David Stafford Quotes

Alcoholism is above all a disease of denial.

The bravest thing David Bowie ever did was to go on stage after Queen at Live Aid.

If you ever feel the person in your life needs rescuing, particularly from him or herself - beware. Codependency is rearing its head again.

Resist trying to be what other people want you to be. Anyone in your life who tries to change you is really saying: as I can't control myself I will try and control you. By the same token, don't attempt to control other people's behaviour - it's not your place.

Recovery [from codependency] may not always be comfortable at first for the other people in one's life. But it is always worth it because, actually, nobody ever respects a 'doormat'.

Non-alcoholic ways in which parents may not 'be there' for the children can include: - violence and sexual abuse - workholism - gambling - transquilliser addiction- - womanizing - frequent journeys abroad - death - suicide - being unemployed or unemployable - frequent hospitalisation - mental or physical handicap - excessive religiosity - rigid rules and regulations - homes where children are never allowed to be themselves but must always be pleasing to adults

Whenever you feel compelled to put others first at the expense of yourself, you are denying your own reality, your own identity.

Despite Lowell's determination to be 'surrounded by Catholics,' the couple instantly got swept up into the fast, loud current of atheist-Jewish-Marxist-hard-drinking-fast-talking literary New York. Philip Rahv and Nathalie Swan took a shine to Lowell and Stafford, and soon they were getting invited to the Rahv's combative, whiskey-soaked parties.

Plato’s term for soul-suture: “the fastening of heaven.” Rumi’s term: “the cord of causation.” Plotinus’s: “our tutelary spirit, not bound up with our nature, not the agent in our action, belonging to us as belonging to our soul, as the power which consummates the chosen life.” And American poets have discovered this magic, too! Denise Levertov speaks of a thread, finer than spider’s silk, that pulls at her, keeps her company, guides her. William Stafford speaks of a thread we can follow as it pierces things that change, yet itself never changes. That these spirit threads, as Plotinus says, aren’t ours, that they’re the soul’s own unbreakable extensions, is why they have the

Dan Ariely has a book calling us “Predictably Irrational", and the introduction tells us “we are pawns in a game whose forces we largely fail to comprehend. We usually think of ourselves [with] ultimate control over the decisions we make [but] this perception has more to do with our desires…than reality”. Cordelia Fine’s book “A mind of its own" has the subtitle “how your brain distorts and deceives”, whilst David McRaney doesn’t pull any punches with the title of his “You are not so smart".

Sunday 8 August. The next day it declared: ‘Workers! You

sent the Yamato, the largest battleship in the world, on a desperate last mission to ram as many

There is required for the composition of the great commander’, he wrote in The World Crisis, ‘not only imagination but also an element of legerdemain, an original and sinister touch, which leaves the enemy puzzled as well as beaten.

In agreeing to head the espionage inquiry he hoped to reassure public opinion. Instead, within a matter of weeks, both he and his committee had become convinced that the threat was real.

I do not see how any patriotic men can continue to support a party which is kept in power by the unnatural combination of Little Englandism, disloyal Fenian Roman Catholics, Welsh and English non-conformists, Temperance fanatics, miscellaneous cranks, and traitors of the Keir Hardie type’,

Backbench MP Edward Pickersgill captured the Liberal temper when he denounced the affair as a sordid business. ‘I suppose secret service work is necessary’, he conceded. ‘But it is dirty work, and when a man has been at the business for twenty years … [his hand] is imbued with that dirty work as is the dyer’s hand.

If his aim is roast pork he is quite willing to burn the house down to get it.

Coventry remains the focus of a persistent story about Churchill’s ruthless determination to protect the Ultra secret. The city was victim of a massive bombing raid on the night of 14 November 1940 when over 500 civilians were killed, the city centre flattened and the cathedral destroyed. Although Ultra had revealed the target, so this tale runs, Churchill refused to allow countermeasures for fear of revealing to the Germans that their ciphers had been broken. Coventry, in short, was deliberately sacrificed to preserve Ultra. This is a myth. Three days before the raid Ultra revealed Luftwaffe plans for a major operation code-named Moonlight Sonata, but gave no date or targets.

Harry Hopkins when he arrived in London early in January 1941 for a first-hand view of Britain’s needs and morale. This frail Iowan had directed the New Deal Emergency Relief Administration and was Roosevelt’s troubleshooter, a man so close to the President that he lived in the White House as part of the family household. He arrived in Britain with the self-defined mission of being the ‘catalytic agent between two prima donnas’.

Hopkins was powerfully impressed. Churchill, he reported to Roosevelt, was the government, the one and only person he needed to have a full meeting of minds.

Attempts at smuggling in explosives disguised as chocolate, biscuits or rubber through Norway having failed, Section D finally shipped them direct to Stockholm labelled as military and technical books. The military attaché who collected them disguised as a French chauffeur described the operation as ‘real Edgar Wallace stuff, in a dark dirty wood at midnight’.

Churchill worked hard to bring Savinkov to London in late 1921. It was not easy. Foreign Office officials regarded him as unreliable, even crooked, and refused him a visa. SIS chief Mansfield Cumming also declined to help, but Churchill leaned on his intelligence contacts in France. Before the Foreign Office had woken up, the British Passport Office in Paris had issued a visa and Savinkov was in London.

But codependency is inappropriate, over-the-top loyalty, caring and supportiveness.

To summarise so far, Step One says I can't; Step Two says: I am not alone; Step Three says: I can be helped. Step Four and Five call for honesty and openness, and action to shed our secrets. In Steps Six and Seven, we take full responsibility for our problems and shortcomings (NOT the same as taking blame) and get help from our 'higher power', in order to change ourselves. Steps Eight and Nine ask for amends to be made to those we have injured or hurt - often a very hard and painful thing to do.