Being An Inconvenience To Someone Quotes

Falling in love is not an act of will. It is not a conscious choice. No matter how open to or eager for it we may be, the experience may still elude us. Contrarily, the experience may capture us at times when we are definitely not seeking it, when it is inconvenient and undesirable. We are as likely to fall in love with someone with whom we are obviously ill matched as with someone more suitable. Indeed, we may not even like or admire the object of our passion, yet, try as we might, we may not be able to fall in love with a person whom we deeply respect and with whom a deep relationship would be in all ways desirable. This is not to say that the experience of falling in love is immune to discipline. Psychiatrists, for instance, frequently fall in love with their patients, just as their patients fall in love with them, yet out of duty to the patient and their role they are usually able to abort the collapse of their ego boundaries and give up the patient as a romantic object. The struggle and suffering of the discipline involved may be enormous. But discipline and will can only control the experience; they cannot create it. We can choose how to respond to the experience of falling in love, but we cannot choose the experience itself.

Maybe I was just flattering myself, thinking I'd be worth some sort of risk. Not that I'd wish that on anyone!" he clarified. "I don't mean that. It just...I don't know. Don't you all see everything I'm risking?" "Umm, no. You're here with your family to give you advice, and we all live around your schedule. Everything about your life stays the same, and ours changed overnight. What in the world could you possibly be risking?" Maxon looked shocked. "America, I might have my family, but imagine how embarrassing it is to have your parents watch as you attempt to date for the first time. And not just your parents-the whole country! Worse than that, it's not even a normal style of dating. "And living around my schedule? When I'm not with you all, I'm organizing troops, making laws, perfecting budgets...and all on my own these days, while my father watches me stumble in my own stupidity because I have none of his experience. And then, when I inevitably do things in a way he wouldn't, he goes and corrects my mistakes. And while I'm trying to do all this work, you-the girls, I mean-are all I can think about. I'm excited and terrified by the lot of you!" He was using his hands more than I'd ever seen, whipping them in the air and running them through his hair. "And you think my life isn't changing? What do you think my chances might be of finding a soul mate in the group of you? I'll be lucky if I can just find someone who'll be able to stand me for the rest of our lives. What if I've already sent her home because I was relying on some sort of spark I didn't feel? What if she's waiting to leave me at the first sign of adversity? What if I don't find anyone at all? What do I do then, America?" His speech had started out angered and impassioned, but by the end his questions weren't rhetorical anymore. He really wanted to know: What was he going to do if no one here was even close to being someone he could love? Though that didn't even seem to be his main concern; he was more worried that no one would love him. "Actually, Maxon, I think you will find your soul mate here. Honestly." "Really?" His voice charged with hope at my prediction. "Absolutely." I put a hand on his shoulder. He seemed to be comforted by that touch alone. I wondered how often people simply touched him. "If your life is as upside down as you say it is, then she has to be here somewhere. In my experience, true love is usually the most inconvenient kind.

Inferiority is not banal or incidental even when it happens to women. It is not a petty affliction like bad skin or circles under the eyes. It is not a superficial flaw in an otherwise perfect picture. It is not a minor irritation, nor is it a trivial inconvenience, an occasional aggravation, or a regrettable but (frankly) harmless lapse in manners. It is not a “point of view” that some people with soft skins find “ offensive. ” It is the deep and destructive devaluing of a person in life, a shredding of dignity and self-respect, an imposed exile from human worth and human recognition, the forced alienation of a person from even the possibility of wholeness or internal integrity. Inferiority puts rightful self-love beyond reach, a dream fragmented by insult into a perpetually recurring nightmare; inferiority creates a person broken and humiliated inside. The fragments— scattered pieces and sharp slivers of someone who can never be made whole—are then taken to be the standard of what is normal in her kind: women are like that. The insult that hurt her—inferiority as an assault, ongoing since birth—is seen as a consequence, not a cause, of her so-called nature, an inferior nature. In English, a graceful language, she is even called a piece. It is likely to be her personal experience that she is insufficiently loved. Her subjectivity itself is second-class, her experiences and perceptions inferior in the world as she is inferior in the world. Her experience is recast into a psychologically pejorative judgment: she is never loved enough because she is needy, neurotic, the insufficiency of love she feels being in and of itself evidence of a deep-seated and natural dependency. Her personal experiences or perceptions are never credited as having a hard core of reality to them. She is, however, never loved enough. In truth; in point of fact; objectively: she is never loved enough. As Konrad Lorenz wrote: “ I doubt if it is possible to feel real affection for anybody who is in every respect one’s inferior. ” 1 There are so many dirty names for her that one rarely learns them all, even in one’s native language.

The three thousand miles in distance he put between himself and Emma tonight is nothing compared with the enormous chasm separating them when they sit next to each other in calculus. Emma's ability to overlook his existence is a gift-but not one that Poseidon handed down. Rachel insists this gift is uniquely a female trait, regardless of the species. Since their breakup, Emma seems to be the only female utilizing this particular gift. Even Rayna could learn a few lessons from Emma in the art of torturing a smitten male. Smitten? More like fanatical. He shakes his head in disgust. Why couldn't I just sift when I turned of age? Why couldn't I find a suitable mild-tempered female to mate with? Live a peaceful life, produce offspring, grow old, and watch my own fingerlings have fingerlings someday? He searches through his mind for someone he might have missed in the past. For a face he overlooked before but could now look forward to every day. For a docile female who would be honored to mate with a Triton prince-instead of a temperamental siren who mocks his title at every opportunity. He scours his memory for a sweet-natured Syrena who would take care of him, who would do whatever he asked, who would never argue with him. Not some human-raised snippet who stomps her foot when she doesn't get her way, listens to him only when it suits some secret purpose she has, or shoves a handful of chocolate mints down his throat if he lets his guard down. Not some white-haired angelfish whose eyes melt him into a puddle, whose blush is more beautiful than sunrise, and whose lips send heat ripping through him like a mine explosion. He sighs as Emma's face eclipses hundreds of mate-worthy Syrena. That's just one more quality I'll have to add to the list: someone who won't mind being second best. His just locks as he catches a glimpse of his shadow beneath him, cast by slithers of sterling moonlight. Since it's close to three a.m. here, he's comfortable walking around without the inconvenience of clothes, but sitting on the rocky shore in the raw is less than appealing. And it doesn't matter which Jersey shore he sits on, he can't escape the moon that connects them both-and reminds him of Emma's hair. Hovering in the shallows, he stares up at it in resentment, knowing the moon reminds him of something else he can' escape-his conscience. If only he could shirk his responsibilities, his loyalty to his family, his loyalty to his people. If only he could change everything about himself, he could steal Emma away and never look back-that is, if she'll ever talk to him again.

Security is a big and serious deal, but it’s also largely a solved problem. That’s why the average person is quite willing to do their banking online and why nobody is afraid of entering their credit card number on Amazon. At 37signals, we’ve devised a simple security checklist all employees must follow: 1. All computers must use hard drive encryption, like the built-in FileVault feature in Apple’s OS X operating system. This ensures that a lost laptop is merely an inconvenience and an insurance claim, not a company-wide emergency and a scramble to change passwords and worry about what documents might be leaked. 2. Disable automatic login, require a password when waking from sleep, and set the computer to automatically lock after ten inactive minutes. 3. Turn on encryption for all sites you visit, especially critical services like Gmail. These days all sites use something called HTTPS or SSL. Look for the little lock icon in front of the Internet address. (We forced all 37signals products onto SSL a few years back to help with this.) 4. Make sure all smartphones and tablets use lock codes and can be wiped remotely. On the iPhone, you can do this through the “Find iPhone” application. This rule is easily forgotten as we tend to think of these tools as something for the home, but inevitably you’ll check your work email or log into Basecamp using your tablet. A smartphone or tablet needs to be treated with as much respect as your laptop. 5. Use a unique, generated, long-form password for each site you visit, kept by password-managing software, such as 1Password.§ We’re sorry to say, “secretmonkey” is not going to fool anyone. And even if you manage to remember UM6vDjwidQE9C28Z, it’s no good if it’s used on every site and one of them is hacked. (It happens all the time!) 6. Turn on two-factor authentication when using Gmail, so you can’t log in without having access to your cell phone for a login code (this means that someone who gets hold of your login and password also needs to get hold of your phone to login). And keep in mind: if your email security fails, all other online services will fail too, since an intruder can use the “password reset” from any other site to have a new password sent to the email account they now have access to. Creating security protocols and algorithms is the computer equivalent of rocket science, but taking advantage of them isn’t. Take the time to learn the basics and they’ll cease being scary voodoo that you can’t trust. These days, security for your devices is just simple good sense, like putting on your seat belt.

Sometimes the best conversations between strangers allow the stranger to remain a stranger. We jump at the chance to judge strangers. We would never do that to ourselves, of course. We are nuanced and complex and enigmatic. But the stranger is easy. If I can convince you of one thing in this book, let it be this: Strangers are not easy. The issue with spies is not that there is something brilliant about them. It is that there is something wrong with us. You believe someone not because you have no doubts about them. Belief is not the absence of doubt. You believe someone because you don’t have enough doubts about them. Those who are not part of existing social hierarchies are free to blurt out inconvenient truths or question things the rest of us take for granted. The advantage to human beings lies in assuming that strangers are truthful. If you don’t begin in a state of trust, you can’t have meaningful social encounters. But remember, doubts are not the enemy of belief; they are its companion. Our strategies for dealing with strangers are deeply flawed, but they are also socially necessary. We tend to judge people’s honesty based on their demeanor. Well-spoken, confident people with a firm handshake who are friendly and engaging are seen as believable. Nervous, shifty, stammering, uncomfortable people who give windy, convoluted explanations aren’t. We do not understand the importance of the context in which the stranger is operating. When you confront the stranger, you have to ask yourself where and when you’re confronting the stranger—because those two things powerfully influence your interpretation of who the stranger is. Don’t look at the stranger and jump to conclusions. Look at the stranger’s world.

It was normal, then, that he should be missed, even mourned—for it’s a hard thing when someone dies at a school like Hampden, where we were all so isolated, and thrown so much together. But I was surprised at the wanton display of grief which spewed forth once his death became official. It seemed not only gratuitous, but rather shameful given the circumstances. No one had seemed very torn up by his disappearance, even in those grim final days when it seemed that the news when it came must certainly be bad; nor, in the public eye, had the search seemed much besides a massive inconvenience. But now, at news of his death, people were strangely frantic. Everyone, suddenly, had known him; everyone was deranged with grief; everyone was just going to have to try and get on as well as they could without him. “He would have wanted it that way.” That was a phrase I heard many times that week on the lips of people who had absolutely no idea what Bunny wanted; college officials, anonymous weepers, strangers who clutched and sobbed outside the dining halls; from the Board of Trustees, who, in a defensive and carefully worded statement, said that “in harmony with the unique spirit of Bunny Corcoran, as well as the humane and progressive ideals of Hampden College,” a large gift was being made in his name to the American Civil Liberties Union—an organization Bunny would certainly have abhorred, had he been aware of its existence.

Chapter 1 Death on the Doorstep LIVY HINGE’S AUNT lay dying in the back yard, which Aunt Neala thought was darned inconvenient. “Nebula!” she called, hoping her weakened voice would reach the barn where that lazy cat was no doubt taking a nap. If Neala had the energy to get up and tap her foot she would. If only that wretched elf hadn’t attacked her, she’d have made her delivery by now. Instead she lay dying. She willed her heart to take its time spreading the poison. Her heart, being just as stubborn as its owner, ignored her and raced on. A cat with a swirling orange pattern on its back ran straight to Neala and nuzzled her face. “Nebula!” She was relieved the cat had overcome its tendency to do the exact opposite of whatever was most wanted of it. Reaching into her bag, Neala pulled out a delicate leaf made of silver. She fought to keep one eye cracked open to make sure the cat knew what to do. The cat took the leaf in its teeth and ran back toward the barn. It was important that Neala stay alive long enough for the cat to hide the leaf. The moment Neala gave up the ghost, the cat would vanish from this world and return to her master. Satisfied, Neala turned her aching head toward the farmhouse where her brother’s family was nestled securely inside. Smoke curled carelessly from the old chimney in blissful ignorance of the peril that lay just beyond the yard. The shimmershield Neala had created around the property was the only thing keeping her dear ones safe. A sheet hung limply from a branch of the tree that stood sentinel in the back of the house. It was Halloween and the sheet was meant to be a ghost, but without the wind it only managed to look like old laundry. Neala’s eyes followed the sturdy branch to Livy’s bedroom window. She knew what her failure to deliver the leaf meant. The elves would try again. This time, they would choose someone young enough to be at the peak of their day dreaming powers. A druid of the Hinge bloodline, about Livy’s age. Poor Livy, who had no idea what she was. Well, that would change soon enough. Neala could do nothing about that now. Her willful eyes finally closed. In the wake of her last breath a storm rose up, bringing with it frightful wind and lightning. The sheet tore free from the branch and flew away. The kitchen door banged open. Livy Hinge, who had been told to secure the barn against the storm, found her lifeless aunt at the edge of the yard. ☐☐☐ A year later, Livy still couldn’t think about Aunt Neala without feeling the memories bite at her, as though they only wanted to be left alone. Thankfully, Livy wasn’t concerned about her aunt at the moment. Right now, Rudus Brutemel was going to get what was coming to him. Hugh, Livy’s twin, sat next to her on the bus. His nose was buried in a spelling book. The bus lurched dangerously close to their stop. If they waited any longer, they’d miss their chance. She looked over her shoulder to make sure Rudus was watching. Opening her backpack, she made a show of removing a bologna sandwich with thick slices of soft homemade bread. Hugh studied the book like it was the last thing he might ever see. Livy nudged him. He tore his eyes from his book and delivered his lines as though he were reading them. “Hey, can I have some? I’m starving.” At least he could make his stomach growl on demand.

She decided at that moment that she wanted Gina for a friend... if Gina wasn't already a friend. She rather hoped that the Champion was. The more she thought about it, the more she hoped. Really, Gina had been very nice to someone that she'd had no real reason to like. After all, if it wasn't for Andie, where would she be now? 'On some other uncomfortable Quest?' Well, maybe. Or maybe still at the Chapter-House. And Andie was the one who had thrust herself on a reluctant Gina. The Champion had no reason to be happy about that. 'But she said herself that having me along made getting around the countryside easier.' Still, when it came right down to it, Andie had been an inconvenience. Yet Gina had never made things uncomfortable for Andie. And once she'd been revealed as being another girl- 'I'd really like her for a friend.' She looked around at the other young women clustered about the makeshift table, which looked as if someone had taken a slab of the fallen stone of the fortress walls and set it on four stumpy columns. Actually, someone probably had- that someone being one of the dragons. 'I'd like to have all of them for friends,' she found herself deciding in surprise. Uncommon trial and hardship, danger and uncertainty had brought them together, but they were making the most of it, and even seemed to be finding ways to enjoy themselves. They'd come to some sort of understanding, it seemed, because she honestly couldn't tell any differences of rank among them by the way they behaved toward one another.

Why is it so exhausting to uphold someone’s heavy, inconvenient burden? Why are we spent from shouldering someone’s grief or being an armor bearer? Why is it that lifting someone out of his or her rubble leaves us breathless? Because we are the body of Christ, broken and poured out, just as He was.

Perhaps it would only make sense to me that any changes you made in me would be useful to me!” “You will be pretty! And interesting to other dragons. And that is enough for any Elderling, let alone a human!” “Perhaps ‘pretty’ wings are enough for you, but if I must bear their weight and the inconvenience of having something growing out of my backbone, perhaps they should be useful. I have never understood why you don’t even try to use your wings. I see the other dragons stretching and working theirs. I’ve seen the silver almost lift himself from the water with his, and he began with a much more ungainly body and smaller wings than yours! You don’t try! I groom your wings and keep them clean. They’ve grown larger and stronger and you could try, but you don’t. All you do is tell me how lovely they are. And lovely they may be, but have you never considered trying to use them for what they are intended?” She could see the dragon’s fury build. She’d dared to criticize her, and Sintara could not tolerate even the implication that she was lazy or self-pitying or perhaps even just a bit…”Stupid.” Thymara said the word aloud. She had no idea what prompted her to do it. Perhaps simply to show Sintara that she’d gone too far and that her keeper would no longer be terrorized by her. How dare she put wings on her back when she could not even master the ones that had naturally on her own? The murmur of voices from the barge was growing louder. Thymara refused to even glance in that direction. She stood, her shirt clutched over her breasts, and faces the furiously spinning eyes of her dragon. Sintara was magnificent in her wrath. She lifted her head and opened her jaws wide, displaying the brightly colored poison sacs in her throat. She opened her wings wide, a reflexive display of size that the dragons often used in an attempt to remind one another of their relative sizes and strengths, and they spread like a magnificent stained-glass panels unfolding. For a moment, Thymara was dizzied by her glory and her glamour. She nearly fell to her knees before her dragon. Then she took a grip on herself and stood up to the blast of pure charisma that Sintara was radiating at her. “Yes. They are beautiful!” she shouted. “Beautiful and useless! As you are beautiful and useless!” A shudder passed over Thymara. She felt suddenly queasy and then realized what she had done. In a bizarre reaction to Sintara’s display, Thymara had spread her own wings. There were shouts of amazement from the keepers on the boat. Sintara was drawing breath. Her jaws were still wide, and Thymara stood rooted before her, watching her poison sacs swell. If the dragon chose to breathe venom on her, there would be no escape. She stood her ground, frozen with terror and fury. “Sintara!” The bellow came from Mercor. “Close your jaws and fold your wings! Do not harm your keeper for speaking truth to you!” “Fight! Fight! Fight!” Spit was trumpeting joyously. “Quiet, pest!” Ranculos roared at him. “Do not spray here! The drift will burn me! Blast your own keeper if you wish, Sintara, but spray me and I swear I will burn your wings as full of holes as rotting canvas!” This from small green Fente. The dragon reared onto her hind legs and spread her own wings in challenge. “Stop this madness!” Mercor bellowed again. “Sintara hurt not your keeper!” “She is mine, and I’ll do as I wish!” Sintara’s trumpet was a shrill whistle of anger. Despite herself, Thymara clapped her hands over her ears. Terror made her reckless. “I don’t care what you do to me! Look at what you’ve already done! You want to kill me? Go ahead, you stupid lizard. Someone else can clear the sucking insects from your eyes, take the leeches off your useless, beautiful wings. Go ahead, kill me!

The truth is that her entire job consisted of caring for others. And while she enjoyed her work for the most part, occasionally, it did get to be a bit too much. The disease, the despair, the demands of both patients and families alike. So to keep herself sane, now and then, she’d inconvenience someone. Never on anything life or death, of course. And never other staff; shitting where she ate held absolutely no appeal to her whatsoever. However, from time to time, she’d been known to drop hints about perfectly functioning elevators being out of order and the cafeteria being closed several hours before it was. Just fun, quirky things.

Cares for Something/Someone Outside the Self “It is the capacity to care — to care intensely about something beyond the limited self — that we seem to find our best clue to what mature individuality is.” —The Mind Alive The Overstreets convincingly argue that, for several reasons, the capacity to deeply care for someone or something forms the very core of the mature mind. First, it slays adolescent ego-absorption by shifting an individual’s focus outside the self, and training that focus on something bigger than the self. Second, it requires the “emotional overflow” of well-developed inner resources, particularly the development of courage, as sincerely caring is underrated as a truly frightening endeavor: “Caring — whether for another person, a line of work, a field of knowledge, or a conviction — is, in a sense, the most hazardous of human experiences. The emotionally impoverished person cannot afford it; for it means choosing to be vulnerable. . . . There is, in psychological truth, a certain terror that is part of the experience of deep caring: the terror of letting one’s self go; putting one’s whole capacity to feel and suffer at the disposal of something beyond the self. No one, it seems safe to assume, who has ever deeply and genuinely loved another human being or a chosen vocation or a social cause or a religious faith has ever wholly escaped this terror.” Third, it is the only way to catalyze one’s full potential: “If the risks of caring are great, so are the rewards; for it is one of the basic facts of human life that the ungiven self is the unfulfilled self. Only the individual who builds a strong, sound relationship with his world can himself become strong, sound, and resourceful: ready for what happens; able to be affirmative and creative in his dealings with experience.” Caring is such a key element of human fulfillment, in part because it provides a non-duplicable source of motivation:   “If a person never greatly cares about anything beyond himself, he has little spontaneous reason to get over the hump of inertia and submit himself to the discipline of a working material or a body of knowledge. . . . an individual’s area of caring and the strength of his caring determine the inconveniences he will willingly suffer and the risks he will run.” Finally, the practice of caring for things outside the self — a process in which the arrows of influence and need work both ways — disabuses you of delusional notions of complete autonomy and control (ideals maturity approaches, but can never completely attain, nor would find desirable to attain); it serves as a visceral, humbling reminder of where you remain (wonderfully) dependent. In caring for some person or idea, you come to an understanding of humanity’s interconnectedness, a “sense of how things hang together; not just the thing itself, but the meaning of it.” As the Overstreets conclude, “the capacity to care — to enjoy richly, love deeply, feel strongly, and if need be, suffer intensely — is, in short, the best guarantee any one of us can have against” the complete stagnation of the self.

Family loves without condition. I’ve forged my own family through determination, sacrifice, and dedication. They aren’t my blood, but they are bound to me deeper than you will ever be. You don’t just get to love me and expect that to be enough. True love is built on everything that exists outside of the word. It’s showing up when you’re needed, no matter the inconvenience. It’s knowing someone, truly knowing them, and accepting everything they are even where you differ or clash. It’s making effort despite the differences, it’s apologies when they’re owed and forgiveness even when it feels impossible. And it took me so fucking long to become a man capable of those things, in part because of you. But mostly because of him. This false king you claim to love. A man who stole everything away from me and is still keen to take more. If you can love a monster unconditionally then that makes you a monster too. So don’t you dare, don’t you fucking dare come to me on your knees, begging for forgiveness, because you won’t find it. You’re not a part of my family, and there’s nothing here for you in my heart but hate.

Family loves without condition. I’ve forged my own family through determination, sacrifice, and dedication. They aren’t my blood, but they are bound to me deeper than you will ever be. You don’t just get to love me and expect that to be enough. True love is built on everything that exists outside of the word. It’s showing up when you’re needed, no matter the inconvenience. It’s knowing someone, truly knowing them, and accepting everything they are even where you differ or clash. It’s making effort despite the differences, it’s apologies when they’re owed and forgiveness even when it feels impossible.