the future, negates journeys and debate? They considered themselves free and no one will ever be free as long as there is plague, pestilence and famine.
”
”
Albert Camus (The Plague)
“
Don't listen to Hassan i Sabbah," they will tell you. "He wants to take your body and all pleasures of the body away from you. Listen to us. We are serving The Garden of Delights Immortality Cosmic Consciousness The Best Ever In Drug Kicks. And love love love in slop buckets. How does that sound to you boys? Better than Hassan i Sabbah and his cold windy bodiless rock? Right?"
At the immediate risk of finding myself the most unpopular character of all fiction—and history is fiction—I must say this:
"Bring together state of news—Inquire onward from state to doer—Who monopolized Immortality? Who monopolized Cosmic Consciousness? Who monopolized Love Sex and Dream? Who monopolized Life Time and Fortune? Who took from you what is yours? Now they will give it all back? Did they ever give anything away for nothing? Did they ever give any more than they had to give? Did they not always take back what they gave when possible and it always was? Listen: Their Garden Of Delights is a terminal sewer—I have been at some pains to map this area of terminal sewage in the so called pornographic sections of Naked Lunch and Soft Machine—Their Immortality Cosmic Consciousness and Love is second-run grade-B shit—Their drugs are poison designed to beam in Orgasm Death and Nova Ovens—Stay out of the Garden of Delights—It is a man-eating trap that ends in green goo—Throw back their ersatz Immortality—It will fall apart before you can get out of The Big Store—Flush their drug kicks down the drain—They are poisoning and monopolizing the hallucinogen drugs—learn to make it without any chemical corn—All that they offer is a screen to cover retreat from the colony they have so disgracefully mismanaged. To cover travel arrangements so they will never have to pay the constituents they have betrayed and sold out. Once these arrangements are complete they will blow the place up behind them.
”
”
William S. Burroughs (Nova Express (The Nova Trilogy, #2))
“
History Eraser
I got drunk and fell asleep atop the sheets but luckily i left the heater on.
And in my dreams i wrote the best song that i've ever written...can't remember how it goes.
I stayed drunk and fell awake and i was cycling on a plane and far away i heard you say you liked me.
We drifted to a party -- cool. The people went to arty school. They made their paints by mixing acid wash and lemonade
In my brain I re-arrange the letters on the page to spell your name
I found an ezra pound and made a bet that if i found a cigarette i'd drop it all and marry you.
Just then a song comes on: "you can't always get what you want" -- the rolling stones, oh woe is we, the irony!
The stones became the moss and once all inhibitions lost, the hipsters made a mission to the farm.
We drove by tractor there, the yellow straw replaced our hair, we laced the dairy river with the cream of sweet vermouth.
In my brain I re-arrange the letters on the page to spell your name
You said "we only live once" so we touched a little tongue, and instantly i wanted to...
I lost my train of thought and jumped aboard the Epping as the doors were slowly closing on the world.
I touched on and off and rubbed my arm up against yours and still the inspector inspected me.
The lady in the roof was living proof that nothing really ever is exactly as it seems.
In my brain I re-arrange the letters on the page to spell your name
We caught the river boat downstream and ended up beside a team of angry footballers.
I fed the ducks some krill then we were sucked against our will into the welcome doors of the casino.
We drank green margaritas, danced with sweet senoritas, and we all went home as winners of a kind.
You said "i guarantee we'll have more fun, drink till the moon becomes the sun, and in the taxi home i'll sing you a triffids song!"
In my brain I re-arrange the letters on the page to spell your name
”
”
Courtney Barnett
“
There is no doubt that the shock of an... emotional experience is often needed to make people wake up and pay attention to what they are doing. There's a famous case of the 13th century Spanish Hidalgo, Raimon Lull, who finally (after a long chase) succeeded in meeting the lady he admired at a secret rendezvous. She silently opened her dress and showed him her breast, rotten with cancer. The shock changed Lull's life; he eventually became an eminent Theologian and one of the Church's greatest missionaries. In the case of such a sudden change one can often prove that an archetype has been at work for a long time in the unconscious, skillfully arranging circumstances that will lead to the crisis... such experiences seem to show that archetypal forms are not just static patterns. They are Dynamic factors that manifest themselves in impulses, just as spontaneously as the instincts. Certain dreams, visions, or thoughts can suddenly appear; and however carefully one investigates, one cannot find out what causes them. This does not mean that they have no cause; they certainly have. But it is so remote or obscure that one cannot see what it is.
”
”
C.G. Jung (Man and His Symbols)
“
It takes the better part of those months for Herr Thiessen to complete the clock. He works on little else, though the sum of money involved makes the arrangement more than manageable. Weeks are spent on the design and the mechanics. He hires an assistant to complete some of the basic woodwork, but he takes care of all the details himself. Herr Thiessen loves details and he loves a challenge. He balances the entire design on that one specific word Mr. Barris used. Dreamlike.
The finished clock is resplendent. At first glance it is simply a clock, a rather large black clock with a white face and a silver pendulum. Well crafted, obviously, with intricately carved woodwork edges and a perfectly painted face, but just a clock.
But that is before it is wound. Before it begins to tick, the pendulum swinging steadily and evenly. Then, then it becomes something else.
The changes are slow. First, the color changes in the face, shifts from white to grey, and then there are clouds that float across it, disappearing when they reach the opposite side.
Meanwhile, bits of the body of the clock expand and contract, like pieces of a puzzle. As thought clock is falling apart, slowly and gracefully.
All of this takes hours.
The face of the clock becomes a darker grey, and then black, with twinkling stars where the numbers had been previously. The body of the clock, which has been methodically turning itself inside out and expanding, is now entirely subtle shades of white and grey. And it is not just pieces, it is figures and objects, perfectly carved flowers and planets and tiny books with actually paper pages that turn. There is a silver dragon curls around part of the now visible clockwork, a tiny princess in a carved tower who paces in distress awaiting an absent prince. Teapots that our into teacups and minuscule curls of steam that rise from them as the seconds tick. Wrapped presents open. Small cats chase small dogs. An entire game of chess is played.
At the center, where a cuckoo bird would live in a more traditional timepiece, is the juggler. Dressed in harlequin style with a grey mask, he juggles shiny silver balls that correspond to each hour. As the hour chimes, another ball joins the rest until at midnight he juggles twelve balls in a complex pattern.
After midnight the clock begins once more to fold in upon itself. The face lightens and the colds return. The number of juggled balls decreases until the juggler himself vanishes.
By noon it is a clock again, and no longer a dream.
”
”
Erin Morgenstern (The Night Circus)
“
She named the people who embodied these attributes “highly sensitive.” Some of these twenty-seven attributes were familiar from Kagan and others’ work. For example, highly sensitive people tend to be keen observers who look before they leap. They arrange their lives in ways that limit surprises. They’re often sensitive to sights, sounds, smells, pain, coffee. They have difficulty when being observed (at work, say, or performing at a music recital) or judged for general worthiness (dating, job interviews). But there were also new insights. The highly sensitive tend to be philosophical or spiritual in their orientation, rather than materialistic or hedonistic. They dislike small talk. They often describe themselves as creative or intuitive (just as Aron’s husband had described her). They dream vividly, and can often recall their dreams the next day. They love music, nature, art, physical beauty. They feel exceptionally strong emotions—sometimes acute bouts of joy, but also sorrow, melancholy, and fear. Highly sensitive people also process information about their environments—both physical and emotional—unusually deeply. They tend to notice subtleties that others miss—another person’s shift in mood, say, or a lightbulb burning a touch too brightly.
”
”
Susan Cain (Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking)
“
POEM – MY AMAZING
TRAVELS
[My composition in my book Travel Memoirs with Pictures]
My very first trip I still cannot believe
Was planned and executed with such great ease.
My father, an Inspector of Schools, was such a strict man,
He gave in to my wishes when I told him of the plan.
I got my first long vacation while working as a banker
One of my co-workers wanted a travelling partner.
She visited my father and discussed the matter
Arrangements were made without any flutter.
We travelled to New York, Toronto, London, and Germany,
In each of those places, there was somebody,
To guide and protect us and to take us wonderful places,
It was a dream come true at our young ages.
We even visited Holland, which was across the Border.
To drive across from Germany was quite in order.
Memories of great times continue to linger,
I thank God for an understanding father.
That trip in 1968 was the beginning of much more,
I visited many countries afterward I am still in awe.
Barbados, Tobago, St. Maarten, and Buffalo,
Cirencester in the United Kingdom, Miami, and Orlando.
I was accompanied by my husband on many trips.
Sisters, nieces, children, grandchildren, and friends, travelled with me a bit.
Puerto Rico, Los Angeles, New York, and Hialeah,
Curacao, Caracas, Margarita, Virginia, and Anguilla.
We sailed aboard the Creole Queen
On the Mississippi in New Orleans
We traversed the Rockies in Colorado
And walked the streets in Cozumel, Mexico.
We were thrilled to visit the Vatican in Rome,
The Trevi Fountain and the Colosseum.
To explore the countryside in Florence,
And to sail on a Gondola in Venice.
My fridge is decorated with magnets
Souvenirs of all my visits
London, Madrid, Bahamas, Coco Cay, Barcelona.
And the Leaning Tower of Pisa
How can I forget the Spanish Steps in Rome?
Stratford upon Avon, where Shakespeare was born.
CN Tower in Toronto so very high
I thought the elevator would take me to the sky.
Then there was El Poble and Toledo
Noted for Spanish Gold
We travelled on the Euro star.
The scenery was beautiful to behold!
I must not omit Cartagena in Columbia,
Anaheim, Las Vegas, and Catalina,
Key West, Tampa, Fort Lauderdale, and Pembroke Pines,
Places I love to lime.
Of course, I would like to make special mention,
Of two exciting cruises with Royal Caribbean.
Majesty of the Seas and Liberty of the Seas
Two ships which grace the Seas.
Last but not least and best of all
We visited Paris in the fall.
Cologne, Dusseldorf, and Berlin
Amazing places, which made my head, spin.
Copyright@BrendaMohammed
”
”
Brenda C. Mohammed (Travel Memoirs with Pictures)
“
What did E.S. like about dreams?
Their similarity to life and their dissimilarity; their salutary effect on body and soul; their unrestricted choice and arrangement of themes and contents; their bottomless depths and eerie heights; their eroticism; their freedom; their openness to guidance by will and suggestion (a perfumed handkerchief under one's pillow, soft music on the radio or gramophone, etc.); their resemblance to death and their power to confer intimations of eternity; their resemblance to madness without the consequences of madness; their cruelty and their gentleness; their power to pry the deepest secrets out of us; their blissful silence, to which cries are not unknown; their telepathic and spiritist faculty of communication with those dead or far away; their coded language, which we manage to understand and translate; their ability to condense the mythical figures of Icarus, Ahasuerus, Jonah, Noah, etc., into images; their monochrome and polychrome quality; their resemblance to the womb and to the jaws of a shark; their faculty of transforming unknown places, people, and landscapes into known ones, and vice versa; their power to diagnose certain ailments and traumas before it is too late; the difficulty of determining how long they last; the fact that they can be mistaken for reality; their power to preserve images and distant memories; their disrespect for chronology and the classical unities of time and action.
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Danilo Kiš (Hourglass)
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The whitewash of Kingdom of Heaven Kingdom of Heaven is a classic cowboys-and-Indians story in which the Muslims are noble and heroic and the Christians are venal and violent. The script is heavy on modern-day PC clichés and fantasies of Islamic tolerance; brushing aside dhimmi laws and attitudes (of which Ridley Scott has most likely never heard), it invents a peace-and-tolerance group called the “Brotherhood of Muslims, Jews and Christians.” But of course, the Christians spoiled everything. A publicist for the film explained, “They were working together. It was a strong bond until the Knights Templar caused friction between them.” Ah yes, those nasty “Christian extremists.” Kingdom of Heaven was made for those who believe that all the trouble between the Islamic world and the West has been caused by Western imperialism, racism, and colonialism, and that the glorious paradigm of Islamic tolerance, which was once a beacon to the world, could be reestablished if only the wicked white men of America and Europe would be more tolerant. Ridley Scott and his team arranged advance screenings for groups like the Council on American-Islamic Relations, making sure that sensitive Muslim feelings were not hurt. It is a dream movie for the PC establishment in every way except one: It isn’t true. Professor Jonathan Riley-Smith, author of A Short History of the Crusades and one of the world’s leading historians of the period, called the movie “rubbish,” explaining that “it’s not historically accurate at all” as it “depicts the Muslims as sophisticated and civilised, and the Crusaders are all brutes and barbarians. It has nothing to do with reality.” Oh, and “there was never a confraternity of Muslims, Jews and Christians. That is utter nonsense.
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Robert Spencer (The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades))
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In consequence of the inevitably scattered and fragmentary nature of our thinking, which has been mentioned, and of the mixing together of the most heterogeneous representations thus brought about and inherent even in the noblest human mind, we really possess only *half a consciousness*. With this we grope about in the labyrinth of our life and in the obscurity of our investigations; bright moments illuminate our path like flashes of lighting. But what is to be expected generally from heads of which even the wisest is every night the playground of the strangest and most senseless dreams, and has to take up its meditations again on emerging from these dreams? Obviously a consciousness subject to such great limitations is little fitted to explore and fathom the riddle of the world; and to beings of a higher order, whose intellect did not have time as its form, and whose thinking therefore had true completeness and unity, such an endeavor would necessarily appear strange and pitiable. In fact, it is a wonder that we are not completely confused by the extremely heterogeneous mixture of fragments of representations and of ideas of every kind which are constantly crossing one another in our heads, but that we are always able to find our way again, and to adapt and adjust everything. Obviously there must exist a simple thread on which everything is arranged side by side: but what is this? Memory alone is not enough, since it has essential limitations of which I shall shortly speak; moreover, it is extremely imperfect and treacherous. The *logical ego*, or even the *transcendental synthetic unity of apperception*, are expressions and explanations that will not readily serve to make the matter comprehensible; on the contrary, it will occur to many that
“Your wards are deftly wrought, but drive no bolts asunder.”
Kant’s proposition: “The *I think* must accompany all our representations ,” is insufficient; for the “I” is an unknown quantity, in other words, it is itself a mystery and a secret. What gives unity and sequence to consciousness, since by pervading all the representations of consciousness, it is its substratum, its permanent supporter, cannot itself be conditioned by consciousness, and therefore cannot be a representation. On the contrary, it must be the *prius* of consciousness, and the root of the tree of which consciousness is the fruit. This, I say, is the *will*; it alone is unalterable and absolutely identical, and has brought forth consciousness for its own ends. It is therefore the will that gives unity and holds all its representations and ideas together, accompanying them, as it were, like a continuous ground-bass. Without it the intellect would have no more unity of consciousness than has a mirror, in which now one thing now another presents itself in succession, or at most only as much as a convex mirror has, whose rays converge at an imaginary point behind its surface. But it is *the will* alone that is permanent and unchangeable in consciousness. It is the will that holds all ideas and representations together as means to its ends, tinges them with the colour of its character, its mood, and its interest, commands the attention, and holds the thread of motives in its hand. The influence of these motives ultimately puts into action memory and the association of ideas. Fundamentally it is the will that is spoken of whenever “I” occurs in a judgement. Therefore, the will is the true and ultimate point of unity of consciousness, and the bond of all its functions and acts. It does not, however, itself belong to the intellect, but is only its root, origin, and controller.
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Arthur Schopenhauer (The World as Will and Representation, Volume II)
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May I speak with you for a minute, Frank?” He stopped working. “James, Dan. Keep Janie out of trouble.” “Yes, sir.” Both boys gave a salute. Frank’s long legs consumed the expanse, and he met me in the bright sunlight. We rounded the corner of the barn and moved away from its wall, closer to the pigpen. “Is there a problem?” He bent slightly, resting his arms on the top of the rail fence surrounding the sty, one foot propped up on the lower slat. I picked at the jagged edge of a fingernail and cleared my throat. “I’m going home.” “I know.” He looked almost . . . stricken. But it passed. Worried about not having made arrangement yet for the children, I imagined. He cleared his throat, kicked at a clod of dirt. “At the end of the month.” “This morning, actually. I have my train ticket.” Only his jaw moved, the muscle tightening and loosening and tightening again. I paced behind him, reached the other side of the small enclosure, chewed my lip, waited for him to say something. Anything. But the silence closed in around me. I had to get free of it. “I’ve been here long enough. I know that now. You need to be with your family, Frank. You need to sleep in your own bed, be among your own things. The children are comfortable with you again. Besides”—I grabbed the top rail of the pen to hold me steady—“I have my own life to live.” I stared off into the distance, hoping he thought I gazed happily into the life I desired. The quiet boiled between us until his words spat out like a flash of lightning. “Just like that, you’d abandon us?” I whirled to face him. “Just a few days earlier than you promised to send me home, remember?” He shoved his hands into the pockets of his overalls and looked me over as if I were a possum in the bedroom. “They’ve lost their mother. And Adabelle. Now they’ll lose you, too. You don’t think they’ll feel that?” I shook my head, my heart breaking into tiny shards. “They’re young. They’ll take to whoever you bring in as quickly as they took to me.” His face reddened. He stalked toward the barn, then turned and came back, pointing his finger in my face. “Let’s get this straight. I’ve not asked you to leave. You’ve taken this on yourself.” “It’s for the best, Frank. It really is. But . . .” I hesitated. The intensity of his anger made me unsure of my final request. My voice shrank to nearly a whisper. “Will you tell them for me?” His eyebrows arched. He threw back his head and belched a derisive laugh. “You want to leave? Fine. I can’t stop you. But I’m not going to be the one to tell them. You are.
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Anne Mateer (Wings of a Dream)
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Yoel Goldenberg makes exhibitions, photographs, models and media craftsmanship. His works are an examination of ideas, for example, validness and objectivity by utilizing an exhaustive methodology and semi exploratory exactness and by referencing documentaries, 'actuality fiction' and prominent experimental reciprocals. Yoel Goldenberg as of now lives and works in Brooklyn.
By challenging the division between the domain of memory and the domain of experience, Goldenberg formalizes the circumstantial and underlines the procedure of synthesis that is behind the apparently arbitrary works. The manners of thinking, which are probably private, profoundly subjective and unfiltered in their references to dream universes, are much of the time uncovered as collections. His practice gives a valuable arrangement of metaphorical instruments for moving with a pseudo-moderate approach in the realm of execution: these fastidiously arranged works reverberate and resound with pictures winnowed from the fantastical domain of creative energy. By trying different things with aleatoric procedures, Yoel Goldenberg makes work in which an interest with the clarity of substance and an uncompromising demeanor towards calculated and insignificant workmanship can be found. The work is detached and deliberate and a cool and unbiased symbolism is utilized.
His works are highlighting unplanned, unintentional and sudden associations which make it conceivable to overhaul craftsmanship history and, far and away superior, to supplement it. Consolidating random viewpoints lead to astounding analogies. With a theoretical methodology, he ponders the firmly related subjects of file and memory. This regularly brings about an examination of both the human requirement for "definitive" stories and the inquiry whether tales "fictionalize" history. His gathered, changed and own exhibitions are being faced as stylishly versatile, specifically interrelated material for memory and projection. The conceivable appears to be genuine and reality exists, yet it has numerous countenances, as Hanna Arendt refers to from Franz Kafka. By exploring dialect on a meta-level, he tries to approach a wide size of subjects in a multi-layered route, likes to include the viewer in a way that is here and there physical and has faith in the thought of capacity taking after structure in a work.
Goldenberg’s works are straightforwardly a reaction to the encompassing environment and uses regular encounters from the craftsman as a beginning stage. Regularly these are confined occasions that would go unnoticed in their unique connection. By utilizing a regularly developing file of discovered archives to make self-ruling works of art, he retains the convention of recognition workmanship into every day hone. This individual subsequent and recovery of a past custom is vital as a demonstration of reflection. Yoel’s works concentrate on the powerlessness of correspondence which is utilized to picture reality, the endeavor of dialog, the disharmony in the middle of structure and content and the dysfunctions of dialect. To put it plainly, the absence of clear references is key components in the work. With an unobtrusive moderate methodology, he tries to handle dialect. Changed into craftsmanship, dialect turns into an adornment. Right then and there, loads of ambiguities and indistinctnesses, which are intrinsic to the sensation, rise up to the top
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Herbert Goldenberg