Barre Fitness Quotes

He invited me into his private world and I was hope hope hoping that the glass slipper would fit my size seven foot

The venom clamours of a jealous woman, Poisons more deadly than a mad dog’s tooth. It seems his sleeps were hinder’d by thy railing: And thereof comes it that his head is light. Thou say’st his meat was sauced with thy upbraidings: Unquiet meals make ill digestions; Thereof the raging fire of fever bred; And what’s a fever but a fit of madness? Thou say’st his sports were hinder’d by thy brawls: Sweet recreation barr’d, what doth ensue But moody and dull melancholy, Kinsman to grim and comfortless despair; And at her heels a huge infectious troop Of pale distemperatures and foes to life? In food, in sport, and life-preserving rest To be disturb’d, would mad or man or beast: The consequence is, then, thy jealous fits Have scared thy husband from the use of wits.

I jumped then. It seemed I heard a child laugh. My imagination, of course. And then, when I should have known better, I headed for the closet and the high and narrow door at the very back end and the steep and narrow dark stairs. A million times I’d ascended these stairs. A million times in the dark, without a candle, or a flashlight. Up into the dark, eerie, gigantic attic, and only when I was there did I feel around for the place where Chris and I had hidden our candles and matches. Still there. Time did stand still in this place. We’d had several candle holders, all of pewter with small handles to grasp. Holders we’d found in an old trunk along with boxes and boxes of short, stubby, clumsily made candles. We’d always presumed them to be homemade candles, for they had smelled so rank and old when they burned. My breath caught! Oh! It was the same! The paper flowers still dangled down, mobiles to sway in the drafts, and the giant flowers were still on the walls. Only all the colors had faded to indistinct gray—ghost flowers. The sparkling gem centers we’d glued on had loosened, and now only a few daisies had sequins, or gleaming stones, for centers. Carrie’s purple worm was there only now he too was a nothing color. Cory’s epileptic snail didn’t appear a bright, lopsided beach ball now, it was more a tepid, half-rotten squashy orange. The BEWARE signs Chris and I had painted in red were still on the walls, and the swings still dangled down from the attic rafters. Over near the record player was the barre Chris had fashioned, then nailed to the wall so I could practice my ballet positions. Even my outgrown costumes hung limply from nails, dozens of them with matching leotards and worn out pointe shoes, all faded and dusty, rotten smelling. As in an unhappy dream I was committed to, I drifted aimlessly toward the distant schoolroom, with the candelight flickering. Ghosts were unsettled, memories and specters followed me as things began to wake up, yawn and whisper. No, I told myself, it was only the floating panels of my long chiffon wings . . . that was all. The spotted rocking-horse loomed up, scary and threatening, and my hand rose to my throat as I held back a scream. The rusty red wagon seemed to move by unseen hands pushing it, so my eyes took flight to the blackboard where I’d printed my enigmatic farewell message to those who came in the future. How was I to know it would be me? We lived in the attic, Christopher, Cory, Carrie and me— Now there are only three. Behind the small desk that had been Cory’s I scrunched down, and tried to fit my legs under. I wanted to put myself into a deep reverie that would call up Cory’s spirit that would tell me where he lay.

But if God-less materialist philosophies are treated as “religions” for free exercise purposes, why shouldn’t official efforts to teach them in lieu of religious beliefs be deemed an establishment of religion? Official sponsorship of a nontheistic ideology that takes the place of religion has the same effect on nonadherents as endorsing a particular theistic religion. Indeed, the Supreme Court foresaw the potential for secularism itself becoming established as a state religion. In one of the first cases abolishing school prayer, the Supreme Court acknowledged that “the State may not establish a ‘religion of secularism’ in the sense of affirmatively opposing or showing hostility to religion, thus ‘preferring those who believe in no religion over those who do believe.’” We have to consider whether our public schools, as currently constituted, are doing exactly that. In my view, the increasing diversity of attitudes and beliefs among Americans in the past few decades makes the states’ continued insistence on a monopoly over publicly funded education constitutionally untenable. This arrangement can no longer finesse the challenge of neutrality, as it did when the religious attitudes of Americans were more monolithic. Nor is it capable of producing genuine religious neutrality. It has deformed and impoverished the very nature of the educational enterprise either by purging it of any moral dimension or by trying to substitute for religion a secular value system that is at war with religion. It is reducing public schools to cockpits for a vicious, winner-take-all culture war over the moral formation of our children. The point is not that we should mandate Christianity in the state’s one-size-fits-all educational monopoly. It is that the diversity of religious belief should lead us to jettison the monopoly. The rise of militant secularism in the United States

Barre is results-driven and appearance-based—it’s got the cultishness of CrossFit or a boot-camp class, but with looks, not strength, as its primary goal. It’s not a pastime, like going to a dance class or taking a lap swim, because the fun you are pursuing mostly comes after the class and not within it. In barre class, I often feel like my body is a race car that I’m servicing dispassionately in the pit—tuning up arms and then legs and then butt and then abs, and then there’s a quick stretch and I’m back on the track, zooming.

Biblical dramas do not follow the patterns of literary dramas because someone ’massaged’ the stories to make them fit. Rather, God has structured human nature and creation so that certain elements are present in all stories worth telling. If biblical dramas have the same structure as fiction, it is because art imitates life, not because the Bible imitates art.

I loved MIT. I found immediately that despite my differences, unlike in high school, I fit in. I was a science nerd just like everyone else.

No sooner was she twenty-three years old than she was twenty-eight; no sooner twenty-eight than thirty-one; time is speeding past her while she examines her existence with a cold, deadly gaze that takes aim at the different areas of her life, one by one-the damp studio crawling with roaches, mold growing in the grout between tiles; the bank loan swallowing all her spare cash; close, intense friendships marginalized by newborn babies, polarized by screaming sweetness that leaves her cold; stress-soaked days and canceled girls’ nights out, but, legs perfectly waxed, ending up jabbering in dreary wine bars with a bevy or available women, shrieking with forced laughter, and always joining in, out of cowardice, opportunism; occasional sexual adventures on crappy mattresses, or against greasy, sooty garage doors, with guys who are clumsy, rushed, stingy, unloving; an excess of alcohol to make all this shine; and the only encounter that makes her heart beat faster is with a guy who pushes back a strand of her hair to light her cigarette, his fingers brushing her temple and the lobe of her ear, who has mastered the art of the sudden appearance, whenever, wherever, his movements impossible to predict, as if he spent his life hiding behind a post, coming out to surprise her in the golden light of a late afternoon, calling her at night in a nearby cafe, walking toward her one morning from a street corner, and always stealing away just as suddenly when it’s over, like a magician, before returning … That deadly gaze strips away everything, even her face, even her body, no matter how well she takes care of it-fitness magazines, tubes of slimming cream, and one hour of floor barre in a freezing hall in Docks Vauban. She is alone and disappointed, in a sate of disgrace, stamping her feet as her teeth chatter and disillusionment invades her territories and her hinterland, darkening faces, ruining gestures, diverting intentions; it swells, this disillusionment, it multiplies, polluting the rivers and forests inside her, contaminating the deserts, infecting the groundwater, tearing the petals from flowers and dulling the luster in animals’ fur; it stains the ice floe beyond the polar circle and soils the Greek dawn, it smears the most beautiful poems with mournful misfortune, it destroys the planet and all its inhabitants from the Big Bang to the rockets of the future, and fucks up the whole world- this hollow, disenchanted world.

You could see it happening by the increasing use of the term narrative to describe news reporting. The word suggests an absence of verifiable fact and objective truth; there is only a story, experienced subjectively, or constructs that may or may not correspond to reality. Everyone can have his or her own version of the facts, whatever they are. The upshot is that news journalists are free to look for stories that fit their conception of reality. For some, this means forcing the facts into preferred narratives, even if they don’t admit—to themselves or anyone else—that that’s what they’re doing. For others, it’s a justification for distorting the truth in the cause of righteousness. For still others, it’s a license to lie. Alexis de Tocqueville, the nineteenth-century French statesman and author, and the greatest chronicler of American democracy, hoped that the institution of the free press might check the natural despotic tendencies of democracy. This was not because Tocqueville believed that the American press did a good job of elevating the public’s understanding and discourse; he did not. Rather, he thought the saving grace of the press was that it was highly fragmented and reflected a wide diversity of voices and localized opinion. In his view, it was precisely the wide variety of diverse voices in the press that made it hard, in a large country such as the United States, to galvanize a consolidated national faction that could impose its views on, and lord it over, the rest of the country. It was when the press consolidated into fewer voices and presented itself as a monolith, he held, that it ceased to act as a bulwark against tyranny and instead enabled it. Once press organizations begin to “advance along the same track,” wrote Tocqueville, “their influence becomes almost irresistible in the long term, and public opinion, struck always from the same side, ends by yielding under their blows.” This is what I saw happening. The

But the main reason Trump won the nomination—and later the general election—was simpler than any of that: he fit the times. Trump had explored running for president twice before, and the voters had shown little interest. This time around, he turned half the country’s unease and confusion about what was happening to America into a powerful political response. In his own way, he articulated the anger that many middle- and working-class Americans felt over the excesses and condescension of the Democratic Party, the coastal elites, and especially the mainstream news media. Trump had diagnosed a decisive divide in the nation: the alienation of average Americans from the increasingly smug and isolated elites that had mismanaged the country and appeared content to preside over a declining America. They felt the old-boy system in Washington had sold them out and that it was time to disrupt the system. Many ordinary Americans were especially sick of the radical progressives’ shrill disparagement of America and scornful attacks on traditional values, and they were deeply frustrated by the wildly partisan role played by the media. In short, in 2016 many voters felt like the character Howard Beale in the 1976 film Network: “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!” Trump’s pugnacious style worked. These frustrated Americans found in him a fighter willing to punch back, go toe-to-toe with the press, and mount a full-throated defense of America and middle-class values. They were tired of the cooing doublespeak of professional politicians and wanted someone who would tell it like it is—straight from the shoulder—and someone willing to follow through and actually do what other politicians said they would do but never did. Trump’s combativeness also enabled him to break through the distortions and smothering hostility of the partisan media and talk right past them, straight to the American people. For many, supporting Trump was an act of defiance—a protest. The more over the top he was, the more they savored the horrified reaction of the elites, especially the media. Arguments that Trump wasn’t presidential missed the point. Trump’s supporters already knew he didn’t conform to presidential norms. Their question was: Where had presidential norms gotten them? They wanted someone who didn’t conform. The Left was taking a wrecking ball to the country. Many fed up Americans wanted to strike back with their own wrecking ball.

officials in an incumbent administration, entrusted with the most sensitive law enforcement and intelligence tools of government power, might abuse them to spy on their opponents and inject their own proclivities into the political process under the guise of national security. The risk is not just that they might attempt to advance their own partisan political preferences, but also there is a more subtle form of corruption: that officials take on a “praetorian guard” mentality—a smug self-assurance that they know what is best for the country and can justifiably use their powers to prevent the people from making mistakes. The risk is that officials like this, convinced they have a higher duty to protect the country from itself, use the government’s security apparatus to undermine candidates whose fitness for office or whose policy proposals don’t measure up to their standards.