Climb Higher Quotes

The harder you fall, the heavier your heart; the heavier your heart, the stronger you climb; the stronger you climb, the higher your pedestal.

Just remember, Callum when you’re floating up and up in your bubble, that bubbles have a habit of bursting. The higher you climb, the further you have to fall.

For, after all, every one who wishes to gain true knowledge must climb the Hill Difficulty alone, and since there is no royal road to the summit, I must zigzag it in my own way. I slip back many times, I fall, I stand still, I run against the edge of hidden obstacles, I lose my temper and find it again and keep it better, I trudge on, I gain a little, I feel encouraged, I get more eager and climb higher and begin to see the widening horizon. Every struggle is a victory. One more effort and I reach the luminous cloud, the blue depths of the sky, the uplands of my desire.

You cannot stay on the summit forever; you have to come down again. So why bother in the first place? Just this: What is above knows what is below, but what is below does not know what is above. One climbs, one sees. One descends, one sees no longer, but one has seen. There is an art of conducting oneself in the lower regions by the memory of what one saw higher up. When one can no longer see, one can at least still know.

What I love most about reading: It gives you the ability to reach higher ground. And keep climbing.

I used to think I knew everything. I was a "smart person" who "got things done," and because of that, the higher I climbed, the more I could look down and scoff at what seemed silly or simple, even religion. But I realized something as I drove home that night: that I am neither better nor smarter, only luckier. And I should be ashamed of thinking I knew everything, because you can know the whole world and still feel lost in it. So many people are in pain-no matter how smart or accomplished-they cry, they yearn, they hurt.But instead of looking down on things, they look up, which is where I should have been looking, too. Because when the world quiets to the sound of your own breathing, we all want the same things:comfort, love, and a peaceful heart.

On the mountains of truth you can never climb in vain: either you will reach a point higher up today, or you will be training your powers so that you will be able to climb higher tomorrow. -

You are grown so very great now, yet the higher a man climbs the farther he has to fall.

We are walking down the street holding hands. There is a playground at the end of the block, and I run to the swings and I climb on and Henry takes the one next to me facing the opposite direction. And we swing higher and higher passing each other, sometimes in synch and sometimes streaming past each other so fast that it seems we are going to collide. And we laugh and laugh, and nothing can ever be sad, no one can be lost or dead or far away. Right now we are here and nothing can mar our perfection or steal the joy of this perfect moment.

What does…meyaah Liessa mean?” That eyebrow seemed to climb even higher. “It means my Queen.

Go higher and higher, until it becomes impossible to bring you down, I wanna use a microscope to locate you, don't even dream of coming down.

This mountain is so formed that it is always wearisome when one begins the ascent, but becomes easier the higher one climbs.

Ways of loving from a distance, mating without even touching-Amor platonicus! The ladder of love one is expected to climb higher and higher, elating the Self and the Other. Plato clearly regards any actual physical contact as corrupt and ignoble because he thinks the true goal of Eros is beauty. Is there no beauty in sex? Not according to Plato. He is after `more sublime pursuits.' But if you ask me, I think Plato's problem, like those of many others, was that he never got splendidly laid.

What I know for sure is that reading opens you up. It exposes you and gives you access to anything your mind can hold. What I love most about reading: It gives you the ability to reach higher ground. And keep climbing.

Elite students climb confidently until they reach a level of competition sufficiently intense to beat their dreams out of them. Higher education is the place where people who had big plans in high school get stuck in fierce rivalries with equally smart peers over conventional careers like management consulting and investment banking. For the privilege of being turned into conformists, students (or their families) pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in skyrocketing tuition that continues to outpace inflation. Why are we doing this to ourselves?

No one starts out on top. You have to work your way up. Some mountains are higher than others, some roads steeper than the next. There are hardships and setbacks, but you can't let them stop you. Even on the steepest road, you must not turn back. You must keep going up. In order to reach the top of the mountain, you have to climb every rock.

The higher you climb, the further you have to fall.

He’s from a generation that never even expected to get midway up the ladder so when he got there he was too stunned to dare climb higher. That’s the problem with midway. Up is everything and down just means all the white people want to party on your street on Sunday night to feel realness. Midway is nowhere.

It's one of the ironies of mountaineering,' said Young, 'that grown men are happy to spend months preparing for a climb, weeks rehearsing and honing their skills, and at least a day attempting to reach the summit. And then, having achieved their goal, they spend just a few moments enjoying the experience, along with one or two equally certifiable companions who have little in common other than wanting to do it all again, but a little higher.

The drunkard does indeed find escape, he does indeed find short respite and rest, but he returns from the illusion and finds everything as it was before. He has not grown wiser, he has not gained knowledge, he has not climbed any higher.

The heights of the spirit can only be climbed by passing through the portals of humility. You can only acquire right knowledge when you have learnt to esteem it. Man has certainly the right to turn his eyes to the light, but he must first acquire this right.

Your future is bright. Just stop hanging around people who try to dim your light and you will climb up to a higher height! Don't give up on the fight! Stand up for your right! It's within your might!

You’re born, you take shit get out in the world, you take more shit climb a little higher, take less shit. till one day you're in the rarefied atmosphere and you’ve forgotten what shit even looks like. Welcome to the layer cake, son.

It is a beautiful impulse to contain the infinite in the finite, to rest order from the chaos, to construct a foothold so we may climb towards higher truth. It is also a limiting one, for in naming things we often come to mistake the names for the things themselves.

My child, when a mountain appears on the journey, we try to go to the left, then to the right. We try to find the easy way to navigate our way back to the easier path.…. But the mountain is there to be crossed. It is on that pilgrimage, as we climb higher, that we are forced to shed the layers upon layers we have carried for so long. Then we find that our load is lighter, and we have come to know something of ourselves in the perilous climb…..Do not seek to avoid the mountain, my child. For it has been placed there at a perfect time. It will only become larger if you seek to delay or draw back from the ascent.

In the mountains of truth you will never climb in vain: either you will get up higher today or you will exercise your strength so as to be able to get up higher tomorrow.

Don't just climb the corporate ladder, master it! And if anyone tries to push you off, show them who's boss and climb even higher.

Stand up; Grow up and Climb up. The reason why you can’t see farther and further is because you didn’t climb higher. Be willing to explore and be informed!

And then as the little plane climbed higher and Olive saw spread out below them fields of bright and tender green in this morning sun, farther out the coastline, the ocean shiny and almost flat, tiny white wakes behind a few lobster boats--then Olive felt something she had not expected to feel again: a sudden surging greediness for life. She leaned forward, peering out the window: sweet pale clouds, the sky as blue as your hat, the new green of the fields, the broad expanse of water--seen from up here it all appeared wondrous, amazing. She remembered what hope was, and this was it. That inner churning that moves you forward, plows you through life the way the boats below plowed the shiny water, the way the plane was plowing forward to a place new, and where she was needed.

All that matters in life," the grey man went on, "is to climb the ladder of success, amount to something, own things. When a person climbs higher than the rest, amounts to more, owns more things, everything else comes automatically: friendship, love, respect, et cetera..." "Isn't there anyone who loves you?" Momo whispered.

I generally find,' Clent murmured after a pause, 'that it is best to treat borrowed time the same way as borrowed money. Spend it with panache, and try to be somewhere else when it runs out.' 'And when we get found, Mr. Clent, when the creditors and bailiffs come after us and it's payment time...' '...then we borrow more, madam, at a higher interest. We embark on a wilder gamble, make a bigger promise, tell a braver story, devise a more intricate lie, sell the hides of imaginary dragons to desperate men, climb to even higher and more precarious ground...and later, of course, our fall and catastrophe will be all the worse, but later will be our watchword, Mosca. We have nothing else - but we can at least make later later.

The higher you want to climb, the more you need leadership. The greater the impact you want to make, the greater your influence needs to be.

The better we become, the higher we climb. The higher we climb, the bigger our ego. The bigger the ego, the harder it is for us to look at others the same way we did before as we can get so full of ourselves we lose our true self. Always be humble. Even if you're good. Always.

Someone once told me that children are like kites. You struggle just to get them in the air; they crash; you add a longer tail. Then they get caught in a tree; you climb up and bring them down, and untangle the string; you run to get them aloft again. Finally, the kite is airborne, and it flies higher and higher, as you let out more string, until it's so high in the sky, it looks like a bird. And if the string snaps, and you've done your job right, the kite will continue to soar in the wind, all by itself.

God doesn’t promise to remove the stones from the path, but He does promise to make them stepping-stones and not stumbling blocks. He promises to help us climb higher because of the difficulties of life.

There are species that can run faster, climb higher, dig deeper, or hit harder, but humans are special because we can run, climb, dig, and hit. The phrase jack of all trades, master of none fits us perfectly. If life on earth were like the Olympic Games, the only event that humans would ever win is the decathlon. (Unless chess became an Olympic sport.)

For the next few minutes, there was a thorough rehashing of the courses (That meat was delicious. The sauce was perfect. And ooh that chocolate mousse.) This was a social nicety that seemed more prevalent the higher you climbed the social ladder and the less your hostess cooked.

Whenever you give up an apartment in New York and move to another city, New York turns into the worst version of itself. Someone I know once wisely said that the expression "It's a nice place to visit, but I wouldn't want to live there" is completely wrong where New York is concerned; the opposite is true. New York is a very livable city. But when you move away and become a vistor, the city seems to turn against you. It's much more expensive (because you need to eat all your meals out and pay for a place to sleep) and much more unfriendly. Things change in New York; things change all the time. You don't mind this when you live here; when you live here, it's part of the caffeinated romance to this city that never sleeps. But when you move away, your experience change as a betrayal. You walk up Third Avenue planning to buy a brownie at a bakery you've always been loyal to, and the bakery's gone. Your dry cleaner move to Florida; your dentist retires; the lady who made the pies on West Fourth Street vanishes; the maitre d' at P.J. Clarke's quits, and you realize you're going to have to start from scratch tipping your way into the heart of the cold, chic young woman now at the down. You've turned your back from only a moment, and suddenly everything's different. You were an insider, a native, a subway traveler, a purveyor of inside tips into the good stuff, and now you're just another frequent flyer, stuck in a taxi on Grand Central Parkway as you wing in and out of La Guardia. Meanwhile, you rad that Manhattan rents are going up, they're climbing higher, they're reached the stratosphere. It seems that the moment you left town, they put a wall around the place, and you will never manage to vault over it and get back into the city again.

The higher you climb, the more Satan will take notice. Keep climbing! Heaven's gate has a lock.

To the Hindu, says Vivekananda, "Man is not travelling from error to truth, but climbing up from truth to truth, from truth that is lower to truth that is higher.

The higher up the tree a cat climbs, the farther it will fall. It's the same for politicians, except politicians don't bounce.

Yet the higher a man climbs the further he has to fall.

You go above and beyond them: but the higher you climb, the smaller you appear to the eye of envy. And he who flies is hated most of all.

If people could climb higher in the social hierarchy in proportion to their incompetence, I guarantee the world would not go round the way it does. But that's not even the problem. What his sentence means isn't that incompetent people have found their place in the sun, but that nothing is harder or more unfair than human reality: humans live in a world where it's words and not deeds that have power, where the ultimate skill is mastery of language.

The higher that the monkey can climb, the more he shows his tail. Call no man happy till he dies, there's no milk at the bottom of the pail. God builds a church and the devil builds a chapel, like the thistles that are growing 'round the trunk of a tree. All the good in the world you could put inside a thimble, and still have room for you and me. If there's one thing you can say about mankind, there's nothing kind about man. You can drive out nature with a pitchfork, but it always coming roaring back again. Misery's the river of the world, misery's the river of the world. Everybody row, everybody row; misery's the river of the world.

Mortals that would follow me, Love virtue, she alone is free, She can teach ye how to climb Higher than the sphery chime; Or if virtue feeble were, Heaven itself would stoop to her.

The acrobat practices: He steps on the edge of a chair and leaps to the floor, feeling the rush as the air flares up his face as he falls. Then he sets himself on something higher, like a table then jumps. He scales a ladder to the ceiling, climbs a tree, pole, watchtower. He keeps increasing the height until no one sees him and the fear to jump leaves him completely, layer by layer [. . .] The acrobat imagines there is a highest possible point in the sky where if he were to fall from it the fall would never end.

The thing about the Lexington International Bank ladder was that it was very long, and climbing it was very exhausting, and so Andrew Brown didn't have a lot of time to think about whether he really wanted to get to the top of it—and besides, since so many other people were climbing too, the view from the top must be worth it. So he kept going. He worked hard. He put his heart and mind and soul into it. There was an opening for a position half a rung higher than he already was. With a promotion, he might get two hours a week of a secretary's time. He'd go to more important meetings, with more senior people, and have the opportunity to impress them, and if he did he might be promoted again and then... well, of course eventually he'd be running the whole office. It's important to have a dream: otherwise you might notice where you really are.

Books, for me, used to be a way to escape. I now consider reading a good book a sacred indulgence, a chance to be any place I choose. It is my absolute favorite way to spend time. What I know for sure is that reading opens you up. It exposes you and gives you access to anything your mind can hold. What I love most about reading: It gives you the ability to reach higher ground. And keep climbing.

She was renowned as the best word shaker of her region because she knew how powerless a person could be WITHOUT words. That's why she could climb higher than anyone else. She had desire. She was hungry for them.

He admonished them never to think of themselves as the strongest or smartest. Even the highest mountain had animals that step on it, he warned. When the animals climb to the top of the mountain, they are even higher than it is.

In the loveliest town of all where the houses were white and high and the elm trees were green and higher than the houses where the front yards were wide and pleasant and the back yards were bushy and worth finding out about, where the streets sloped down to the stream and the stream flowed quietly under the bridge, where the lawns ended in orchards and the orchards ended in fields and the fields ended in pastures and the pastures climbed the hill and disappeared over the top toward the wonderful wide sky, in this loveliest of all towns Stuart stopped to get a drink of sarsaparilla.

Each time I tell myself you have reached the summit of your strangeness, you find a way to climb still higher.” “Look at it this way: being married to me will never be boring.

when you’re floating up and up in your bubble, that bubbles have a habit of bursting. The higher you climb, the further you have to fall.

Constantly risking absurdity and death whenever he performs above the heads of his audience the poet like an acrobat climbs on rime to a high wire of his own making and balancing on eyebeams above a sea of faces paces his way to the other side of day performing entrechats and sleight-of-foot tricks and other high theatrics and all without mistaking any thing for what it may not be For he's the super realist who must perforce perceive taut truth before the taking of each stance or step in his supposed advance toward that still higher perch where Beauty stands and waits with gravity to start her death-defying leap And he a little charleychaplin man who may or may not catch her fair eternal form spreadeagled in the empty air of existence

For, after all, every one who wishes to gain true knowledge must climb the Hill Difficulty alone, and since there is no royal road to the summit, I must zigzag it in my own way. I slip back many times, I fall, I stand still, I run against the edge of hidden obstacles, I lose my temper and find it again and keep it better, I trudge on, I gain a little, I feel encouraged, I get more eager and climb higher and begin to see the widening horizon. Every struggle is a victory. One more effort and I reach the luminous cloud, the blue depths of the sky, the uplands of my desire. I am not always alone, however, in these struggles.

I was preoccupied about keeping a healthy distance from Trump. So I figured out which way the president would likely enter the room and mingled my way to the opposite end, by the windows looking over the South Lawn toward the Washington Monument. I couldn’t get farther away without climbing out of the window, an option that would begin to look more appealing as time went by.

When I was a child growing up in Salinas we called San Francisco “the City”. Of course it was the only city we knew, but I still think of it as the City, and so does everyone else who has ever associated with it. A strange and exclusive work is “city”. Besides San Francisco, only small sections of London and Rome stay in the mind as the City. New Yorkers say they are going to town. Paris has no title but Paris. Mexico City is the Capital. Once I knew the City very well, spent my attic days there, while others were being a lost generation in Paris. I fledged in San Francisco, climbed its hills, slept in its parks, worked on its docks, marched and shouted in its revolts. In a way I felt I owned the City as much as it owned me. San Francisco put on a show for me. I saw her across the bay, from the great road that bypasses Sausalito and enters the Golden Gate Bridge. The afternoon sun painted her white and gold---rising on her hills like a noble city in a happy dream. A city on hills has it over flat-land places. New York makes its own hills with craning buildings, but this gold and white acropolis rising wave on wave against the blue of the Pacific sky was a stunning thing, a painted thing like a picture of a medieval Italian city which can never have existed. I stopped in a parking place to look at her and the necklace bridge over the entrance from the sea that led to her. Over the green higher hills to the south, the evening fog rolled like herds of sheep coming to cote in the golden city. I’ve never seen her more lovely. When I was a child and we were going to the City, I couldn’t sleep for several nights before, out of busting excitement. She leaves a mark.

But then suddenly there was no place higher to go. I felt my cracked lips stretch into a painful grin. I was on top of the Devil's Thumb. Fittingly, the summit was a surreal, malevolent place, an improbably slender wedge of rock and rime no wider than a file cabinet. It did not encourage loitering. As I straddled the highest point, the south face fell away beneath my right boot for twenty-five hundred feet; beneath my left boot the north face dropped twice that distance.

Indeed, it is the nature of intelligent life to climb mountains, to strive to stand on ever higher ground to gaze farther into the distance. It is a drive completely divorced from the demands of survival.

Truly, the higher you climb, the harder you fall. Life is full of surprises, and one cannot escape whatever that comes. Even when mortal has become god, we do not have the good fortune to avoid fate in the end.

I keep thinking grief feels like climbing a staircase while looking down,” she said. “You won’t forget where you’ve been, but you’ve got to keep rising. It all gets farther away, but it’s all still there. And you’ve only got one way to go and you don’t really want to go on rising, but you’ve got to. And that tightness in your chest doesn’t go away, but you somehow go on breathing that thinner, higher air. It’s like you grow a third lung. Like you’ve somehow gotten bigger when you thought you were only broken.

Hope was a huge hill you climbed higher every day. And when something went wrong, it was like getting pushed off a cliff. The higher you’d climbed, the farther you fell, and the more broken you were when you hit the bottom.

Homo sapiens is a spider trying to crawl out of a basin. The higher he crawls, the steeper the hill. Sooner or later, down he goes. So long as he's on the bottom, he can get along quite nicely, but as soon as he starts climbing, he begins to slip. And the higher he climbs the farther he falls. It doesn't matter which direction he tries. He can make civilization after civilization, but every time, long before he begins to be really civilized, skid!

I like longing climbing up the railings of sound and color catching into my open mouth the frozen scent I like my loneliness suspended higher than a bridge embracing the sky with its arms and my love walking barefoot over the snow

Our Heavenly Father loves each one of us and understands that this process of climbing higher takes preparation, time, and commitment. He understands that we will make mistakes at times, that we will stumble, that we will become discouraged and perhaps even wish to give up and say to ourselves it is not worth the struggle. We know it is worth the effort, for the prize, which is eternal life, is “the greatest of all the gifts of God.” And to qualify, we must take one step after another and keep going to gain the spiritual heights we aspire to reach.

Without doubt, princes become great when they overcome difficulties and hurdles put in their path. When fortune wants to advance a new prince... She creates enemies for him, making them launch campaigns against him so that he is compelled to overcome them and climb higher on the ladder that they have brought him. Therefore, many judge that a wise prince must skillfully fan some enmity whenever the opportunity arises, so that in crushing it he will increase his standing.

But was falling such a bad thing, she wondered. Was it, perhaps better to see the top of the mountain, even if only for a moment, than never to even try? Or was it that the higher you allow yourself to climb, the further you have to come crashing down to earth?

The new goddess contingency could not be erected until the God of heaven was utterly despoiled of his dominion over the sons of men, and in the room thereof a home-bred idol of self-sufficiency set up, and the world persuaded to worship it. But that the building climb no higher, let all men observe how the word of God overthrows this babylonian tower.

It's one of my profound thoughts, but it came from another profound thought. It was one of Papa's guests, at the dinner party yesterday, who said: "Those who can, do; those who can't, teach; those who can't teach teach the teachers; and those who can't teach the teachers, go into politics." Everyone seemed to find this very inspiring but for the wrong reasons . . . It doesn't mean what you think it does at the outset. If people could climb higher in the social hierarchy in proportion to their incompetence, I guarantee the world would not go around the way it does. But that's not even the problem. What his sentence means isn't that incompetent people have found their place in the sun, but that nothing is harder or more unfair than human reality: humans live in a world where it's words and not deeds that have power, where the ultimate scale is mastery of language. This is a terrible thing because basically we are primates who've been programmed to eat, sleep, reproduce, conquer and make our territory safe, and the ones who are most gifted at that, the most animal types among us, always get screwed by the others, the fine talkers, despite these latter being incapable of defending their own garden or bringing a rabbit home for dinner or procreating properly. Humans live in a world where the weak are dominant. This is a terrible insult to our animal nature, a sort of perversion or a deep contradiction.

When someone is up there and he deserves to be up there, try to learn from what he has achieved. If you think he doesn’t deserve it, still try to learn from what he has achieved and add your own capability to it, as it might result in you climbing higher than him. But you should not sit on the ground, gazing at him with hatred and waiting for him to fall, because his descent won’t help you reach the top. And also you might often miss the point that people whom you look down upon may actually be far more capable than you. Anyway, to cut a long story short, I feel it’s truly wasteful to expend your energy in hating someone.

but the higher you climb, the smaller you appear to the eye of envy. And he who flies is hated most of all.

The higher a man climbs, the farther he has to fall.

At twenty-nine, life no longer held any brightness for him, but Voltaire supplied him with man-made wings. Spreading these man-made wings, he soared with ease into the sky. The higher he flew, the farther below him sank the joys and sorrows of a life bathed in the light of the intellect. Dropping ironies and smiles upon the shabby towns below, he climbed through the open sky, straight for the sun--as if he had forgotten about that ancient Greek who plunged to his death in the ocean when his man-made wings were singed by the sun." -from "The Life of a Stupid Man

We were on the Congo’s eastern edge and, as the helicopter climbed higher, I could see nothing but an unbroken spread of vegetation. I was looking at the Congo’s rainforest, one of the natural wonders of the world. Conservationists describe it as one of the Earth’s lungs, an immense expanse of oxygen-generating green, matched in size only by the Amazonian rainforest. Explorers recorded it as one of the most impenetrable and hostile environments on the planet – as clammy as a pressure cooker, thick with disease, capped by a tree-top canopy too solid for sunlight to penetrate.

With knowledge of the diagrams you will be able to interpret many of the new feelings, sensations, ideas that will come to your mind, and transfer this interpretation to the ordinary mind. Without diagrams you will not be able to do it. They are the intermediate language which will connect the language of the higher emotional centre with our ordinary centres. At the same time this language is a kind of ladder by which we can climb from ordinary thinking to the thinking of higher emotional centre.

We climbed this hill. Each step up we could see farther, so of course we kept going. Now we’re at the top. Science has been at the top for a few centuries now. And we look out across the plain and we see this other tribe dancing around above the clouds, even higher than we are. Maybe it’s a mirage, maybe it’s a trick. Or maybe they just climbed a higher peak we can’t see because the clouds are blocking the view. So we head off to find out—but every step takes us downhill. No matter what direction we head, we can’t move off our peak without losing our vantage point. So we climb back up again. We’re trapped on a local maximum. But what if there is a higher peak out there, way across the plain? The only way to get there is to bite the bullet, come down off our foothill and trudge along the riverbed until we finally start going uphill again. And it’s only then you realize: Hey, this mountain reaches way higher than that foothill we were on before, and we can see so much better from up here. But you can’t get there unless you leave behind all the tools that made you so successful in the first place. You have to take that first step downhill.

Getting older, Mawyndulë, is like climbing a mountain. The higher you go, the greater the view. From time to time, you look back. At such heights, you can see paths behind you: the trails you took and the ones you foolishly disregarded; the blind alleys you fortunately missed, purely out of chance rather than by some greater wisdom on your part. You also spot others following you, people making the same stupid decisions. From your elevated position, you witness their bad choices, the ones they can’t see because they aren’t standing where you are. You could shout down, attempt to warn them, but they rarely listen. They are too blinded by the indisputable fact that the path you followed got you where you are, to the place they want to be.

People who feel sorry for themselves are obsessed with their own problems and their own fate. Is that really much different than the greedy and egotistical people who want to feel better than everybody else? The higher I climb in my life, the more I realize how much I need to mop that floor. Because that’s where all the knowledge is. There is no grit at the top, no tests of resolve in steak dinners, five-star hotels, or spa treatments. Once you make it in this world, you have to freefall back to the bottom in some way to keep learning and growing.

Wren no longer sees life as a long, linear ladder with a beginning, middle, and end. Instead, she considers how life is like a spiraling trail up a mountain. Each circling lap represents a learning cycle, the same lesson at a slightly higher elevation. Wren realizes she likes to rest as much as she likes to climb. She begins to enjoy the view.

What am I? The modest narrator who accompanies your triumphs; the dancer who supports you when you rise in your lovely grace; the branch upon which you rest a moment when you are tired of flying; the bass that interposes itself below the soprano’s fervour to let it climb even higher—what am I? I am the earthly gravity that keeps you on the ground. What am I, then? Body, mass, earth, dust and ashes.—You, my Cordelia, you are soul and spirit.” —Johannes the Seducer, from_Either/Or_

What I have to face is that 'Barb,' the name on my ID tag, is not exactly the same person as Barbara. 'Barb' is what I was called as a child, and still am by my siblings, and I sense that at some level I'm regressing. Take away the career and the higher education, and maybe what you're left with is this original Barb, the one who might have ended up working at Wal-Mart for real if her father hadn't managed to climb out of the mines. So it's interesting, and more than a little disturbing, to see how Barb turned out — that she's meaner and slyer than I am, more cherishing of grudges, and not quite as smart as I'd hoped.

By fixing my sights on one summit after another, I managed to keep my bearings through some thick postadolescent fog. Climbing mattered. The danger bathed the world in a halogen glow that caused everything—the sweep of the rock, the orange and yellow lichens, the texture of the clouds—to stand out in brilliant relief. Life thrummed at a higher pitch. The world was made real.

History and literature rebuke our self-sufficiency; that's one reason why we ought to study them. It's not so much that people of olden times were the finest exemplars of higher humanity, for they too fell short of their ideals, as must all who aspire to higher things--that's what ideals are for. It's that we have abandoned those ideals once animating our civilization, refusing to learn them anew with each generation. We have assumed their transfer to be automatic. We have not indeed jettisoned the hope and drive that keep us working for a better world (that's the good news), but we have forgotten to cultivate ourselves as individuals.

Climbing mattered. The danger bathed the world in a halogen glow that caused everything—the sweep of the rock, the orange and yellow lichens, the texture of the clouds—to stand out in brilliant relief. Life thrummed at a higher pitch. The world was made real.

...his sleep, though deep as death itself, was not dreamless this time, but threaded with ghostly wisps of dreams. These wisps were clearly recognizable as scraps of odors. At first they merely floated in thin threads past Grenouille's nose, but then they grew thicker, more cloudlike. And now it seemed as if he were standing in the middle of a moor from which fog was rising. The fog slowly climbed higher. Soon Grenouille was completely wrapped in fog, saturated with fog, and it seemed he could not get his breath for the foggy vapor. If he did not want to suffocate, he would have to breathe the fog in. And the fog was, as noted, an odor. And Grenouille knew what kind of odor. The fog ws his own odor. His, Grenouille's, own body odor was the fog. And the awful thing was that Grenouille, although he knew that his odor was his odor, could not smell it. Virtually drowning in himself, he could not for the life of him smell himself!

Encouraging white women to see themselves as higher up the ladder—the hierarchy—of oppressions and injustices employed by patriarchy to maintain itself must be seen for the ruse that it is. Those women might be benefitting from proximity to white power, but nothing protects women from patriarchy. We must dismantle the hierarchies that patriarchy uses, not aim to climb our way up its ladder of injustices.

I began to say that my most important talent—or habit—was persistence. Without it, I would have given up writing long before I finished my first novel. It’s amazing what we can do if we simply refuse to give up. I suspect that this is the most important thing I’ve said in all my interviews and talks as well as in this book. It’s a truth that applies to more than writing. It applies to anything that is important, but difficult, important, but frightening. We’re all capable of climbing so much higher than we usually permit ourselves to suppose. The word, again, is “persist”!

With rope-ladders learned I to reach many a window, with nimble legs did I climb high masts: to sit on high masts of perception seemed to me no small bliss; To flicker like small flames on high masts: a small light, certainly, but a great comfort to cast-away sailors and shipwrecked ones! By diverse ways and wendings did I arrive at my truth; not by one ladder did I mount to the height where mine eye roveth into my remoteness. And unwillingly only did I ask my way - that was always counter to my taste! Rather did I question and test the ways themselves. A testing and a questioning hath been all my travelling: and verily, one must also learn to answer such questioning! That, however - is my taste: Neither a good nor a bad taste, but my taste, of which I have no longer either shame or secrecy. "This is now my way - where is yours?" Thus did I answer those who asked me "the way." For "the way" - it doth not exist!

When someone is up there and he deserves to be up there, try to learn from what he has achieved. If you think he doesn’t deserve it, still try to learn from what he has achieved and add your own capability to it, as it might result in you climbing higher than him. But you should not sit on the ground, gazing at him with hatred and waiting for him to fall, because his descent won’t help you reach the top. And also you might often miss the point that people whom you look down upon may actually be far more capable than you.

The question that lingers is, how much was I a factor in my own survival, and how much was science, and how much miracle? I don't have the answer to that question. Other people look to me for the answer, I know. But if I could answer it, we would have the cure for cancer, and what's more, we would fathom the true meaning of our existences. I can deliver motivation, inspiration, hope, courage, and counsel, but I can't answer the unknowable. Personally, I don't need to try. I 'm content with simply being alive to enjoy the mystery. Good Joke: A man is caught in a flood, and as the water rises he climbs to the roof of his house and waits to be rescued. A guy in a motorboat comes by, and he says, "Hop in, I'll save you." "No thanks," the man on the rooftop says. "My Lord will save me." But the floodwaters keep rising. A few minutes later, a rescue plane flies overhead and the pilot drops a line. "No, thanks," the man on the rooftop says. "My Lord will save me." But the floodwaters rise ever higher, and finally, they overflow the roof and the man drowns. When he gets to heaven, he confronts God. "My Lord, why didn't you save me?" he implores. "You idiot," God says. "I sent a boat, I sent you a plane." I think in a way we are all just like the guy on the rooftop. Things take place, there is a confluence of events and circumstances, and we can't always know their purpose, or even if there is one. But we can take responsibility for ourselves and be brave.

Higher and higher he climbed. His strength came from somewhere deep inside himself and also seemed to come from the outside as well. After focusing on Big Thumb for so long, it was as if the rock had absorbed his energy and now acted like a kind of giant magnet pulling him toward it. After a while he became aware of a foul odor. At first he thought it came from Zero, but it seemed to be in the air, hanging heavy all around him. He also noticed that the ground wasn’t as steep anymore. As the ground flattened, a huge stone precipice rose up ahead of him, just barely visible in the

Nigger, you sure ought to be glad it was us you talked to that way. You’re a lucky bastard, ’cause if you’d said that to some other white man, you might’ve been a dead nigger now.” I was learning rapidly how to watch white people, to observe their every move, every fleeting expression, how to interpret what was said and what left unsaid. Late one Saturday night I made some deliveries in a white neighborhood. I was pedaling my bicycle back to the store as fast as I could when a police car, swerving toward me, jammed me into the curbing. “Get down, nigger, and put up your hands!” they ordered. I did. They climbed out of the car, guns drawn, faces set, and advanced slowly. “Keep still!” they ordered. I reached my hands higher. They searched my pockets and packages. They seemed dissatisfied when they could find nothing incriminating. Finally, one of them said: “Boy, tell your boss not to send you out in white neighborhoods at this time of

Morals, including especially, our institutions of property, freedom and justice, are not a creation of man’s reason but a distinct second endowment conferred on him by cultural evolution - runs counter to the main intellectual outlook of the twentieth century. The influence of rationalism has indeed been so profound and pervasive that, in general, the more intelligent an educated person is, the more likely he or she now is not only to be a rationalist, but also to hold socialist views (regardless of whether he or she is sufficiently doctrinal to attach to his or her views any label, including ‘socialist’). The higher we climb up the ladder of intelligence, the more we talk with intellectuals, the more likely we are to encounter socialist convictions. Rationalists tend to be intelligent and intellectual; and intelligent intellectuals tend to be socialist. One’s initial surprise at finding that intelligent people tend to be socialist diminishes when one realises that, of course, intelligent people will tend to overvalue intelligence, and to suppose that we must owe all the advantages and opportunities that our civilisation offers to deliberate design rather than to following traditional rules, and likewise to suppose that we can, by exercising our reason, eliminate any remaining undesired features by still more intelligence reflection, and still more appropriate design and ’rational coordination’ of our undertakings. This leads one to be favorably disposed to the central economic planning and control that lie at the heart of socialism… And since they have been taught that constructivism and scientism are what science and the use of reason are all about, they find it hard to believe that there can exist any useful knowledge that did not originate in deliberate experimentation, or to accept the validity of any tradition apart from their own tradition of reason. Thus [they say]: ‘Tradition is almost by definition reprehensible, something to be mocked and deplored’.

I’m done being polite about this bullshit. My list of professional insecurities entirely stems from being a young woman. Big plot twist there! As much as I like to execute equality instead of discussing the blaring inequality, the latter is still necessary. Everything, everywhere, is still necessary. The more women who take on leadership positions, the more representation of women in power will affect and shift the deep-rooted misogyny of our culture—perhaps erasing a lot of these inherent and inward concerns. But whether a woman is a boss or not isn’t even what I’m talking about—I’m talking about when she is, because even when she manages to climb up to the top, there’s much more to do, much more to change. When a woman is in charge, there are still unspoken ideas, presumptions, and judgments being thrown up into the invisible, terribly lit air in any office or workplace. And I’m a white woman in a leadership position—I can only speak from my point of view. The challenges that women of color face in the workforce are even greater, the hurdles even higher, the pay gap even wider. The ingrained, unconscious bias is even stronger against them. It’s overwhelming to think about the amount of restructuring and realigning we have to do, mentally and physically, to create equality, but it starts with acknowledging the difference, the problem, over and over.

The moon had risen higher and the moonlight was bright in the little open place. All around it the shadows were dark among the trees. “After a long while, a doe and her yearling fawn came stepping daintily out of the shadows. They were not afraid at all. They walked over to the place where I had sprinkled the salt, and they both licked up a little of it. “Then they raised their heads and looked at each other. The fawn stepped over and stood beside the doe. They stood there together, looking at the woods and the moonlight. Their large eyes were shining and soft. “I just sat there looking at them, until they walked away among the shadows. Then I climbed down out of the tree and came home.” Laura whispered in his ear, “I’m glad you didn’t shoot them!” Mary said, “We can eat bread and butter.” Pa lifted Mary up out of her chair and hugged them both together. “You’re my good girls,” he said. “And now it’s bedtime. Run along, while I get my fiddle.” When Laura and Mary had said their prayers and were tucked snugly under the trundle bed’s covers, Pa was sitting in the firelight with the fiddle. Ma had blown out the lamp because she did not need its light. On the other side of the hearth she was swaying gently in her rocking chair and her knitting needles flashed in and out above the sock she was knitting. The long winter evenings of fire-light and music had come again.

Kvothe?” Auri said softly. I clenched my teeth against the sobbing and lay still as I could, hoping she would think I was asleep and leave. “Kvothe?” she called again. “I brought you—” There was a moment of silence, then she said, “Oh.” I heard a soft sound behind me. The moonlight showed her tiny shadow on the wall as she climbed through the window. I felt the bed move as she settled onto it. A small, cool hand brushed the side of my face. “It’s okay,” she said quietly. “Come here.” I began to cry quietly, and she gently uncurled the tight knot of me until my head lay in her lap. She murmured, brushing my hair away from my forehead, her hands cool against my hot face. “I know,” she said sadly. “It’s bad sometimes, isn’t it?” She stroked my hair gently, and it only made me cry harder. I could not remember the last time someone had touched me in a loving way. “I know,” she said. “You have a stone in your heart, and some days it’s so heavy there is nothing to be done. But you don’t have to be alone for it. You should have come to me. I understand.” My body clenched and suddenly the taste of plum filled my mouth again. “I miss her,” I said before I realized I was speaking. Then I bit it off before I could say anything else. I clenched my teeth and shook my head furiously, like a horse fighting its reins. “You can say it,” Auri said gently. I shook again, tasted plum, and suddenly the words were pouring out of me. “She said I sang before I spoke. She said when I was just a baby she had the habit of humming when she held me. Nothing like a song. Just a descending third. Just a soothing sound. Then one day she was walking me around the camp, and she heard me echo it back to her. Two octaves higher. A tiny piping third. She said it was my first song. We sang it back and forth to each other. For years.” I choked and clenched my teeth. “You can say it,” Auri said softly. “It’s okay if you say it.” “I’m never going to see her again,” I choked out. Then I began to cry in earnest. “It’s okay,” Auri said softly. “I’m here. You’re safe.

Originally, the word power meant able to be. In time, it was contracted to mean to be able. We suffer the difference. Iwas waiting for a plane when I overheard two businessmen. One was sharing the good news that he had been promoted, and the other, in congratulation, said, “More power to you.” I've heard this expression before, but for some reason, I heard it differently this time and thought, what a curious sentiment. As a good wish, the assumption is that power is the goal. Of course, it makes a huge difference if we are wishing others worldly power or inner power. By worldly power, I mean power over things, people, and situations—controlling power. By inner power, I mean power that comes from being a part of something larger—connective power. I can't be certain, but I'm fairly sure the wish here was for worldly power, for more control. This is commonplace and disturbing, as the wish for more always issues from a sense of lack. So the wish for more power really issues from a sense of powerlessness. It is painfully ironic that in the land of the free, we so often walk about with an unspoken and enervating lack of personal freedom. Yet the wish for more controlling power will not set us free, anymore than another drink will quench the emptiness of an alcoholic in the grip of his disease. It makes me think of a game we played when I was nine called King of the Hill, in which seven or eight of us found a mound of dirt, the higher the better, and the goal was to stand alone on top of the hill. Once there, everyone else tried to throw you off, installing themselves as King of the Hill. It strikes me now as a training ground for worldly power. Clearly, the worst position of all is being King of the Hill. You are completely alone and paranoid, never able to trust anyone, constantly forced to spin and guard every direction. The hills may change from a job to a woman to a prized piece of real estate, but those on top can be so enslaved by guarding their position that they rarely enjoy the view. I always hated King of the Hill—always felt tense in my gut when king, sad when not, and ostracized if I didn't want to play. That pattern has followed me through life. But now, as a tired adult, when I feel alone and powerless atop whatever small hill I've managed to climb, I secretly long for anyone to join me. Now, I'm ready to believe there's more power here together.

Cursing himself, he glided his fingertips from her shoulder inward along the elegant line of her collarbone. She responded to him with a sigh of intoxicated pleasure, arching her head back, lifting her breasts slightly as her body rose to his touch. His eyes glazed over as he realized then that she was awake enough to know what she wanted. He leaned down at once and kissed her shoulder softly, whispering her name. "Wake to me." She touched his head in answer, draping her arm weakly over his neck. He moved onto the bed with her, his heart pounding. He lay beside her, close enough to consume with his lips the small, heady sigh that escaped hers. He watched the dreamy smile that curved her lips as he began caressing her with seductive reassurance, letting her get accustomed to his touch. "That's right. You just relax," he breathed. He skimmed his palm down her arm, but at her elbow, he diverted his explorations to her slender waist. From there, he ran his hand down lower, to her hip. She stretched a little like a pampered cat under his patient stroking. He bent his head at length and pressed a kiss to the white line of her tender neck. He was rewarded with another enticing undulation of her body, drawing him closer. As his lips worked his way higher, Kate turned her mouth to his invitingly. She met his gaze for a fleeting instant before he kissed her; her glittering, heavy-lidded eyes teemed with feverish desire. "Hullo there," he whispered, then he bent his head and claimed her mouth. Her low moan passed from her lips to his. Rohan answered in kind as he deepened the kiss, capturing her chin between his finger and thumb. She clutched two fistfuls of his shirt for a passing instant. Her mouth tasted of red wine. He drank deeper. As she opened her mouth to his hungry kiss, he skimmed his fingertips down her throat to her chest. He slipped his hand into her gown and cupped her breast. With tingling hands, he took her nipple between his finger and thumb and held it lightly as he kissed her. Her approving groan asked wordlessly for more. She touched his shoulders, arms, and chest as he moved downward over her body to indulge himself in sampling her breasts. She made no move to stop him, no longer cold or shivering as she had been in the great hall, but panting, her skin aglow with newfound heat as he undid the bodice of her skimpy gown and bared her lovely breasts. Closing his eyes, he took her nipple into his mouth and sucked until it swelled to glorious fullness against his tongue. The kiss went on and on, for she was even sweeter than he had already fantasized in the great hall. Now that he had her nipple in his mouth, he could not get enough of her. But when she began to writhe hungrily beneath him, her moans climbing, he obliged her, taking his hand down slowly over her quivering stomach through her gown. She was wanton, but he stoked her fire by keeping a leisurely pace for now. He put his hand between her legs, giving her a taste of what she craved. She began rubbing restlessly against the snug hold of his hand cupping her mound. He was rock hard, and enjoyed pleasuring her for a while further, feeling the dampness of her core permeating the thin cloth of her gown

Right now he needed to concentrate on keeping himself under control. Inside, his gut churned. There was a war going on. The joy of holding his son again clashed with the waves of anger that rose higher and higher with each passing moment. He thought he had known why Pete had arrived at the farm. He had pushed the fork into the soil and watched the earth turn over sure that the truth of their tragedy was about to be laid before them. He had watched the dry earth give up the rich brown soil and wanted to stay there forever in the cold garden just watching his fork move the earth. He had not wanted to hear what Pete had to say. And now this..this..What did you call this? A miracle? What else could it be? But this miracle was tainted. He was not holding the same boy he had taken to the Easter Show. This thin child with shaved hair was not the Lockie he knew. Someone had taken that child. They had taken his child and he could feel by the weight of him they had starved him. Someone had done this to him. They had done this and god knew what else. Doug walked slowly into the house, trying to find the right way to break the news to Sarah. She was lying down in the bedroom again. These days she spent more time there than anywhere else. Doug walked slowly through the house to the main bedroom at the back. It was the only room in the house whose curtains were permanently closed. How damaged was his child? Would he ever be the same boy they had taken up to the Show ? What had been done to him? Dear God, what had been done to him? His ribs stuck out even under the jumper he was wearing. It was not his jumper. He had been dressed in shorts and a T-shirt, perfect for the warm day. He had a cap with a Bulldogs logo. What could have happened to his clothes? How long had he had the jumper?Doug bit his lip. First things first. He opened the bedroom door cautiously and looked into the gloom. Sarah was on her back. Her mouth was slightly open. She was fast asleep. The room smelled musty with the heater on. Sarah slept tightly wrapped in her covers. Doug swallowed. He wanted to run into the room whooping and shouting that Lockie was home but Sarah was so fragile he had no idea how she would react. He walked over to the window and opened the curtains. Outside it was getting dark already but enough light entered the room to wake Sarah up. She moaned and opened her eyes. ‘Oh god, Doug, please just close them. I’m so tired.’ Doug sat down on the bed and Sarah turned her back to him. She had not looked at him. Lockie opened his eyes and looked around the room. ‘Ready to say hello to Mum, mate?’ Doug asked. ‘Hi, Mum,’ said Lockie to his mother’s back. His voice had changed. It was deeper and had an edge to it. He sounded older. He sounded like someone who had seen too much. But Sarah would know it was her boy. Doug saw Sarah’s whole body tense at the sound of Lockie’s voice and then she reached her arm behind her and twisted the skin on her back with such force Doug knew she would have left a mark. ‘It’s not a dream, Sarah,’ he said quietly. ‘He’s home.’ Sarah sat up, her eyes wide. ‘Hi, Mum,’ said Lockie again. ‘Hello, my boy,’ said Sarah softly. Softly, as though he hadn’t been missing for four months. Softly, as though he had just been away for a day. Softly, as though she hadn’t been trying to die slowly. Softly she said, ‘Hello, my boy.’ Doug could see her chest heaving. ‘We’ve been looking for you,’ she said, and then she held out her arms. Lockie climbed off Doug’s lap and onto his mother’s legs. She wrapped her arms around him and pushed her nose into his neck, finding his scent and identifying her child. Lockie buried his head against her breasts and then he began to cry. Just soft little sobs that were soon matched by his mother’s tears. Doug wanted them to stop but tears were good. He would have to get used to tears.