Caldwell Quotes

I know now that we never get over great losses; we absorb them, and they carve us into different, often kinder, creatures.

Learn everything you can, anytime you can, from anyone you can, there will always come a time when you will be grateful you did.

A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear.

What they never tell you about grief is that missing someone is the simple part.

I know now that we never get over great losses; we absorb them, and they carve us into different, often kinder, creatures. ...We tell the story to get them back, to capture the traces of footfalls through the snow.

...that was Bud Caldwell's Rules and Things to Have a Funner LIfe and Make a Better Liar Out of Yourself Number 83...If a Adult Tells You Not to Worry, and You Weren't Worried Before, You Better Hurry Up and Start 'Cause You're Already Running Late.

The Minister of Army answered, “Bob, I thought that you would have been an astute and clever enough a politician to think of this yourself, but seeing how you have asked me, I suggest that you wait until eight in the night on Thursday 29/April/1965 to announce that Australia will send the First Battalion Royal Australian Regiment to fight in South Vietnam. By you waiting until the evening of 29/April/1965 to announce this in Parliament, the labour opposition leader of Arthur Caldwell and his deputy leader of Gough Whitlam should be absent, as will be most of the entire parliament, because the following day is the beginning of a long week- end. You are legally not required to give advanced warning to the house, so you can easily get away with this!

Hope in the beginning feels like such a violation of the loss, and yet without it we couldn't survive.

I'm going to take a shower," I said and prepared for the comment I knew was coming. "You know what they say, conserve water and shower with a friend.

In a society that profits from your self doubt, liking yourself is a rebellious act.

The real hell of this," he told her, "is that you're going to get through it.

The budget should be balanced, the Treasury should be refilled, public debt should be reduced, the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled, and the assistance to foreign lands should be curtailed lest Rome become bankrupt. People must again learn to work, instead of living on public assistance.

I am not alone at all, I thought. I was never alone at all. And that, of course, is the message of Christmas. We are never alone. Not when the night is darkest, the wind coldest, the world seemingly most indifferent. For this is still the time God chooses.

Love is simple. You fall and that's it. You'll work the other stuff out. You just gotta let yourself fall and have faith that someone will be there to catch you." I didn't want to do any falling. Falling usually led to meeting a hard surface in an unpleasant way.

Never invest yourself in anything so deeply that its failure could cost you your happiness.

You can be happy with money and you can be wretched with it. It depends on what kind of person you are. -- A Prologue to Love

It's and old, old story: I had a friend and we shared everything, and then she died and so we shared that, too.

Maybe this is the point: to embrace the core sadness of life without toppling headlong into it, or assuming it will define your days.

Grief is what tells you who you are alone.

Like a starfish, the heart endures its amputation.

Scratch a fantasy and you'll find a nightmare.

I saw Hunter when I woke up. I saw Hunter as I ate a bowl of cereal. I saw him in human sexuality, where he seemed to be trying to break a record for most innuendos in one hour. I saw him at work where he assaulted my email. I saw him every night at dinner. I saw him go to and from the bathroom. I saw him at our stupid meditations, where were as pointless as socks with sandals. I. Saw. Him. EVERYWHERE.

The strong take from the weak, but the smart take from the strong.

Loving you was the best mistake I ever made.

Corrupt citizens breed corrupt rulers, and it is the mob who finally decides when virtue shall die.

You're not just doing that to impress her, are you?" "Everything I do is to impress her. It's my mission in life," he said with a completely serious face, while he squeezed my knee under the table. Mom burst out laughing. "I like him," she said. "Me too. I think I'll keep him," I said, taking his hand and twisting my fingers with his. "Good," he said, giving my hand a squeeze.

You're serious?" "As a heart attack." I set my bag down and leaned on the counter. Okay, Hunter Zaccadelli, you could make me dinner. "Stuffed French toast, sweet potato hash and strawberries and cream." "Breakfast for dinner? You rebel, you.

...a good friend stands in harm's way for you the second you ask--but a great friend does it without being asked at all.

The more controlling the parent,” Caldwell explained, “the more likely a child is to experience boredom.

Subject: This is a work environment and this is harassment Mr. Zaccadelli, I am writing to inform you that your proposition has been rejected. Due to both the fact that we are coworkers, as well as roommates, I would find it inappropriate to “visit the stacks” with you. I will reject all further offers at this time. If, in the future, I decide to entertain such an offer, I will inform you via correspondence. Respectfully (not) yours, Miss Taylor Caldwell P.S. Stop fucking emailing me.

. . . a statement that is repugnant to one's beliefs can be as true as one that is pleasurable.

Reading, not just an escape, but an exercise in living...

Three a.m. in downtown Caldwell, New York, gave you just enough obstacles to keep shit amusing.

Your smile would bring a lesser man to his knees. But if you wore your glasses and smiled at me like that, it would topple me.

He doesn’t tell me how beautiful I am; he shows me.

It ain't no use putting up your umbrella till it rains!

It's a funny thing about love: you don't need to have it returned to love somebody. Loving's enough. -- A Prologue to Love

When psychologists Catherine Caldwell-Harris and Ayse Ayçiçegi compared U.S. and Turkish samples, they found that having "an orientation inconsistent with societal values" is a risk factor for poor mental health. The findings support what the researchers call the personality-culture clash hypothesis: "Psychological adjustment depends on the degree of match between personality and the values of surrounding society." To the extent that introverts feel the need to explain, apologize, or feel guilty about what works best for them, they feel alienated not only from society but from themselves.

The more wants a man has, the less freedom.

Hope,... which whispered from Pandora's box after all the other plagues and sorrows had escaped, is the best and last of all things. Without it, there is only time. And time pushes at our backs like a centrifuge, forcing outward and away, until it nudges us into oblivion... It's a law of motion, a fact of physics..., no different from the stages of white dwarves and red giants. Like all things in the universe, we are destined from birth to diverge. Time is simply the yardstick of our separation. If we are particles in a sea of distance, exploded from an original whole, then there is a science to our solitude. We are lonely in proportion to our years.

Tawny shrugged. "I was overreacting. Typical big sister move. He explained why he did it, and it makes sense, in a slightly twisted way. He's not a bad guy. He's just a jerk. But a nice one." "That doesn't make any sense." "Men rarely do.

God is never absent from the affairs of men, though we are not conscious of Him very often.

The only things people can ever know about you are the ones that you let them see

I'd confused need with love and love with sacrifice.

Oh my God. Just bang Matthew Caldwell already and get it over with.” “He’s married.

It's taken years for me to understand that dying doesn't end the story; it transforms it. Edits, rewrites, the blur, aand epiphany of one-way dialogue. Most of us wander in and out of one another's lives until not death, but distance, does us part-- time and space and heart's weariness are the blander executioners or human connection.

I'd begun to realize that there was an unspoken predjudice among book-learned people, a secret conviction they all seemed to share, that life as we know it is an imperfect vision of reality, and that only art, like a pair of reading glasses can correct it.

The adventure of our first days together gradually blossomed into something else: a feeling I'd never had, which I can only compare to the sensation of returning home, of joining a balance that needs no adjusting, as if the scales of my life had been waiting for her all along.

He'd tried a life separated from God, and it was no way to live. He'd rather be a son who was chastened than a stranger who was ignored.

The only education in grief that any of us ever gets is a crash course.

That she was irreplaceable became a bittersweet loyalty: Her death was what I had now instead of her.

Mankind adores its betrayers, and murders its saviors.

If people are lucky enough to have family they should cultivate it. --A Prologue to Love

Eventually it becomes obvious to me that I have stopped living and started killing time.

I killed that boy, Parks. If you turn my life into an equation, the number that comes out is a minus one. That's my lifetime score, you understand me? And you... you and Caldwell, and Private Ginger fucking Rogers... my God, whether it means anything or not, I will die my own self before I let you take me down to minus two.

Let me learn your interests and share them, tell me of your hopes and together we will attain them, and desire for nothing because as long as you're mine, if you should call forth the stars, I'll bring them down to you.

Like all things in the universe, we are destined from birth to diverge. Time is simply the yard-stick of our separation. If we are particles in a sea of distance, exploded from an original whole, then there is a science to our solitude. We are lonely in proportion to our years.

Most of us wander in and out of one another's lives until not death, but distance, does us part--time and space and the heart's weariness are the blander executioners of human connection.

All I wanted was simple and yet the hardest thing to find: a sense of well-being.

The belief that life was hard and often its worst battles were fought in private, that it was possible to walk through fear and come out scorched but still breathing.

Hope...which is whispered from Pandora's box only after all the other plagues and sorrows had escaped, is the best and last of all things. Without it, there is only time. And time pushes at our backs like a centrifuge, forcing us outward and away, until it nudges us into oblivion.

I nearly had a cakegasm at the table. My eyes rolled back in my head, and I moaned. "Sweet Christ." I opened my eyes to find Hunter watching me with the strangest expression on his face. "What? It's really good; you should try some," I said, pushing the plate at him. It was a testament of how embarrassed I was about the cakegasm that I was even sharing at all. "I swear, if there weren't a table between us, I would be kissing you right now. And none too gently." I put my form down and swallowed so I wouldn't choke. "You didn't seem to mind about the recliner," I said. "True. But there wan't an audience, and that's a very ugly recliner. This is a very nice table. Also there is glass and sharp things I wouldn't want hurting you." "Good point. Please, have some." "If you're going to make that noise and that face again, I don't know if I can let you have any more." "I'll be good. I swear." "You're not good. That's the problem." "You're right. I'm not," I said, giving him my own smirk. "I do try, though." "Cruel. That's the word to describe you right now." "Just have some cake.

If a nation has not God that nation must fall, but if a nation has God then all the powers of evil, and all the armies, cannot shake its foundations; no, not even if the whole world is arrayed against it.

The only education in grief that any of us ever gets is a crash course. Until Caroline had died I had belonged to that other world, the place of innocence, and linear expectations, where I thught grief was a simple, wrenching realm of sadness and longing that graduallu receded. What that definition left out was the body blow that loss inflicts, as well as the temporary madness, and a range of less straightforward emotions shocking in their intensity.

I always want to feel good and I never want to feel bad. Because of this, I’m experienced in substance abuse issues.

Everything about death is a cliché until you're in it.

If writers possess a common temperament, it's that they tend to be shy egomaniacs; publicity is the spotlight they suffer for the recognition they crave.

That was the recipe of our relationship, I think. We gave each other what we never expected to find.

...we both saw something we liked, a willingness to have no walls, or maybe just an unwillingness to keep them standing.

Near the end I asked him one night in the hospital corridor what he thought was happening, and he said, "Tell her everything you haven't said," and I smiled with relief. "There's nothing," I said. "I've already told her everything.

Republics never survive, for their people do not like freedom but prefer to be led and guided and flattered and seduced into slavery by a benevolent, or not so, benevolent despot. They want to worship Caesar. So, American republicanism will inevitably die and become a democracy, and then decline, as Aristotle said into a despotism.

Sisters share a bond that no one can explain. They understand each other in a way not even girl friends can approach. Secrets, heartbreaks, codes, history, delights, and sheer happiness can be shared in a simple glance between sisters. Many have attempted to decipher the language between sisters, and many have failed. sisters everywhere understand the importance of the bond and respect the relationship in other sisters. There is nothing more prized to a women than the secrets she shares with her sisters.

I can accept that all I’ve ever wanted is not very special—all I’ve ever wanted, like most people, is proof of love.

No man is more abhorred than a man who is different from his neighbors. They feel violated and threatened if one dares to be as they are not.

He had rid my inherited house of a lustful ghost, opened my eyes to a concealed world of strange forces and arcane knowledge, and buggered me twice.

We need imperfection in our relationships, else we would die from the thickness of intimacy.

Menulis cerita pendek dan novel bukanlah sesuatu hal yang dapat aku lakukan dengan mudah dan menyenangkan.

Preachers has got to preach against something. It wouldn’t do them no good to preach for everything. They got to be against something every time.

Old dogs can be a regal sight. Their exuberance settles over the years into a seasoned nobility, their routines become as locked into yours as the quietest and kindest of marriages.

You can stay on the porch. Like how you left me on the floor outside our room." "I didn't know what else to do. You found the check, and I panicked." "That isn't an excuse." "I know. And I'm not saying that this is going to make up for it. I'm going to try, really try, to make you trust me again. I want you to trust me. I just... I couldn't sleep last night without you. It was the strangest thing, being in the room alone without you. I couldn't hear you breathing, and your laughter was gone and you were gone, and it was like a part of my life was missing. A big part. I tripped going to the bathroom and banged my head. See?" He pointed to a lovely gash on his forehead. "And then I burned my hand on the toaster oven. And then my car wouldn't start. Again. I've never had such bad luck in my life.

I decide to hone my joy. I dance around the kitchen to Judy Garland’s Greatest Hits on the turntable. The sun on my chest, I spin in my socks. Bruised, exhausted, and fluttering back to earth.

All over the world there were families deciding to care about each other and encourage one another along the paths God had given them.

Life is horrible and unfair and terrifying. But those are not reasons to stop living.

If you don't own your grunt work, can you really say you've done the climb?

Things hurt worse before they hurt better.

You may have forgotten how to use it because it’s been so hurt, but it is there and someday you will find the person who teaches that organ to again beat.

I should walk away. That would be the right thing to do. It would be the smart thing. But I can't, because I'm Taylor Caldwell, the girl who cuts.

Are you Darah, Renee or Taylor? You look like a Taylor to me," he said, looking me up and down. I wasn't at my best, considering I was dressed for moving heavy objects in a blue UMaine t-shirt and black soccer shorts, and I had my light brown hair in a haphazard bun against the back of my neck. His eyes raked up and down twice, and for some reason the way he assessed me made me blush and want to kick him in the balls at the same time. "There must be a mistake," I said. He adjusted his bag on his shoulder. "That's a creative name. What do you shorten it to? Missy?

The problem isn't that I'm uncomfortable with it, the problem is that I want it!" I yelled. It was official; I'd lost it. Oh well, I wasn't known for having a long fuse. "Are you happy? Jesus. You say something like that and then expect me to just be whatever about it. That's like teasing someone with a giant red velvet cake and then putting it in one of those glass rotating desert thingies." I wasn't my most eloquent at the moment. "Does this mean I'm the cake?" "Shut up, it was a metaphor." "So you want me?" So much it hurt. "Yes," I whispered. "Right now?" "Yes." "Oh." Now he was the one who sounded nervous. "It's just... a surprise." "I told you I would entertain the idea." "I know. I just didn't think you'd be so enthusiastic so soon." "Hunter, I'm a virgin. Not a nun." He didn't talk for a moment. "That was the sexiest thing you've ever said. God, why do you do this to me?

So what now?" he said. "What do you mean?" "What do we do now? We can't just be roommates." "You said you didn't like me." "I don't like you. I don't like how your hair smells, and how I can't stop thinking about waking up and seeing your face. I hate how my bed felt empty when you left. I don't like how good you were with my family, especially Harper, and how I wanted to see you with then again, but not just as a guest. As a member. You're right. I don't like you at all." "When did you change your mind?" "My mind never changed. I've wanted you since the moment you opened the door and had that stunned look on your face. It just took me a while to admit it. Why deny it now? It is what it is and it's not going to change." "Oh." "This doesn't mean I'm going to be nice. I'm still going to be an ass. I'll just be an ass who apologizes and brings you flowers to say he's been a dick." "Chocolate," I said. "What?" "I'd rather have chocolate when you apologize." "Chocolate it is." He smiled. "So does that mean what I think it means?" "No. It just means that you get to bring me chocolate when you've been an ass. I'm going to weigh three hundred pounds." I focused my attention back on the peppers. I couldn't think about Hunter's declaration of... whatever it was. Footsteps didn't make me look up. "Taylor, look at me. Please." Damn. If only he didn't say please. "I can't promise to not make you mad. I can't promise that I won't hurt you. All I can promise is that I want you in my life, and I'll do anything to keep you there.

They were sitting in their nice apartments or dorm rooms reading the latest Haruki Murakami story while I was sitting in a shitty little ramshackle house reading a used copy of Erskine Caldwell's God's Little Acre. They weren't bad people. They all did volunteer work, voted Democrat and believed in the goodness of humanity. I voted Democrat, needed Habitat for Humanity to come to my house and knew from personal experience the shittiness of humanity because I was shitty myself.

I get drunk and high like in high school. I smoke weed out of a can, I drink wine out of a box. I used to be more hardcore in my self-destruction, but I am back to basics now.

what feels like nectar in the beginning turns into poison in the long run, and what feels like poison in the beginning is nectar in the end.

Death is a divorce nobody asked for; to live through it is to find a way to disengage from what you thought you couldn't stand to lose.

A man's judged by what he is and not what he was.

You're the loveliest you'll ever be...until tomorrow and then you will be even lovelier.

My mother wanted to be Betty Boop. Betty Boop was independent. Betty Boop was sexy. Betty Boop really had her shit together, you know?

You know what comes after looking... physical contact.

So it wasn't a dream. You really are here in my bedroom....

A strange thing has happened as I've aged; I have felt my parents' love for me more strongly every year.

Never mix books and bed. In the spectrum of excitement, sex & thought were on opposite ends. Both to be enjoyed, but never at the same time.

Sometimes honesty and cruelty go hand in hand, do they not?” she asked softly and released the curtain. It fluttered into place. “Sometimes honesty can be the greatest form of cruelty.

What manner of men had lived in those days...who had so eagerly surrendered their sovereignty for a lie and a delusion? Why had they been so anxious to believe that the government could solve problems for them which had been pridefully solved, many times over, by their fathers? Had their characters become so weak and debased, so craven and emasculated, that offers of government dole had become more important than their liberty and their humanity? Had they not know that power delegated to the government becomes the club of tyrants? They must have known. They had their own history to remember, and the history of five thousand years. Yet, they had willingly and knowingly, with all this knowledge, declared themselves unfit to manage their own affairs and had placed their lives, which belonged to God only, in the hands of sinister men who had long plotted to enslave them, by wars, by "directives," by "emergencies." In the name of the American people, the American people had been made captive.

Love lost is a special kind of failure, I think. It's a reminder that some consummations, no matter how devoutly wished for, never come; that some apes will never be men, not in all the world's ages.

Wicked men are born every generation, and it is the duty of a nation to render them impotent. When you discover a man who seeks power for himself, out of hatred or contempt for his fellows, destroy him,

Good preachers don’t preach about God and heaven, and things like that. They always preach against something, like hell and the devil. Them is things to be against. It wouldn’t do a preacher no good to preach for God. He’s got to preach against the devil and all wicked and sinful things. That’s what the people like to hear about. They want to hear about the bad things.

Inde fernut, titidem qui vivere debeat annos, corpre de patrio parvum phenica renasci' It's from Ovid. It means, 'A little phoenix is born anew from the father's body, fated to live the same number of years.

Like the lotus flower, business blooms in the mud, and in the dark of night. The lotus is an amazing creation of God, because for all of its beauty, it is the sum total of work performed in a mess. It is also a creation that has the ability to create seeds in its habitat for a very long time without help from human hands. The lotus has the ability to survive beyond the mercurial nature of weather (storms, frost). The lotus is one strong, powerful, and resilient flower that blossoms in a substance (mud) that none of us would want to touch.

A son is a promise that time makes to a man,the guarantee every father receives that whatever he holds dear will someday be considered foolish, and that person he loves best in the world will misunderstand him.

Mostly I couldn't bear... the paltry notion that memory was all that eternal life really meant, and I spent too much time wondering where people got the fortitude or delusion to keep on moving past the static dead.

I feel New York inside me when I talk too loudly, when I'm in line for coffee and feel rageful and restless, when I ask inappropriate and personal questions of strangers. When I say, 'Oh, I walked,' and people look at me quizzically and say, 'That's a long walk.

Dad always taught me that it’s not what happens to you, it’s how you deal with it.

He still could not understand why he had nothing, and would never have anything, and there was no one who knew and who could tell him. It was the unsolved mystery of his life.

In the United States, the person who led the fight to reform treatment of the mentally ill and to develop asylums was Dorothea Dix. Often neglected in history, Dix was a nurse

All you need is one person in the world to condone your horrifying behavior, and to each other, we were that one special person.

The worst thief is a bad book

Menulis fiksi adalah menuangkan perasaan dan semangat hidup dalam untaian kata-kata di atas kertas-sebuah usaha tanpa akhir untuk mendapatkan makna-makna yang berbeda

We all choose how to look at life. --A Prologue to Love

The human heart is hard to grasp.

We all feel inadequate very often. It’s only when it gets chronic that it is disturbing to one’s emotions and can get out of hand and make you pretty damn miserable.

Time passed, worlds diverged.

You don't love Buck. If you did, you'd have four kids by now. Wouldn't you? Now wouldn't you? A woman like you...

You can live doing what you love or die having done nothing at all.

Don't let love take too high, 'cause you'll be a kite without a tail, and before you know it, caught in a storm cloud. And lightning ain't kind. Love ain't worth being electrocuted for.

Maybe she just needed out. Out of Caldwell. Out of the CCJ. Out of the electronic family of her alarm clock and the phone on her desk and the TV that kept her dreams away while she slept.

Are you calling into question my honor, ma’am?” he demanded in terse ducal tones his grandfather would have been impressed by. The woman snorted. “I expect if you cannot tell that I am, then I should also call into question your intelligence.

Most of all I told this story because I wanted to say something about hope and the absence of it, and how we keep going anyway. About second chances, and how they’re sometimes buried amid the dross, even when you’re poised for the downhill grade. The narrative can always turn out to be a different story from what you expected.

I loved you and reverenced you, for teachers are the noblest of men and labor for little and only from the fullness of their unselfish souls. In your name, and in my memory of you, I will do the best I can, and remember you always.

The other thing I know now, is that we survive grief merely and surely by outlasting it. The ongoing fact of the narrative eclipses the heartbreak within. A deal that seems to be the price we pay for getting to hold on to our beloved dead.

Everyone living is doomed

I Don’t Do Drugs I Am Drugs

Piety without joy, faith without cheer, duty without pleasure, prayer without delight—these do not please the Lord God.

By God, I can’t sort out whether you’re insolent as brass or missing a brain between your ears.” “If I’m forced to choose from solely those two options? The former.

Life is all about risk and reward. Better to have struggled, to have tried, than to not have seized an opportunity at all.

A great adventure without success is far superior to a climb where everything goes as planned.

The real trick is to let life, with all it's ordinary missteps and regrets, be consistently more mysterious and alluring then it's end.

...gregarious hermit. I wanted the warmth of spontaneous connection and the freedom to be left alone.

I can give you the love I feel that was slowly kindled and cultivated, just like the flowers you tend.

Nature had found the perfect place to hide the yellow fever virus. It seeded itself and grew in the blood, blooming yellow and running red.

The two hardest things to contemplate in life (...) are failure and age, and those are one and the same.

And do you agree that the mornings when we appreciated each other might have been better than the mornings we loved each other?

How odd, to have a mother, a father, a brother and frequent visitors, and yet still be lonely…I

Made a decision. I will never let a sunny day happen without me again. Darkness is almost always guaranteed unless some strange thing happens. But the sun...?! Go get some.

Co-operative and corporate farming would have saved them all.

In Buddhism, the term hungry ghost refers to the person whose appetite exceeds their capacity for satisfaction.

Life is made up of desires that seem big and vital one minute, and little and absurd the next. I guess we get what's best for us in the end.

Don't you guys ever get sick of sucking face?

Gossip was nothing more than a kernel of truth cooked within masterful lies, then expertly fed to a voracious lot of people who thrived off those falsities.

When God became human, He made Himself into an image. By His own incarnation, He shattered the prohibition against art.

Forlorness. An unspoken sadness that required no words.

There is nothing stronger and nobler than when man and wife are of one heart and mind in a house. A grief to their foes, and to their friends great joy. But their own hearts know it best.

Give me back what should already be mine. Give me the dark, the freedom of the streets, the right to walk wherever I want, unafraid of rape or assault or just being messed with. The stars belong to me as much as you. Move over. Make room on the bench.

They could never quite reconcile themselves to the idea that our lives don't follow the dramatic arc that a good author gives to a great literary character. Only in accidents of pure perfection does the world actually become a stage." (Rule of Four, 54-55)

All of this seems as though it were yesterday, or forever ago, in that crevasse between space and time that stays fixed in the imagination. I remember it all because I remember it all. In crisis with someone you love, the dialogue is as burnished as a scar on a tree.

What I know: When I met you, a blue rush began. We treat desire as a problem to be solved. We fucked for six straight hours that afternoon, which does not seem precisely possible but that is what the clock said. We killed the time. To read is to cover one’s face, to write is to show it. Are there many things in this cool-hearted world so utterly exquisite as the pure love of one woman for another woman?

Hsiao Lao smiled weakly. "He is a foolish God... Your God does not behave in the way I would expect." I laughed suddenly, for I had thought the same many times -- how foolish God is with me, my sweet, spendthrift, profligate Lord, bestowing on me things I would not have thought myself capable of. "It may seem that way, Hsaso Lao. He is foolish in His giving and in His care for us. He has spoiled me throughout my life.

This obsession is a curious thing. Sometimes wonder about the merits of devoting so much of myself to a singular climbing objective. Much of the time it beats me down, leaves me hanging my head in despair. But then there are the moments that bring me to life. When excitement wells up inside my chest in a way that doesn’t happen in every day life. Today my fingertips were cracked and bleeding. I made no progress despite great conditions. Now I am on the ground and can hardly contain my excitement to get back on the wall. It’s a crazy rollercoaster and I owe my family and partners a great deal for encouraging me through it all.

When I wept and told him I was afraid I was too intense, too much, he interrupted my tears and said, "If someone came down from above and told me I could keep only one thing about you, it would be your too-muchness.

Civil rights thus does not temper popular sovereignty, it replaces it. What we call political correctness is the natural outcome of civil rights, which makes fighting bias a condition for the legitimacy of the state. Once bias is held to be part of the “unconscious,” of human nature, there are no areas of human life in which the state’s vigilance is not called for.

She could sometimes stand the pain of it in her stomach when she knew there was nothing to eat, but when Lov stood in full view taking turnips out of the sack, she could not bear the sight of seeing food no one would let her have.

There were always well-developed plans in Jeeter’s mind for the things he intended doing; but somehow he never got around to doing them. One day led to the next, and it was much more easy to say he would wait until tomorrow. When that day arrived, he invariably postponed action until a more convenient time. Things had been going along in that easy way for almost a lifetime now; nevertheless,

Kegiatan fisik dalam menulis fiksi bertolak belakang dengan hasil yang didapat. Kegiatan tersebut adalah duduk tegang dan jenuh sepanjang siang atau malam di depan meja dan mesin ketik, pada saat aku ingin berdiri dan pergi ke suatu tempat untuk melihat sesuatu yang aku yakini lebih menarik dibanding apa yang sedang aku kerjakan.

I feel drawn to the word "unmoored" during this time. I look it up a few times a week. I stare at the definition on my computer screen. I love the example sentence Wikipedia uses, which says, Left unmoored, the boat gradually drifts out to sea. It pops into my head when I wake in the mornings, while I walk the streets, wait for the bus, the train, get into cabs, eat lunch alone, and browse the shelves at the library.

Only with the entrenchment of political correctness did it become clear what Americans had done in 1964: They had inadvertently voted themselves a second constitution without explicitly repealing the one they had. Each constitution contained guarantees

It is always hard to leave a home a drama a way of life a life. So I sat there warm and safe that night held by the sea and a good man and my own good fortune victim and witness to all the transitory sweetness like Gatsby's dreams that stood before and behind me.

...Because every desire has its proper object...people spend their lives wanting things the shouldn't. The world confuses them into taking heir love and aiming it where it doesn't belong...All it takes to be happy is to love the right things, in the right amounts. Not money. Not books. People. Adults who don't understand that never feel fulfilled...

Man and the State. Always must they be enemies, for men had been given freedom by God and the State hated God, and loathed men and everlastingly fought against the rights of men. The liberty of the individual defied the luxury and the privileges of those who deemed themselves greater and wiser than their fellows, and wished to enslave their brothers. The

physicians, Drs. Bill Castelli, Bill Roberts and Caldwell Esselstyn, Jr., that in their long careers they had never seen a heart disease fatality among their patients who had blood cholesterol levels below 150 mg/dL. Dr. Castelli was the long-time director of the famous Framingham Heart Study of NIH; Dr. Esselstyn was a renowned surgeon at the Cleveland Clinic who did a remarkable study reversing heart disease (chapter five); Dr. Roberts has long been editor of the prestigious medical journal Cardiology. BLOOD CHOLESTEROL AND DIET

In hindsight, I see it was my decision not to let go. I didn't know how, though some days I focused completely on it: using therapy, distraction, exercise. Other days I left myself wildly grieve. Finn affects it all: every conversation I have, what I choose to wear, what books I read, what films and shows I watch. There's that Buddhist quote, (S)he who angers you owns you. She owned me. I allowed it. She controlled me. I knew this feeling of misery would pass, that what I needed was time, but I was impatient. Unfortunately, we must live through the present to get to the future, writes Hanif Kureishi in his novel Intimacy.

I've always loved the idea that passion breeds success. I now realize, much to my chagrin, that telling someone who doesn't feel the fire to simply follow his passion is a little like telling someone who doesn't have any legs to run to the fridge and get you a sandwich.

Life is a comedy for the man who thinks, a tragedy for the man who feels.

She looks at me looking at her, and says, In my wildest dreams, I never thought you would look at me that way.

I was trying so hard, and I was so frustrated, that I could not see anything beyond the pressure I placed on myself.” Ryker

He had come to shock the people out of their complacency. This was evident in his every word. There were no sacred sheep in his flock.

The rest of the family tree had a root system soggy with alcohol... One aunt had fallen asleep with her face in the mashed potatoes at Thanksgiving dinner; another's fondness for Coors was so unwavering that I can still remember the musky smell of the beer and the coldness of the cans. Most of the men drank the way all Texas men drank, or so I believed, which meant that they were tough guys who could hold their liquor until they couldn't anymore--a capacity that often led to some cloudy version of doom, be it financial ruin or suicide or the lesser betrayal of simple estrangement. Both social drinkers, my parents had eluded these tragic endings; in the postwar Texas of suburbs and cocktails, their drinking was routine but undramatic.

My eyes pop out when I catch a glimpse of how much leg she's showing. She's wearing her shortest mini skirt, the one that drives me crazy. Her legs look about a mile long as she crosses them and bobs her foot in time with the cafe's background music. She's really trying to kill me, isn't she?

On the day when you again allow abominable men to confiscate your freedom, your money, your lives, your private property, your manhood and your sacred honor, in the name of "security' or "national emergency' you will die, and never again shall you be free. If plotters again destroy your Republic, they will do it by your greedy and ignorant assent, by your disregard of your neighbors' rights, by your apathy and your stupidity. We were brought to the brink of universal death and darkness because we had become that most contemptible of people -- an angerless one. Keep alive and vivid all your righteous anger against traitors, against those who would abrogate your Constitution, against those who would lead you to wars with false slogans and cunning appeals to your patriotism.

We found out that day, fairly quickly, how great and complex our fondness was for each other; I also had my first sense of something central about Caroline that would become a pillar of our friendship. When she was confronted with any emotional difficulty, however slight or major, her response as to approach rather than to flee. There she would stay until the matter was resolved, and the emotional aftermath was free of any hangover or recrimination. My instincts toward resolution were similar: I knew that silence and distance were far more pernicious than head-on engagement. This compatibility helped to ensure that there was no unclaimed baggage between us in the years to come.

So ended the formative period in [his] life, the single year that set in motion all the clockwork of his future identity. Thinking back on it, I wonder if it isn't the same for all of us. Adulthood is a glacier encroaching quietly on youth. When it arrives, the stamp of childhood suddenly freezes, capturing us for good in the image of our last act, the pose we struck when the ice of age set in.

in all the years i had blundered along in search of my own footing, she had never given me an inkling of this wish. unburdened by the demands of history or anyone else's dreams, i had wandered toward and finally reached a world far outside the plains i loved and loathed. my mother had neither begrudged me this journey nor expected it, certain that i had to make my own way. but she packed my toolbox with her great wit and forbearance before i went, and she stashed there, for long safekeeping, her desire.

In Buddhism, the term hungry ghost refers to the person whose appetite exceeds their capacity for satisfaction. The visual of a hungry ghost is a Buddha-ghost with a tiny mouth and an enormous stomach. They’re greedy, starved for money, sex, drugs, power, status, all the good stuff. More is never enough.

It became clear that Keisha Blake could not start something without finishing it. If she climbed onto the boundary wall of Caldwell, she was compelled to walk the entire wall, no matter the obstructions in her path (beer cans, branches). This compulsion, applied to other fields, manifested itself as "intelligence." Every unknown word sent her to a dictionary--in search of something like "completion"--and every book led to another book, a process that, of course, could never be completed. This route through early life gave her no small portion of joy, and, indeed, it seemed at first that her desires and her capacities were basically aligned. She wanted to read things--could not resist wanting to read things--and reading was easily done, and relatively inexpensive. On the other hand, that she should receive any praise for such reflexive habits baffled the girl, for she knew herself to be fantastically stupid about many things. Wasn't it possible that what others mistook for intelligence was in fact only a sort of mutation of the will?

Toyota would be credited for its just-in-time theory of manufacturing, in which parts arrived from suppliers just in time to be part of the final assembly. But in any real sense that process began at the Rouge. Toasting Philip Caldwell, the head of Ford who in 1982 was visiting Japan, Eiji Toyoda, of the Toyota company, said, “There is no secret to how we learned to do what we do, Mr. Caldwell. We learned it at the Rouge.

Leanoardo wrote that a painter should begin every canvas with a wash of black, because all things in nature are dark except where exposed by the light. Most painters do the opposite, starting with a whitewash and adding the shadows last. But Paul, who knows Leonardo so well you'd thing the old man slept on the bottom bunk, understands the value of starting with the shadows. The only things people can ever know about you are the ones you let them see.

With that in mind, I try to imagine the greatest gift I could've given my father. And as sleep descends on me, the answer seems strangely clear: my faith in his idols. That was what he wanted all along - to feel that we were united by something permanent, to know that as long as he and I believed in the same thing, we would never be apart.

You know, me finding the perfect dress is more about you than it is about me." "Oh yeah? How's that?" "My plan, you see, is to scour the city for just the right dress that will make it absolutely impossible for you to resist me. You'll simply be at my mercy the entire night." Trent frowns, "How is that different from any other time we're together?

In the book The Fantasy Bond, Robert Firestone explains that children need to believe their parents are good, that everything is well and loving, because if they see the truth, they will crumble in the face of reality. It’s odd my mother would say something that profound because of a CoverGirl blush. Even now, it embarrasses me to think about—that she nailed me so hard.

I believe human relationships can and should follow the mind-set of adventure, defined not by climbing but by its greater meaning: embracing the unknown. In remaining open to others, you gain knowledge, and your perspective of life and of the world expands.

Sublime Books The Known World, by Edward P. Jones The Buried Giant, by Kazuo Ishiguro A Thousand Trails Home, by Seth Kantner House Made of Dawn, by N. Scott Momaday Faithful and Virtuous Night, by Louise Glück The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. Le Guin My Sentence Was a Thousand Years of Joy, by Robert Bly The World Without Us, by Alan Weisman Unfortunately, It Was Paradise, by Mahmoud Darwish Collected Fictions, by Jorge Luis Borges, trans. Andrew Hurley The Xenogenesis Trilogy, by Octavia E. Butler Map: Collected and Last Poems, by Wisława Szymborska In the Lateness of the World, by Carolyn Forché Angels, by Denis Johnson Postcolonial Love Poem, by Natalie Diaz Hope Against Hope, by Nadezhda Mandelstam Exhalation, by Ted Chaing Strange Empire, by Joseph Kinsey Howard Tookie’s Pandemic Reading Deep Survival, by Laurence Gonzales The Lost City of the Monkey God, by Douglas Preston The House of Broken Angels, by Luis Alberto Urrea The Heartsong of Charging Elk, by James Welch Selected Stories of Anton Chekhov, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating, by Elisabeth Tova Bailey Let’s Take the Long Way Home, by Gail Caldwell The Aubrey/Maturin Novels, by Patrick O’Brian The Ibis Trilogy, by Amitav Ghosh The Golden Wolf Saga, by Linnea Hartsuyker Children of Time, by Adrian Tchaikovsky Coyote Warrior, by Paul VanDevelder Incarceration Felon, by Reginald Dwayne Betts Against the Loveless World, by Susan Abulhawa Waiting for an Echo, by Christine Montross, M.D. The Mars Room, by Rachel Kushner The New Jim Crow, by Michelle Alexander This Is Where, by Louise K. Waakaa’igan I Will Never See the World Again, by Ahmet Altan Sorrow Mountain, by Ani Pachen and Adelaide Donnelley American Prison, by Shane Bauer Solitary, by Albert Woodfox Are Prisons Obsolete?, by Angela Y. Davis 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows, by Ai Weiwei Books contain everything worth knowing except what ultimately matters. —Tookie * * * If you are interested in the books on these lists, please seek them out at your local independent bookstore. Miigwech! Acknowledgments

From the first winter afternoon in the Harvard ball fields, "Oh no--I need you" had become an admission and a clarion call--the tenet of dependency that forms the weft of friendship. We needed each other so that we could count the endless days of forests and flat water, but the real need was soldered by the sadder, harder moments--discord or helplessness or fear--that we dared to expose to each other. It took me years to grasp that this grit and discomfort in any relationship are an indicator of closeness, not it's opposite.

Today, Aaron decided, he would begin to grieve in earnest. He would walk the lonely beach, mocked by gulls, uncaring, his every step a stately rebuke to the malign forces that had blighted his fate. His was the tragedy of a man who couldn't have his own way, and he intended to make known his anguish in the solemn solitude that only a stretch of sand, a suspiring sea, and a beetling cliff could provide.

The New York Times, baffled by Delaware’s obstinacy, tried to argue the state into change in an 1867 editorial. If it had previously existed in [the convicted person’s] bosom a spark of self-respect this exposure to public shame utterly extinguishes it. Without the hope that springs eternal in the human breast, without some desire to reform and become a good citizen, and the feeling that such a thing is possible, no criminal can ever return to honorable courses. The boy of eighteen who is whipped at New Castle [a Delaware whipping post] for larceny is in nine cases out of ten ruined. With his self-respect destroyed and the taunt and sneer of public disgrace branded upon his forehead, he feels himself lost and abandoned by his fellows. —QUOTED IN ROBERT GRAHAM CALDWELL, Red Hannah: Delaware’s Whipping Post

This was a hard-won but brilliant education: I had realized, as life is always willing to instruct, that the world as we see it is only the published version. The subterranean realms, whether churches or hospital rooms or smoke-filled basements, are part of what holds up the rest. The realized life versus the external picture of it: the assumption and projections that we all make about other people's lives.

Here are the facts. Coronary artery disease is the leading killer of men and women in Western civilization. In the United States alone, more than half a million people die of it every single year. Three times that number suffer known heart attacks. And approximately three million more have “silent” heart attacks, experiencing minimal symptoms and having no idea, until well after the damage is done, that they are in mortal danger. In the course of a lifetime, one out of every two American men and one out of every three American women will have some form of the disease.

Counting on each other became automatic. When I found a sweater in Texas I wanted, I learned to buy two, which was easier than seeing the look of disappointment on Caroline's face when I returned home with only one. When she went out from the boathouse on a windy day, she gave me her schedule in advance, which assuaged her worst-case scenario of flipping the boat, being hit on the head by an oar, and leaving Lucille stranded at home. I still have my set of keys to her house, to locks and doors that no longer exist, and I keep them in my glove compartment, where they have been moved from one car to another in the past couple of years. Someday I will throw them in the Charles, where I lost the seat to her boat and so much else.

It is too late for lip service, the service of the Pharisee. God is deaf to such prayers. There must be an awakening in the hearts of man, true repentance, true penance. Not prayers that we be saved from the death of the body, but prayers that we be saved from the death of the spirit, which is hatred and lust and cruelty and materialism.

He would not even consider going elsewhere to live, even though he were offered a chance to work another man’s farm on shares. Even to move to Augusta and work in the cotton mills would be impossible for him. The restless movement of the other tenant farmers to the mills had never had any effect on Jeeter. Working in cotton mills might be all right for some people, he said, but as for him, he would rather die of starvation than leave the land. In seven years his views of the subject had not been altered; and if anything, he was more determined than ever to remain where he was at all cost.

Typical was the French polymath Ernest Renan, who wrote in 1883: Those liberals who defend Islam do not know Islam. Islam is the seamless union of the spiritual and the temporal, it is the reign of dogma, it is the heaviest chain mankind has ever borne. In the early Middle Ages, Islam tolerated philosophy, because it could not stop it. It could not stop it because it was as yet disorganized, and poorly armed for terror.…But as soon as Islam had a mass of ardent believers at its disposal, it destroyed everything in its path. Religious terror and hypocrisy were the order of the day. Islam has been liberal when weak, and violent when strong. Let us not give it credit for what it was merely unable to suppress.

Parks waits a long while, until he’s absolutely certain that Justineau’s monologue is finished. The truth is, for most of the time he’s been trying to figure out what it is exactly that she’s trying to tell him. Maybe he was right the first time about where they were heading, and Justineau airing her ancient laundry is just a sort of palate-cleanser before they have sex. Probably not, but you never know. In any case, the countermove to a confession is an absolution, unless you think the sin is unforgivable. Parks doesn’t. “It was an accident,” he tells her, pointing out the obvious. “And probably you would have ended up doing the right thing. You don’t strike me as the sort of person who just lets shit slide.” He means that, as far as it goes. One of the things he likes about Justineau is her seriousness. He frigging flat-out hates frivolous, thoughtless people who dance across the surface of the world without looking down. “Yeah, but you don’t get it,” Justineau says. “Why do you think I’m telling you all this?” “I don’t know,” Parks admits. “Why are you telling me?” Justineau steps away from the parapet wall and squares off against him – range, zero metres. It could be erotic, but somehow it’s not. “I killed that boy, Parks. If you turn my life into an equation, the number that comes out is minus one. That’s my lifetime score, you understand me? And you … you and Caldwell, and Private Ginger f**king Rogers … my God, whether it means anything or not, I will die my own self before I let you take me down to minus two.” She says the last words right into his face. Sprays him with little flecks of spit. This close up, dark as it is, he can see her eyes. There’s something mad in them. Something deeply afraid, but it’s damn well not afraid of him. She leaves him with the bottle. It’s not what he was hoping for, but it’s a pretty good consolation prize.

Jaclyn’s Snickerdoodle Recipe Ingredients: 1-1/2 cups sugar 1/2 cup BUTTER, softened 1 teaspoon pure vanilla 2 eggs 2-3/4 cups flour 1 teaspoon cream of tartar 1/2 teaspoon baking soda 1/4 teaspoon salt 2 tablespoons sugar 2 teaspoons ground cinnamon AND a secret ingredient! 1/4 teaspoon nutmeg (cookies are good without the nutmeg, but sooo good with it) Instructions: Heat oven to 350 degrees Fahrenheit. Combine first four ingredients and mix well In separate bowl combine flour, cream of tartar, and baking soda. Then mix into creamed mixture. Blend well to avoid flour clumps! Shape dough into 1-inch balls. Combine the 2 tablespoons sugar with the cinnamon and nutmeg. Roll each dough ball in the sugar mixture and place on a cookie sheet, leaving about 2 inches between cookies. Bake approximately 10 minutes. Remove from cookie sheet immediately and allow to cool. ENJOY warm or allow to cool. Serve with cold milk or hot beverage of your choice. These keep best in the refrigerator if they last more than a few minutes!!