Attacking Someone Quotes

Someone who smiles too much with you can sometime frown too much with you at your back.

You never called me back," he said. "I called you so many times and you never called me back." Magnus looked at Alec as if he'd lost his mind. "Your city is under attack," he said. "The wards have been broken, and the streets are full of demons. And you want to know why I haven't called you?" Alec set his jaw in a stubborn line. "I want to know why you haven't called me back." Magnus threw his hands up in the air in a gesture of utter exasperation. Alec noted with interest that when he did it, a few sparks escaped from his fingertips, like fireflies escaping from a jar. "You're an idiot." "Is that why you haven't called me? Because I'm an idiot?" "No." Magnus strode toward him. "I didn't call you because I'm tired of you only wanting me around when you need something. I'm tired of watching you be in love with someone else - someone, incidentally, who will never love you back. Not the way I do." "You love me?" "You stupid Nephilim," Magnus said patiently. "Why else am I here? Why else would I have spent the past few weeks patching up all your moronic friends every time they got hurt? And getting you out of every ridiculous situation you found yourself in? Not to mention helping you win a battle against Valentine. And all completely free of charge!

It's not everyday I get to tell someone I was attacked by a pair of flying reading glasses. Ow" -PUCK

Life was better than he expected with his new Italian family inheritance, and it felt good to take a deep breath without fear of someone attacking him or his family.

A time is coming when men will go mad, and when they see someone who is not mad, they will attack him, saying, 'You are mad; you are not like us.

When you're dodging, you're "afraid of getting hit." When you're attacking, you're "afraid of hitting me." When you're protecting someone, you're "afraid of them dying." It's pathetic! You can't give into fear in a fight! When you're dodging, think "I won't let you hit me!" When you're protecting someone, think "I won't let you die!" When you're attacking, think "I will cut you!" --Urahara Kisuke

I had never been this mad at her before. It was one thing to be attacked by someone you hated, but this was something else. This was the kind of hurt that could only be inflicted by someone you loved, who you thought loved you. It was sort of like being stabbed from the inside out.

A good person? Well… I don’t really like that term. Because to me, it just seems to mean someone who’s good for you. And I don’t think there’s any one person who’s good for everyone." --Armin Arlert

I didn't expect a knife, though. Is it the one missing from the kitchen?" "Did Rand report it?" I felt betrayed. Why hadn't he just asked for it back? "No. It just makes sense to keep track of large kitchen knives, so when one goes missing you're not surprised when someone attacks you with it.

When you notice someone does something toxic the first time, don't wait for the second time before you address it or cut them off. Many survivors are used to the "wait and see" tactic which only leaves them vulnerable to a second attack. As your boundaries get stronger, the wait time gets shorter. You never have justify your intuition.

What do you think?" shouted Razumihin, louder than ever, "you think I am attacking them for talking nonsense? Not a bit! I like them to talk nonsense. That's man's one privilege over all creation. Through error you come to the truth! I am a man because I err! You never reach any truth without making fourteen mistakes and very likely a hundred and fourteen. And a fine thing, too, in its way; but we can't even make mistakes on our own account! Talk nonsense, but talk your own nonsense, and I'll kiss you for it. To go wrong in one's own way is better than to go right in someone else's. In the first case you are a man, in the second you're no better than a bird. Truth won't escape you, but life can be cramped. There have been examples. And what are we doing now? In science, development, thought, invention, ideals, aims, liberalism, judgment, experience and everything, everything, everything, we are still in the preparatory class at school. We prefer to live on other people's ideas, it's what we are used to! Am I right, am I right?" cried Razumihin, pressing and shaking the two ladies' hands.

I keep warning and warning, and nobody seems willing to listen. One of these days someone is going to wake up to the fact that I'm serious when I say never to attack my sister without looking over your shoulder for me. (Rhoan)

I always knew there was no one who is going to accept my flaws and understand my brokenness.And i knew it very well that nobody would hold my hand when the wind of darkness overcome my life so i just pushed them,i pushed them all away.

Males--they've all trained against each other. They expect attacks to certain zones on their bodies and from someone who's used to relying on upper-body strength. And they always, always underestimate women.

That no one dies of migraine seems to someone deep in an attack as an ambiguous blessing.

You see!" said a strained voice. Tonks was glaring at Lupin. "She still wants to marry him, even though he's been bitten! She doesn't care!" "It's different," said Lupin, barely moving his lips and looking suddenly tense. "Bill will not be a full werewolf. The cases are completely-" "But I don't care either, I don't care!" said Tonks, seizing the front of Lupin's robes and shaking them. "I've told you a million times...." And the meaning of Tonk's Patronus and her mouse-colored hair, and the reason she had come running to find Dumbledore when she had heard a rumor someone had been attacked by Greyback, all suddenly became clear to Harry; it had not been Sirius that Tonks had fallen in love with after all. "And I've told you a million times," said Lupin, refusing to meet her eyes, staring at the floor, "that I am too old for you, too poor....too dangerous...." "I've said all along you're taking a ridiculous line on this, Remus," said Mrs. Weasley over Fleur's shoulder as she patted her on the back. "I am not being ridiculous," said Lupin steadily. "Tonks deserves somebody young and whole." "But she wants you," said Mr. Weasley, with a small smile. "And after all, Remus, young and whole men do not necessarily remain so." He gestured sadly at his son, lying between them. "This is....not the moment to discuss it," said Lupin, avoiding everybody's eyes as he looked around distractedly. "Dumbledore is dead...." "Dumbledore would have been happier than anybody to think that there was a little more love in the world," said Professor McGonagall curtly...

You know, when I first met Gansey,I couldn't figure out why he was friends with someone like Ronan. Gansey was always in class, always getting stuff done, always a teacher's pet. And here was Ronan, like a heart attack that never stopped.

Terrorist', noun: 1. Someone my government tells me is a terrorist; 2. Someone my President decides to kill.

Well," he said, "I don't believe that either." "Believe what? That I messed up? Why not?" "Weren't you just listening? I saw you in Spokane. Someone like you doesn't mess up freeze." I was about to give him the same line I had given the guardians, that killing Strigoi didn't make me invincible, but he cut me off: "Plus I saw your face out there." "Out.... on the quad?" "Yeah," several more quite moments passed. "I don't know what happened, but the way you looked...that wasn't the look of someone trying to get back at a person. It wasn't the look of someone blanking out of Alto's attack either. It was something different...I don't know. But you were completely consumed by something else—and honestly? Your expression? Kind of scary." "Yet...you aren't giving me a hard time over that either." "Not my business. If it was big enough to take you over like that, then it must be serious. But if push comes to shove, I feel safe with you, Rose. I know you'd protect me if there really was a Strigoi there." He yawned. "Okay. Now that I have bared my soul, can we please go to bed? Maybe you don't need beauty sleep, but some of us aren't so lucky.

But all I feel is impatience, fury for the opposition I anticipate and the lies I'm going to have to tell to make it happen, and frustration that I can't even take a walk without them sending someone to hover. Attack me," she said. "I beg your pardon, Lady Queen?" "You should attack me, and we'll see what he does. He's probably quite bored--it'll be a relief to him." "Mightn't he run me through with his sword?" "Oh." Bitterblue chuckled. "Yes, I suppose he might. That would be a shame." "I'm gratified that you think so," said Giddon dryly.

I'm so disappointed, Ichigo, so very disappointed. Sadly, your sword exhibits only fear. When you counter, it's because you fear being killed. When you attack, you fear killing. And when you protect someone, you fear you could let them die. At this point, the only thing your sword speaks is sensless fright, and that's not good. What you don't need in battle is fear. Nothing will come of it. When you counter, you don't let them cut you. When you protect someone, you don't let them die. And when you attack, you kill." -Kisuke Urahara (Bleach)

Though I know that he had something to do with the attack simulation, and with all those deaths, I find it difficult to pair those actions with the man I see in front of me. I wonder if this is how it is with all evil men, that to someone, they look just like good men, talk like good men, are just as likeable as good men.

If, however, you take a moment to observe how you actually feel immediately after you criticise someone, you'll notice that you will feel a little deflated and ashamed, almost like you're the one who has been attacked. The reason this is true is that when we criticise, it's a statement to the world and to ourselves, "I have a need to be critical." This isn't something we are usually proud to admit.

Separate yourself from these insecurities in life, then NEVER support anyone that will attack someone else for the way they look

Osama, baah!" Bashir roared. "Osama is not a product of Pakistan or Afghanistan. He is a creation of America. Thanks to America, Osama is in every home. As a military man, I know you can never fight and win against someone who can shoot at you once and then run off and hide while you have to remain eternally on guard. You have to attack the source of your enemy's strength. In America's case, that's not Osama or Saddam or anyone else. The enemy is ignorance. That only way to defeat it is to build relationships with these people, to draw them into the modern world with education and business. Otherwise the fight will go on forever.

When someone calls you a racist, sexist, bigot, homophobe because you happen to disagree with them about tax policy or same-sex marriage or abortion, that’s bullying. When someone slanders you because you happen to disagree with them about global warming or the government shutdown, that’s bullying. When someone labels you a bad human being because they disagree with you, they are bullying you. They are attacking your character without justification. That’s nasty. In fact, it makes them nasty.

Being a teenager and figuring out who you are is hard enough without someone attacking you

You know, when I first met Gansey, I couldn’t figure out why he was friends with someone like Ronan. Gansey was always in class, always getting stuff done, always a teacher’s pet. And here was Ronan, like a heart attack that never stopped. I knew I couldn’t complain, ’cause I hadn’t come first. Ronan had. But one day, he’d done some stupid shit I don’t even remember, and I just couldn’t take it. And I asked why Gansey was even friends with him if he was such an asshole all the time. And I remember Gansey told me that Ronan always told the truth, and the truth was the most important thing.

[W]hen someone finds himself quite unjustly attacked and hated on all sides, there is no need for such a person to feel dismayed by misfortune. See how Fortune, who has harmed many a one, is so inconstant, for God, Who opposes all wrong deeds, raises up those in whom hope dwells.

If someone insulted my biceps, I wouldn’t attack him,” Dalinar said. “I’d refer him to a physician, because obviously something is wrong with his eyes.

When you're having an asthma attack, you don't have any breath. When you don't have any breath, it's hard to speak. You're limited by the amount of air you can spend from your lungs. That's not much, something between three to six words. It gives the word a meaning. You're searching through the piles of words in your head, picking the most important ones. And they have a cost. It's not like the healthy people that take out every word that has accumulated in their head like garbage. When someone, while having an asthma attack, says "I love you" or "I really love you", there's a difference. A word difference. And a word is a lot, because that word could have been "sit", "Ventolin" or even "ambulance".

Boast of Quietness Writings of light assault the darkness, more prodigious than meteors. The tall unknowable city takes over the countryside. Sure of my life and death, I observe the ambitious and would like to understand them. Their day is greedy as a lariat in the air. Their night is a rest from the rage within steel, quick to attack. They speak of humanity. My humanity is in feeling we are all voices of that same poverty. They speak of homeland. My homeland is the rhythm of a guitar, a few portraits, an old sword, the willow grove's visible prayer as evening falls. Time is living me. More silent than my shadow, I pass through the loftily covetous multitude. They are indispensable, singular, worthy of tomorrow. My name is someone and anyone. I walk slowly, like one who comes from so far away he doesn't expect to arrive.

Watching someone have a panic attack was like looking in the eyes of someone trapped behind glass, drowning right in front of you.

Whenever we are attacked, people are willing to give up someone else's liberties for their own security.

...she's leaving now. ... Janis attacks the back door of the school gym and finds herself in a heavy cloud of smoke. She realizes she's found the Goths' hangout. Who knew? "Oof," someone says. She keeps walking, muttering, "sorry" to whomever it was she hit with the flying door. *** Cabel: ... That was the Goth stage where I decided I'd never get the girl of my dreams because of my scars. Not to mention the hairstyle. (pause) But then she slammed a door handle into my gut. And, when a girl does that to a boy, it means she likes him.

If you were sitting quietly on your couch, waiting for your girlfriend to come back inside so you could finish watching your movie, and while you were waiting, someone called you up and said “I’ll give you a million dollars if you can guess what’s going to happen next,” you absolutely would not guess “I am going to be brutally and unexpectedly attacked by a goose in my own home.” Even if you had a hundred guesses, you would not guess that.

Causing any damage or harm to one party in order to help another party is not justice, and likewise, attacking all feminine conduct [in order to warn men away from individual women who are deceitful] is contrary to the truth, just as I will show you with a hypothetical case. Let us suppose they did this intending to draw fools away from foolishness. It would be as if I attacked fire -- a very good and necessary element nevertheless -- because some people burnt themselves, or water because someone drowned. The same can be said of all good things which can be used well or used badly. But one must not attack them if fools abuse them.

Christ, Reaper, with your bald head and all that soot, you look like a mannequin someone attacked with a blowtorch

I can't be yours forever, Mab," I told her, the words flying into my mouth as if by magic. "I already belong to someone else. I belong to Alice!

It’s a privilege to have someone trust you enough to show you those pieces of themselves, the most vulnerable and tender, the least polished. It’s a show of trust to let you see them first thing in the morning, in the middle of a panic attack, right after they’ve cried. To give you a shaky smile after a messy fight. To come back to you again and again with their heart in their hands.

ABUSIVE MEN COME in every personality type, arise from good childhoods and bad ones, are macho men or gentle, “liberated” men. No psychological test can distinguish an abusive man from a respectful one. Abusiveness is not a product of a man’s emotional injuries or of deficits in his skills. In reality, abuse springs from a man’s early cultural training, his key male role models, and his peer influences. In other words, abuse is a problem of values, not of psychology. When someone challenges an abuser’s attitudes and beliefs, he tends to reveal the contemptuous and insulting personality that normally stays hidden, reserved for private attacks on his partner. An abuser tries to keep everybody—his partner, his therapist, his friends and relatives—focused on how he feels, so that they won’t focus on how he thinks, perhaps because on some level he is aware that if you grasp the true nature of his problem, you will begin to escape his domination.

When I feel threatened, vulnerable, or insecure, whether it from simply walking into a room of unknown people, meeting someone for the first time, an unexpected or expected confrontation, or doing something new, I affirm in my mind (over and over): There is no danger, there is no threat. From there, the discomfort lessens and I become open for discovery and adventure.

Attacking someone without warning for something they did weeks before? Check. Ready to turn a simple breed dispute into something far uglier with the razor blade she kept on her at all times? Check. Using blood as a weapon of rudeness? Check. Threatening death? Check. Attacking a helpful stranger or friend? Check. Kissing a helpful stranger or friend without warning or permission? Check. Yeah, it only took Gwen six weeks to become her mother.

The worse thing you can do in a fight is stop moving. When someone attacks, they create force, movement, momentum, but you'll be okay as long as you can see and feel the direction of that force and travel with it.

I had a dream about you last night. We started a shoe company, and a competitor (probably someone from Nike) attacked you, so I had to stab them in the throat with a shoelace. I guess it would have been better to use that shoelace to strangle them. 


A woman who can eat a real bruschetta is a woman you can love and who can love you. Someone who pushes the thing away because it's messy is never going to cackle at you toothlessly across the living room of your retirement cottage or drag you back from your sixth heart attack by sheer furious affection. Never happen. You need a woman who isn't afraid of a faceful of olive oil for that.

One exits... Another enters. The stage always needs someone in this role... When one actor leaves... Another one jumps in and takes his place. The world will always have people like us. Break a leg, Hange.

Men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at the most can defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. As a result, their neighbor is for them not only a potential helper or sexual object, but also someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him. Homo homini lupus [man is wolf to man]. Who, in the face of all his experience of life and of history, will have the courage to dispute this assertion?

It’s easy to forgive people who have never done anything to make us angry. People who do make us angry, however, are our most important teachers. They indicate the limits to our capacity for forgiveness. “Holding grievances is an attack on God’s plan for salvation.” The decision to let go our grievances against other people is the decision to see ourselves as we truly are, because any darkness we let blind us to another’s perfection also blinds us to our own. It can be very hard to let go of your perception of someone’s guilt when you know that by every standard of ethics, morality, or integrity, you’re right to find fault with them. But the Course asks, “Do you prefer that you be right or happy?

He knew he tended toward gloom. It made him consider blood poisoning and heart attacks when someone else might see a touch of indigestion. Those carefully considered worst-case scenarios made him a good doctor, but they also made him feel like a dark little raincloud. When Lydia Charingford was around, though, he felt like a smiling dark little raincloud.

I am hyper vigilant and would be dangerous if threatened.... If someone broke into my house or attacked me in the street, it's THEM I would fear for.... But as Yo La Tengo recently put it so succinctly: I am not afraid of you and I will beat your ass.

Telling someone with OCD to stop obsessing about something is like telling someone who's having an asthma attack to just breathe normally.

I don’t like being here with these people and animals. I’m going to retire, but remember, courage is doing what we know is dangerous. It’s risking our safety for a chance at something better. Don’t let your fears shape your reality because no matter how cautious you are, someone or something always sneaks in the back door to manifest that fear. Better to face it and defeat it than to let it attack you unawares. (Maxis)

It is very difficult to develop a proper sense of self-esteem in a dysfunctional family. Having very little self-worth, looking at one’s own character defects becomes so overwhelming there is no room for inward focus. People so afflicted think: “I need to keep you from knowing me. I have already rejected me, but if you knew how flawed I am, you would also reject me…and since this is all I have, I could not stand any more rejection. I am not worthy of someone understanding me so you will not get the chance...so I must judge, reject, attack, and/or find fault with you. I don’t accept me so how can I accept you?

had no doubt the same would happen in the tavern, and had no doubt Nesta would resent us for ruining her night. At least I could slip inside mostly unnoticed. If both of us went in there, I knew my sister would see it as an attack. So it would be me. Alone. Rhys kissed my brow. “If someone propositions you, tell them we’ll both be free in an hour.

Try to forgive by trying to understand how it would feel to be in the other’s shoes. If someone hurts you – ask them - “What hurts you so much that you would do this?” Listen to the answer and try to understand what is valid for them. They may have been fighting for your attention, but no one thinks of themselves as attackers, only defenders! So don’t judge their ways, only set them free by giving them a chance to speak. You may both learn a lot from your kindness and courage in asking for the truth. But even if nothing changes, release it, remember that you both have a right to be who you choose to be. When we make judgements we're inevitably acting on limited knowledge, so ask if you seek to understand, or simply let them be!

If someone wanted to smuggle Sarin gas into the city, how would they do it? Where are the obvious and less obvious points of entry? How would they weaponize it?

The fact is that when you admit that you can’t blame anyone or anything else, you begin to blame yourself. The human mind gives up trying to find an executioner, but still it must blame someone. Anger that is not expressed tends to turn inward and, instead, attacks the very one who feels it. You move from anger and guilt into depression.

He wished that he could break out his knitting, but for some reason, people didn’t take you seriously as a warrior when you were knitting. He’d never figured out why. Making socks required four or five double-ended bone needles, and while they weren’t very large, you could probably jam one into someone’s eye if you really wanted to. Not that he would. He’d have to pull the needle out of the sock to do it, and then he’d be left with the grimly fiddly work of rethreading the stitches. Also, washing blood out of wool was possible, but a pain. Still, if he had to suddenly pull out his sword and fend off an attack, there was a chance he’d drop the yarn, and since he’d been feeling masochistic and was using two colors for this current set of socks, there was absolutely no chance the yarn wouldn’t get tangled and then he’d be trying to murder people while chasing the yarn around. And god forbid the tide rose and he went berserk. You never got the knitting untangled after that; you usually just had to throw it away completely.

The wrath of God is never an evil wrath. God gets angry because he loves people like a mother would love her child if someone were to harm it. There is something wrong if the mother never gets angry; it is safe to say that that is the unloving mother.

At a dinner party in north London, I listened to friends bragging about buying Porsches with their bonuses and sending out from their offices for pizzas and clean shirts because they were clinching a deal and could not leave their desks. I wanted to tell them of a place where every family had lost a son or a husband or had a leg blown off, almost every child seen someone die in a rocket attack and where a small boy had told me his dream was to have a brightly coloured ball. But, when I began to talk about Afghanistan, I watched eyes glaze and felt as if I was trying to have a conversation about a movie no one else had seen.

Criticism is an alluring substitute for creation, because tearing things down, unlike building them up, really is as easy as falling off a stump. It’s blissfully simple to strike a savvy, sophisticated pose by attacking someone else’s creations, but the old adage is right: Any fool can burn down a barn. Building one is something else again.

The moon is always jealous of the heat of the day, just as the sun always longs for something dark and deep. They could see how love might control you, from your head to your toes, not to mention every single part of you in between. A woman could want a man so much she might vomit in the kitchen sink or cry so fiercly blood would form in the corners of her eyes. She put her hand to her throat as though someone were strangling her, but really she was choking on all that love she thought she’d needed so badly. What had she thought, that love was a toy, something easy and sweet, just to play with? Real love was dangerous, it got you from inside and held on tight, and if you didn’t let go fast enough you might be willing to do anything for it’s sake. She refused to believe in superstition, she wouldn’t; yet it was claiming her. Some fates are guaranteed, no matter who tries to intervene. After all I’ve done for you is lodged somewhere in her brain, and far worse, it’s in her heart as well. She was bad luck, ill-fated and unfortunate as the plague. She is not worth his devotion. She wishes he would evaporate into thin air. Maybe then she wouldn’t have this feeling deep inside, a feeling she can deny all she wants, but that won’t stop it from being desire. Love is worth the sum of itself and nothing more. But that’s what happens when you’re a liar, especially when you’re telling the worst of these lies to yourself. He has stumbled into love, and now he’s stuck there. He’s fairly used to not getting what he wants, and he’s dealt with it, yet he can’t help but wonder if that’s only because he didn’t want anything so badly. It’s music, it’s a sound that is absurdly beautiful in his mouth, but she won’t pay attention. She knows from the time she spent on the back stairs of the aunts’ house that most things men say are lies. Don’t listen, she tells herself. None if it’s true and none of it matters, because he’s whispering that he’s been looking for her forever. She can’t believe it. She can’t listen to anything he tells her and she certainly can’t think, because if she did she might just think she’d better stop. What good would it do her to get involved with someone like him? She’d have to feel so much, and she’s not that kind. The greatest portion of grief is the one you dish out for yourself. She preferred cats to human beings and turned down every offer from the men who fell in love with her. They told her how sticks and stones could break bones, but taunting and name-calling were only for fools. — & now here she is, all used up. Although she’d never believe it, those lines in *’s face are the most beautiful part about her. They reveal what she’s gone through and what she’s survived and who exactly she is, deep inside. She’s gotten back some of what she’s lost. Attraction, she now understands, is a state of mind. If there’s one thing * is now certain of, it’s house you can amaze yourself by the things you’re willing to do. You really don’t know? That heart-attack thing you’ve been having? It’s love, that’s what it feels like. She knows now that when you don’t lose yourself in the bargain, you find you have double the love you started with, and that’s one recipe that can’t be tampered with. Always throw spilled salt over your left shoulder. Keep rosemary by your garden gate. Add pepper to your mashed potatoes. Plant roses and lavender, for luck. Fall in love whenever you can.

I’ve learned to bully doesn’t only involve attacking someone physically or verbally; it is so much more. Bullying consists of invading other people’s property, humiliation, mind games (pretending to be someone’s friend), manipulation, making threats, spreading rumors, showing aggressive behavior, and/or excluding someone from a group on purpose.

The Surprise Attack. This is when you think someone scaring you will frighten the hiccups away. Of course, popping a paper bag behind you or clapping in your ear isn’t going to cut it. No, this only works when somebody shoves you off a tall skyscraper ledge into a properly rigged-up safety net forty stories below.

Nondefensive phrases: • Really? • I see. • I understand. • That’s interesting. • That’s your choice. • I’m sure you see it that way. • You’re entitled to your opinion. • I’m sorry you’re upset. • Let’s talk about this when you’re calmer. • Yelling and threatening aren’t going to solve anything. • This subject is off-limits. • I don’t choose to have this conversation. • Guilt peddling and playing the pity card are not going to work anymore. • I know you’re upset. • This is nonnegotiable. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, these phrases will act like a referee coming in to stop a fight. They nip conflict in the bud. You won’t need them when someone is pleasant, but they’re essential when you’re being blamed, bullied, attacked, or criticized.

When someone is attacking you, they are coming to you for advice. How you react advises them.

I usually feel pretty screamy when someone attacks my school.

God, the only thing worse than having a panic attack was trying to have one in secret while someone else was watching.

Someone once said to me: You never mention his looks. And it's true, I don't, I find it difficult. At that time, he was probably the most beautiful man alive, as he was certainly the most violent, but that's the problem. How do you separate a tiger's beauty from its ferocity? Or a cheetah's elegance from the speed of the attack? Achilles was like that- the beauty and the terror were two sides of a single coin.

[I]t is something that comes up as a struggle in me. It especially came up when I was about 16 or 17. In high school people think you have to be so macho. People get attacked just because someone insinuates something about their sexuality. I think that’s gruesome.

Was this what it was going to be like? Was I turning into someone who had panic attacks about walking home from the tube or staying the night alone in the house without their boyfriend? No, fuck that. I would not be that person.

Have the doctors checked on you yet?” She shook her head. “I asked them to come again once he’s rested a little. I’ll get back to my room soon enough.” Of course. Of course the woman who just had a heart attack could spare getting herself to a more comfortable place so her husband could take a nap. Seriously, even if I did find someone, could it ever compare to them?

He's been asleep since the war began. He knows this now. In defending himself from death he lost his grip on life. He thinks of Emina, risking her life to deliver expired pills to someone she's never met. Of the young man who ran into the street to save her when she was shot. Of the cellist who plays for those killed in a mortar attack. He could run now, but he doesn't.

I love and if someone I love is hurt I'll kill the attacker and no one else, that is love. I hate and if I hate I'll kill their whole family to bring pain to that person, that is hate, In this way I do not think love and hate are the same side of a blade

Haven’t you offered up some part of your Self to someone (or something), and taken on a “narrative” in return? Haven’t we entrusted some part of our personality to some greater System or Order? And if so, has not that System at some stage demanded of us some kind of “insanity”? Is the narrative you now possess really and truly your own? Are your dreams really your own dreams? Might not they be someone else’s visions that could sooner or later turn into nightmares?

ARIADNE: Why are they looking at me? COBB: Because you're changing things. My subconscious feels that someone else is creating the world. The more you change things, the quicker the projections converge on you. ARIADNE: Converge? COBB: They feel the foreign nature of the dreamer, and attack-like white blood cells fighting an infection. ARIADNE: They're going to attack us? COBB: Just you, actually.

When someone is attacking you, they are coming to you for advice.

Love vanquishes all attackers, it is impregnable in defense. When heaven wants to protect someone, does it send an army? No, it protects him with love.

Why are we up here?” Mark asked. Alec pointed a finger at him. “Because it’s what you do when someone comes to your house and attacks your people. You fight back. I’m not going to let these bloodsuckers get away with that crap.

Finders keepers!" Ian shouted, scooping up the overlay and hopping onto a rock outcropping. "You cheater!" Amy was furious. No way was he going to get away with that. She climbed the rock, matching him step for step until she reached the top. There he turned to her, panting for breath. "Not bad for a Cahill," he said, grinning. "You --y-y-you--" The words caught in her throat, the way they always did. He was staring at her, his eyes dancing with laughter, making her so knotted up with anger and hatred that she thought she would explode. "C-c-can't--" But in that moment, something totally weird happened. Maybe it was a flip of his head, a movement in his eyebrow, she couldn't tell. But it was as if someone had suddenly held a painting at a different angle, and what appeared to be a stormy sea transformed into a bright bouquet -- a trick of the eye that proved everything was just a matter of perspective. His eyes were not mocking at all. They were inviting her, asking her to laugh along. Suddenly, her rage billowed up and blew off in wisps, like a cloud. "You're ... a Cahill, too," she replied. "Touche." His eyes didn't move a millimeter from hers. This time she met his gaze. Solidly. This time she didn't feel like apologizing or attacking or running away. She wouldn't have minded if he just stared like that all day.

There is nothing wrong with leaving if you feel attacked. In fact, there are times when it’s a good thing to do (see chapter 8). The damage comes from remaining passive and silent, absorbing the other person’s criticism while your sense of personal power and self-esteem deteriorate.

If you lose your ego, you lose the thread of that narrative you call your Self. Humans, however, can't live very long without some sense of a continuing story. Such stories go beyond the limited rational system (or the systematic rationality) with which you surround yourself; they are crucial keys to sharing time-experience with others. Now a narrative is a story, not a logic, nor ethics, nor philosophy. It is a dream you keep having, whether you realize it or not. Just as surely as you breathe, you go on ceaselessly dreaming your story. And in these stories you wear two faces. You are simultaneously subject and object. You are a whole and you are a part. You are real and you are shadow. "Storyteller" and at the same time "character". It is through such multilayering of roles in our stories that we heal the loneliness of being an isolated individual in the world. Yet without a proper ego nobody can create a personal narrative, any more than you can drive a car without an engine, or cast a shadow without a real physical object. But once you've consigned your ego to someone else, where on earth do you go from there? At this point you receive a new narrative from the person to whom you have entrusted your ego. You've handed over the real thing, so what comes back is a shadow. And once your ego has merged with another ego, your narrative will necessarily take on the narrative created by that ego. Just what kind of narrative? It needn't be anything particularly fancy, nothing complicated or refined. You don't need to have literary ambitions. In fact, the sketchier and simpler the better. Junk, a leftover rehash will do. Anyway, most people are tired of complex, multilayered scenarios-they are a potential letdown. It's precisely because people can't find any fixed point within their own multilayered schemes that they're tossing aside their own self-identity.

The psychoanalyst W. R. Bion came up with the term containment to describe a mother’s ability to manage her baby’s pain. Remember, babyhood is not a time of bliss; it’s one of terror. As babies we are trapped in a strange, alien world, unable to see properly, constantly surprised at our bodies, alarmed by hunger and wind and bowel movements, overwhelmed by our feelings. We are quite literally under attack. We need our mother to soothe our distress and make sense of our experience. As she does so, we slowly learn how to manage our physical and emotional states on our own. But our ability to contain ourselves directly depends on our mother’s ability to contain us—if she had never experienced containment by her own mother, how could she teach us what she did not know? Someone who has never learned to contain himself is plagued by anxious feelings for the rest of his life, feelings that Bion aptly titled nameless dread. Such a person endlessly seeks this unquenchable containment from external sources—he needs a drink or a joint to “take the edge off” this endless anxiety. Hence my addiction to marijuana.

I surrendered my identity in your eyes. Now I'm just like everybody else, and it's so funny, the way monogamy is funny, the way someone falling down in the street is funny. I entered a revolving door and emerged as a human being. When you think of me is my face electronically blurred? I remember your collarbone, forming the tiniest satellite dish in the universe, your smile as the place where parallel lines inevitably crossed. Now dinosaurs freeze to death on your shoulder. I remember your eyes: fifty attack dogs on a single leash, how I once held the soft audience of your hand. I've been ignored by prettier women than you, but none who carried the heavy pitchers of silence so far, without spilling a drop.

I get so pissed off whenever someone looks at you wrong. Or says the wrong thing to you. Or posts pictures all over your locker. Or if they smile at you. Or call you beautiful. Or…anything!” He released a breath and took a deep inhale. “Anything they do to hurt you or make you smile makes me want to attack.” He exhaled. “And that doesn’t really make for great ethics.

Then I sit there, running the heat to try and thaw my feet after Lucy’s flat, and watch the people going past. They make me edgy. Dozens and dozens of people, they just keep coming, and every single one of their heads is crammed with stories they believe and stories they want to believe and stories someone else has made them believe, and every story is battering against the thin walls of the person’s skull, drilling and gnawing for its chance to escape and attack someone

I haven't lived an especially long life but there's one thing I'm sure of. The people capable of changing things are the ones who can throw away everything dear to them. They can leave behind their humanity when forced to face down monsters. Someone who can't throw anything away will never be able to change anything.

The only fear a guy felt when he asked out a girl was fear that she might reject him. He didn’t worry that she might gather a few of her friends, surprise him afterward in a dark parking lot on his way home from work, tie him up, torture and beat him, and then leave him to die. He never had to worry that, even if she said yes, they’d have to pretend to only be friends when they were in public, because if they didn’t someone might spit on them or call them names or attack them.

What these apocalypse agitators couldn't seem to grasp was that the planet was managing to self-destruct very nicely on its own, thank you. So, all the attacks, protests and assassinations were the equivalent of giving a wedgie to someone who was lying on the floor, bleeding out from every orifice, and expecting them to care.

In a world full of fossils, the slightest movement of a pebble on the slope of the cliff is nearly enough to bring on a whole series of heart attacks-so you can imagine what happens when someone dynamites the whole mountain!

Perhaps we don’t pray the same as our Christian brothers and sisters do, but many men and women of God believe, regardless of our religion or our religious differences, we all pray to the same God. I have never read such evil thoughts. How does someone who writes such hateful words have the unmitigated gall to call himself a Christian?

I will never understand why people insist upon calling my cell phone. It’s such an aggressive action to take: calling someone. Each time my phone rings, I have a heart attack like my pocket’s on fire and a tiny siren is going off.

Whenever i see someone fighting me for no reason, I'm always highly impressed that God has instigated his anger against me, just as he did to pharoah against the Israelites, so as to cast me away into my promise land of fulfilment.

I feel like I’ve been physically attacked. Like someone took control of who I am. Took that control away from me.

For her to attack him here, the last bastion of his pride and self-respect, is the kind of betrayal of which only someone you love is capable.

Should we shake hands or something? What’s the protocol when someone uses his body as a shield for you in an almost bear attack?

Writing implies faith in someone listening,/ different in content but not need/ from the child who cries in the night./ Making is an attack on dying, on chaos,/ on blind inertia, on the second law/ of thermodynamics, on indifference, on cold,/ on contempt, on the silence/ that does not follow the chord resolved,/ the sentence spoken, but the something/ that cannot be said.

It was a myth you couldn't function on opiates: shooting up was one thing but for someone like me-jumping at pigeons beating from the sidewalk, afflicted with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder practically to the point of spasticity and cerebral palsy-pills were the key to being not only competent, but high-functioning.

To threaten someone with a gun is the same as attacking them, If you had taken his gun, the real war would have started, and in all likelihood we would never have got out of that place alive,

Resentment attacks our vital forces and does us much harm. When someone has made us suffer, our tendency is to keep the memory of the wrong alive in our minds, like a “bill” we will produce in due time to demand settlement. Those accumulated bills end up poisoning our lives. It is wiser to cancel every debt, as the Gospel invites us to. In return, we will be forgiven everything, and our hearts will be set free, whereas nurturing resentment toward others closes us to the positive things they could contribute to us.

She knew what to do if too many people showed up for supper, or if someone arrived early for a party, but what did you do when rats attacked your mother-in-law? Who told you how to cope with that?

I need bruschetta (that's "broo-SKET-uh," not "brushetter," a slender piece of ciabatta toasted and brushed with garlic and oil and covered in fresh tomato and basil-- the chunks inevitably fall off the bread and the olive oil runs over your lips and down your chin. The whole thing is delicious, deeply physical and delightfully undignified, and a woman who can eat a real bruschetta is a woman you can love and who can love you. Someone who pushes the thing away because it's messy is never going to cackle at you toothlessly across the living room of your retirement cottage or drag you back from your sixth heart attack by sheer furious affection. Never happen. You need a woman who isn't afraid of a faceful of olive oil for that)

Theoretically, let's stipulate, for argument's sake, that there are a lot of powerful people at a university like this who believe things that aren't, strictly speaking, true." Leftists, you mean." Let's just call them people. Powerful people." All right." These powerful people believe things like: One culture is as good as another. Or, there's no such thing as good and evil. Therefore, if America is at odds or at war with someone, it must be America's fault. You only have to think about those statements for two minutes to see that they can't possibly be true. But these people think they should be true and they think they'll seem to be true if no one is allowed to say they're not true. So they attack anyone who says that they're not true. They call him names. Racist, sexist, phobic, offensive, whatever. They demand apologies from him. They make his life a misery, so no one wants to speak up." So it's like the emperor's new clothes." Right. Except instead of clothes, it's all the emperor's lies. And in an Empire of Lies, only a crazy man would speak the truth.

But did guys like Dylan care about her people? Or did he believe, like many others, the victims had it coming? Arya compared the situation to a rape accusation by someone who was sexually promiscuous. She was asking for it, wasn’t she? In this case, Muslims were asking for it, weren’t they? 

When you feel the emotional reaction of someone's supposed [verbal] attack, what you're doing is getting them to reflect to you that some portion of yourself feels that way about yourself. Otherwise you wouldn't react. You would just observe it - "oh interesting." - and move on with your day. But if you react to it, it's showing you some part of you actually is buying into this as true. So say: "Well thank you: Thank you for showing that I was not loving all of myself." And when you really start doing that, then you may start to see that someone else's attitude toward you may change.

No, hey, no.” He bent down until his eyes were level with hers. “We’re not arguing. I’m just worried about you, OK? I want to keep you safe. I love you, always will. No matter how many times you almost give me a heart attack or a nervous breakdown. It’s just…” He drew off, his voice guttering out. “It’s scary, to know that someone might want to hurt you, or make you scared. You’re my person. My little one. My Sarge. And I’m supposed to protect you.

What does it mean to care? Let me start by saying that the word care has become a very ambivalent word. When someone says: 'I will take care of him!' it is more likely an announcement of an impending attack than of a tender compassion. And besides this ambivalence, the word is most often used in a negative way. 'Do you want coffee or tea?' 'I don't care.' 'Do you want to stay home or go to a movie?' 'I don't care.' 'Do you want to walk or go by car?' 'I don't care.' This expression of indifference toward choices in life has become commonplace. And often it seems that not to care has become more acceptable than to care, and a carefree life-style more attractive than a careful one.

With a deliberate shrug, he stepped free of the hold on his shoulder. “Tell me something, boys,” he drawled. “Do you wear that leather to turn each other on? I mean, is it a dick thing with you all?” Butch got slammed so hard against the door that his back teeth rattled. The model shoved his perfect face into Butch’s. “I’d watch your mouth, if I were you.” “Why bother, when you’re keeping an eye on it for me? You gonna kiss me now?” A growl like none Butch had ever heard came out of the guy. “Okay, okay.” The one who seemed the most normal came forward. “Back off, Rhage. Hey, come on. Let’s relax.” It took a minute before the model let go. “That’s right. We’re cool,” Mr. Normal muttered, clapping his buddy on the back before looking at Butch. “Do yourself a favor and shut the hell up.” Butch shrugged. “Blondie’s dying to get his hands on me. I can’t help it.” The guy launched back at Butch, and Mr. Normal rolled his eyes, letting his friend go this time. The fist that came sailing at jaw level snapped Butch’s head to one side. As the pain hit, Butch let his own rage fly. The fear for Beth, the pent-up hatred of these lowlifes, the frustration about his job, all of it came out of him. He tackled the bigger man, taking him down onto the floor. The guy was momentarily surprised, as if he hadn’t expected Butch’s speed or strength, and Butch took advantage of the hesitation. He clocked Blondie in the mouth as payback and then grabbed the guy’s throat. One second later, Butch was flat on his back with the man sitting on his chest like a parked car. The guy took Butch’s face into his hand and squeezed, crunching the features together. It was nearly impossible to breathe, and Butch panted shallowly. “Maybe I’ll find your wife,” the guy said, “and do her a couple of times. How’s that sound?" “Don’t have one.” “Then I’m coming after your girlfriend.” Butch dragged in some air. “Got no woman.” “So if the chicks won’t do you, what makes you think I’d want to?” “Was hoping to piss you off.” “Now why’d you want to do that?” Blondie asked. “If I attacked first”—Butch hauled more breath into his lungs—“your boys wouldn’t have let us fight. Would’ve killed me first. Before I had a chance at you.” Blondie loosened his grip a little and laughed as he stripped Butch of his wallet, keys, and cell phone. “You know, I kind of like this big dummy,” the guy drawled. Someone cleared a throat. Rather officiously. Blondie leaped to his feet, and Butch rolled over, gasping. When he looked up, he was convinced he was hallucinating. Standing in the hall was a little old man dressed in livery. Holding a silver tray. “Pardon me, gentlemen. Dinner will be served in about fifteen minutes.” “Hey, are those the spinach crepes I like so much?” Blondie said, going for the tray. “Yes, Sire.” “Hot damn.” The other men clustered around the butler, taking what he offered. Along with cocktail napkins. Like they didn’t want to drop anything on the floor. What the hell was this? “Might I ask a favor?” the butler said. Mr. Normal nodded with vigor. “Bring out another tray of these and we’ll kill anything you want for you.” Yeah, guess the guy wasn’t really normal. Just relatively so. The butler smiled as if touched. “If you’re going to bloody the human, would you be good enough to do it in the backyard?” “No problem.” Mr. Normal popped another crepe in his mouth. “Damn, Rhage, you’re right. These are awesome.

After all, as it says on a needlepoint sampler or throw pillow or the occasional bumper sticker: Good girls go to heaven, but bad girls go everywhere. In high heels. Or mules by Manolo Blahnik, the strappy, tangly kind that give you blisters. And when their feet start to hurt, they bitch about it a lot, until someone agrees to carry them home. Bad girls understand that there is no point in being good and suffering in silence. What good has good ever done? We women still only make seventy-one cents, on average, for every man's dollar. We still have to listen to studies telling us that a single woman over the age of 35 had best avoid airplanes because she is more likely to die in a terrorist attack than get married.

Where are you from?” usually bothers me, but tonight I note his brown skin, and I know it’s not the same thing as a white American asking me the same question. I note his Muslim name. His question is not an attack but an invitation, a cup of tea, from someone who also feels lonely in this country and is looking for a bit of home.

This is going to sound trite, I suppose, but you never know when it’s going to be the last time. That you hug someone. That you kiss. That you say goodbye. I don’t know what my last words were to Ty. Probably something like, Smell you later , as I went out the door that morning. I can’t remember. It wasn’t significant, is all I know. We were never one of those families that says “I love you” at the end of every conversation, just in case. Steven’s parents do that. When he calls to tell them he’s going to be late or something, he always ends by saying “I love you, too.” Even if he’ll see them in 10 minutes. I used to think that was the tiniest bit lame. If you say something that often, it loses its meaning, doesn’t it? But now I understand. If the unthinkable happens—a car accident, a heart attack, whatever—at least you’ll know your last words were something positive. There’s a security in that. A comfort.

Hitherto, the Palestinians had been relatively immune to this Allahu Akhbar style. I thought this was a hugely retrograde development. I said as much to Edward. To reprint Nazi propaganda and to make a theocratic claim to Spanish soil was to be a protofascist and a supporter of 'Caliphate' imperialism: it had nothing at all to do with the mistreatment of the Palestinians. Once again, he did not exactly disagree. But he was anxious to emphasize that the Israelis had often encouraged Hamas as a foil against Fatah and the PLO. This I had known since seeing the burning out of leftist Palestinians by Muslim mobs in Gaza as early as 1981. Yet once again, it seemed Edward could only condemn Islamism if it could somehow be blamed on either Israel or the United States or the West, and not as a thing in itself. He sometimes employed the same sort of knight's move when discussing other Arabist movements, excoriating Saddam Hussein's Ba'ath Party, for example, mainly because it had once enjoyed the support of the CIA. But when Saddam was really being attacked, as in the case of his use of chemical weapons on noncombatants at Halabja, Edward gave second-hand currency to the falsified story that it had 'really' been the Iranians who had done it. If that didn't work, well, hadn't the United States sold Saddam the weaponry in the first place? Finally, and always—and this question wasn't automatically discredited by being a change of subject—what about Israel's unwanted and ugly rule over more and more millions of non-Jews? I evolved a test for this mentality, which I applied to more people than Edward. What would, or did, the relevant person say when the United States intervened to stop the massacres and dispossessions in Bosnia-Herzegovina and Kosovo? Here were two majority-Muslim territories and populations being vilely mistreated by Orthodox and Catholic Christians. There was no oil in the region. The state interests of Israel were not involved (indeed, Ariel Sharon publicly opposed the return of the Kosovar refugees to their homes on the grounds that it set an alarming—I want to say 'unsettling'—precedent). The usual national-security 'hawks,' like Henry Kissinger, were also strongly opposed to the mission. One evening at Edward's apartment, with the other guest being the mercurial, courageous Azmi Bishara, then one of the more distinguished Arab members of the Israeli parliament, I was finally able to leave the arguing to someone else. Bishara [...] was quite shocked that Edward would not lend public support to Clinton for finally doing the right thing in the Balkans. Why was he being so stubborn? I had begun by then—belatedly you may say—to guess. Rather like our then-friend Noam Chomsky, Edward in the final instance believed that if the United States was doing something, then that thing could not by definition be a moral or ethical action.

Wit was insulting each person as they stepped onto the island. “Brightness Marakal! What a disaster that hairstyle is; how brave of you to show it to the world. Brightlord Marakal, I wish you’d warned us you were going to attend; I’d have forgone supper. I do so hate being sick after a full meal. Brightlord Cadilar! How good it is to see you. Your face reminds me of someone dear to me.” “Really?” wizened Cadilar said, hesitating. “Yes,” Wit said, waving him on, “my horse. Ah, Brightlord Neteb, you smell unique today—did you attack a wet whitespine, or did one just sneeze on you? Lady Alami! No, please, don’t speak—it’s much easier to maintain my illusions regarding your intelligence that way. And Brightlord Dalinar.” Wit nodded to Dalinar as he passed. “Ah, my dear Brightlord Taselin. Still engaged in your experiment to prove a maximum threshold of human idiocy? Good for you! Very empirical of you.

A fisherman in the month of May stood angling on the bank of the Thames with an artificial fly. He threw his bait with so much art, that a young trout was rushing toward it, when she was prevented by her mother. “Never,” said she, “my child, be too precipitate, where there is a possibility of danger. Take due time to consider, before you risk an action that may be fatal. How know you whether yon appearance be indeed a fly, or the snare of an enemy? Let someone else make the experiment before you. If it be a fly, he will very probably elude the first attack: and the second may be made, if not with success, at least with safety.” She had no sooner spoken, than a gudgeon seized the pretended fly, and became an example to the giddy daughter of the importance of her mother’s counsel.   FABLES, ROBERT DODSLEY, 1703-1764

Men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at the most can defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. As a result, their neighbor is for them not only a potential helper or sexual object, but also someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him. Homo homini lupus [Man is a wolf to man]. Who, in the face of all his experience of life and of history, will have the courage to dispute this assertion?

That is a logic which Freud attacks, by the way, the two-proposition self-cancelling structure. Freud considered this structure a revelation of rationalization. Someone is accused of stealing a horse, to which he replies, ‘I don’t steal horses and anyhow you have a crummy horse.’ If you ponder the reasoning in this you can see the actual thought-process behind it. The second statement does not reinforce the first. It only looks like it does. In terms of our perpetual theological disputations – brought on by Fat’s supposed encounter with the divine – the two-proposition self-cancelling structure would appear like this: 1) God does not exist. 2) And anyhow he’s stupid.

I'd like to start this week with a request, and this one goes out to the followers of the three Abrahamic religions: the Muslims, Christians, and Jews. It's just a little thing, really, but do you think that when you've finished smashing up the world and blowing each other to bits and demanding special privileges while you do it, do you think that maybe the rest of us could sort of have our planet back? I wouldn't ask, but I'm starting to think that there must be something written in the special books that each of you so enjoy referring to that it's ok to behave like special, petulant, pugnacious, pricks. Forgive the alliteration, but your persistent, power-mad punch-ups are pissing me off. It's mainly the extremists obviously, but not exclusively. It's a lot of 'main-streamers' as well. Let me give you an example of what I'm talking about. Muslims: listen up my bearded and veily friends! Calm down, ok? Stop blowing stuff up. Not everything that said about you is an attack on the prophet Mohammed and Allah that needs to end in the infidel being destroyed. Have a cup of tea, put on a Cat Stevens record, sit down and chill out. I mean seriously, what's wrong with a strongly-worded letter to The Times? Christians: you and your churches don't get to be millionaires while other people have nothing at all. They're your bloody rules; either stick to them or abandon the faith. And stop persecuting and killing people you judge to be immoral. Oh, and stop pretending you're celibate -- it's a cover-up for being a gay or a nonce. Right, that's two ticked off. Jews! I know you're god's 'Chosen People' and the rest of us are just whatever, but when Israel behaves like a violent, psychopathic bully and someone mentions it that doesn't make them antisemitic. And for the record, your troubled history is not a license to act with impunity now.

When you criticize someone with followers, the followers recognize that, if you are correct, they have been sucked in. If they had been sucked in, then they must not be too bright, or at least they were not well enough informed to form a critical judgment which would have led them to identify their leader as someone not worth following. So, a criticism of the leader produces a particular response in the followers. They feel that there has been an attack on them personally. The critic is saying, loud and clear, that anyone who has followed this particular leader is not a good judge of character, intellect, or facts. They are quite correct. This is exactly what the critic is saying.

Most people are not looking for provable truths. As you said, truth is often accompanied by intense pain, and almost no one is looking for painful truths. What people need is beautiful, comforting stories that make them feel as if their lives have some meaning. Which is where religion comes from." (...) "If a certain belief--call it 'Belief A'--makes the life of that man or this woman appear to be something of deep meaning, then for them belief A is the truth. If Belief B makes their lives appear to be powerless & puny, then Belief b turns out to be a falsehood. The distinction is quite clear. If someone insists that Belief B is the truth, people will probably hate him ignore him, or, in some cases, attack him. It means nothing to them that Belief B might be logical or provable.

When deceit and attack become a regular part of marital interactions, there is no clear communication, no resolution to the problem, and no healing. It’s impossible to have a close, loving relationship with someone you can’t trust, can’t talk with, or who won’t take a look at himself when he hurts you.

Where's my sister?" "She's setting up the island we found tonight." Galen shakes his head. "You slithering eel. You might have told me what you were up to." Toraf laughs. "Oh sure. 'Hey, Galen, I need to borrow Emma for a few minutes so I can kiss her, okay?' Didn't see that going over very well." "You think your surprise attack went over better?" Toraf shrugs. "I'm satisfied." "I could have killed you today." "Yeah." "Don't ever do that again." "Wasn't planning on it. Thought it was real sweet of you to defend your sister's honor. Very brotherly." Toraf snickers. "Shut up." "I'm just saying." Galen runs a hand through his hair. "I only saw Emma. I forgot all about Rayna." "I know, idiot. That's why I let you hit me fifty-eight times. That's what I would do if someone kissed Rayna." "Fifty-nine times." "Don't get carried away, minnow. By the way, was Emma boiling mad or just a little heated? Should I keep my distance for a while?" Galen snorts. "She laughed so hard I thought she'd pass out. I'm the one in trouble." "Shocker. What'd you do?" "The usual." Hiding his feelings. Blurting out the wrong thing. Acting like a territorial bull shark. Toraf shakes his head. "She won't put up with that forever. She already thinks you only want to change her so she can become another of your royal subjects." "She said that?" Galen scowls. "I don't know what's worse. Letting her think that, or telling her the truth about why I'm helping her to change." "In my opinion, there's nothing to tell her unless she can actually change. And so far, she can't." "You don't think she's one of us?" Toraf shrugs. "Her skin wrinkles. It's kind of gross. Maybe she's some sort of superhuman. You know, like Batman." Galen laughs. "How do you know about Batman?" "I saw him on that black square in your living room. He can do all sorts of things other humans can't do. Maybe Emma is like him." "Batman isn't real. He's just a human acting like that so other humans will watch him." "Looked real to me." "They're good at making it look real. Some humans spend their whole lives making something that isn't real look like something that is." "Humans are creepier than I thought. Why pretend to be something you're not?" Galen nods. To take over a kingdom, maybe? "Actually, that reminds me. Grom needs you." Toraf groans. "Can it wait? Rayna's getting all cozy on our island right about now." "Seriously. I don't want to know." Toraf grins. "Right. Sorry. But you can see my point, right? I mean, if Emma were waiting for you-" "Emma wouldn't be waiting for me. I wouldn't have left." "Rayna made me. You've never hit me that hard before. She wants us to get along. Plus, there's something I need to tell you, but I didn't exactly get a change to." "What?" "Yesterday when we were practicing in front of your house, I sensed someone. Someone I don't know. I made Emma get out of the water while I went to investigate." "And she listened to you?" Toraf nods. "Turns out, you're the only one she disobeys.

someone in a high place - the mayor, chief of police, or other official - would receive information that a neighboring city was already in flames and that carloads of armed black men were coming to attack this city. This happened in Cedar Rapids when Des Moines was allegedly in flames. It happened in Ardmore, Oklahoma, and in Fort Worth, Texas, when it was alleged that Oklahoma City was in flames and carloads were converging on those cities. It happened in Reno and other western cities, when Oakland, California, was supposed to be in flames. It happened in Roanoke when Richmond, Virginia, was supposed to be in flames.

... you think I am attacking them for talking nonsense? Not a bit! I like them to talk nonsense. That's man's one privilege over all creation. Through error you come to the truth! I am a man because I err! You never reach any truth without making fourteen mistakes and very likely a hundred and fourteen. And a fine thing too, in its way; but we can't even make mistakes on our own account! Talk nonsense, but talk your own nonsense, and I'll kiss you for it. To go wrong in one's way is better than to go right in someone else's.

A couple of years ago, I read the findings of a study on the effects of divorced and separated parents talking negatively about their exes in the presence of their children. What I remember about the study most vividly is really just one thing: that it's devastating for a child to hear one parent speak ill of the other. In fact, so much so that the researchers found it was less psychologically damaging if a parent said directly to the child "You are a worthless piece of shit" than it was for a parent to say "Your mother/father is a worthless piece of shit." I don't remember if they had any theories about why that was so, but it made sense to me. I think we all have something sturdier inside of us that rears up when we're being attacked that we simply can't call upon when someone we love is being attacked, especially if that someone is our parent, half of us-the primal other- and the person doing the attacking is the other half, the other primal other.

When someone becomes hostile, if you respond by viewing the argument as a war, you can either attack or retreat. If instead you treat it as a dance, you have another option—you can sidestep. Having a conversation about the conversation shifts attention away from the substance of the disagreement and toward the process for having a dialogue. The more anger and hostility the other person expresses, the more curiosity and interest you show. When someone is losing control, your tranquility is a sign of strength. It takes the wind out of their emotional sails.

Ian whirled to attack Duncan. His father had yanked the silver scalpel out of his chest and he drove that scalpel right toward Duncan’s heart. And the bastard was smiling as he did it. “Let’s see you save someone now, hero.” The scalpel sank into his flesh. Duncan glanced down at the weapon. “Isn’t it supposed to burn?” Ian’s face paled.

Wit was insulting each person as they stepped onto the island. “Brightness Marakal! What a disaster that hairstyle is; how brave of you to show it to the world. Brightlord Marakal, I wish you’d warned us you were going to attend; I’d have forgone supper. I do so hate being sick after a full meal. Brightlord Cadilar! How good it is to see you. Your face reminds me of someone dear to me.” “Really?” wizened Cadilar said, hesitating. “Yes,” Wit said, waving him on, “my horse. Ah, Brightlord Neteb, you smell unique today—did you attack a wet whitespine, or did one just sneeze on you? Lady Alami! No, please, don’t speak—it’s much easier to maintain my illusions regarding your intelligence that way. And Brightlord Dalinar.” Wit nodded to Dalinar as he passed. “Ah, my dear Brightlord Taselin. Still engaged in your experiment to prove a maximum threshold of human idiocy? Good for you! Very empirical of you.

Each time I wondered at how any of them could ever consider that life would be better without them, and then I remembered that it’s the same thing I struggle with when my brain tries to kill me. And so they’ve saved me too. That’s why I continue to talk about mental illness, even at the cost of scaring people off or having people judge me. I try to be honest about the shame I feel because with honesty comes empowerment. And also, understanding. I know that if I go out on a stage and have a panic attack, I can duck behind the podium and hide for a minute and no one is going to judge me. They already know I’m crazy. And they still love me in spite of it. In fact, some love me because of it. Because there is something wonderful in accepting someone else’s flaws, especially when it gives you the chance to accept your own and see that those flaws are the things that make us human. I do worry that one day other kids will taunt my daughter when they’re old enough to read and know my story. Sometimes I wonder if the best thing to do is just to be quiet and stop waving the banner of “fucked up and proud of it,” but I don’t think I’ll put down this banner until someone takes it away from me. Because quitting might be easier, but it wouldn’t be better.

Then something ran out from the brush and I screamed, “CHUPACABRA!” And then Victor slammed on the brakes and just stared at me like I’d gone insane. Probably because I’d been so flustered that I’d accidentally shouted, “CHALUPA!” which I’ll admit is disconcerting to have someone scream at you while you’re being attacked by a dangerous creature.

John Lewis said, "You have to be taught the way of peace, the way of love, the way of nonviolence. In the religious sense, in the moral sense, you can say that in the bosom of every human being, there is a spark of the divine. So you don’t have a right as a human to abuse that spark of the divine in your fellow human being. From time to time, we would discuss that, if you have someone attacking you, beating you, spitting on you, you have to think of that person. Years ago that person was an innocent child, an innocent little baby. What happened? Did something go wrong? Did someone teach that person to hate, to abuse others? You try to appeal to the goodness of every human being and you don’t give up. You never give up on anyone.

You read, move your lips, figure out the words, and it's like you're in two places at the same time: you're sitting or lying with your legs curled up, your hand groping in the bowl, but you can see different worlds, far-off worlds that maybe never existed but still seem real. You run or sail or race in a sleigh--you're running away from someone, or you yourself have decided to attack--your heart thumps, life flies by, and it's wondrous: you can live as many different lives as there are books to read.

There are two basic coping mechanisms. One consists of dreading the chaos, fighting it and abusing oneself after losing, building a structured life of work/marriage/gym/reunions/children/depression/affair/divorce/alcoholism/recovery/heart attack, in which every decision is a reaction against the fear of the worst (make children to avoid being forgotten, fuck someone at the reunion in case the opportunity never comes again, and the Holy Grail of paradoxes: marry to combat loneliness, then plunge into that constant marital desire to be alone). This is the life that cannot be won, but it does offer the comforts of battle—the human heart is content when distracted by war. “The second mechanism is an across-the-board acceptance of the absurd all around us. Everything that exists, from consciousness to the digestive workings of the human body to sound waves and bladeless fans, is magnificently unlikely. It seems so much likelier that things would not exist at all and yet the world shows up to class every morning as the cosmos takes attendance. Why combat the unlikeliness? This is the way to survive in this world, to wake up in the morning and receive a cancer diagnosis, discover that a man has murdered forty children, discover that the milk has gone sour, and exclaim, 'How unlikely! Yet here we are,' and have a laugh, and swim in the chaos, swim without fear, swim without expectation but always with an appreciation of every whim, the beauty of screwball twists and jerks that pump blood through our emaciated veins.

But what’s important is that you enjoy and appreciate every day, and that’s something you can accomplish by just living in the moment. Don’t look behind you. Unless someone yells, “Look out behind you!” Then you should definitely look behind you because there’s a good chance a Frisbee is being thrown at your head or, if you’re in a movie, an attractive teenage vampire is about to attack you.

How could I even function today if all of this happened to me?" I pleaded, wishing Dr. Summer would tell me that he'd been wrong, that all of those thoughts didn't belong to me. Dr. Summer reminded me gently, "When you were attacked, your mind went far away so you could survive. Some people describe this as an out-of-body experience. Your mind creatively and instinctively protected you by dissociating from the violence and terror. When you talk about the thoughts in your head, you have a flat demeanor like you're talking about someone else. Doesn't it feel that way to you?" "Yes. It doesn't ever feel like I'm talking about me. It doesn't feel like it happened to me.

What in Bursin’s holy name is that?” he snarled. If it were possible to die of embarrassment, Martise was sure she wouldn’t survive the next few minutes.  “I was singing.” His eyebrows rose almost to his hairline.  “Singing.  Is that what you call it?  It sounded like someone was torturing a cat.” “I thought I might work faster if I sang.”  She wiped the perspiration from her forehead with a gloved hand and regretted the action.  The swipe of citrus oil she’d left on her skin burned.  Cael continued to howl, and a door shut with a bang. "That will be Gurn coming to rescue us from whatever demon he thinks is attacking."  The branch supporting Silhara creaked as he adjusted his stance and leaned closer to her.  “Tell me something, Martise.”  A leaf slapped him in the eye, and he ripped it off its twig with an irritated snap.  “How is it that a woman, blessed with a voice that could make a man come, sings badly enough to frighten the dead?” She was saved from having to answer the outlandish question by the quick thud of running footsteps.  Silhara disappeared briefly from view when he bent to greet their visitor.  Unfortunately, his answers to Gurn’s unspoken questions were loud and clear. “That was Martise you heard.  She was…singing. “Trust me, I’m not jesting.  You can unload your bow.” His next indignant response made her smile.  “No, I wasn’t beating her!  She’s the one tormenting me with that hideous wailing!” Martise hid her smile when he reappeared before her.  His scowl was ferocious.  “Don’t sing.”  He pointed a finger at her for emphasis.  “You’ve scared my dog, my birds and my servant with your yowling.”  He paused.  “You’ve even managed to scare me.

When we sat down in the plane, Clare took something out of her pocket and handed it to me. It looked like a tube of lipstick. I frowned at her. 'Is this really the time to swap make-up?' I asked. She grinned. 'It's a hand taser. My parents make me carry one.' She took the cap off and pointed to the metal edge. 'If someone attacks you, you press the tip against their skin and it shoots out a charge.' I looked down at it. 'Does it last long?' She shook her head. 'It's pretty harmless. Noah and Pat used to play taser tag around the house when I was growing up.

One of the defining features of hierarchy is that you take the powerful and exciting jobs for yourself and impose the crummy tasks on others. That's a purpose of hierarchy. So when you come together to share the unpleasant work it's an attack on hierarchy. Because what's the point of hierarchy if not getting someone else to do what you don't want to do? What is hierarchy but a way to escape your share of the responsibilities?

On the positive side, you are “in love” with your partner. This is at first a deeply satisfying state. You feel intensely alive. Your existence has suddenly become meaningful because someone needs you, wants you, and makes you feel special, and you do the same for him or her. When you are together, you feel whole. The feeling can become so intense that the rest of the world fades into insignificance. However, you may also have noticed that there is a neediness and a clinging quality to that intensity. You become addicted to the other person. He or she acts on you like a drug. You are on a high when the drug is available, but even the possibility or the thought that he or she might no longer be there for you can lead to jealousy, possessiveness, attempts at manipulation through emotional blackmail, blaming and accusing — fear of loss. If the other person does leave you, this can give rise to the most intense hostility or the most profound grief and despair. In an instant, loving tenderness can turn into a savage attack or dreadful grief. Where is the love now? Can love change into its opposite in an instant? Was it love in the first place, or just an addictive grasping and clinging?

Fat people—especially very fat people, like me—are frequently met with screwed-up faces insisting on health and concern. Often, we defend ourselves by insisting that concerns about our health are wrongheaded, rooted in faulty and broad assumptions. We rattle off our test results and hospital records, citing proudly that we’ve never had a heart attack, hypertension, or diabetes. We proudly recite our gym schedules and the contents of our refrigerators. Many fat people live free from the complications popularly associated with their bodies. Many fat people don’t have diabetes, just as many fat people do have loving partners despite common depictions of us. Although we are not thin, we proudly report that we are happy and we are healthy. We insist on our goodness by relying on our health. But what we mean is that we are tired of automatically being seen as sick. We are exhausted from the work of carrying bodies that can only be seen as doomed. We are tired of being heralded as dead men walking, undead specters from someone else’s morality tale.

I trudged down the stairs and stood on the sidewalk examining my car. Deep scratch in the roof from a misplaced bullet. Hole in windsheild plus embeddedbullet in passenger seat. Bashed-in right rear quarter panel and right passenger-side door from slegehammer. Previous damage from creepy gun attack by insane stalker, And someone had spray painted EAT ME on the driver's side door. "Your car's a mess,"Lula said. "I don't know what it is with you and cars.

But what's important is that you enjoy and appreciate every day, and that's something you can accomplish by just living in the moment. Don't look behind you. Unless someone yells, "Look out behind you!" Then you should definitely look behind you because there's a good chance a Frisbee is being thrown at your head or, if you're in a movie, an attractive teenage vampire is about to attack you. Otherwise, don't look back and don't spend too much time worrying about the future. Stay in the present. There are a few ways to do that. Stop and smell the roses. Wake up and smell the coffee. Enjoy the sweet smell of success. I guess just keep taking big whiffs of stuff because it seems like the more we smell, the happier we are going to be. You know what I mean.

Wait, wait,' he began, interrupting Oblonsky. 'Aristocratism, you say. But allow me to ask, what makes up this aristocratism of Vronsky or whoever else it may be - such aristocratism that I can be scorned? You consider Vronsky an aristocrat, but I don't. A man whose father crept out of nothing by wiliness, whose mother, God knows who she didn't have liaisons with... No, excuse me, but I consider myself an aristocrat and people like myself, who can point to three or four honest generations in their families' past, who had a high degree of education (talent and intelligence are another thing), and who never lowered themselves before anyone, never depended on anyone, as my father lived, and my grandfather. And I know many like that. You find it mean that I count the trees in the forest, while you give away thirty thousand to Ryabinin; but you'll have rent coming in and I don't know what else, while I won't, and so I value what I've inherited and worked for... We're the aristocrats, and not someone who can only exist on hand-outs from the mighty of this world and can be bought for twenty kopecks. 'But who are you attacking? I agree with you,' said Stepan Arkadyich sincerely and cheerfully, though he felt Levin included him among those who could be bought for twenty kopecks.

Most people are not looking for provable truths. As you said, truth is often accompanied by intense pain, & almost no one is looking for painful truths. What people need is beautiful, comforting stories that make them feel as if their lives have some meaning. Which is where religion comes from. The man turned his neck several times before continuing. If a certain belief-call it 'Belief A'-makes the life of that man or this woman appear to be something of deep meaning, then for them belief A is the truth. If Belief B makes their lives appear to be powerless & puny, then Belief b turns out to be a falsehood. The distinction is quite clear. If someone insists that Belief B is the truth, people will probably hate him ignore him, or, in some cases, attack him. It means nothing to them that Belief B might be logical or provable.

Today the most serious computer predators are funded by rich criminal syndicates and even nation-states, and their goals are far more ambitious. Cyberattacks were launched at digital networks in Estonia by ethnic Russian protesters in 2007 and in Georgia before Russia attacked that country in 2008; and someone, probably Israel or the United States (or both), successfully loosed a worm called Stuxnet in 2010 to sabotage computer-controlled uranium centrifuges inside Iran’s secretive nuclear program.

Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally believed to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petrie dish of melodrama and distortion. I remember well, for instance, the blind animal terror which ensued when some townie set off the civil defense sirens as a joke. Someone said it was a nuclear attack; TV and radio reception, never good there in the mountains, happened to be particularly bad that night, and in the ensuing stampede for the telephones the switchboard shorted out, plunging the school into a violent and almost unimaginable panic. Cars collided in the parking lot. People sceamed, wept, gave away t heir possessions, huddled in small groups for comfort and warmth. Some hippies barricaded themselves in the Science Building, in the lone bomb shelter, and refused to let anyone in who didn't know the world to "Sugar Magnolia." Factions formed, leaders rose from the chaos. Though the world, in fact, was not destroyed, everyone had a marvelous time and people spoke fondly of the event for years afterward.

Calling you a racist and sexist, a bigot and a homophobe, gives them a sense of satisfaction with their status in the universe, even if they never help a single individual human being. This is a bully tactic. When someone calls you a racist, sexist, bigot, homophobe because you happen to disagree with them about tax policy or same-sex marriage or abortion, that’s bullying. When someone slanders you because you happen to disagree with them about global warming or the government shutdown, that’s bullying. When someone labels you a bad human being because they disagree with you, they are bullying you. They are attacking your character without justification. That’s nasty. In fact, it makes them nasty.

Lady Sarah gazes at Henry’s shiny shoes, her face heartbroken. “Do you ever think . . . that perhaps you should be with—” “Do not even think of finishing that fucking sentence,” Henry warns. “Why not?” She lifts her chin. “It’s the truth.” “The truth?” Henry mocks. “The truth is I wouldn’t even be here if it weren’t for you. I don’t know where I’d be or what I’d be doing, but I know it wouldn’t be pretty." “He’s right, you know, Sarah.” Prince Nicholas steps over to them. “Before you, Henry was an unmitigated disaster. Reckless, spoiled, self-destructive—” “Thank you, Nicholas,” Henry says. “I think she gets the picture.” Nicholas smacks his brother on the back and grins cheekily. “Happy to help.” Henry slips his hands into his pockets, rocking on his heels, telling Sarah, “I could say the same thing, you know. You don’t think I know you’d be better off with someone whose everyday life doesn’t send you reeling into a panic attack?” Sarah shakes her head. “No, that’s not true. I could never be better off with anyone else. I would never want to be. You’re mine, Henry, and I’m keeping you.

Each of these people has an extreme version of what we call a high-conflict personality. Unlike most of us, who normally try to resolve or defuse conflicts, people with high-conflict personalities (HCPs) respond to conflicts by compulsively increasing them. They usually do this by focusing on Targets of Blame, whom they mercilessly attack—verbally, emotionally, financially, reputationally, litigiously, and sometimes violently—often for months or years, even if the initial conflict was minor. Their Targets of Blame are usually someone close (a coworker, neighbor, friend, partner, or family member) or someone in a position of authority (boss, department head, police, government agent). Sometimes, though, the Target of Blame can be completely random.

I was called an 'ethnic traitor' and kicked in the pit of the stomach, then called a 'sellout' and stuck across the face again. I really couldn't understand what the last one meant. I knew the literal meaning of the word, of course, but I just couldn't bring myself to think that I was a sellout. I could sense the incongruity of the label but didn't have words to express it. Then someone who was able to say exactly what I was feeling appeared, like a superhero. A voice rose up from the back of the classroom. "We've never belonged to a country we could sell out

In sociological terms, they call it the fundamental attribution error. Basically, it means that when people see someone in a bad situation, they tend to believe that individual brought it on themselves. Of course, there are always external, situational forces at play, but it’s human nature to think it could never happen to you. You’d fight back differently if attacked; crawl your way out of the burning building; wouldn’t fall for that online scam. And, of course, you’d never end up sleeping on the streets. Those people have drug problems, mental health issues, no work ethic.

Of course, our natural impulse in these [intractable conflict] situations is to fight or flee. To lash out, blame, attack, or challenge someone, or otherwise try to get out and avoid the situation altogether. These responses make perfect sense in the short term, but likely will have little effect on the 5 percent [of conflicts that are intractable]. In fact, they may make matters worse in the long term. So if escaping or resolving this conflict is your goal (and we do not assume this is always the case), we suggest a different approach. And it begins with complicating your life.

There's some kind of universal 'how to deal with a kidnapper as a girl' lecture?" "It goes along with telling us how to hold our keys between our fingers so we can stab people's eyes out with them if they attack us in parking lots," Iris says. "And checking the back seat of the car before we get into it in case there's someone hiding there," I add. "And how you should kick the brake light out of the back of a car if someone throws you in a trunk–" "That way you can wave your hand out, and the cars driving behind can see you and call 911." Wes stares at us. "That's really fucked up.

I discovered that I had been intuitively using the less-is-more idea as an aid in decision making (contrary to the method of putting a series of pros and cons side by side on a computer screen). For instance, if you have more than one reason to do something (choose a doctor or veterinarian, hire a gardener or an employee, marry a person, go on a trip), just don’t do it. It does not mean that one reason is better than two, just that by invoking more than one reason you are trying to convince yourself to do something. Obvious decisions (robust to error) require no more than a single reason. Likewise the French army had a heuristic to reject excuses for absenteeism for more than one reason, like death of grandmother, cold virus, and being bitten by a boar. If someone attacks a book or idea using more than one argument, you know it is not real: nobody says “he is a criminal, he killed many people, and he also has bad table manners and bad breath and is a very poor driver.

Interior turmoil arises when we realize that we may have hurt, degraded, or frightened someone with our many outbursts. We’ll feel some sense of release with the expression of our strong emotions, but we’ll be disappointed about our poor relating skills or ashamed about our lack of control. Expressing strong emotions at others can damage our ego structure and our sense of self-esteem. Then, our lowered self-esteem tends to make us less able to manage our emotions properly the next time, and we tend to slide into an almost uncontrollable habit of flinging our strong emotions all over the place. We become trapped in a cycle of attacks and retreats, enmeshment and isolation, and explosions and apologies. Our internal checks and balances seem to get broken, and we become emotionally volatile.

Most people reflect on their own thoughts: Is this true? Am I overreacting? I should check this out. But people with PDs don’t seem to have the ability to reflect on their own thoughts or behavior. Like someone who is drunk, their thinking is continually “under the influence” of their cognitive distortions. They can send, but not receive, new information. Because they are unaware of their cognitive distortions, these distortions can underlie serious misbehavior, including physical abuse, emotional abuse, and even legal abuse (using the legal system to attack a target and to promote false or unnecessary litigation). Information that does not fit the distortion is rigidly unconsciously blocked as too threatening and confusing. Instead, people with PDs defend their distortions in an effort to protect themselves. Blamers repeatedly react to “false alarms” caused by all-or-nothing thinking, jumping to conclusions, and so forth. They truly believe that they are in danger, and they feel powerless and out of control inside.

The thing about fires most people don’t realise is the noise. It’s deafening so even if you shout, you can’t be heard three feet away. You can never quite get used to the fury of it, it’s like a mighty roar of anger that just keeps going. I suppose flame is beautiful, the way it leaps into the air like it’s free to do what it wants. Other elements are also free and I guess the sea can be pretty awesome, wind too, and lightning, but fire has a mind and a determination. You don’t see it as a blind raging thing, which I suppose it is, but something that attacks and thinks and changes tactics. It has a malevolence that uses surprise, dirty tricks, cunning. You get to think of it as someone, not something, and it’s someone you have to beat, but right from the start you don’t like your chances because it’s so big and unpredictable and can do so much harm.

Once upon a time, mystery fans had to solve puzzles on their own; now, you not only didn’t need to be the one to solve it, you didn’t even need to be hanging around on the website where someone else had solved it. An Ana Lucia flashback episode in the second season showed Jack’s father, Christian, visiting a blonde Australian woman. Not long after it aired, I saw someone on the Television Without Pity message boards passing along a theory they had read on a different site suggesting that this woman was Claire’s mother, that Christian was her father, and that Jack and Claire were unwitting half-siblings. I hadn’t connected those dots myself, but the theory immediately made sense to me. When I interviewed Cuse that summer, he mentioned Christian Shephard, and I said, “And he’s Claire’s father, too, right?” Cuse looked like he was about to have a heart attack.

You know, it’s funny. If someone attacked you with a knife and scarred you, the courts would assess the physical damage—how long a scar, how many stitches it took to close the wound, whatever—and they’d come up with a figure that you’d be entitled to in compensation. But hurting someone with words that they’ll always remember? With an act they’ll never forget? That’s physical damage, too—it changes you just as permanently as a scar. But instead of tallying up what the compensation should be, we just say, ‘Get over it,’ or ‘You should develop a thicker skin,’ or—and this is ironic, given that it’s the one thing that’s impossible—‘you should just forget about it.

Growing up with EI parents can make you very self-critical because they think that criticism is the only way to turn you into a responsible person. You end up feeling like you never measure up and constantly need to improve yourself. You evaluate yourself to a point that’s destructive, not constructive. Like your parents, you may think that self-criticism will make you a better person. But criticizing yourself won’t improve you any more than attacking a child’s self-esteem makes them more confident. Self-criticism is no way to have a relationship with yourself. It sentences you to a life of anxious dependency in which no power is greater than someone else’s opinion of you.

Oh I could be out, rollicking in the ripeness of my flesh and others’, could be drinking things and eating things and rubbing mine against theirs, speculating about this person or that, waving, indicating hello with a sudden upward jutting of my chin, sitting in the backseat of someone else’s car, bumping up and down the San Francisco hills, south of Market, seeing people attacking their instruments, afterward stopping at a bodega, parking, carrying the bottles in a paper bag, the glass clinking, all our faces bright, glowing under streetlamps, down the sidewalk to this or that apartment party, hi, hi, putting the bottles in the fridge, removing one for now, hating the apartment, checking the view, sitting on the arm of a couch and being told not to, and then waiting for the bathroom, staring idly at that ubiquitous Ansel Adams print, Yosemite, talking to a short-haired girl while waiting in the hallway, talking about teeth, no reason really, the train of thought unclear, asking to see her fillings, no, really, I’ll show you mine first, ha ha, then no, you go ahead, I’ll go after you, then, after using the bathroom she is still there, still in the hallway, she was waiting not just for the bathroom but for me, and so eventually we’ll go home together, her apartment, where she lives alone, in a wide, immaculate railroad type place, newly painted, decorated with her mother, then sleeping in her oversized, oversoft white bed, eating breakfast in her light-filled nook, then maybe to the beach for a few hours with the Sunday paper, then wandering home whenever, never- Fuck. We don't even have a baby-sitter.

It is important you understand how fear affects you and how it drives human behavior so you can start to see situations and people accurately and respond more appropriately. When someone is behaving badly, attacking you, or being defensive, critical, or judgmental, it is not really about you. Fear is the real reason people behave badly. Their fears make them selfish, defensive, mean, and grouchy. Every time someone is behaving badly, step back and ask yourself, “What is this person afraid of? What fear inside me is driving my reaction to their attack? What am I afraid of?” When you can accurately see the fear behind their behavior, and yours, you will see the situation for what it really is.

Kristin comes down the stairs, and the pressure on my chest snaps. I take a moment to turn away, inhaling deeply, blinking away tears. She sets the plate on a table behind the couch, and half tiptoes back up the stairs. Thank god. I don’t think I could have handled maternal attention right this second. My body feels like it’s on a hair trigger. I need to get it together. This is why people avoid me. Someone asks if I want a drink and I have a panic attack. “You’re okay.” Declan is beside me, and his voice is low and soft, the way it was in the foyer. He’s so hard all the time, and that softness takes me by surprise. I blink up at him. “You’re okay,” he says again. I like that, how he’s so sure. Not Are you okay? No question about it. You’re okay. He lifts one shoulder in a half shrug. “But if you’re going to lose it, this is a pretty safe place to fall apart.” He takes two cookies from the plate, then holds one out to me. “Here. Eat your feelings.” I’m about to turn him down, but then I look at the cookie. I was expecting something basic, like sugar or chocolate chip. This looks like a miniature pie, and sugar glistens across the top. “What . . . is that?” “Pecan pie cookies,” says Rev. He’s taken about five of them, and I think he might have shoved two in his mouth at once. “I could live on them for days.” I take the one Declan offered and nibble a bit from the side. It is awesome. I peer up at him sideways. “How did you know?” He hesitates, but he doesn’t ask me what I mean. “I know the signs.” “I’m going to get some sodas,” Rev says slowly, deliberately. “I’m going to bring you one. Blink once if that’s okay.” I smile, but it feels watery around the edges. He’s teasing me, but it’s gentle teasing. Friendly. I blink once. This is okay. I’m okay. Declan was right. “Take it out on the punching bag,” calls Rev. “That’s what I do.” My eyes go wide. “Really?” “Do whatever you want,” says Declan. “As soon as we do anything meaningful, the baby will wake up.” Rev returns with three sodas. “We’re doing something meaningful right now.” “We are?” I say. He meets my eyes. “Every moment is meaningful.” The words could be cheesy—should be cheesy, in fact—but he says them with enough weight that I know he means them. I think of The Dark and all our talk of paths and loss and guilt. Declan sighs and pops the cap on his soda. “This is where Rev starts to freak people out.” “No,” I say, feeling like this afternoon could not be more surreal. Something about Rev’s statement steals some of my earlier guilt, to think that being here could carry as much weight as paying respects to my mother. I wish I knew how to tell whether this is a path I’m supposed to be on. “No, I like it. Can I really punch the bag?” Rev shrugs and takes a sip of his soda. “It’s either that or we can break out the Play-Doh

New Rule: Now that liberals have taken back the word "liberal," they also have to take back the word "elite." By now you've heard the constant right-wing attacks on the "elite media," and the "liberal elite." Who may or may not be part of the "Washington elite." A subset of the "East Coast elite." Which is overly influenced by the "Hollywood elite." So basically, unless you're a shit-kicker from Kansas, you're with the terrorists. If you played a drinking game where you did a shot every time Rush Limbaugh attacked someone for being "elite," you'd be almost as wasted as Rush Limbaugh. I don't get it: In other fields--outside of government--elite is a good thing, like an elite fighting force. Tiger Woods is an elite golfer. If I need brain surgery, I'd like an elite doctor. But in politics, elite is bad--the elite aren't down-to-earth and accessible like you and me and President Shit-for-Brains. Which is fine, except that whenever there's a Bush administration scandal, it always traces back to some incompetent political hack appointment, and you think to yourself, "Where are they getting these screwups from?" Well, now we know: from Pat Robertson. I'm not kidding. Take Monica Goodling, who before she resigned last week because she's smack in the middle of the U.S. attorneys scandal, was the third-ranking official in the Justice Department of the United States. She's thirty-three, and though she never even worked as a prosecutor, was tasked with overseeing the job performance of all ninety-three U.S. attorneys. How do you get to the top that fast? Harvard? Princeton? No, Goodling did her undergraduate work at Messiah College--you know, home of the "Fighting Christies"--and then went on to attend Pat Robertson's law school. Yes, Pat Robertson, the man who said the presence of gay people at Disney World would cause "earthquakes, tornadoes, and possibly a meteor," has a law school. And what kid wouldn't want to attend? It's three years, and you have to read only one book. U.S. News & World Report, which does the definitive ranking of colleges, lists Regent as a tier-four school, which is the lowest score it gives. It's not a hard school to get into. You have to renounce Satan and draw a pirate on a matchbook. This is for the people who couldn't get into the University of Phoenix. Now, would you care to guess how many graduates of this televangelist diploma mill work in the Bush administration? On hundred fifty. And you wonder why things are so messed up? We're talking about a top Justice Department official who went to a college founded by a TV host. Would you send your daughter to Maury Povich U? And if you did, would you expect her to get a job at the White House? In two hundred years, we've gone from "we the people" to "up with people." From the best and brightest to dumb and dumber. And where better to find people dumb enough to believe in George Bush than Pat Robertson's law school? The problem here in America isn't that the country is being run by elites. It's that it's being run by a bunch of hayseeds. And by the way, the lawyer Monica Goodling hired to keep her ass out of jail went to a real law school.

Men are not gentle creatures who want to be loved, and who at the most can defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. As a result, their neighbor is for them not only a potential helper or sexual object, but also someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him. Homo homini lupus [man is wolf to man]. Who in the face of all his experience of life and of history, will have the courage to dispute this assertion?

Kiaran tosses me his coat. “Here. There’s a roll of bread for you in the inner pocket. You need to eat something.” The bread is wrapped in leaves that kept it dry. I gratefully murmur my thanks that Kiaran is so practical. Between the Morrigan’s attacks and worrying over the Book, I didn’t even notice how famished I was. Kiaran gathers wood for a fire and I light it with my powers. A small bit of energy I’m willing to risk because I’m so bloody tired and I’ve never seen Kiaran look this rough, either. Now you know how I feel, I think wryly as I move to sit near the flames. No invulnerable, shining fae skin. No immediate healing. Just the deep bone-tiredness of mortality. Kiaran sits opposite, as far from me as possible. The scent of burning wood must mask the scent of my blood, at least a little. His eyes flicker to me in a quick, controlled assessment. “Your wounds need binding.” I can’t help but smile. “First the bread, now my wounds. Is this the Kiaran MacKay way of fussing over someone?” “I don’t fuss,” Kiaran says. “I give stern instructions, like: Bind your goddamn wounds.” “I don’t like overbearing men.” His mouth quirks into a sly smile. “And yet I love assertive, stubborn women.” I laugh in surprise. “God, I adore you.

Do you know what a honey mushroom is?" she blurted out, plucking at the hairs on his arm, which was wrapped around her. He was silent for a moment before letting out a husky laugh "No. Why?" "It's the largest living thing on earth. Larger than trees, elephants, whales-this one living thing takes up over three square miles in Oregon." She could almost feel him turning that random fact over in his brain. She was glad she wasn't facing him. This would be so much harder if she had to look into his eyes instead of at the wall. "Like the mushroom cap is over three miles across?" he asked. Harper shook her head. "No, no. That's the amazing part. When you look at it-the part you see aboveground-it's this tiny little mushroom head. It looks so insignificant. They just pop up here and there" she gestures with her fingertips as though she could draw them in the air. "But it creates this root-like system called hyphae. And the hyphae-it spreads and grows and, kind of... takes over underground. One living thing, every cell genetically identical, spreading below the surface to take up this enormous amount of space." Dan was quiet for a moment. "Why are you telling me this?" he asked, placing a kiss into her neck. Harper swallowed and fiddled with the edge of the sheet. "Because thats' what my anxiety feels like-a honey mushroom." She felt Dan tense behind her, but she pushed on." A lot of times, someone on the outside, like you, maybe, sees these clues to it-my fidgeting, my mind seeming a million miles away, panic attacks. But inside" -she tapped her chest- "it's this intricate network of sharp pain and fear that's constantly growing and pulsing through me. It's always there, right beneath my skin, huge and controlling, but no one can see it. I just feel it. And it hurts. So badly. It makes me want to curl up into a ball or sprint out of my skeleton. This huge, inescapable thing inside me that controls me." she paused, picking aggressively at her nails; "It feels cruel to have your own body do that to you".

But were we able to offer “them” a more viable narrative? Did we have a narrative potent enough to chase away Asahara’s “utter nonsense”? That was the big task. I am a novelist, and as we all know a novelist is someone who works with “narratives,” who spins “stories” professionally. Which meant to me that the task at hand was like a gigantic sword dangling above my head. It’s something I’m going to have to deal with much more seriously from here on. I know I’m going to have to construct a “cosmic communication device” of my own. I’ll probably have to piece together every last scrap of junk, every weakness, every deficiency inside me to do it. (There, I’ve gone and said it—but the real surprise is that it’s exactly what I’ve been trying to do as a writer all along!)

We all have one thing in common—we’re born with power, but the world doesn’t like a confident woman, so they try to crush them with tabloids of what “perfection” should look like. It’s all a hoax to deceive us into thinking we’re lesser of a woman if we don’t look or act a certain way. We, as a sisterhood, must rise above that and harness the power our ancestors fought so hard for and destroy the patriarchy. This won’t happen quickly. In order for this to happen, we have to stop slut shaming, skinny shaming, fat shaming, fit shaming, or any shaming. There is no shame in what someone looks like, period—what is truly shameful is how easy it is for some of us to attack the other all because it’s not something we would wear or how we would talk. Individuality is a gift.

Vulnerability is usually attacked, not with fists but with shaming. Many children learn quickly to cover up any signs of weakness, sensitivity, and fragility, as well as alarm, fear, eagerness, neediness, or even curiosity. Above all, they must never disclose that the teasing has hit its mark. Carl Jung explained that we tend to attack in others what we are most uncomfortable with in ourselves. When vulnerability is the enemy, it is attacked wherever it is perceived, even in a best friend. Signs of alarm may provoke verbal taunts such as “fraidy cat” or “chicken.” Tears evoke ridicule. Expressions of curiosity can precipitate the rolling of eyes and accusations of being weird or nerdy. Manifestations of tenderness can result in incessant teasing. Revealing that something caused hurt or really caring about something is risky around someone uncomfortable with his vulnerability. In the company of the desensitized, any show of emotional openness is likely to be targeted. The vulnerability engendered by peer orientation can be overwhelming even when children are not hurting one another. This vulnerability is built into the highly insecure nature of peer-oriented relationships. Vulnerability does not have to do only with what is happening but with what could happen — with the inherent insecurity of attachment. What we have, we can lose, and the greater the value of what we have, the greater the potential loss. We may be able to achieve closeness in a relationship, but we cannot secure it in the sense of holding on to it — not like securing a rope or a boat or a fixed interest-bearing government bond. One has very little control over what happens in a relationship, whether we will still be wanted and loved tomorrow. Although the possibility of loss is present in any relationship, we parents strive to give our children what they are constitutionally unable to give to one another: a connection that is not based on their pleasing us, making us feel good, or reciprocating in any way. In other words, we offer our children precisely what is missing in peer attachments: unconditional acceptance.

Our family was starting. We kept on moving with our young lives, shortly afterward and took Ben Young with us everywhere. But pretty soon Pegi started noticing that Ben was not doing the things some other babies were doing. Pegi was wondering if something was wrong. She was young, and nothing had ever gone wrong in her life. People told us kids grow at different rates and do things at different times. But as Ben reached six months old, we found ourselves sitting in a doctor's office. He glanced at us and offhandedly said, "Of course. Ben has cerebral palsy." I was in shock. I walked around in a for for weeks. I couldn't fathom how I had fathered two children with a rare condition that was not supposed to be hereditary, with tow different mothers. I was so angry and confused inside, projecting scenarios in my mind where people said something bad about Ben or Zeke and I would just attack them, going wild. Luckily that never did happen, but there was a root of instability inside me for a while. Although it mellowed with time, I carried that feeling around for years. Eventually Pegi and I, wanting to have another child after Ben, went to se an expert of the subject. That was Pegi's idea. Always organized and methodical in her approach to problems, Pegi planned an approach to our dilemma with her very high intelligence. We both loved children but were a little gun-shy about having another, to say the least. After evaluating our situation and our children, the doctor told us that probably Zeke dis not actually have CP-he likely had suffered a stroke in utero. The symptoms are very similar. Pegi and I weighed this information. To know someone like her and to make a decision about a subject as important as this with her was a gift beyond anything I have ever experienced. It was her idea, and she had guided us to this point. We made a decision together to go forward and have another child.

Recently, my friend Erika called my cell phone. I will never understand why people insist upon calling my cell phone. It’s such an aggressive action to take: calling someone. Each time my phone rings, I have a heart attack like my pocket’s on fire and a tiny siren is going off. I’d also like to take this opportunity to address texting. Texting = Better Than Calling. Unless. Unless you are one of those people who doles out texts like IOUs. Unless you believe that whenever you feel like it, you can just poke at me, ping me, jump into my day like Hiiiiii and feel so entitled to a response that the next time I see you, you will arrange your face in an injured manner and say quietly, “Hey. You doing okay? I just never heard back…” At this moment, I have 183 unread texts. Texts are not the boss of me, and neither is anybody who texts me. I have decided, once and for all, that just because someone texts me does not obligate me to respond. If I believed differently, I’d walk around all day feeling anxious and indebted, responding instead of creating. Now that we’ve established why I have no friends, let’s return to Erika.

Pierre Janet, a French professor of psychology who became prominent in the early twentieth century, attempted to fully chronicle late- Victorian hysteria in his landmark work The Major Symptoms of Hysteria. His catalogue of symptoms was staggering, and included somnambulism (not sleepwalking as we think of it today, but a sort of amnesiac condition in which the patient functioned in a trance state, or "second state," and later remembered nothing); trances or fits of sleep that could last for days, and in which the patient sometimes appeared to be dead; contractures or other disturbances in the motor functions of the limbs; paralysis of various parts of the body; unexplained loss of the use of a sense such as sight or hearing; loss of speech; and disruptions in eating that could entail eventual refusal of food altogether. Janet's profile was sufficiently descriptive of Mollie Fancher that he mentioned her by name as someone who "seems to have had all possible hysterical accidents and attacks." In the face of such strange and often intractable "attacks," many doctors who treated cases of hysteria in the 1800s developed an ill-concealed exasperation.

I encourage my patients to do what it takes to normalize their blood pressure so they do not require medication. Prescribing medications for high blood pressure has the effect of giving someone a permission slip. Medication has a minimal effect in reducing heart attack occurrence in patients with high blood pressure because it does not remove the underlying problem (atherosclerosis), it just treats the symptom. Patients given medication now falsely believe they are protected, and they continue to follow the same disease-causing lifestyle that led to the problem to begin with, until the inevitable occurs—their first heart attack or stroke. Maybe if high blood pressure medications had never been invented, doctors would have been forced to teach healthful living and nutritional disease causation to their patients. It is possible that many more lives could have been saved.

I’ll be damned. You found him.” “Thanks to you,” I said. Adrian glanced over at me. A smile started to form—and then instantly dried up. “What happened to your face?” “Oh.Marcus hit me.” I’d never seen Adrian move so fast. Marcus had no chance to react, probably because he was exhausted from our earlier encounter. Adrian shoved Marcus up against a wall and—to my complete and utter astonishment—punched Marcus. Adrian had once joked that he never dirtied his hands, so this was something I never could have prepared myself for. In fact, if Adrian was going to attack someone, I would’ve expected something magical and spirit-driven. Yet . . . as I watched him, I could see that anything as thoughtful as magic was far from Adrian’s mind. He had kicked into primal mode. See a threat. Go after it. It was yet another surprising—yet fascinating—side of the enigma that was Adrian Ivashkov.

Do you want to hold her?” Qhuinn asked. Xcor recoiled as if someone had inquired whether he’d like a hot poker in his hands. Then he recovered, shaking his head as he made a manly show of scrubbing his tears away like they were permanent marker on his cheeks. “I don’t think I’m quite ready for that. She looks…so delicate.” “She’s strong, though. She’s got her mahmen’s blood in her, too.” Qhuinn looked at Blay. “And she’s got good parents. They both do. We’re in this together, people, three fathers and one mom, two kids. Bam!” Xcor’s voice got low. “A father…?” He laughed softly. “I went from having no family, to having a mate, a brother, and now…” Qhuinn nodded. “A son and a daughter. As long as you are Layla’s hellren, you are their father, too.” Xcor’s smile was transformative, so wide that it stretched his face into something she had never seen. “A son and a daughter.” “That’s right,” Layla whispered with joy. But then instantly that expression on his face was gone, his lips thinning out and his brows dropping down like he was ready to go on the attack. “She is never dating. I don’t care who he is—” “Right!” Qhuinn put his palm out for a high five. “That’s what I’m talking about!” “Now, hold on,” Blay interjected as they clapped hands. “She has every right to live her life as she chooses.” “Yes, come on,” Layla added. “This double-standard stuff is ridiculous. She’s going to be allowed…” As the argument started up, she and Blay fell in beside each other, and Qhuinn and Xcor lined up shoulder to shoulder, their massive forearms crossed over their chests. “I’m good with a gun,” Xcor said like that was the end of things. “And I can handle the shovel,” Qhuinn tacked on. “They’ll never find the body.” The two of them pounded knuckles and looked so dead serious that Layla had to roll her eyes. But then she was smiling. “You know something?” she said to the three of them. “I really believe…that it’s all going to be okay. We’re going to work it out, together, because that’s what families do.” As she rose up on her tiptoes and kissed her male, she said, “Love has a way of fixing everything…even your daughter starting to date.” “Which is not going to happen,” Xcor countered. “Ever.” “My man,” Qhuinn said, backing him up. “I knew I liked you—” “Oh, for the love,” Layla muttered as the debate resumed, and Blay started laughing and Qhuinn and Xcor continued bonding. -Qhuinn, Xcor, Layla, & Blay

I have never returned to the mortal realms. Those who make frequent trips do so at great personal sacrifice.” I looked at Reth, who still stood next to me, had been standing next to me this entire time, silent and watching. Reth who never needed to come back to Earth after I freed him from IPCA. Reth who was looking dimmer by the hour after taking the midnight faerie’s attack in my place. The Light Queen followed my gaze. “My golden son has given much because of his love for you and his devotion to me. He may yet give up all.” Well, bleep. It was so much simpler to hate him. “I know you hold depths of anger and bitterness toward the fey, child, but please understand our desperation. And please know my deep respect for humans and human life. Such beautiful, fragile animals, so fleeting and easily broken yet powerful beyond anything faeries can ever hope to be. We cannot create but live forever, unchanging. You change with every breath, dying even as you live, but your thread to eternity and immortality is reborn with every new generation.” I was bust avoiding Reth’s eyes, not wanting to think that, as someone who was nobly sacrificing to be around me and protect me. Not wanting to accept that he really loved me the way he was always saying he did.

Yet what moved Our Blessed Lord to invective was not badness but just such self-righteousness as this…He said that the harlots and the Quislings would enter the Kingdom of Heaven before the self-righteous and the smug. Concerning all those who endowed hospitals and libraries and public works, in order to have their names graven in stone before their fellow men, He said, “Amen I say to you, they have received their reward” (Matt. 6:2). They wanted no more than human glory, and they got it. Never once is Our Blessed Lord indignant against those who are already, in the eyes of society, below the level of law and respectability. He attacked only the sham indignation of those who dwelt more on the sin than the sinner and who felt pleasantly virtuous, because they had found someone more vicious than they. He would not condemn those whom society condemned; his severe words were for those who had sinned and had not been found out…He would not add His burden of accusation to those that had already been hurled against the winebibbers and the thieves, the cheap revolutionists, the streetwalkers, and the traitors. They were everybody’s target, and everybody knew that they were wrong…And the people who chose to make war against Our Lord were never those whom society had labeled as sinners. Of those who sentenced Him to death, none had ever had a record in the police court, had ever been arrested, was ever commonly known to be fallen or weak. But among his friends, who sorrowed at His death, were coverts drawn from thieves and from prostitutes. Those who were aligned against Him were the nice people who stood high in the community—the worldly, prosperous people, the men of big business, the judges of law courts who governed by expediency, the “civic-minded” individuals whose true selfishness was veneered over with public generosity. Such men as these opposed him and sent Him to His death.

We are the center. In each of our minds - some may call it arrogance, or selfishness - we are the center, and all the world moves about us, and for us, and because of us. This is the paradox of community, the one and the whole, the desires of the one often in direct conflict with the needs of the whole. Who among us has not wondered if all the world is no more than a personal dream? I do not believe that such thoughts are arrogant or selfish. It is simply a matter of perception; we can empathize with someone else, but we cannot truly see the world as another person sees it, or judge events as they affect the mind and the heart of another, even a friend. But we must try. For the sake of all the world, we must try. This is the test of altruism, the most basic and undeniable ingredient for society. Therein lies the paradox, for ultimately, logically, we each must care more about ourselves than about others, and yet, if, as rational beings we follow that logical course, we place our needs and desires above the needs of our society, and then there is no community. I come from Menzoberranzan, city of drow, city of self. I have seen that way of selfishness. I have seen it fail miserably. When self-indulgence rules, then all the community loses, and in the end, those striving for personal gains are left with nothing of any real value. Because everything of value that we will know in this life comes from our relationships with those around us. Because there is nothing material that measures against the intangibles of love and friendship. Thus, we must overcome that selfishness and we must try, we must care. I saw this truth plainly following the attack on Captain Deudermont in Watership. My first inclination was to believe that my past had precipitated the trouble, that my life course had again brought pain to a friend. I could not bear this thought. I felt old and I felt tired. Subsequently learning that the trouble was possibly brought on by Deudermont's old enemies, not my own, gave me more heart for the fight. Why is that? The danger to me was no less, nor was the danger to Deudermont, or to Catti-brie or any of the others about us. Yet my emotions were real, very real, and I recognized and understood them, if not their source. Now, in reflection, I recognize that source, and take pride in it. I have seen the failure of self-indulgence; I have run from such a world. I would rather die because of Deudermont's past than have him die because of my own. I would suffer the physical pains, even the end of my life. Better that than watch one I love suffer and die because of me. I would rather have my physical heart torn from my chest, than have my heart of hearts, the essence of love, the empathy and the need to belong to something bigger than my corporeal form, destroyed. They are a curious thing, these emotions. How they fly in the face of logic, how they overrule the most basic instincts. Because, in the measure of time, in the measure of humanity, we sense those self-indulgent instincts to be a weakness, we sense that the needs of the community must outweigh the desires of the one. Only when we admit to our failures and recognize our weaknesses can we rise above them. Together.

These books have really helped me get through some rough patches in my life... So if you want to disagree with me, that's fine, but please do so in a respectful manner. (On anyone's posts for that matter) You never know what someone may be going through. I was recently called an idiot and other names that I won't repeat because I try to keep my language clean, simply because I was defending some other people who were being attacked for loving the Keeper of the Lost Cities. And I know for a fact that many people (myself included) go to books to escape their everyday life. I know of a few people who have read a book that helped them through depression because the characters in that book found a way through it. I've heard about people who were thinking about suicide and then part of a book helped them realize that it wasn't the answer. Books can save lives, as well as any other hobby. So feel free to share your opinion, but please don't attack people for theirs, no matter what it is.

Many of the innovations in science and philosophy have come from unbelievers, some of whom died for their 'unbeliefs.' Without unbelief, we might well be living in the Dark Ages or at least in the intellectual equivalent of that time. In past centuries many theists savagely attacked atheists on the ground that someone without a belief in God must be a moral 'monster,' who would permit any action. This argument is rarely heard today, as the number of people who are openly atheists has become so large that its falsity is self-evident. Atheists do have a moral code to guide them. It is usually based upon the Golden Rule, plus a variety of utilitarian reasons, although there are a number of other possible systems. Rather than being immoral, most atheists are extremely moral. There are a large number of people who can and do manage to lead decent upright lives with no use for a belief in God as a guide. Atheists do not care whether others believe as they do. They do ask, however, for the right to believe as they wish ....

Ha, ha, ha! You will be finding enjoyment in toothache next," you cry, with a laugh. We have hundreds more books for your enjoyment. Read them all! "Well, even in toothache there is enjoyment," I answer. I had toothache for a whole month and I know there is. In that case, of course, people are not spiteful in silence, but moan; but they are not candid moans, they are malignant moans, and the malignancy is the whole point. The enjoyment of the sufferer finds expression in those moans; if he did not feel enjoyment in them he would not moan. It is a good example, gentlemen, and I will develop it. Those moans express in the first place all the aimlessness of your pain, which is so humiliating to your consciousness; the whole legal system of nature on which you spit disdainfully, of course, but from which you suffer all the same while she does not. They express the consciousness that you have no enemy to punish, but that you have pain; the consciousness that in spite of all possible Wagenheims you are in complete slavery to your teeth; that if someone wishes it, your teeth will leave off aching, and if he does not, they will go on aching another three months; and that finally if you are still contumacious and still protest, all that is left you for your own gratification is to thrash yourself or beat your wall with your fist as hard as you can, and absolutely nothing more. Well, these mortal insults, these jeers on the part of someone unknown, end at last in an enjoyment which sometimes reaches the highest degree of voluptuousness. I ask you, gentlemen, listen sometimes to the moans of an educated man of the nineteenth century suffering from toothache, on the second or third day of the attack, when he is beginning to moan, not as he moaned on the first day, that is, not simply because he has toothache, not just as any coarse peasant, but as a man affected by progress and European civilisation, a man who is "divorced from the soil and the national elements," as they express it now-a-days. His moans become nasty, disgustingly malignant, and go on for whole days and nights. And of course he knows himself that he is doing himself no sort of good with his moans; he knows better than anyone that he is only lacerating and harassing himself and others for nothing; he knows that even the audience before whom he is making his efforts, and his whole family, listen to him with loathing, do not put a ha'porth of faith in him, and inwardly understand that he might moan differently, more simply, without trills and flourishes, and that he is only amusing himself like that from ill-humour, from malignancy. Well, in all these recognitions and disgraces it is that there lies a voluptuous pleasure. As though he would say: "I am worrying you, I am lacerating your hearts, I am keeping everyone in the house awake. Well, stay awake then, you, too, feel every minute that I have toothache.

Suppose someone says, “Unfortunately, the popularity of soccer, the world’s favorite pastime, is starting to decline.” You suspect he is wrong. How do you question the claim? Don’t even think of taking a personal shot like “You’re silly.” That only adds heat, not light. “I don’t think so” only expresses disagreement without delving into why you disagree. “What do you mean?” lowers the emotional temperature with a question but it’s much too vague. Zero in. You might say, “What do you mean by ‘pastime’?” or “What evidence is there that soccer’s popularity is declining? Over what time frame?” The answers to these precise questions won’t settle the matter, but they will reveal the thinking behind the conclusion so it can be probed and tested. Since Socrates, good teachers have practiced precision questioning, but still it’s often not used when it’s needed most. Imagine how events might have gone if the Kennedy team had engaged in precision questioning when planning the Bay of Pigs invasion: “So what happens if they’re attacked and the plan falls apart?” “They retreat into the Escambray Mountains, where they can meet up with other anti-Castro forces and plan guerrilla operations.” “How far is it from the proposed landing site in the Bay of Pigs to the Escambray Mountains?” “Eighty miles.” “And what’s the terrain?” “Mostly swamp and jungle.” “So the guerrillas have been attacked. The plan has fallen apart. They don’t have helicopters or tanks. But they have to cross eighty miles of swamp and jungle before they can begin to look for shelter in the mountains? Is that correct?” I suspect that this conversation would not have concluded “sounds good!” Questioning like that didn’t happen, so Kennedy’s first major decision as president was a fiasco. The lesson was learned, resulting in the robust but respectful debates of the Cuban missile crisis—which exemplified the spirit we encouraged among our forecasters.

Since it morphed from “battle fatigue” or “shell shock” into a formal psychiatric illness, combat PTSD has been framed as a result of the sheer terror of being under attack, of someone trying to kill you and those around you. As we’ve seen, it is an illness where fear conditioning is overgeneralized and pathological, an amygdala grown large, hyperreactive, and convinced that you are never safe. But consider drone pilots—soldiers who sit in control rooms in the United States, directing drones on the other side of the planet. They are not in danger. Yet their rates of PTSD are just as high as those of soldiers actually “in” war. Why? Drone pilots do something horrifying and fascinating, a type of close-range, intimate killing like nothing in history, using imaging technology of extraordinary quality. A target is identified, and a drone might be positioned invisibly high in the sky over the person’s house for weeks, the drone operators always watching, waiting, say, for a gathering of targets in the house. You watch the target coming and going, eating dinner, taking a nap on his deck, playing with his kids. And then comes the command to fire, to release your Hellfire missile at supersonic speed.

When I was a kid, I used to have these panic attacks thinking about how I could never be anyone else. I couldn't be my mom or my dad, and for my whole life, I'd have to walk around inside a body that kept me from ever truly knowing anyone else. It made me feel lonely, desolate, almost hopeless. When I told my parents about this, I expected them to know the feeling I was talking about, but they didn't. "That doesn't mean there's anything wrong with feeling that way, though, sweetie!" Mom insisted. "Who else do you think about being?" my dad said with his particular blunt fascination. The fear lessened, but the feeling never went away. Every once in a while, I'd roll it back out, poke at it. Wonder how I could ever stop feeling lonely when no one could ever know me all the way. When I could never peer into someone else's brain and see it all. And now I'm crying because reading this story makes me feel for the first time that I'm not in body. Like there's some bubble that stretches around me and Alex and makes it so we're just two different colored globs in a lava lamp, mixing freely, dancing around each other, unhindered. I'm crying because I'm relieved. Because I will never again feel as alone as I did during those long nights as a kid. As long as I have him, I will never be alone again.

WHEN YOU BECOME INVOLVED IN AN ARGUMENT or some conflict situation, perhaps with a partner or someone close to you, start by observing how defensive you become as your own position is attacked, or feel the force of your own aggression as you attack the other person's position. Observe the attachment to your views and opinions. Feel the mental-emotional energy behind your need to be right and make the other person wrong. That's the energy of the egoic mind. You make it conscious by acknowledging it, by feeling it as fully as possible. Then one day, in the middle of an argument, you will suddenly realize that you have a choice, and you may decide to drop your own reaction — just to see what happens. You surrender. I don't mean dropping the reaction just verbally by saying “Okay, you are right,” with a look on your face that says, “I am above all this childish unconsciousness.” That's just displacing the resistance to another level, with the egoic mind still in charge, claiming superiority. I am speaking of letting go of the entire mental-emotional energy field inside you that was fighting for power. The ego is cunning, so you have to be very alert, very present, and totally honest with yourself to see whether you have truly relinquished your identification with a mental position and so freed yourself from your mind.

Our internal boundaries define and contain the unique personal characteristics of our thoughts, feelings, opinions, behaviors, beliefs, and spirituality. Boundaries help us recognize, honor, and respect our individual wants, needs, and desires. They help us define our separateness and give us safety in our intimate communications with others. If someone verbally attacks us, we maintain our internal boundary and practice self-containment by moderately expressing our thoughts and feelings about their behavior using “I” statements. Or, we may choose not to respond and silently remind ourselves that how another person acts is about that person, not about us. If someone confronts us about our behavior, we use our internal boundary to listen to what they say. We do not internalize what is said before deciding if any of it rings true for us. If we have wronged the other person, we make amends. In either situation our self-worth is not diminished because we have maintained our internal boundaries. 110:2 We use internal boundaries in various ways. An example is deciding how much personal information, such as personal history or financial information, to share with others. Conversely, we refrain from delving into others’ personal business. We might really want to ask a question or say something to someone, yet we do not because we know that person’s private life is none of our business. 111:1 When we have healthy internal boundary systems, we recognize that each individual is responsible for his or her emotional, mental, and spiritual boundaries. We allow ourselves and others to have their own thoughts, feelings, opinions, behaviors, beliefs, and spirituality. With functional boundaries we are able to meet our needs without infringing on others’ abilities to meet their needs. Our internal boundaries can be flexible and we decide what is safe and comfortable for ourselves.

Anxiety isn’t an attack that explodes out of me; it’s not a volcano that lies dormant until it’s triggered by an earth-shattering event. It’s a constant companion. Like a blowfly that gets into the house in the middle of summer, flying around and around. You can hear it buzzing, but you can’t see it, can’t capture it, can’t let it out. My anxiety is invisible to others, but often it’s the focal point of my mind. Everything that happens on a day-to-day basis is filtered through a lens colored by anxiety. That nervousness that makes your palms sweat and your heart race before you get up and make a speech in front of an audience? That’s what I feel in a normal conversation at a dinner table. Or just thinking about having a conversation at a dinner table. The fear that other people feel on rare occasions, reserved only for when they jump out of a plane or hear a strange noise in the middle of the night—that’s my normal. That’s what I feel when the phone rings. When someone knocks on my door. When I go outside. When I’m alone. When I’m in line at a store. Everything feels like I’m on a stage, spotlight on me, all eyes on me, watching, judging. Like I’m one second away from total disaster. It’s invisible, it’s irrational, it’s never-ending. I could be standing there, smiling and chatting like everything is totally fine, while secretly wanting to scream and cry and run away. No one would ever know. In my mind, no one can hear me scream. I hide it because I know it’s not understood or acceptable—because I’m not understood or acceptable.

Because now mental health disorders have gone “mainstream”. And for all the good it’s brought people like me who have been given therapy and stuff, there’s a lot of bad it’s brought too. Because now people use the phrase OCD to describe minor personality quirks. “Oooh, I like my pens in a line, I’m so OCD.” NO YOU’RE FUCKING NOT. “Oh my God, I was so nervous about that presentation, I literally had a panic attack.” NO YOU FUCKING DIDN’T. “I’m so hormonal today. I just feel totally bipolar.” SHUT UP, YOU IGNORANT BUMFACE. Told you I got angry. These words – words like OCD and bipolar – are not words to use lightly. And yet now they’re everywhere. There are TV programmes that actually pun on them. People smile and use them, proud of themselves for learning them, like they should get a sticker or something. Not realizing that if those words are said to you by a medical health professional, as a diagnosis of something you’ll probably have for ever, they’re words you don’t appreciate being misused every single day by someone who likes to keep their house quite clean. People actually die of bipolar, you know? They jump in front of trains and tip down bottles of paracetamol and leave letters behind to their devastated families because their bullying brains just won’t let them be for five minutes and they can’t bear to live with that any more. People also die of cancer. You don’t hear people going around saying: “Oh my God, my headache is so, like, tumoury today.” Yet it’s apparently okay to make light of the language of people’s internal hell

First, remember how Control Dramas get started in the first place. When people feel insecure, they do things to feel better in various ways. We don’t just have to defend against our own hurts and anxieties; we also have to defend against others who we think are trying to put us down or otherwise manipulate us to steal our energy. When someone puts us down, we sense that we are under attack and pay attention to them. Because “where attention goes, energy flows,” they get a hit of energy from us and we feel diminished. So we tend to fight back by putting them down or manipulating them in return to get the energy back. As you read in Celestine, this is the game played by too many, keeping too much conflict and corruption in the world. But this is all Ego stuff, of course, developed initially in insecure families. You already know the cure is to always be Spiritually Connected so we have our own centered inner security, which gives us an endless supply of energy, regardless of who is trying to steal it. We don’t have to play these games any longer. Here is what to do: simply stay connected with the person, giving them energy, and then “name their game.” For instance, if you are facing a “poor me” drama, in which the person wants to make you feel guilty about something you didn’t intend to do, simply say, “I am feeling that I’m being forced to feel guilty.” And stick to that. Don’t defend yourself. Just keep explaining your experience of the situation. Keep sending love. They might need to retreat, but you aren’t affected. You are a giver, secure in yourself. You cleared an inauthentic game by expressing authentic honesty. You offered your experience of the situation. Whether the other person wanted to or not, in response to your authenticity, they will find themselves becoming more authentic as well. And since you aren’t disconnecting, it opens the door to talk about true feelings in a relationship. Sometimes it’s the “aloof” Control Drama you’re facing, and the person is using distancing or mystification to get you to keep asking questions in order to win your energy. Collapse their game by giving them energy anyway and authentically saying, “I feel like I really can’t get to know you because you don’t share details about yourself.” Similarly, if you are facing an “Interrogator” who bids for energy by constantly finding something to criticize about you, simply say that you feel criticized and put down when you are with them. They will feel your energy and authentic sincerity and, again, will grow more authentic themselves, right in front of your eyes. The same name-the-game approach also works for the most aggressive Control Drama, the “Intimidator,” trying to get energy from you by telling you they are going to blow up and do something crazy, literally trying to scare you into giving them energy. Gently name the game, but be careful—sometimes it is more prudent to remove yourself from the situation.

To take the choice of another…to forget their concrete reality, to abstract them, to forget that you are a node in a matrix, that actions have consequences. We must not take the choice of another being. What is community but a means to…for all we individuals to have…our choices. ” Kar’uchai shrugged and indicated the world around them vaguely. “Your city institutions…Talking and talking of individuals…but crushing them in layers and hierarchies…until their choices might be between three kinds of squalor. “We have far less, in the desert. We hunger, sometimes, and thirst. But we have all the choices that we can. Except when someone forgets themselves, forgets the reality of their companions, as if they were an individual alone…And steals food, and takes the choice of others to eat it, or lies about game, and takes the choice of others to hunt it; or grows angry and attacks without reason, and takes the choice of another not to be bruised or live in fear. “A child who steals the cloak of some beloved other, to smell at night…they take away the choice to wear the cloak, but with respect, with a surfeit of respect. “Other thefts, though, do not have even respect to mitigate them. “To kill…not in war or defence, but to…murder…is to have such disrespect, such utter disrespect, that you take not only the choice of whether to live or die that moment…but every other choice for all of time that might be made. Choices beget choices…if they had been allowed their choice to live, they might have chosen to hunt for fish in a salt-swamp, or to play dice, or to tan hides, to write poesy or cook stew…and all those choices are taken from them in that one theft. “That is choice-theft in the highest degree. But all choice-thefts steal from the future as well as the present.

Transcendental generosity is generally misunderstood in the study of the Buddhist scriptures as meaning being kind to someone who is lower than you.  Someone has this pain and suffering and you are in a superior position and can save them—which is a very simple-minded way of looking down on someone.  But in the case of the bodhisattva, generosity is not so callous.  It is something very strong and powerful; it is communication.   Communication must transcend irritation, otherwise it will be like trying to make a comfortable bed in a briar patch.  The penetrating qualities of external color, energy, and light will come toward us, penetrating our attempts to communicate like a thorn pricking our skin.  We will wish to subdue this intense irritation and our communication will be blocked.   Communication must be radiation and receiving and exchange.  Whenever irritation is involved, then we are not able to see properly and fully and clearly the spacious quality of that which is coming toward us, that which is presenting itself as communication.  The external world is immediately rejected by our irritation which says, “no, no, this irritates me, go away.”  Such an attitude is the complete opposite of transcendental generosity.   So the bodhisattva must experience the complete communication of generosity, transcending irritation and self-defensiveness.  Otherwise, when thorns threaten to prick us, we feel that we are being attacked, that we must defend ourselves.  We run away from the tremendous opportunity for communication that has been given to us, and we have not been brave enough even to look to the other shore of the river.  We are looking back and trying to run away.   Generosity is a willingness to give, to open without philosophical or pious or religious motives, just simply doing what is required at any moment in any situation, not being afraid to receive anything.  Opening could take place in the middle of a highway.  We are not afraid that smog and dust or people’s hatreds and passions will overwhelm us; we simply open, completely surrender, give.  This means that we do not judge, do not evaluate.  If we attempt to judge or evaluate our experience, if we try to decide to what extent we should open, to what extent we should remain closed, the openness will have no meaning at all and the idea of paramita, of transcendental generosity, will be in vain.  Our action will not transcend anything, will cease to be the act of a bodhisattva.   The whole implication of the idea of transcendence is that we see through the limited notions, the limited conceptions, the warfare mentality of this as opposed to that. Generally, when we look at an object, we do not allow ourselves to see it properly.  Automatically we see our version of the object instead of actually seeing the object as it is.  Then we are quite satisfied, because we have manufactured or own version of the thing within ourselves.   Then we comment on it, we judge, we take or reject; but there is on real communication going on at all.   Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism, p.167, Chogyam Trungpa Rimpoche

Cecily let her cheek fall to Leta’s shoulder and hugged her back. It felt so nice to be loved by someone in the world. Since her mother’s death, she’d had no one of her own. It was a lonely life, despite the excitement and adventure her work held for her. She wasn’t openly affectionate at all, except with Leta. “For God’s sake, next you’ll be rocking her to sleep at night!” came a deep, disgusted voice at Cecily’s back, and Cecily stiffened because she recognized it immediately. “She’s my baby girl,” Leta told her tall, handsome son with a grin. “Shut up.” Cecily turned a little awkwardly. She hadn’t expected this. Tate Winthrop towered over both of them. His jet-black hair was loose as he never wore it in the city, falling thick and straight almost to his waist. He was wearing a breastplate with buckskin leggings and high-topped mocassins. There were two feathers straight up in his hair with notches that had meaning among his people, marks of bravery. Cecily tried not to stare at him. He was the most beautiful man she’d ever known. Since her seventeenth birthday, Tate had been her world. Fortunately he didn’t realize that her mad flirting hid a true emotion. In fact, he treated her exactly as he had when she came to him for comfort after her mother had died suddenly; as he had when she came to him again with bruises all over her thin, young body from her drunken stepfather’s violent attack. Although she dated, she’d never had a serious boyfriend. She had secret terrors of intimacy that had never really gone away, except when she thought of Tate that way. She loved him… “Why aren’t you dressed properly?” Tate asked, scowling at her skirt and blouse. “I bought you buckskins for your birthday, didn’t I?” “Three years ago,” she said without meeting his probing eyes. She didn’t like remembering that he’d forgotten her birthday this year. “I gained weight since then.” “Oh. Well, find something you like here…” She held up a hand. “I don’t want you to buy me anything else,” she said flatly, and didn’t back down from the sudden menace in his dark eyes. “I’m not dressing up like a Lakota woman. In case you haven’t noticed, I’m blond. I don’t want to be mistaken for some sort of overstimulated Native American groupie buying up artificial artifacts and enthusing over citified Native American flute music, trying to act like a member of the tribe.” “You belong to it,” he returned. “We adopted you years ago.” “So you did,” she said. That was how he thought of her-a sister. That wasn’t the way she wanted him to think of her. She smiled faintly. “But I won’t pass for a Lakota, whatever I wear.” “You could take your hair down,” he continued thoughtfully. She shook her head. She only let her hair loose at night, when she went to bed. Perhaps she kept it tightly coiled for pure spite, because he loved long hair and she knew it. “How old are you?” he asked, trying to remember. “Twenty, isn’t it?” “I was, give years ago,” she said, exasperated. “You used to work for the CIA. I seem to remember that you went to college, too, and got a law degree. Didn’t they teach you how to count?” He looked surprised. Where had the years gone? She hadn’t aged, not visibly.

My knuckles brushed one of his wings- smooth and cool like silk, but hard as stone with it stretched taut. Fascinating, I blindly reached again... and dared to run a fingertip along some inner edge. Rhysand shuddered, a soft groan slipping past my ear. 'That,' he said tightly, 'is very sensitive.' I snatched my finger back, pulling away far enough to see his face. With the wind, I had to squint, and my braided hair ripped this way and that, but- he was entirely focused on the mountains around us. 'Does it tickle?' He flicked his gaze to me, then to the snow and pine that went on forever. 'It feels like this,' he said, and leaned in so close that his lips brushed the shell of my ear as he sent a gentle breath into it. My back arched on instinct, my chin tipping up at the caress of that breath. 'Oh,' I managed to say, I felt him smile against my ear and pull away. 'If you want an Illyrian male's attention, you'd be better off grabbing him by the balls. We're trained to protect our wings at all costs. Some males attack first, ask questions later, if their wings are touched without invitation.' 'And during sex?' The question blurted out. Rhys's face was nothing but feline amusement as he monitored the mountains. 'During sex, an Illyrian male can find completion just by having someone touch his wings in the right spot.' My blood thrummed. Dangerous territory; more lethal than the drop below. 'Have you found that to be true?' His eyes stripped me bare. 'I've never allowed anyone to see or touch my wings during sex. It makes you vulnerable in a way that I'm not... comfortable with.' 'Too bad,' I said, staring out too casually toward the mighty mountain that now appeared on the horizon, towering over the others. And capped, I noted, with that glimmering palace of moonstone. 'Why?' he asked warily. I shrugged, fighting the upward tugging of my lips. 'Because I bet you could get into some interesting positions with those wings.' Rhys loosed a barking laugh, and his nose grazed my ear. I felt him open his mouth to whisper something, but- Something dark and fast and sleek shot for us, and he plunged down and away, swearing.

When Benjamin Bloom studied his 120 world-class concert pianists, sculptors, swimmers, tennis players, mathematicians, and research neurologists, he found something fascinating. For most of them, their first teachers were incredibly warm and accepting. Not that they set low standards. Not at all, but they created an atmosphere of trust, not judgment. It was, “I’m going to teach you,” not “I’m going to judge your talent.” As you look at what Collins and Esquith demanded of their students—all their students—it’s almost shocking. When Collins expanded her school to include young children, she required that every four-year-old who started in September be reading by Christmas. And they all were. The three- and four-year-olds used a vocabulary book titled Vocabulary for the High School Student. The seven-year-olds were reading The Wall Street Journal. For older children, a discussion of Plato’s Republic led to discussions of de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, Orwell’s Animal Farm, Machiavelli, and the Chicago city council. Her reading list for the late-grade-school children included The Complete Plays of Anton Chekhov, Physics Through Experiment, and The Canterbury Tales. Oh, and always Shakespeare. Even the boys who picked their teeth with switchblades, she says, loved Shakespeare and always begged for more. Yet Collins maintained an extremely nurturing atmosphere. A very strict and disciplined one, but a loving one. Realizing that her students were coming from teachers who made a career of telling them what was wrong with them, she quickly made known her complete commitment to them as her students and as people. Esquith bemoans the lowering of standards. Recently, he tells us, his school celebrated reading scores that were twenty points below the national average. Why? Because they were a point or two higher than the year before. “Maybe it’s important to look for the good and be optimistic,” he says, “but delusion is not the answer. Those who celebrate failure will not be around to help today’s students celebrate their jobs flipping burgers.… Someone has to tell children if they are behind, and lay out a plan of attack to help them catch up.” All of his fifth graders master a reading list that includes Of Mice and Men, Native Son, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, The Joy Luck Club, The Diary of Anne Frank, To Kill a Mockingbird, and A Separate Peace. Every one of his sixth graders passes an algebra final that would reduce most eighth and ninth graders to tears. But again, all is achieved in an atmosphere of affection and deep personal commitment to every student. “Challenge and nurture” describes DeLay’s approach, too. One of her former students expresses it this way: “That is part of Miss DeLay’s genius—to put people in the frame of mind where they can do their best.… Very few teachers can actually get you to your ultimate potential. Miss DeLay has that gift. She challenges you at the same time that you feel you are being nurtured.

I want to be married,” I blurted. “I want you to marry me.” Fuuuuuuuck. And so my entire carefully constructed speech was thrown out the window. My grandmother’s antique ring was in a box in the dresser—nowhere near me—and my plan to kneel and do everything right just evaporated. In the circle of my arms, Chloe grew very still. “What did you just say?” I had completely botched the plan, but it was too late to turn back now. “I know we have only been together for a little over a year,” I explained, quickly. “Maybe it’s too soon? I understand if it’s too soon. It’s just that how you feel about the way we kiss? I feel that way about everything we do together. I love it. I love to be inside you, I love working with you, I love watching you work, I love fighting with you, and I love just sitting on the couch and laughing with you. I’m lost when I’m not with you, Chloe. I can’t think of anything, or anyone, who is more important to me, every second. And so for me, that means we’re already sort of married in my head. I guess I wanted to make it official somehow. Maybe I sound like an idiot?” I looked over at her, feeling my heart try to jackhammer its way up my throat. “I never expected to feel this way about someone.” She stared at me, eyes wide and lips parted as if she couldn’t believe what she was hearing. I stood and ran over to the dresser, pulling the box from the drawer and carrying it over to her. When I opened the box and let her see my grandmother’s antique diamond and sapphire ring, she clapped a hand over her mouth. “I want to be married,” I said again. Her silence was unnerving, and fuck, I’d completely botched this with my rambling nonsense. “Married to you, I mean.” Her eyes filled with tears and she held them, unblinking. “You. Are such. An ass.” Well, that was unexpected. I knew it might be too soon, but an ass? Really? I narrowed my eyes. “A simple ‘It’s too soon’ would have sufficed, Chloe. Jesus. I lay my heart out on the—” She pushed off the bed and ran over to one of her bags, rummaging through it and pulling out a small blue fabric bag. She carried it back to me with the ribbon hooked over her long index finger, and dangled the bag in my face. I ask her to marry me and she brings me a souvenir from New York? What the fuck is that? “What the fuck is that?” I asked. “You tell me, genius.” “Don’t get smart with me, Mills. It’s a bag. For all I know you have a granola bar, or your tampons, in there.” “It’s a ring, dummy. For you.” My heart was pounding so hard and fast I half wondered if this was what a heart attack felt like. “A ring for me?” She pulled a small box out of the bag and showed it to me. It was smooth platinum, with a line of coarse titanium running through the middle. “You were going to propose to me?” I asked, still completely confused. “Do women even do that?” She punched me, hard, in the arm. “Yes, you chauvinist. And you totally stole my thunder.” “So, is that a yes?” I asked, my bewilderment deepening. “You’ll marry me?” “You tell me!” she yelled, but she was smiling. “Technically you haven’t asked yet.” “Goddamnit, Bennett! You haven’t, either!” “Will you marry me?” I asked, laughing. “Will you marry me?” With a growl, I took the box and dropped it on the floor, flipping her onto her back.

I didn’t answer, occupied in dissolving the penicillin tablets in the vial of sterile water. I selected a glass barrel, fitted a needle, and pressed the tip through the rubber covering the mouth of the bottle. Holding it up to the light, I pulled back slowly on the plunger, watching the thick white liquid fill the barrel, checking for bubbles. Then pulling the needle free, I depressed the plunger slightly until a drop of liquid pearled from the point and rolled slowly down the length of the spike. “Roll onto your good side,” I said, turning to Jamie, “and pull up your shirt.” He eyed the needle in my hand with keen suspicion, but reluctantly obeyed. I surveyed the terrain with approval. “Your bottom hasn’t changed a bit in twenty years,” I remarked, admiring the muscular curves. “Neither has yours,” he replied courteously, “but I’m no insisting you expose it. Are ye suffering a sudden attack of lustfulness?” “Not just at present,” I said evenly, swabbing a patch of skin with a cloth soaked in brandy. “That’s a verra nice make of brandy,” he said, peering back over his shoulder, “but I’m more accustomed to apply it at the other end.” “It’s also the best source of alcohol available. Hold still now, and relax.” I jabbed deftly and pressed the plunger slowly in. “Ouch!” Jamie rubbed his posterior resentfully. “It’ll stop stinging in a minute.” I poured an inch of brandy into the cup. “Now you can have a bit to drink—a very little bit.” He drained the cup without comment, watching me roll up the collection of syringes. Finally he said, “I thought ye stuck pins in ill-wish dolls when ye meant to witch someone; not in the people themselves.” “It’s not a pin, it’s a hypodermic syringe.” “I dinna care what ye call it; it felt like a bloody horseshoe nail. Would ye care to tell me why jabbing pins in my arse is going to help my arm?” I took a deep breath. “Well, do you remember my once telling you about germs?” He looked quite blank. “Little beasts too small to see,” I elaborated. “They can get into your body through bad food or water, or through open wounds, and if they do, they can make you ill.” He stared at his arm with interest. “I’ve germs in my arm, have I?” “You very definitely have.” I tapped a finger on the small flat box. “The medicine I just shot into your backside kills germs, though. You get another shot every four hours ’til this time tomorrow, and then we’ll see how you’re doing.” I paused. Jamie was staring at me, shaking his head. “Do you understand?” I asked. He nodded slowly. “Aye, I do. I should ha’ let them burn ye, twenty years ago.

PERCY JACKSON!" Poseidon announced. My name echoed around the chamber. All talking died down. The room was silent except for the crackle of the hearth fire. Everyone's eyes were on me—all the gods, the demigods, the Cyclopes, the spirits. I walked into the middle of the throne room. Hestia smiled at me reassuringly. She was in the form of a girl now, and she seemed happy and content to be sitting by her fire again. Her smile gave me courage to keep walking. First I bowed to Zeus. Then I knelt at my father's feet. "Rise, my son," Poseidon said. I stood uneasily. "A great hero must be rewarded," Poseidon said. "Is there anyone here who would deny that my son is deserving?" I waited for someone to pipe up. The gods never agreed on anything, and many of them still didn't like me, but not a single one protested. "The Council agrees," Zeus said. "Percy Jackson, you will have one gift from the gods." I hesitated. "Any gift?" Zeus nodded grimly. "I know what you will ask. The greatest gift of all. Yes, if you want it, it shall be yours. The gods have not bestowed this gift on a mortal hero in many centuries, but, Perseus Jackson—if you wish it—you shall be made a god. Immortal. Undying. You shall serve as your father's lieutenant for all time." I stared at him, stunned. "Um . . . a god?" Zeus rolled his eyes. "A dimwitted god, apparently. But yes. With the consensus of the entire Council, I can make you immortal. Then I will have to put up with you forever." "Hmm," Ares mused. "That means I can smash him to a pulp as often as I want, and he'll just keep coming back for more. I like this idea." "I approve as well," Athena said, though she was looking at Annabeth. I glanced back. Annabeth was trying not to meet my eyes. Her face was pale. I flashed back to two years ago, when I'd thought she was going to take the pledge to Artemis and become a Hunter. I'd been on the edge of a panic attack, thinking that I'd lose her. Now, she looked pretty much the same way. I thought about the Three Fates, and the way I'd seen my life flash by. I could avoid all that. No aging, no death, no body in the grave. I could be a teenager forever, in top condition, powerful, and immortal, serving my father. I could have power and eternal life. Who could refuse that? Then I looked at Annabeth again. I thought about my friends from camp: Charles Beckendorf, Michael Yew, Silena Beauregard, so many others who were now dead. I thought about Ethan Nakamura and Luke. And I knew what to do. "No," I said. The Council was silent. The gods frowned at each other like they must have misheard. "No?" Zeus said. "You are . . . turning down our generous gift?" There was a dangerous edge to his voice, like a thunderstorm about to erupt. "I'm honored and everything," I said. "Don't get me wrong. It's just . . . I've got a lot of life left to live. I'd hate to peak in my sophomore year." The gods were glaring at me, but Annabeth had her hands over her mouth. Her eyes were shining. And that kind of made up for it.

He concluded the speech with an irritated motion of his hands. Unfortunately, Evie had been conditioned by too many encounters with Uncle Peregrine to discern between angry gestures and the beginnings of a physical attack. She flinched instinctively, her own arms flying up to shield her head. When the expected pain of a blow did not come, she let out a breath and tentatively lowered her arms to find Sebastian staring at her with blank astonishment. Then his face went dark. “Evie,” he said, his voice containing a bladelike ferocity that frightened her. “Did you think I was about to…Christ. Someone hit you. Someone hit you in the past—who the hell was it?” He reached for her suddenly—too suddenly—and she stumbled backward, coming up hard against the wall. Sebastian went very still. “Goddamn,” he whispered. Appearing to struggle with some powerful emotion, he stared at her intently. After a long moment, he spoke softly. “I would never strike a woman. I would never harm you. You know that, don’t you?” Transfixed by the light, glittering eyes that held hers with such intensity, Evie couldn’t move or make a sound. She started as he approached her slowly. “It’s all right,” he murmured. “Let me come to you. It’s all right. Easy.” One of his arms slid around her, while he used his free hand to smooth her hair, and then she was breathing, sighing, as relief flowed through her. Sebastian brought her closer against him, his mouth brushing her temple. “Who was it?” he asked. “M-my uncle,” she managed to say. The motion of his hand on her back paused as he heard her stammer. “Maybrick?” he asked patiently. “No, th-the other one.” “Stubbins.” “Yes.” Evie closed her eyes in pleasure as his other arm slid around her. Clasped against Sebastian’s hard chest, with her cheek tucked against his shoulder, she inhaled the scent of clean male skin, and the subtle touch of sandalwood cologne. “How often?” she heard him ask. “More than once?” “I…i-it’s not important now.” “How often, Evie?” Realizing that he was going to persist until she answered, Evie muttered, “Not t-terribly often, but…sometimes when I displeased him, or Aunt Fl-Florence, he would lose his temper. The l-last time I tr-tried to run away, he blackened my eye and spl-split my lip.” “Did he?” Sebastian was silent for a long moment, and then he spoke with chilling softness. “I’m going to tear him limb from limb.” “I don’t want that,” Evie said earnestly. “I-I just want to be safe from him. From all of them.” Sebastian drew his head back to look down into her flushed face. “You are safe,” he said in a low voice. He lifted one of his hands to her face, caressing the plane of her cheekbone, letting his fingertip follow the trail of pale golden freckles across the bridge of her nose. As her lashes fluttered downward, he stroked the slender arcs of her brows, and cradled the side of her face in his palm. “Evie,” he murmured. “I swear on my life, you will never feel pain from my hands. I may prove a devil of a husband in every other regard…but I wouldn’t hurt you that way. You must believe that.

Free spirits, the ambitious, ex-socialists, drug users, and sexual eccentrics often find an attractive political philosophy in libertarianism, the idea that individual freedom should be the sole rule of ethics and government. Libertarianism offers its believers a clear conscience to do things society presently restrains, like make more money, have more sex, or take more drugs. It promises a consistent formula for ethics, a rigorous framework for policy analysis, a foundation in American history, and the application of capitalist efficiencies to the whole of society. But while it contains substantial grains of truth, as a whole it is a seductive mistake. . . . The most fundamental problem with libertarianism is very simple: freedom, though a good thing, is simply not the only good thing in life. . . . Libertarians try to get around this fact that freedom is not the only good thing by trying to reduce all other goods to it through the concept of choice, claiming that everything that is good is so because we choose to partake of it. Therefore freedom, by giving us choice, supposedly embraces all other goods. But this violates common sense by denying that anything is good by nature, independently of whether we choose it. . . . So even if the libertarian principle of “an it harm none, do as thou wilt,” is true, it does not license the behavior libertarians claim. Consider pornography: libertarians say it should be permitted because if someone doesn’t like it, he can choose not to view it. But what he can’t do is choose not to live in a culture that has been vulgarized by it. . . . There is no need to embrace outright libertarianism just because we want a healthy portion of freedom, and the alternative to libertarianism is not the USSR, it is America’s traditional liberties. . . . Paradoxically, people exercise their freedom not to be libertarians. The political corollary of this is that since no electorate will support libertarianism, a libertarian government could never be achieved democratically but would have to be imposed by some kind of authoritarian state, which rather puts the lie to libertarians’ claim that under any other philosophy, busybodies who claim to know what’s best for other people impose their values on the rest of us. . . . Libertarians are also naïve about the range and perversity of human desires they propose to unleash. They can imagine nothing more threatening than a bit of Sunday-afternoon sadomasochism, followed by some recreational drug use and work on Monday. They assume that if people are given freedom, they will gravitate towards essentially bourgeois lives, but this takes for granted things like the deferral of gratification that were pounded into them as children without their being free to refuse. They forget that for much of the population, preaching maximum freedom merely results in drunkenness, drugs, failure to hold a job, and pregnancy out of wedlock. Society is dependent upon inculcated self-restraint if it is not to slide into barbarism, and libertarians attack this self-restraint. Ironically, this often results in internal restraints being replaced by the external restraints of police and prison, resulting in less freedom, not more. This contempt for self-restraint is emblematic of a deeper problem: libertarianism has a lot to say about freedom but little about learning to handle it. Freedom without judgment is dangerous at best, useless at worst. Yet libertarianism is philosophically incapable of evolving a theory of how to use freedom well because of its root dogma that all free choices are equal, which it cannot abandon except at the cost of admitting that there are other goods than freedom. Conservatives should know better.