“
Don't cohabitate. Don't fornicate. Don't look at pornography. Don't create a standard of beauty. Have your spouse be your standard of beauty. This is one of the great devastating effects of pornography: you lust after people and compare your spouse to them. It's impossible to be satisfied in your marriage if you don't have a standard that is biblical; that standard is always your spouse.
”
”
Mark Driscoll
“
The space around us is a claw half grasped, holding tight without quite crushing, and I wish, in the idle way I always wish these days, that I felt more confident in my ability to breathe.
”
”
Julia Armfield (Our Wives Under the Sea)
“
I can't cohabitate with rodents." She pauses. That's a lie. I've lived with Loren for nine months, but I draw the line right here.
”
”
Krista Ritchie (Kiss the Sky (Calloway Sisters, #1))
“
Not all tongues that wag cohabit with a brain.
”
”
Donita K. Paul (DragonFire (DragonKeeper Chronicles, #4))
“
Our inability to think beyond our own species, or to be able to co-habit with other life forms in what is patently a massive collaborative quest for survival, is surely a malady that pervades the human soul.
”
”
Lawrence Anthony
“
I think she cared more for that bloody dog than for me, for us. And maybe that's not so stupid, looking back... maybe it is easier living on your own looking after some stupid mutt than sharing your life with other actual human beings.
”
”
Mark Haddon (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time)
“
I'll share my life with you. But, not my doughnuts.
”
”
Crystal Woods (Write like no one is reading 2)
“
The arrogant elimination of the Djaouts of our world must nerve us to pursue our own combative doctrine, namely: that peaceful cohabitation on this planet demands that while the upholders of any creed are free to adopt their own existential absolutes, the right of others to do the same is thereby rendered implicit and sacrosanct. Thus the creed of inquiry, of knowledge and exchange of ideas, must be upheld as an absolute, as ancient and eternal as any other.
”
”
Wole Soyinka (The Last Summer of Reason)
“
When also I am told that a woman, called the Virgin Mary, said, or gave out, that she was with child without any cohabitation with a man, and that her betrothed husband, Joseph, said that an angel told him so, I have a right to believe them or not: such a circumstance required a much stronger evidence than their bare word for it: but we have not even this; for neither Joseph nor Mary wrote any such matter themselves. It is only reported by others that they said so. It is hearsay upon hearsay, and I do not chose to rest my belief upon such evidence.
”
”
Thomas Paine (The Age of Reason)
“
Eve sucked air through her nose. "The next person, the very next person, who says that is going to know my wrath."
"I'm on a first-name basis with your wrath, sir. I guess this isn't the best time to tell you that McNab and I are thinking of cohabitating."
"Oh my God. My eye." Desperate, Eve pressed her fist to the twitch. "Not while I'm driving.
”
”
J.D. Robb (Portrait in Death (In Death, #16))
“
She was a lover and a lewd cohabitator, a liar and a cherished friend, an aunt and a kindly grandmother, a champion of the fallen, and a late-in-coming fighter for reason over fear. Even in those final hours, quite and rocking, arriving and departing, she knew who she was.
”
”
Laura Moriarty (The Chaperone)
“
She has no mother because fatherblood hates with love and pride, but motherblood with hate loves and cohabits.
”
”
William Faulkner (Light in August)
“
Only there, only when ready, will we be able to blossom (albeit painfully) into a joy that cohabitates with grief — rather than displacing or replacing it.
”
”
Joanne Cacciatore (Bearing the Unbearable: Love, Loss, and the Heartbreaking Path of Grief)
“
Are you seeing anyone, Maggie?” My mother’s voice is low, the whisper reserved for talk of scandal—like premarital cohabitation and non-procreative sex. “Are you even trying to find love? Or do you intend to continue fornicating with random men outside the sanctity of marriage?”
“So if I were married I’d have your blessing to fornicate with random men? Maybe I should reconsider my stance on marriage.” The words are out of my mouth before I can stop them. I’m batting zero on the New Me plan.
”
”
Lexi Ryan (Unbreak Me (Splintered Hearts, #1))
“
Malevolence and paranoia cohabit in a twisted mind. Bad men trust no one because they know the treachery of which they themselves are capable.
Bad men...destroy one another, although...they prefer those who are innocent and as pure as this world allows them to be. They feed on violence, but they feast on the despoiling of what is good.
”
”
Dean Koontz (Odd Hours (Odd Thomas, #4))
“
A man who lives with his wife is safer and more venerable than a man who lives with a tramp.
”
”
Michael Bassey Johnson
“
But in introducing me simultaneously to skepticism and to wonder, they taught me the two uneasily cohabiting modes of thought that are central to the scientific method.
”
”
Carl Sagan (The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark)
“
Scott is gone.
I've had two days with this truth. This truth and me, we're acquainted now, past the shock of our first unhappy meeting and into the uneasy-cohabitation stage. Its barbs are slightly duller than they were that first night, when even breathing felt agonizing and wrong. Tootsie and Marjorie hovered over me, waiting to see whether I'd collapse, while Mama looked on, white-faced, from her rocker by the fire. "Gone?" I would whisper, to no-one in particular. I, too, waited for me to be overwhelmed - but all that happened was what happens to anyone who has lost their one love: my heart cleaved into two parts, before and foreverafterward.
”
”
Therese Anne Fowler (Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald)
“
Every individual is multicultural; cultures are not monolithic islands but criss-crossed alluvial plains. Individual identity stems from the encounter of multiple collective identities within one and the same person; each of our various affiliations contributes to the formation of the unique creature that we are. Human beings are not all similar, or entirely different; they are all plural within themselves, and share their constitutive traits with very varied groups, combining them in an individual way. The cohabitation of different types of belonging within each one of us does not in general cause any problems- and this ought , in turn, to arouse admiration: like a juggler, we keep all the balls of our identity in the air at once, with the greatest ease!
Individual identity results from the interweaving of several collective identities; it is not alone in this respect. What is the origin of the culture of a human group? The reply- paradoxically- is that it comes from previous cultures. A new culture arises from the encounter between several smaller cultures, or from the decomposition of a bigger culture, or from interaction with neighboring culture. There is never a human life prior to the advent of culture.
”
”
Tzvetan Todorov
“
I introduced Nora as my wife, though that was a lie. Old people, that's what they wanted to hear. If you were married, you were mature, reliable, exactly like them, because in their day men and women didn't just live together--they made a commitment, they had children and went on cruises and built big houses on lakes and filled them with all the precious trinkets and manufactured artifacts they'd collected along the way.
”
”
T. Coraghessan Boyle
“
I don’t really care if their parents are same sex, lesbian or gay, straight, married, cohabitating, divorced, bi-racial or what. If they love and take care of them, which is basically what all children need and want, I don’t think it matters.
-- Breaking Through (Military Romantic Suspense) (Book 2 of the SEAL TEAM Heartbreakers)
”
”
Teresa J. Reasor
“
I told her about the time that I got so tired of you stealing the sheets that in my sleep-weary logic I decided that the thing to do was to tie them around my legs, knot and all, and how, when you attempted to steal them that night, you ended up yanking me into you, and I was so startled that I sprang up, tripped, and was nearly concussed.
”
”
David Levithan (The Lover's Dictionary)
“
Cohabit with plants.
”
”
Steven Magee
“
Even the tongue and the teeth cannot cohabit without fighting
”
”
Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀ (Stay with Me)
“
It’s hard to be mad, watching the rare humor shared between them. When was the last time I saw them joke with each other? When was the last time their smiles echoed each other’s? Something unclenches in my heart to witness it: the familiarity of long cohabitation, the bonds forged outside of Oaths and despite of them, the wavelength of understanding tuned to the frequency of Sel and Nick.
”
”
Tracy Deonn (Bloodmarked (The Legendborn Cycle, #2))
“
In life, in religion, in science, this I believe: any conviction worth its salt has chosen to cohabit with a piece of mystery, and that mystery is at the essence of the vitality and growth of the thing.
”
”
Krista Tippett (Becoming Wise: An Inquiry into the Mystery and Art of Living)
“
The human form was never [formed] to beget children. This tendency among people to cohabit is nothing but animal instinct inherited from all the previous lives of evolution from the stone to the human form.
”
”
Meher Baba
“
What is it that has called you so suddenly out of nothingness to enjoy for a brief while a spectacle which remains quite indifferent to you? The conditions for your existence are almost as old as the rocks. For thousands of years men have striven and suffered and begotten and women have brought forth in pain. A hundred years ago, perhaps, another man sat on this spot; like you he gazed with awe and yearning in his heart at the dying light of the glaciers. Like you he was begotten of man and born of woman. He felt pain and brief joy as you do. Was he someone else? Was it not you yourself? What is this Self of yours? What was the necessary condition for making the thing conceived this time into you, just you and not someone else? What clearly intelligible scientific meaning can this 'someone else' really have? If she who is now your mother had cohabited with someone else and had a son by him, and your father had done likewise, would you have come to be? Or were you living in them, and in your father's father... thousands of years ago? And even if this is so, why are you not your brother, why is your brother not you, why are you not one of your distant cousins? What justifies you in obstinately discovering this difference - the difference between you and someone else - when objectively what is there is the same?
”
”
Erwin Schrödinger (My View of the World)
“
In my Paris apartment, when a neighbor drives nails into the wall at an undue hour, I "naturalize" the noise by imagining that I am in my house in Dijon, where I have a garden. And finding everything I hear quite natural, I say to myself: "That's my woodpecker at work in the acacia tree." This is my method for obtaining calm when things disturb me.
”
”
Gaston Bachelard (The Poetics of Space)
“
Author's Note: I wanted to read the book that would begin to answer some of my questions, because I felt I couldn't write it... I also doubted my ability to handle monsoon and slum conditions after years of lousy health. I made the decision to try in the course of an absurdly long night at home alone in Washington, D.C. Tripping over an unabridged dictionary, I found myself on the floor with a punctured lung and three broken ribs in a spreading pool of Diet Dr Pepper, unable to slither to a phone. In the hours that passed, I arrived at a certain clarity. Having proved myself ill-suited to safe cohabitation with an unabridged dictionary, I had little to lose by pursuing my interests in another quarter-- a place beyond my so-called expertise, where the risk of failure would be great but the interactions somewhat more meaningful.
”
”
Katherine Boo (Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death, and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity)
“
The Poison Maiden has conceived by him, and is plumb ready to enter the divine category of mother, only one last fiend clubs her to death. The final clinch of male romanticism is that each man kills the thing he loves; whether she be Catharine in A Farewell to Arms, or the Grecian Urn, the 'tension that she be perfect' means that she must die, leavinf the hero's status as a great lover unchallenged. The pattern is still commonplace: the hero cannot marry. The sexual exploit must be conquest, not cohabitation and mutual tolerance.
”
”
Germaine Greer (The Female Eunuch)
“
I’m a pedestrian, i walk under the sky and the magnetism of the stars that cohabit up there.
”
”
Alain Bremond-Torrent (running is flying intermittently (CATEMPLATIONS 1))
“
Malevolence and paranoia cohabit in a twisted mind. Bad men trust no one because they know the treachery of which they themselves are capable.
”
”
Dean Koontz (Odd Hours (Odd Thomas, #4))
“
Love may be blind, but cohabitation comes with all the latest X-ray gizmos.
”
”
David Mitchell (The Bone Clocks)
“
Still, the first rule of cohabitation is Thou Shalt Not Diss the Other Dude’s Kinfolk.
”
”
Josh Lanyon (So This is Christmas (The Adrien English Mysteries, #5.5))
“
Leur cohabitation devenait un théâtre de deux forces antagoniques: une attirance progressive brimée par une distance toujours respectée.
”
”
David Foenkinos (Le Mystère Henri Pick)
“
What I tell my clients about “the cohabitation effect” is this: The effect that living together has on your partnership will likely depend not on whether you live together but how.
”
”
Meg Jay (The Defining Decade: Why Your Twenties Matter—And How to Make the Most of Them Now)
“
Aren’t you a little young to be a captain? Not that I’m sure you weren’t wonderful at it,” I added hastily, “but Frank’s got to be your same age, and Mr. Graces and Mr. Liu are both older than you. How on earth did it happen?”
He shut down. It was like a curtain being pulled across a window. This was a subject he definitely did not wish to discuss.
“The title is honorary,” he said, not meeting my gaze. “I can’t stop them calling me that, even though I’ve asked them not to. I was the highest-ranking officer to survive the…accident.”
Accident? I supposed this was another one of those things he didn’t want to tell me because it would make me hate him.
Recognizing that dropping that particular topic-for now at least-would probably be best. I said, “John, I can warn you about the Furies. And I know exactly where the coffin is. All you have to do is take me back to Isla Huesos-just this one time, to help Alex-and I’ll never mention going there again. I’ll even,” I said, reaching up to straighten the collar of his leather jacket, which had gone askew, “forgive you for the waffles-“
John seized me by both shoulders, pulling me towards him so abruptly that Hope gave an alarmed flap of her wings.
“Pierce,” he said. “Do you mean that?”
When I pushed back some of the hair that had tumbled into my face and raised my dark eyes to meet his light ones, I saw that he was staring down at me with an intensity that burned.
“You’ll never mention going back to Isla Huesos again if I take you there right now, this once, to talk to your cousin Alex?” he demanded. “You’ll give…cohabitation another chance?”
His sudden fierceness was making me nervous.
“Of course, John,” I said. “But it’s not like I have a choice.”
“What if you did?” he asked, his grip tightening.
I blinked. “But I can’t. You said-“
He gave me a little shake. “Never mind what I said. What if I was wrong?”
I reached up to lay a hand on his cheek. It felt a little scratchy, because he hadn’t shaved. I didn’t care about stubble. What I cared about was the desperate need I saw in his eyes. The need for me.
“I’d come back,” I said, simply, “to stay with you.”
A second later, the late-and everything around it-was gone.
”
”
Meg Cabot (Underworld (Abandon, #2))
“
How do you find cohabiting with neighbors from whom, after all, you do differ somewhat?"
"I manage." The witcher looked him straight in the eyes, "I manage because I have to. Because I've no other way out. Because I've overcome the vanity and pride of being different. I've understood that they are a pitiful defense against being different. Because I've understood that the sun shines differently when something changes, but I'm not the axis of those changes. The sun shines differently, but it will continue to shine, and jumping at it with a hoe isn't going to do anything. We've got to accept facts, elf. That's what we've got to learn.
”
”
Andrzej Sapkowski (The Last Wish (The Witcher, #0.5))
“
Every newly announced engagement or cohabitation or even accidental pregnancy that crossed her feeds—no matter how tenuous her connection to the parties involved—was a personal attack.
”
”
Jessie Gaynor (The Glow)
“
I couldn't say anything. All those years I had tried to get us to cohabitate, and all it took for this blond scientist bitch was some little womb booger and there he was, boom, ready to commit
”
”
Melissa Broder (The Pisces)
“
Fur, feathers, scales or skin…we coexist. We must. If humans fail to cohabitate with the natural world, they will become extinct. We need the plants, animals and insects far more than they need us.
”
”
Rick Wood
“
Then there were his education and his reading, the books he bought and borrowed, his knowledge of things that could not be eaten or worn or cohabited with, his interest in poetry and his respect for good writing.
”
”
John Steinbeck (East of Eden)
“
The long tail predicted utopian cohabitation of tiny consumer subcultures but, instead, the professional classes have all coalesced into a world of omnivore taste where nothing is great because everything is good.
”
”
W. David Marx (Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change)
“
most well-meaning and generous Parisians were aware, in general, of the laws restricting the lives of their Jewish cohabitants but had convinced themselves that the government was only trying to control immigration and “terrorism.
”
”
Ronald C. Rosbottom (When Paris Went Dark: The City of Light Under German Occupation, 1940-1944)
“
I enter. I’m not scared of Master Ez.
I lean against the door with my eyes shut and breathe. Why did he ask me here if he wasn’t going to be waiting?
“You look gorgeous,” a silky voice purrs and I jump again.
“I thought you weren’t here. Why did Aaron let me in?” My voice quivers in fear- hell, yeah… I’m afraid of Master Ez.
The office doesn’t get a second of my notice. Master Ez sits at his desk. He doesn’t get up. He smirks at me lasciviously. His steel eyes glow in the dim room. He commands me to look at him and I can’t stop.
“I ask the questions, Regina.” The cadence is smooth, but there is an undercurrent of threat.
He called me Regina, only Ezra calls me Regina. The one that was upset when I fled to the bathroom is the childlike Ezra- he probably would call me Regina, too. Master Ez calls me Queen. The true Ezra is a combination of both- an integrated personality. He’s the one talking to me. Why is HE looking at me like that?
“I don’t understand that look, Ezra,” I mumble.
“As I’ve said over and over, we are one in the same- Master Ez and I.” He sighs like he gets sick of pointing out that fact.
“Um- yeah… but Master Ez loves ladies and they’re missing an appendage for you to enjoy,” I tease because anything else would scare the shit out of me.
“Regina, Regina,” he laughs. “The Ezra I used to be liked boys. That changed- quickly and against my will. Master Ez only likes girls. Doesn’t it seem likely that if who I used to be liked boys and who manifested liked woman, that perhaps I enjoy both now? If we are to cohabitate in peace, we have certain concessions to make.
”
”
Erica Chilson (Checkmate (Mistress & Master of Restraint, #7))
“
Freethought Today, publication of the Freedom from Religion Foundation, every month presents two full pages of criminal cases involving scores of clergy and other religious leaders, hypocritical keepers of heterosexual family values, who are charged with sexual assault, rape, statutory rape, sodomy, coerced sex with parishioners and minors, indecent liberties with minors, molestation and sexual abuse of children (of both sexes), marriage or cohabitation with underage girls, financial embezzlement, fraud, theft, and other crimes.
”
”
Michael Parenti (Contrary Notions: The Michael Parenti Reader)
“
What was wonderful was that even within the drunkenness of two a.m., each of you somehow recognized the more permanent worth and pleasure of the other. You may have arrived with others, will perhaps cohabit this night with others, but both of you have found your fates.
”
”
Michael Ondaatje (The English Patient)
“
When was the last time their smiles echoed each other's? Something unclenches in my heart to witness it: the familiarity of long cohabitation, the bonds formed outside of Oaths and despite of them, the wavelength of understanding tuned to the frequency of Sel and Nick.
”
”
Tracy Deonn (Bloodmarked (The Legendborn Cycle, #2))
“
This large pool of single youth, along with the extension of the life span, has contributed to a stunning explosion of solitary living in Western societies. More than one-quarter of all U.S. households now contain only one person. At various times and in various places in history, rates of nonmarital sex, divorce, cohabitation, or out-of-wedlock childbearing have been higher than they are today.38 But never before have so many people lived alone. And never before have unmarried people, living alone or in couples, had the same rights as married adults.
”
”
Stephanie Coontz (Marriage, a History: From Obedience to Intimacy)
“
She was every Cora she'd ever been: Cora X, Cora Kaufmann, Cora Carlisle. She was an orphan on a roof, a lucky girl on a train, a dearly loved daughter by chance. She was a blushing bride of seventeen, a sad and stoic wife, a loving mother, an embittered chaperone, and a daughter pushed away. She was a lover and a lewd cohabitator, a liar and a cherished friend, and aunt and a kindly grandmother, a champion of the fallen, and a late-in-coming fighter for reason over fear. Even in those final hours, quiet and rocking, arriving and departing, she knew who she was.
”
”
Laura Moriarty (The Chaperone)
“
Thermodynamics is one of those words best avoided in a book with any pretence to be popular, but it is more engaging if seen for what it is: the science of 'desire'. The existence of atoms and molecules is dominated by 'attractions', 'repulsions', 'wants' and 'discharges', to the point that it becomes virtually impossible to write about chemistry without giving in to some sort of randy anthromorphism. Molecules 'want' to lose or gain electrons; attract opposite charges; repulse similar charges; or cohabit with molecules of similar character. A chemical reaction happens spontaneously if all the molecular partners desire to participate; or they can be pressed to react unwillingly through greater force. And of course some molecules really want to react but find it hard to overcome their innate shyness. A little gentle flirtation might prompt a massive release of lust, a discharge of pure energy. But perhaps I should stop there.
”
”
Nick Lane (Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution)
“
I’d finally gotten ready, even anxious, to adopt another cat, and it’d taken long months of mourning for me to reach that point: my last companion, Suki, had, after four years of unexpected but very close cohabitation, been claimed by the cruelly short life expectancy (just four to five years) of indoor-outdoor felines, especially those in wildernesses as remote as the one we inhabited. In fact, before encountering me and deciding that I was a human she could trust, Suki had lived on her own for two years and raised at least one litter of kittens in the wild, and so had beaten the odds admirably; but her disappearance had nonetheless been a terrible blow,
”
”
Caleb Carr (My Beloved Monster: Masha, the Half-wild Rescue Cat Who Rescued Me)
“
This is sacred space.
Libation . . . instead of pouring water on the ground, I pour words on the page.
I begin with this libation in honor of all of those unknown and known spirits who surround us. I acknowledge the origins of this land where I am seated while writing this introduction. This land was inhabited by Indigenous people, the very first people to inhabit this land, who lived here for thousands of years before the Europeans arrived and were unfortunately unable to cohabitate without dominating, enslaving, raping, terrorizing, stealing from, relocating, and murder- ing the millions of members of Indigenous nations throughout Turtle Island, which is now known as North America. I write libation to those millions of Indigenous women, men, and children; and those millions of kidnapped and enslaved African women, men, and children whose genocide, confiscated land, centuries of free labor, forced migration, traumatic memories of rape, and sweat, tears, and blood make up the very fiber and foundation of all of the Americas and the Caribbean.
”
”
Aishah Shahidah Simmons (Love WITH Accountability: Digging up the Roots of Child Sexual Abuse)
“
A man's earthly possessions are in one of two places - the place he left them in or the place his significant other moved them to without telling him.
”
”
Stewart Stafford
“
Smart people cohabit with smart partners.
”
”
Steven Magee
“
Malevolence and paranoia cohabit in a twisted mind. Bad men trust no one because they know the treachery of which they themselves are capable. After
”
”
Dean Koontz (Odd Hours (Odd Thomas, #4))
“
The past in New Orleans cohabits with the present to an extent not even approximated in any other North American city.
”
”
Tom Piazza (Why New Orleans Matters)
“
People don’t think compassion and strength cohabit, but compassion feels good, builds brains, creates connection and stops war (inner and outer).
Now that is strength!
”
”
Kelly Corbet (BIG: the practice of joy)
“
For historical reasons – centuries spent as the subjects of warring city-states with the rule of law often taking a back seat to power politics and family loyalties – many Italians, especially those from points south, have little respect for the law and, seemingly, little understanding of its purpose, which is that of setting the boundaries for civil cohabitation.
”
”
Sari Gilbert (My Home Sweet Rome: Living (and loving) in Italy's Eternal City)
“
It kind of freaked me out. Because I don’t know if I’m ready for that kind of thing yet.” Or maybe the problem was that I wasn’t prepared for how ready I was…
“Ready for-?” He broke off, and then frowned as if it had all become clear. “Wait.” He dropped his arms from around my waist and took a step away from me. “You think I spent the night wit you?”
“Didn’t you?” I blinked back at him. “There’s only the one bed. And…well, you were in it when I woke up.”
Thunder boomed overhead. It wasn’t as loud as the violent cracks that had occurred in my dream. Although the rumbles were long enough-and intense enough-that the silverware on the table began to make an eerie tinkling sound.
And my bird, who’d been calmly cleaning herself on the back of my chair, suddenly took off, seeing shelter on the highest bookshelf against the far wall.
I realized I’d just insulted my host, and no joke was going to get me out of it this time.
“For your information, Pierce,” John said, his tone almost disturbingly calm-but his eyes flashed the same shade as the stone around my neck, which had gone the color of the metal studs at his wrists-“I spent most of last night on the couch. Until one point early this morning, when I heard you call my name. You were crying in your sleep.”
The salt water I’d tasted on my lips. Not due to rain from a violent hurricane, but from the tears I’d shed, watching him die in front of me.
“Oh,” I said uncomfortably. “John, I’m so-“
It turned out he wasn’t finished.
“I put my arms around you to try to comfort you, because I know what this place can be like, at least at first. It’s not exactly hell, but it’s the next closest place to it. You wouldn’t let go of me. You held on to me like you were drowning, and I was your only lifeline.”
I swallowed, astonished at how close he’d come to describing my dream…except it had been the other way around. I’d been his lifeline; only he’d let go of me, sacrificing himself so that I could live.
“Right,” I said. “Of course. I’m sorry.” I couldn’t believe how stupid I’d been, especially since my mother had always worried so much about my talking in my sleep. On the other hand, I had been upfront with him about my lack of experience when it came to men. “But this is good, see?” I reached out to take his hand. “I told you I could never hate you-“
He pulled his hand away, exactly like in my dream. Well, not exactly, because he wasn’t being sucked from my grasp by a giant ocean swell. Instead, he’d dropped my fingers because he was leaving to go sort the souls of the dead.
“You will,” he assured me, bitterly. “You’re already regretting your decision to-what was it you called it? Oh, right-cohabitate with me.”
“No,” I insisted. “I’m not. All I said was that I want to take things more slowly-“
That had nothing to do with him-it had to do with me and my fear of not being able to control myself when he was kissing me. It was too humiliating to admit that out loud, however.
”
”
Meg Cabot (Underworld (Abandon, #2))
“
Consider the difference in size between some of the very tiniest and the very largest creatures on Earth. A small bacterium weights as little as 0.00000000001 gram. A blue whale weighs about 100,000,000 grams. Yet a bacterium can kill a whale … . Such is the adaptability and versatility of microorganisms as compared with humans and other so-called “higher” organisms, that they will doubtless continue to colonise and alter the face of the Earth long after we and the rest of our cohabitants have left the stage forever. Microbes, not macrobes, rule the world. —Bernard Dixon, 1994
”
”
Laurie Garrett (The Coming Plague: Newly Emerging Diseases in a World Out of Balance)
“
Although they were aware that many poorer women like Kate cohabited with monogamous common-law partners, no real distinction was made between this type of “fallen woman” and acknowledged prostitutes.
”
”
Hallie Rubenhold (The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper)
“
Well,” I said, trying to keep my tone light as I walked over to put my arms around his neck, though I had to stand on my toes to do so. “That wasn’t so bad, was it? You told me something about yourself that I didn’t know before-that you didn’t, er, care for your family, except for your mother. But that didn’t make me hate you…it made me love you a bit more, because now I know we have even more in common.”
He stared down at him, a wary look in his eyes. “If you knew the truth,” he said, “you wouldn’t be saying that. You’d be running.”
“Where would I go?” I asked, with a laugh I hoped didn’t sound as nervous to him as it did to me. “You bolted all the doors, remember? Now, since you shared something I didn’t know about you, may I share something you don’t know about me?”
Those dark eyebrows rose as he pulled me close. “I can’t even begin to imagine what this could be.”
“It’s just,” I said, “that I’m a little worried about rushing into this consort thing…especially the cohabitation part.”
“Cohabitation?” he echoed. He was clearly unfamiliar with the word.
“Cohabitation means living together,” I explained, feeling my cheeks heat up. “Like married people.”
“You said last night that these days no one your age thinks of getting married,” he said, holding me even closer and suddenly looking much more eager to stick around for the conversation, even though I heard the marina horn blow again. “And that your father would never approve it. But if you’ve changed your mind, I’m sure I could convince Mr. Smith to perform the ceremony-“
“No,” I said hastily. Of course Mr. Smith was somehow authorized to marry people in the state of Florida. Why not? I decided not to think about that right now, or how John had come across this piece of information. “That isn’t what I meant. My mom would kill me if I got married before I graduated from high school.”
Not, of course, that my mom was going to know about any of this. Which was probably just as well, since her head would explode at the idea of my moving in with a guy before I’d even applied to college, let alone at the fact that I most likely wasn’t going to college. Not that there was any school that would have accepted me with my grades, not to mention my disciplinary record.
“What I meant was that maybe we should take it more slowly,” I explained. “The past couple years, while all my friends were going out with boys, I was home, trying to figure out how this necklace you gave me worked. I wasn’t exactly dating.”
“Pierce,” he said. He wore a slightly quizzical expression on his face. “Is this the thing you think I didn’t know about you? Because for one thing, I do know it, and for another, I don’t understand why you think I’d have a problem with it.”
I’d forgotten he’d been born in the eighteen hundreds, when the only time proper ladies and gentlemen ever spent together before they were married was at heavily chaperoned balls…and that for most of the past two centuries, he’d been hanging out in a cemetery.
Did he even know that these days, a lot of people hooked up on first dates, or that the average age at which girls-and boys as well-lost their virginity in the United States was seventeen…my age?
Apparently not.
“What I’m trying to say,” I said, my cheeks burning brighter, “is that I’m not very experienced with men. So this morning when I woke up and found you in bed beside me, while it was really, super nice-don’t get me wrong, I enjoyed it very much-it kind of freaked me out. Because I don’t know if I’m ready for that kind of thing yet.” Or maybe the problem was that I wasn’t prepared for how ready I was…
”
”
Meg Cabot (Underworld (Abandon, #2))
“
La liberté de séparation est une caractéristique essentielle de la cohabitation, aiguillon contre l’inertie et l’engourdissement du couple. On peut espérer même, plus ou moins secrètement, que l’histoire d’amour que l’on est en train de vivre ne sera pas la dernière. L’envie d’être « encore amoureux », d’avoir des frissons de découvertes fait rêver. Se jurer fidélité éternelle, c’est être un peu mort.
”
”
Serge Chaumier (La déliaison amoureuse : De la fusion romantique au désir d'indépendance)
“
In order to assimilate the culture of the oppressor and venture into his fold, the colonized subject has to pawn some of his own intellectual possessions. For instance, one of the things he has had to assimilate is the way the colonialist bourgeoisie thinks. This is apparent in the colonized intellectual's inaptitude to engage in dialogue. For he is unable to make himself inessential when confronted with a purpose or idea. On the other hand, when he operates among the people he is constantly awestruck. He is literally disarmed by their good faith and integrity. He is then constantly at risk of becoming a demagogue. He turns into a kind of mimic man who nods his assent to every word by the people, transformed by him into an arbiter of truth. But the fellah, the unemployed and the starving do not lay claim to truth. They do not say they represent the truth because they are the truth in their very being.
During this period the intellectual behaves objectively like a vulgar opportunist. His maneuvering, in fact, is still at work. The people would never think of rejecting him or cutting the ground from under his feet. What the people want is for everything to be pooled together. The colonized intellectual's insertion into this human tide will find itself on hold because of his curious obsession with detail. It is not that the people are opposed to analysis. They appreciate clarification, understand the reasoning behind an argument, and like to see where they are going. But at the start of his cohabitation with the people the colonized intellectual gives priority to detail and tends to forget the very purpose of the struggle - the defeat of colonialism. Swept along by the many facets of the struggle, he tends to concentrate on local tasks, undertaken zealously but almost always too pedantically. He does not always see the overall picture. He introduces the notion of disciplines, specialized areas and fields into that awesome mixer and grinder called a people's revolution. Committed to certain frontline issues he tends to lose sight of the unity of the movement and in the event of failure at the local level he succumbs to doubt, even despair. The people, on the other hand, take a global stance from the very start. "Bread and land: how do we go about getting bread and land?" And this stubborn, apparently limited, narrow-minded aspect of the people is finally the most rewarding and effective model.
”
”
Frantz Fanon
“
It takes six years to learn to live together, and get over the most furious fits of wishing you hadn't married him, and hating him, but after that he becomes a habit and a property and you stop bothering about it.
”
”
George Bernard Shaw
“
There is no effective distinction, in Russia, between organized crime and government, so kryshas have proliferated to where they block out the sky. Everyone lives under protection. The transformation has been systemic. It cannot be attributed exclusively to the actions of any one individual. But under the presidency of Vladimir Putin, the cohabitation of crime and government became the norm. Crime is the central and most stable force in Russian society.
”
”
Andrew G. McCabe (The Threat: How the FBI Protects America in the Age of Terror and Trump)
“
All of both (Native American) sexes go about naked…They (women) have another custom, very shameful
and beyond all human belief. For their women, being very lustful, cause the private parts
of their husbands to swell up to such a huge size that they appear deformed…They (men)
marry as many wives as they please; and son cohabits with mother, male cousin with
female, and any man with the first woman he meets. They dissolve their marriages as
often as they please…The women as I have said go about naked and are very libidinous,
yet they have tolerably beautiful bodies and cleanly…When they had the opportunity of
copulating with Christians, urged by excessive lust, they defiled and prostituted
themselves.
”
”
Amerigo Vespucci
“
It's as if every conversation with a woman was a test, and men always failed it, because they always lacked the key to the code and so they never quite understood what the conversation was really about. If, just once, a man could understand, really comprehend the whole of the conversation, then the perfect union between male and female would be possible. But instead men and women continued to cohabit, even to love each other, without ever quite crossing over the chasm of misunderstanding between them.
”
”
Orson Scott Card
“
Those who say marriage is no different to cohabitation are perhaps less sensitive to issues of continuity. Legally and socially, marriage provided us with an framework, struts: as a tradition, it predates history. And yet it is still trivialised as no more than “a piece of paper”, or by the perception of it as a kind of country club from which those demarcated as undesirable are excluded. But marriage is not about religion or gender; it is an admission of vulnerability, a commitment to the perpetual evaluation of priorities and a social stabiliser.
”
”
Antonella Gambotto-Burke (Mama: Dispatches from the Frontline of Love)
“
If I’d been alone, I wouldn’t have eaten at all. I’d have taken a shower, thrown on an oversize T-shirt, and gone to bed surrounded by a few select penguins. Now I had a fancy dinner to eat, by candlelight nonetheless. If I said I wasn’t hungry, would he be insulted? Would he pout? Would he yell about all the work going to waste and tell me about starving kids in Southeast Asia? “Shit,” I said softly and with feeling. Well, hell, if we ever were going to cohabitate, he’d have to know the truth. I was unsociable, and food was something you ate so you wouldn’t die. I
”
”
Laurell K. Hamilton (The Lunatic Cafe (Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter, #4))
“
But is formalizing a bond really such a significant shift, such an emotional event? This may strike many as a silly question, given that so many couples today live together before marriage. About 41 percent of U.S. couples now cohabit before they wed, compared with only 16 percent in 1980. So how much of a change can there be after an official ceremony? A lot, researchers have found. Living together may fully acquaint you with someone’s everyday habits and likes and dislikes—he drops his dirty laundry on the floor or in the hamper; she wants the right or left side of the bed—but it often stops short of complete emotional linkage. It’s like bouncing on the diving board but not plunging in. Moreover, cohabitation seems to have a hangover effect. Data show that couples that have lived together are more likely to be dissatisfied with marriage and to divorce. Why this is so is unclear, but it may be that couples who live together have more general reservations about marriage, more ambivalence about long-term commitment, and are less religious. Religiosity seems to encourage partners to wed and, when problems occur, to struggle to stay married.
”
”
Sue Johnson (Love Sense: The Revolutionary New Science of Romantic Relationships (The Dr. Sue Johnson Collection Book 2))
“
In western societies, Asian men are considered the least attractive race of men, uniformly passed off as inadequate, unattractive sexual partners by women of all races. Scientific studies have been conducted in which women of every race identify Asian men as the least desirable, and not only that, on average Asian men need to make more than 75% than men of other races to attract white women which are the pickiest women of all races. Not only that, whereas all women of all races prefer men of their own race, that is, the vast majority of black women prefer black men, white women prefer white men, Mexican women prefer Mexican men, etc, this trend is only reversed in the case of Asian men. The vast majority of Asian women prefer non-Asian men as sexual partners; about 50% of Asian women marry non-Asian men and a whopping 80% of Asian women have had sexual intercourse or are currently cohabiting with non-Asian men, the vast majority of which are white men. Not only that, in many cases, Asian women tend to make more money than their non-Asian sexual partners, which is unheard of for women of other races, since in all other races women prefer to date men who make more money than themselves. Asian men are so inferior not only are non-Asian women rejecting them, even Asian women reject Asian men.
”
”
Ling Anderson (My Miserable Life as an Asian Boy Growing up in America: Humiliation, forced feminization, forced homosexuality, castration, brainwashing, slavery, solitary confinement, despair)
“
I do not fear that "future generations will not read novels," etc. It is probably a complete misunderstanding to conceive of serious art in categories of production, market, readers, supply and demand(...)art is not the fabrication of stories for readers but a spiritual cohabitation, something so tense and so separate from science, even contradictory to it, that there can be no competition between them. If someone fine, dignified, prolific, brilliant (this is how one ought to speak of artists this is the language art demands) is born in the future, if someone unique and unrepeatable is born, a Bach, a Rembrandt, then he will win people over, charm and seduce them...
”
”
Witold Gombrowicz (Diary)
“
Each species with which we share the earth is a success story. Each of our cohabitants has evolved an ingenious set of life strategies, and made them work. To live on an earth without fascinating, often beautiful creatures would be to live on a lesser earth. The trick is not to let them slip away, but to understand and help them on their terms.
”
”
Phillip Hoose (Moonbird: A Year on the Wind with the Great Survivor B95)
“
Anger certainly seems to have an evolutionary basis. It serves a social purpose: displays of anger encourage others to change their behaviour and thus work to stop people transgressing societal rules that keep us cohabiting comfortably. If we neither felt nor exhibited annoyance, we would become ‘slavish’, in Aristotle’s words, and an easy target for exploitation
”
”
Derren Brown (Happy: Why More or Less Everything is Absolutely Fine)
“
Picture yourself being with your family not as you think you “should” be but in ways that fill you with happiness. What are you doing and saying? What wonderful experiences are you having together? What values do you want to embody and pass along? What can you contribute to your family that is unique to you? Keep in mind that your family doesn’t have to be a traditional family—ideas along those lines are often Brules. “Family” may be cohabiting partners, a same-sex partner, a marriage where you decided not to have children, or a single life where you consider a few close friends as family. Don’t fall into society’s definition of family. Instead, create a new model of reality and think of family as those whom you truly love and want to spend time with.
”
”
Vishen Lakhiani (The Code of the Extraordinary Mind: 10 Unconventional Laws to Redefine Your Life and Succeed On Your Own Terms)
“
Memes, like genes, are selected against the background of other memes in the meme pool. The result is that gangs of mutually compatible memes – coadapted meme complexes or memeplexes – are found cohabiting in individual brains. This is not because selection has chosen them as a group, but because each separate member of the group tends to be favoured when its environment happens to be dominated by the others.
”
”
Susan Blackmore (The Meme Machine (Popular Science))
“
Much of what bureaucrats do, after all, is evaluate things. They are continually assessing, auditing, measuring, weighing the relative merits of different plans, proposals, applications, courses of action, or candidates for promotion. Market reforms only reinforce this tendency. This happens on every level. It is felt most cruelly by the poor, who are constantly monitored by an intrusive army of moralistic box-tickers assessing their child-rearing skills, inspecting their food cabinets to see if they are really cohabiting with their partners, determining whether they have been trying hard enough to find a job, or whether their medical conditions are really sufficiently sever to disqualify them from physical labor. All rich countries now employ legions of functionaries whose primary function is to make poor people feel bad about themselves. (p. 41)
”
”
David Graeber (The Utopia of Rules: On Technology, Stupidity, and the Secret Joys of Bureaucracy)
“
The more I know the human being, the more I cling to animal nature.
Mention poem 2013
Since its beginnings, the human being has been a complex and enigmatic being,
capable of great achievements and feats,
and at the same time, of the most cruel and vile acts.
There is no doubt that our species is one of the most evolved and sophisticated
of the planet, but at what cost?
What is behind our apparent superiority?
When we observe human behavior,
we can see that it hides a mixture of animal instincts
and rational thoughts.
Although human beings take pride in our ability
for critical thinking and reflection,
We are also emotional, impulsive and visceral beings.
And it is precisely this duality that makes us so different from animals.
that cohabit this planet with us.
It is often difficult for us to understand the nature of animals,
because we cannot access their internal world.
However, what we can say
is that animals are transparent beings,
His actions are always a consequence of his instincts,
not from premeditated thoughts or complex emotions.
For animals, living is following their instinct,
something that allows them to act quickly and effectively
in situations of danger or threat.
Animals are beings in balance with their environment,
They don't feel the need to constantly change,
nor to think beyond the here and now.
On the other hand, we have human beings,
beings capable of conceiving abstract thoughts,
create works of art, invent technologies and, at the same time,
of destroying the environment, oppressing other human beings
and commit acts of extreme cruelty.
The human being is a complex, contradictory being,
capable of loving and hating, forgiving and punishing, healing and destroying.
We are creatures of light and darkness,
in a constant search for balance between both parties.
But what is behind our duality as human beings?
Why are we capable of the worst acts of destruction and cruelty?
If we look back at the history of humanity,
we can see that our genetic patterns are impregnated
of violence, war and resentment.
History has been a constant parade of wars and conflicts,
each one more brutal than the last.
This being the only way in which many cultures
they have found to impose their ideas or consolidate power.
It is precisely here that the idea is born that the creators of humanity
They have intoxicated us with the yoke of evil.
Who are these forgers?
They are the same societies, cultures, religions,
policies, which have used violence, war and resentment
as a tool to impose their desires and ideals on others.
This is the curse that we have dragged like chains since long ago,
that of a genetic pattern that drags us towards violence and war.
It is true that, as human beings, we can choose our own paths,
our own decisions, and not fall into the trap
of cruelty and evil.
However, it is also true that we carry within us
an ancestral burden that is difficult to overcome.
What will the most advanced civilizations in the universe think of us?
Will we be violent and hateful beings for them?
Or will we be beings like animals, in balance with our environment?
The answer is not easy, since it remains an unknown.
if we are able to overcome our animal instincts
and embrace only the best of our humanity.
The key to this lies in becoming aware of our own duality,
to recognize that we carry both light and darkness within us,
and make a real effort to choose the best of ourselves,
instead of letting ourselves be carried away by our internal evil.
”
”
Marcos Orowitz
“
The strategy of the Germans and their French police cohort was stealthy, predictable, and almost successful. Until mid-1942, when anti-Jewish operations became more violent and the rumors of a Nazi Final Solution had finally reached Paris, most well meaning and generous Parisians were aware in general of the laws restricting the lives of their Jewish co-habitants, but had convinced themselves that the government was only trying to control immigration and terrorism.
”
”
Ronald C. Rosbottom (When Paris Went Dark: The City of Light Under German Occupation, 1940-1944)
“
In redemption we reconcile things to the way they were supposed to be. We become dependent and give up our independent stance before God and others. We give up trying to control things we cannot control and yield to and trust God’s control. Also, we regain control of what we were created to control in the first place, which is ourselves. We regain the fruit of “self-control.” We give up the role of playing judge with ourselves and others by giving up judgmentalism, condemnation, wrath, shaming, and so on so that we are free to experience ourselves and others as we really are. So, by not being God, we are free to be who we truly are and allow others to be who they truly are as well. We stop redesigning life and making new rules and instead live the life God designed us to live. For example, God designed marriage, but humans rewrite the rules to make cohabitation or serial monogamy a new design with disastrous consequences. In redemption we begin to do it God’s way.
”
”
Henry Cloud (How People Grow: What the Bible Reveals About Personal Growth)
“
Look at your “hobophobia.”
If there is one group of people our majority population fear and despise it is rootless, nomadic individuals with no stake in society. They offend simply by “opting out”—of property, commitments, beliefs, relationships, expectations. Many such people have turned their backs on a society they don’t understand or can’t cope with. They have absconded from the pressures to compete, to perform, to sell out, to join in the dance of bureaucracy, money worries, cohabitation, housekeeping, procreation, you-name-it. Society is right to fear such people because they embody the sane rejection of many insanely onerous “civilized” values that would collapse under scrutiny. Strangely, though, society also makes an idol of Jesus, apparently a nomad who had no possessions or family ties, who walked away from a promising career in carpentry, a hobo if ever there was one. (We haven’t, however, made a popular hero out of Diogenes, the ultimate dirty Greek hobo.)
”
”
Colin Feltham (Keeping Ourselves in the Dark)
“
My parents were not scientists. They knew almost nothing about science. But in introducing me simultaneously to skepticism and to wonder, they taught me the two uneasily cohabiting modes of thought that are central to the scientific method. They were only one step out of poverty. But when I announced that I wanted to be an astronomer, I received unqualified support—even if they (as I) had only the most rudimentary idea of what an astronomer does. They never suggested that, all things considered, it might be better to be a doctor or a lawyer.
”
”
Carl Sagan (The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark)
“
The reforms Cornwallis initiated on his return to Calcutta further consolidated this position. In America, Britain had lost its colonies not to Native Americans, but to the descendants of European settlers. Cornwallis was determined to make sure that a settled colonial class never emerged in India to undermine British rule as it had done, to his own humiliation, in America. By this period one in three British men in India were cohabiting with Indian women, and there were believed to be more than 11,000 Anglo-Indians in the three Presidency towns.
”
”
William Dalrymple (The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire)
“
According to Gallup polls and sociologists, one of the greatest scandals of our day is that “evangelical Christians are as likely to embrace lifestyles every bit as hedonistic, materialistic, self-centered and sexually immoral as the world in general.”3 The statistics are devastating: Church members divorce their spouses as often as their secular neighbors. Church members beat their wives as often as their neighbors. Church members’ giving patterns indicate they are almost as materialistic as non-Christians. White evangelicals are the most likely people to object to neighbors of another race. Of the “higher-commitment” evangelicals, a rapidly growing number of young people think cohabitation is acceptable prior to marriage.4 Ron Sider, in his book The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience, summarizes the level of our compartmentalization: “Whether the issue is marriage and sexuality or money and care for the poor, evangelicals today are living scandalously unbiblical lives. . . . The data suggest that in many crucial areas evangelicals are not living any differently from their unbelieving neighbors.”5
”
”
Peter Scazzero (Emotionally Healthy Spirituality: It's Impossible to Be Spiritually Mature, While Remaining Emotionally Immature)
“
Women always said things like that, and it made him crazy. It's as if every conversation with a woman was a test, and men always failed it, because they always lacked the key to the code and so they never quite understood what the conversation was really about. If, just once, the man could understand, really comprehend the whole of the conversation, then the perfect union between male and female would be possible. But instead men and women continue to cohabit, even to love each other, without ever quite crossing over the chasm of misunderstanding between them.
”
”
Orson Scott Card (Enchantment)
“
The creation of new symbioses by mergers on a crowded planet is called symbiogenesis. And we might call all aspects of its study “symbiogenetics”—the science of normative symbioses, the word commanding respect because of its apparent coinage from genetics; in fact, I derived it directly from symbiogenesis, though the connotation is a good one. Although this type of evolution sounds bizarre—a monstrous breach of Platonic etiquette in favor of polymorphous perversity—it is now confirmed by genetic evidence, taught in textbooks. It is a fact, or what the French philosopher of science Bruno Latour and the Belgian physicist-turned-philosopher Isabelle Stengers, not putting too fine a point on it, would call a factish. Nonetheless, although symbiogenesis—the evolution of new species by symbiosis—is now recognized, it is still treated as marginal, applicable to our remote ancestors but not relevant to present-day core evolutionary processes. This is debatable. We are crisscrossed and cohabited by stranger beings, intimate visitors who affect our behavior, appreciate our warmth, and are in no rush to leave. Like all visible life-forms, we are composites.
”
”
Dorion Sagan (Cosmic Apprentice: Dispatches from the Edges of Science)
“
According to Gallup polls and sociologists, one of the greatest scandals of our day is that “evangelical Christians are as likely to embrace lifestyles every bit as hedonistic, materialistic, self-centered and sexually immoral as the world in general.”3 The statistics are devastating: Church members divorce their spouses as often as their secular neighbors. Church members beat their wives as often as their neighbors. Church members’ giving patterns indicate they are almost as materialistic as non-Christians. White evangelicals are the most likely people to object to neighbors of another race. Of the “higher-commitment” evangelicals, a rapidly growing number of young people think cohabitation is acceptable prior to marriage.4 Ron Sider, in his book The Scandal of the Evangelical Conscience, summarizes the level of our compartmentalization: “Whether the issue is marriage and sexuality or money and care for the poor, evangelicals today are living scandalously unbiblical lives. . . . The data suggest that in many crucial areas evangelicals are not living any differently from their unbelieving neighbors.”5 But you don’t need a lot of statistics to know how true this is. Just ask Angela, a new member of our congregation whose question to me also explained why she had dropped out of church for five years: “Why is it that so many Christians make such lousy human beings?
”
”
Peter Scazzero (Emotionally Healthy Spirituality: It's Impossible to Be Spiritually Mature, While Remaining Emotionally Immature)
“
Above all, there has never been a community that did not cohabit with its dead. But today, socially, the dead are no more. They are deceased. They are ontic has-beens. And with the vanishing of the dead, the most significant distinction between homo and all other primates is gone. When you show me a paleolithic skull, I recognize it as human not because of the cubic measure of the brain or because of the hand tools found in the grave but because of signs of burial. These reveal that this "person" lived a life on the borderline between the seen and the unseen, in the presence of the living and the dead. Neither the dead nor other invisible beings had to show themselves to be considered social realities.
”
”
Barbara Duden (Disembodying Women: Perspectives on Pregnancy and the Unborn)
“
daughters of men; have taken to yourselves wives; have acted like the sons of the earth, and have begotten an impious offspring? 3You being spiritual, holy, and possessing a life which is eternal, have polluted yourselves with women; have begotten in carnal blood; have lusted in the blood of men; and have done as those who are flesh and blood do. 4These however die and perish. 5Therefore have I given to them wives, that they might cohabit with them; that sons might be born of them; and that this might be transacted upon earth. 6But you from the beginning were made spiritual, possessing a life which is eternal, and not subject to death for ever. 7Therefore I made not wives for you, because, being spiritual, your dwelling is in heaven.
”
”
Enoch (The Book of Enoch)
“
THE mother, Lillian, comes to the consultation alone and provides the history. She is forty-three, a widow, the husband having died from appendicitis when the patient was six. The patient, Robert, is the older of two children; his sister was conceived shortly before the father’s death. Mother raised both siblings by herself in Boston, though she cohabited for some time with a dancing instructor, a relationship which ended bitterly. She is vague as to the reason, does not answer whether he was rough with her and whether this might have been witnessed by the children, though she is adamant that they were never touched. Patient attended school, performed well, though had few friends, spent most of his time reading science and mystery magazines.
”
”
Daniel Mason (North Woods)
“
The second solution is communitarianism, also baptised assimilation. It is a question of a compromise, inspired by the United States and rather unclear theories of intellectual ‘ethnopluralism’, Right-wing and Left-wing. People born abroad keep their ‘culture’, but adhere to a common ‘minimum’, a global Social Contract.[140] Society becomes a pacific kaleidoscope, united by a soft and pacifying deus ex machina.[141]
This utopian vision, Rousseauian and adolescent, still defended by learned old fogies, who flirt just a little with apartheid (whence its partisans on the extreme Right) has been tried by all the European states. The result has been total failure. There has been no ‘assimilation’ of ‘ethnic communities’ cohabiting peacefully. On the contrary, ethnic civil war is just around the corner.
”
”
Guillaume Faye (Convergence of Catastrophes)
“
These neighborhood was our first home as a community but, once Italians began to gain status as “full” Americans, they moved out of the communities that they co-habited with other immigrants and people of color. The rootedness in this community shifted into a dissention of difference and of privilege. In order for Italian-Americans to mark their new social location under assumed “Whiteness,” they had to make a physical move away from the marginal communities of color. The discussion ended in my favor but would mark the beginning of a long struggle of unpacking the internalized oppression and discrimination that marked my family’s identity of “White”-working class-Italian-Americans learning to assimilate while keeping their hyphenated identity. Learning to build bridges between my different borders and my passions has been a continual process for me.
”
”
Lachrista Greco (Olive Grrrls: Italian North American Women & The Search For Identity)
“
The air without is impregnated with raindew moisture, life essence celestial, glistering on Dublin stone there under starshiny coelum. God's air, the Allfather's air, scintillant circumambient cessile air. Breathe it deep into thee. By heaven, Theodore Purefoy, thou hast done a doughty deed and no botch! Thou art, I vow, the remarkablest progenitor barring none in this chaffering allincluding most farraginous chronicle. Astounding! In her lay a Godframed Godgiven preformed possibility which thou hast fructified with thy modicum of man's work. Cleave to her! Serve! Toil on, labour like a very bandog and let scholarment and all Malthusiasts go hang. Thou art all their daddies, Theodore. Art drooping under thy load, bemoiled with butcher's bills at home and ingots (not thine!) in the countinghouse? Head up! For every newbegotten thou shalt gather thy homer of ripe wheat. See, thy fleece is drenched. Dost envy Darby Dullman there with his Joan? A canting jay and a rheumeyed curdog is all their progeny. Pshaw, I tell thee! He is a mule, a dead gasteropod, without vim or stamina, not worth a cracked kreutzer. Copulation without population! No, say I! Herod's slaughter of the innocents were the truer name. Vegetables, forsooth, and sterile cohabitation! Give her beefsteaks, red, raw, bleeding! She is a hoary pandemonium of ills, enlarged glands, mumps, quinsy, bunions, hayfever, bedsores, ringworm, floating kidney, Derbyshire neck, warts, bilious attacks, gallstones, cold feet, varicose veins. A truce to threnes and trentals and jeremies and all such congenital defunctive music! Twenty years of it, regret them not. With thee it was not as with many that will and would and wait and never do. Thou sawest thy America, thy lifetask, and didst charge to cover like the transpontine bison. How saith Zarathustra? Deine Kuh Trübsal melkest Du. Nun Trinkst Du die süsse Milch des Euters. See! it displodes for thee in abundance. Drink, man, an udderful! Mother's milk, Purefoy, the milk of human kin, milk too of those burgeoning stars overhead rutilant in thin rainvapour, punch milk, such as those rioters will quaff in their guzzling den, milk of madness, the honeymilk of Canaan's land. Thy cow's dug was tough, what? Ay, but her milk is hot and sweet and fattening. No dollop this but thick rich bonnyclaber. To her, old patriarch! Pap! Per deam Partulam et Pertundam nunc est bibendum!
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James Joyce (Ulysses)
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The air without is impregnated with raindew moisture, life essence celestial, glistening on Dublin stone there under starshiny coelum. God’s air, the Allfather’s air, scintillant circumambient cessile air. Breathe it deep into thee. By heaven, Theodore Purefoy, thou hast done a doughty deed and no botch! Thou art, I vow, the remarkablest progenitor barring none in this chaffering allincluding most farraginous chronicle. Astounding! In her lay a Godframed Godgiven preformed possibility which thou hast fructified with thy modicum of man’s work. Cleave to her! Serve! Toil on, labour like a very bandog and let scholarment and all Malthusiasts go hang. Thou art all their daddies, Theodore. Art drooping under thy load, bemoiled with butcher’s bills at home and ingots (not thine!) in the countinghouse? Head up! For every newbegotten thou shalt gather thy homer of ripe wheat. See, thy fleece is drenched. Dost envy Darby Dullman there with his Joan? A canting jay and a rheumeyed curdog is all their progeny. Pshaw, I tell thee! He is a mule, a dead gasteropod, without vim or stamina, not worth a cracked kreutzer. Copulation without population! No, say I! Herod’s slaughter of the innocents were the truer name. Vegetables, forsooth, and sterile cohabitation! Give her beefsteaks, red, raw, bleeding! She is a hoary pandemonium of ills, enlarged glands, mumps, quinsy, bunions, hayfever, bedsores, ringworm, floating kidney, Derbyshire neck, warts, bilious attacks, gallstones, cold feet, varicose veins. A truce to threnes and trentals and jeremies and all such congenital defunctive music! Twenty years of it, regret them not. With thee it was not as with many that will and would and wait and never—do. Thou sawest thy America, thy lifetask, and didst charge to cover like the transpontine bison. How saith Zarathustra? Deine Kuh Trübsal melkest Du. Nun Trinkst Du die süsse Milch des Euters. See! it displodes for thee in abundance. Drink, man, an udderful! Mother’s milk, Purefoy, the milk of human kin, milk too of those burgeoning stars overhead rutilant in thin rainvapour, punch milk, such as those rioters will quaff in their guzzling den, milk of madness, the honeymilk of Canaan’s land. Thy cow’s dug was tough, what? Ay, but her milk is hot and sweet and fattening. No dollop this but thick rich bonnyclaber. To her, old patriarch! Pap! Per deam Partulam et Pertundam nunc est bibendum!
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James Joyce (Ulysses)
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had made acquaintance with convicts in Tobolsk; at Omsk I settled myself down to live four years in common with them. They are rough, angry, embittered men. Their hatred for the nobility is boundless; they regard all of us who belong to it with hostility and enmity. They would have devoured us if they only could. Judge then for yourself in '-hat danger we stood, having to cohabit with these people for some years, eat with them, sleep by them, and with no possibility of complaining of the affronts which were constantly put upon us. " You nobles have iron beaks, you have torn us to pieces. When you were masters, you injured the people, and now, when it's evil days with you, you want to be our brothers." This theme was developed during four years. A hundred and fifty foes never wearied of persecuting us—it was their joy, their diversion, their pastime; our sole shield was our indifference and our moral superiority, which they were forced to recognize and respect; they were also impressed by our never yielding to their will. They were for ever conscious that we stood above them. They had not the least idea of what our offence had been. We kept our own counsel about that, and so we could never come to understand one another; we had to let the whole of the vindictiveness, the whole of the hatred, that they cherish against the nobility, flow over us.
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Fyodor Dostoevsky (Letters of Fyodor Michailovitch Dostoyevsky to his family and friends)
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What we need is a Tools to Help You Co-habit With Your Suffering Day. I don’t think that’s going to happen any time soon. In the meantime, though, here are my tools. Share. They might help others. Talk. Don’t keep it to yourself. There’s a great saying in Narcotics Anonymous: an addict alone is in bad company. Let people in. It’s scary and sometimes it can go wrong, but when you manage to connect with people, it’s magic. Let people go. (The toxic ones.) They don’t need to know – just gently withdraw. Learn to say no. I struggled so much with this, but when I started to do it, it was one of the most liberating things that ever happened to me. Learn to say yes. As I’ve got older, I’ve become quite ‘safe’. I am trying more and more to take myself out of my comfort zone. Find purpose. It can be anything – a charity, volunteering … Accept that Life is a roller coaster. Ups and downs. Accept yourself. Even the bits you really don’t like – you can work on those. No one is perfect. Try not to judge. If I’m judging people, it says more about where I am than about them. It’s at that point that I probably need to talk to someone … Music is a mood-altering drug. Some songs can make you cry, but some can make you really euphoric. I choose to mostly listen to the latter. Exercise. There is science to back me up here. Exercise is a no-brainer for mood enhancement. Look after something. Let something need you for its survival. It doesn’t have to be kids. It can be an animal, a houseplant, anything. And last but not least … Faith. I’m not sure what I believe in, but I do feel that when I pray, my prayers are being heard. Not always answered, but heard. And that’s enough.
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Scarlett Curtis (It's Not OK to Feel Blue (and other lies): Inspirational people open up about their mental health)
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Our plastic susceptibility to forces of technocapitalism as well as different explosions in the streets and in our neighbourhoods (if not in our houses) is an opportunity for the revolutionary subject of trauma. If capitalism and terrorism are transplanted within us with such ease that we can no longer see them as threat to the plasticity of our brains, so do the other traumas from which capitalism, state and religion run away. As opposed to capitalism, the state and other grounding systems which preserve their verity by isolating fields of trauma in order to protect themselves against syntheses of the universal absolute, the brain has the ability to reconnect all isolated traumas within its plastic field and expand along the mediating functions of trauma. The obligation of the revolutionary subject with regard to exporting the revolution is not to shun traumas of capitalism and fundamentalism, since this refusal or disavowal contributes to the strategy of capitalism and fundamentalism in isolating traumas, forces and resources in order to govern and monopolize them within this or that world. On the contrary, the obligation of the revolutionary subject is to absorb and interiorize traumas so as to expose ‘isolated traumas’ (this or that regional world), interconnect them to its regional horizon and widen them across the geocosmic continuum and deep into the cosmic exteriority. Modern man is a surgeon who does not amputate himself from the worlds of capitalism and religion. Instead, he transplants himself and these worlds inside each other in order to reconnect his actual regional horizon (cohabited with capitalism and fundamentalism) once again to the freedom of absolute depths. To this end, the revolution on the geocosmic continuum that is the revolution rekindled out of the Copernican commune should not be paved on the politico- philosophical corpus of those who impose on us wanton discrepancies and excesses of the earthly life but those who delude us with the axiomatic verity of ourselves and reform the ground of the terrestrial thought in one way or another.
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Reza Negarestani