Defining Her Beauty Quotes

She began to see that character is a better possession than money, rank, intellect, or beauty, and to feel that if greatness is what a wise man has defined it to be, 'truth, reverence, and good will,' then her friend Friedrich Bhaer was not only good, but great.

When you judge a woman by her appearance, it doesn't define her, it defines you. Ladies, never allow yourself to be defined by someone's inability to appreciate your unique beauty.

Whatever is deeply, essentially female--the life in a woman's expression, the feel of her flesh, the shape of her breasts, the transformations after childbirth of her skin--is being reclassified as ugly, and ugliness as disease. These qualities are about an intensification of female power, which explains why they are being recast as a diminution of power. At least a third of a woman's life is marked with aging; about a third of her body is made of fat. Both symbols are being transformed into operable condition--so that women will only feel healthy if we are two thirds of the women we could be. How can an "ideal" be about women if it is defined as how much of a female sexual characteristic does not exist on the woman's body, and how much of a female life does not show on her face?

We do not have to spend money and go hungry and struggle and study to become sensual; we always were. We need not believe we must somehow earn good erotic care; we always deserved it. Femaleness and its sexuality are beautiful. Women have long secretly suspected as much. In that sexuality, women are physically beautiful already; superb; breathtaking. Many, many men see this way too. A man who wants to define himself as a real lover of women admires what shows of her past on a woman's face, before she ever saw him, and the adventures and stresses that her body has undergone, the scars of trauma, the changes of childbirth, her distinguishing characteristics, the light is her expression. The number of men who already see in this way is far greater than the arbiters of mass culture would lead us to believe, since the story they need to tell ends with the opposite moral.

Everyone wanted so many things from her—to believe in herself and see her own true beauty, but not to be conceited, to know her place. Be more than your looks, but never speak out of turn. Don't be defined by love, but remember, you're nothing without it. Be a princess. Find your prince. You don't need a man to complete you. Stand on your own two feet.

When people see some things as beautiful, other things become ugly. When people see some things as good, other things become bad. Being and non-being create each other. Difficult and easy support each other. Long and short define each other. High and low depend on each other. Before and after follow each other. Therefore the Master acts without doing anything and teaches without saying anything. Things arise and she lets them come; things disappear and she lets them go. She has but doesn't possess, acts but doesn't expect. When her work is done, she forgets it. That is why it lasts forever.

She may resent Playboy because she resents feeling ugly in sex--or, if "beautiful," her body defined and diminished by pornography. It inhibits in her something she needs to live, and gives her the ultimate anaphrodisiac: the self-critical sexual gaze. Alice Walker's essay "Coming Apart" investigates the damage done: Comparing herself to her lover's pornography, her heroine "foolishly" decides that she is not beautiful.

At least a third of a woman's life is marked with aging; about a third of her body is made of fat. Both symbols are being transformed into operable condition--so that women will only feel healthy if we are two thirds of the women we could be. How can an "ideal" be about women if it is defined as how much of a female sexual characteristic does not show on her body, and how much of a female life does not show on her face?

When you look at me that way, I feel so beautiful." "You are beautiful." He signed deep in his chest. His hands slid up and down her arms, caressing her roughly. "So damned beautiful." "So are you." She put a hand to his bare chest, tracing the defined ridges of his musculature. "Like a diamond. Hard and gleaming, and cut with all these exquisite facets. Inside...pure, brilliant fire.

Cathy's a nice person, in a forceful sort of way. She makes you notice her kindness. Her niceness is writ large, it is her defining quality and she needs it acknowledged.

All morning, Spence has been a well-oiled machine of activity. Everyone doing her bit, quietly and efficiently. It's strange how deliberate people are after a death. All the indecision suddenly vanishes into clear, defined moments--changing the linens, choosing a dress or a hymn, the washing up, the muttering of prayers. All the small, simple, conscious acts of living a sudden defense against the dying we do every day.

Love is an afternoon of fishing when I'd sooner be at the ballet. Love is eating burnt toast and lumpy graving with a big smile. Love is hearing the words 'You're beautiful' as I fail to squeeze into my fat jeans. Love is refusing to bring up the past, even if doing so would be a slam dunk to prove your point. Love is your hand wiping away my tears, trying to erase streaks of mascara. Love is the warm hug that extinguishes an argument. Love is a humbly-uttered apology, even if not at fault. Love is easy to recognize but so hard to define; however, I think it boils down to this... Love is caring so much about the feelings of someone else, you sacrifice whatever it takes to help him or her feel better. In other words, love is my heart being sensitive to yours.

She was truly beautiful, though that was not what drew him to want to know more about her. This woman of wealth and privilege had something else about her—and inner beauty—which he couldn't quite define.

Our scars define us,” Maddis said quietly, the tip of her finger tracing the three slashed lines. “They tell a story of courage and survival. They tell of who we are at our deepest being, of the challenges we’ve faced and overcome.” Whispering now, she patted Kiva’s hand and finished, “Not all scars are as visible as this. I daresay you have many more on the inside. But never forget that every scar is beautiful. And you should never, ever, be ashamed of them.

But Orlando was a woman — Lord Palmerston had just proved it. And when we are writing the life of a woman, we may, it is agreed, waive our demand for action, and substitute love instead. Love, the poet has said, is woman’s whole existence. And if we look for a moment at Orlando writing at her table, we must admit that never was there a woman more fitted for that calling. Surely, since she is a woman, and a beautiful woman, and a woman in the prime of life, she will soon give over this pretence of writing and thinking and begin at least to think of a gamekeeper (and as long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking). And then she will write him a little note (and as long as she writes little notes nobody objects to a woman writing either) and make an assignation for Sunday dusk and Sunday dusk will come; and the gamekeeper will whistle under the window — all of which is, of course, the very stuff of life and the only possible subject for fiction. Surely Orlando must have done one of these things? Alas,— a thousand times, alas, Orlando did none of them. Must it then be admitted that Orlando was one of those monsters of iniquity who do not love? She was kind to dogs, faithful to friends, generosity itself to a dozen starving poets, had a passion for poetry. But love — as the male novelists define it — and who, after all, speak with greater authority?— has nothing whatever to do with kindness, fidelity, generosity, or poetry. Love is slipping off one’s petticoat and — But we all know what love is. Did Orlando do that? Truth compels us to say no, she did not. If then, the subject of one’s biography will neither love nor kill, but will only think and imagine, we may conclude that he or she is no better than a corpse and so leave her.

The 'bath' was almost the size of a small swimming pool, the steam curling off it pure, sensual temptation. A shower stood to her right, but it had no glass walls, the area defined only by an expanse of gold-flecked tile. A lightbulb went off in her head. 'Wings,' she whispered. 'It’s all to accommodate those beautiful wings.

Life, it has been agreed by everyone whose opinion is worth consulting, is the only fit subject for novelist or biographer; life, the same authorities have decided, has nothing whatever to do with sitting still in a chair and thinking. Thought and life are as the poles asunder. Therefore — since sitting in a chair and thinking is precisely what Orlando is doing now — there is nothing for it but to recite the calendar, tell one’s beads, blow one’s nose, stir the fire, look out of the window, until she has done… Surely, since she is a woman, and a beautiful woman, and a woman in the prime of life, she will soon give over this pretence of writing and thinking and begin at least to think of a gamekeeper (and as long as she thinks of a man, nobody objects to a woman thinking). And then she will write him a little note (and as long as she writes little notes nobody objects to a woman writing either) and make an assignation for Sunday dusk… She was kind to dogs, faithful to friends, generosity itself to a dozen starving poets, had a passion for poetry. But love — as the male novelists define it — and who, after all, speak with greater authority? — has nothing whatever to do with kindness, fidelity, generosity, or poetry. Love is slipping off one’s petticoat and — But we all know what love is… If then, the subject of one’s biography will neither love nor kill, but will only think and imagine, we may conclude that he or she is no better than a corpse and so leave her.

I know you are afraid, mon amour," he whispered softly, his hands sliding up her rib cage to her breasts. "But I am no longer a beast. You leashed the demon. There is only me, a man who very much wants to make love to his lifemate." She felt his breath against her nipple. "Let me show you how it is supposed to be. Beautiful. Such pleasure.I can bring you so much pleasure,ma petite." His mouth closed over her breast, hot and moist. The sound of his voice was memerizing, enticing. She could get caught up forever in the mere sound of it. There was no thought in his mind for his own burning body, his own urgent demands; he wanted to show her the beauty and pleasure of true mating. Flames raced through her blood and licked down her skin at the intensity of the eroticism, the craving his mouth at her breast created. She moaned, low and soft, the note brushing at his soul like the flutter of butterfly wings. Her hands slid over his back, tracing each defined muscle with her fingertips, commiting him to memory. Tears filled her eyes. How could a man be so sensual, so perfect? He was stealing her will as easily as he was stealing her body. "Want me, Savannah," he whispered softly. "Want me the way I want you.

She began to see that character is a better possession than money, rank, intellect, or beauty, and to feel that if greatness is what a wise man has defined it to be, "truth, reverence. and good will." then her friend Friedrich Bhaer was not only good, but great.

I like looking at your body,” she said. “Thank you. I like looking at you, period,” I responded. She removed her shirt. She asked for help with her bra. We embraced. Our skins touched. I felt her heart beat against my chest. I felt my heart beating. Our heartbeats became one. One heartbeat. We became one. Time passed. I looked at my watch. 10:10. I stood. She remained on the bed, defining beauty. “It’s getting close to eleven, baby. You should probably get up,” I said, looking for my shirt. I ran my hands through my hair. “Stand right there,” she said. “Don’t move.” I stood. She reached to the side of the bed, and got her phone from her purse. She held it at arm’s length. “Don’t move,” she said. “I heard you,” I responded. I stood. She took three photos. “I wish I could paint a picture of you,” I said. “Do you paint?” she asked. “No,” I responded, “But I wish I could. I would paint a picture of you right now, lying there without your shirt. I could stand here, Britney, and admire you for all of what is forever. You make me want to cry. But. That part of me is broken.

Even if her life is falling apart, she is still this: an artist. She creates beauty; she finds beauty. She is not defined only by her failures.

And it was from these images, Claire, beautiful and in pain in the river, that Delilah got the idea for a series that would define her style, her whole career. Queer women, turmoil, and water.

There is a bench in the back of my garden shaded by Virginia creeper, climbing roses, and a white pine where I sit early in the morning and watch the action. Light blue bells of a dwarf campanula drift over the rock garden just before my eyes. Behind it, a three-foot stand of aconite is flowering now, each dark blue cowl-like corolla bowed for worship or intrigue: thus its common name, monkshood. Next to the aconite, black madonna lilies with their seductive Easter scent are just coming into bloom. At the back of the garden, a hollow log, used in its glory days for a base to split kindling, now spills white cascade petunias and lobelia. I can't get enough of watching the bees and trying to imagine how they experience the abundance of, say, a blue campanula blosssom, the dizzy light pulsing, every fiber of being immersed in the flower. ... Last night, after a day in the garden, I asked Robin to explain (again) photosynthesis to me. I can't take in this business of _eating light_ and turning it into stem and thorn and flower... I would not call this meditation, sitting in the back garden. Maybe I would call it eating light. Mystical traditions recognize two kinds of practice: _apophatic mysticism_, which is the dark surrender of Zen, the Via Negativa of John of the Cross, and _kataphatic mysticism_, less well defined: an openhearted surrender to the beauty of creation. Maybe Francis of Assissi was, on the whole, a kataphatic mystic, as was Thérèse of Lisieux in her exuberant momemnts: but the fact is, kataphatic mysticism has low status in religious circles. Francis and Thérèse were made, really made, any mother superior will let you know, in the dark nights of their lives: no more of this throwing off your clothes and singing songs and babbling about the shelter of God's arms. When I was twelve and had my first menstrual period, my grandmother took me aside and said, 'Now your childhood is over. You will never really be happy again.' That is pretty much how some spiritual directors treat the transition from kataphatic to apophatic mysticism. But, I'm sorry, I'm going to sit here every day the sun shines and eat this light. Hung in the bell of desire.

No.” Mom placed her hand on my knee. “We don’t do that. We don’t put ourselves down.” She combed my hair behind my ear and placed her hands on my cheeks. “Not only are you beautiful on the outside, Eleanor Rose, you are stunning on the inside. You are creative. You have the best laugh I’ve ever heard. You are kind, giving, and brave. Don’t ever think you aren’t good enough based on what the magazines define as beauty. You. Are. Beautiful.

An employer can’t prove an employee incompetent simply by announcing that she is. But because “beauty” lives so deep in the psyche, where sexuality mingles with self-esteem, and since it has been usefully defined as something that is continually bestowed from the outside and can always be taken away, to tell a woman she is ugly can make her feel ugly, act ugly, and, as far as her experience is concerned, be ugly, in the place where feeling beautiful keeps her whole.

As a rule things happened to Dot. She was not weak, because there was nothing in her to tell her she was being weak. She was not strong because she never knew that some of the things she did were brave. She neither defined nor conformed nor compromised.

What does it mean to be cultured? Who is the cultured person? The cultured individual is not defined nor determined by status in society nor by wealth; but the cultured individual is determined and defined by his or her sense for the art of life. And what is the art of life? The art of life is the reflection of the mind and the soul upon the world, upon other people, upon the respect and understanding of other people and upon the things that are in this world and beyond. There is a joy that is always sought in beautiful things. Being cultured is being conscious, reflective, understanding, feeling, aware. Knowing how to feel, to listen, to understand. A desire to find or to create joy in many things— that is the art of life. And these things define a cultured person.

shook her, this place. It was awful. Tragic. Yet… yet it moved her. The sorrow she felt. It was profound. It was moving, somehow. The sorrow of the terrible abandoned garbage dump and the sad graves and the lonesome shacks made her feel something so far inside herself that she could not define it or place it. She was so disturbed that it gave her the strangest comfort, as though something she had suspected about life all along was being confirmed, and the sorrow she felt in her bed at night was reflected by this soil.

The beauty and the tragedy of the modern world is that it eliminates many situations that require people to demonstrate a commitment to the collective good. Protected by police and fire departments and relieved of most of the challenges of survival, an urban man might go through his entire life without having to come to the aid of someone in danger—or even give up his dinner. Likewise, a woman in a society that has codified its moral behavior into a set of laws and penalties might never have to make a choice that puts her very life at risk. What would you risk dying for—and for whom—is perhaps the most profound question a person can ask themselves. The vast majority of people in modern society are able to pass their whole lives without ever having to answer that question, which is both an enormous blessing and a significant loss. It is a loss because having to face that question has, for tens of millennia, been one of the ways that we have defined ourselves as people. And it is a blessing because life has gotten far less difficult and traumatic than it was for most people even a century ago.

I have been with a hundred women, but never loved one until her. I could be with a thousand more and never find another Layana. She is beautiful, classy, but with a sharp edge that defines her personality, a thread of dark that complements all of her light. One that will cut you should you cross her. One that will fight for her wants, her needs, her opinions. She stares in my eyes and loves me with a vehemence all her own. A scary, passionate type of love. One that rips away all pretenses and allows us to love each other bare and without consequence.

I went to the room in Great Jones Street, a small crooked room, cold as a penny, looking out on warehouses, trucks and rubble. There was snow on the windowledge. Some rags and an unloved ruffled shirt of mine had been stuffed into places where the window frame was warped and cold air entered. The refrigerator was unplugged, full of record albums, tapes, and old magazines. I went to the sink and turned on both taps all the way, drawing an intermittent trickle. Least is best. I tried the radio, picking up AM only at the top of the dial, FM not at all." The industrial loft buildings along Great Jones seemed misproportioned, broad structures half as tall as they should have been, as if deprived of light by the great skyscraper ranges to the north and south." Transparanoia owns this building," he said. She wanted to be lead singer in a coke-snorting hard-rock band but was prepared to be content beating a tambourine at studio parties. Her mind was exceptional, a fact she preferred to ignore. All she desired was the brute electricity of that sound. To make the men who made it. To keep moving. To forget everything. To be that sound. That was the only tide she heeded. She wanted to exist as music does, nowhere, beyond maps of language. Opal knew almost every important figure in the business, in the culture, in the various subcultures. But she had no talent as a performer, not the slightest, and so drifted along the jet trajectories from band to band, keeping near the fervers of her love, that obliterating sound, until we met eventually in Mexico, in somebody's sister's bed, where the tiny surprise of her name, dropping like a pebble on chrome, brought our incoherent night to proper conclusion, the first of all the rest, transactions in reciprocal tourism. She was beautiful in a neutral way, emitting no light, defining herself in terms of attrition, a skinny thing, near blond, far beyond recall from the hard-edged rhythms of her life, Southwestern woman, hard to remember and forget...There was never a moment between us that did not measure the extent of our true connection. To go harder, take more, die first.

People who profess to have no faith, do not actually have no faith. They simply do not have faith as defined by the rest of the people. Many people who do not have faith as defined by the rest— do have a faith in many other good things— honesty, dedication, inner strength, and so on and so forth. And if you ask him (or her) why do they abide by these beliefs if there be no external force to damn them if they do not abide, they will answer and say, that it is because it is who they are, it is what they believe in, and that to them any other way is abominable. He (or she) does have a faith. It is just not expressed on one of the main paths of expression that most of the population walk on. They are just different in their faith, that is all. Religion should be rightly termed "The love of the beautiful." For anyone who has a true love and devotion to what is beautiful, does have a faith. That is his faith, that is his religion.

The point is, Johnny, you get to say. You get to define the terms of your life. You get to negotiate and articulate the complexities and contradictions of your feelings for this woman. You get to describe the particular kind of oh-shit-I-didn't-mean-to-fall-in-love-but-I-sorta-did love you appear to have for her.

Ask a woman who she is, and she’ll tell you who she loves, who she serves, and what she does. I am a mother, a wife, a sister, a friend, a career woman. The fact that we define ourselves by our roles is what keeps the world spinning. It’s also what makes us untethered and afraid. If a woman defines herself as a wife, what happens if her partner leaves? If a woman defines herself as a mother, what happens when the kids leave for college? If a woman defines herself as a career woman, what happens when the company folds? Who we are is perpetually being taken from us, so we live in fear instead of peace. We cling too tightly, close our eyes to what we need to look at hard, avoid questions that need to be asked, and in a million ways insist to our friends, partners, and children that the purpose of their existence is to define us. We build sandcastles and then try to live inside them, fearing the inevitable tide. Answering the question Who do I love? is not enough. We must live lives of our own. To live a life of her own, each woman must also answer: What do I love? What makes me come alive? What is beauty to me, and when do I take the time to fill up with it? Who is the soul beneath all of these roles? Each woman must answer these questions now, before the tide comes. Sandcastles are beautiful, but we cannot live inside them. Because the tide rises. That’s what the tide does. We must remember: I am the builder, not the castle. I am separate and whole, over here, eyes on the horizon, sun on my shoulders, welcoming the tide. Building, rebuilding. Playfully. Lightly. Never changing. Always changing.

Moments of pride commemorate people’s achievements. We feel our chest puff out and our chin lift. 2. There are three practical principles we can use to create more moments of pride: (1) Recognize others; (2) Multiply meaningful milestones; (3) Practice courage. The first principle creates defining moments for others; the latter two allow us to create defining moments for ourselves. 3. We dramatically underinvest in recognition. • Researcher Wiley: 80% of supervisors say they frequently express appreciation, while less than 20% of employees agree. 4. Effective recognition is personal, not programmatic. (“ Employee of the Month” doesn’t cut it.) • Risinger at Eli Lilly used “tailored rewards” (e.g., Bose headphones) to show his team: I saw what you did and I appreciate it. 5. Recognition is characterized by a disjunction: A small investment of effort yields a huge reward for the recipient. • Kira Sloop, the middle school student, had her life changed by a music teacher who told her that her voice was beautiful. 6. To create moments of pride for ourselves, we should multiply meaningful milestones—reframing a long journey so that it features many “finish lines.” • The author Kamb planned ways to “level up”—for instance “Learn how to play ‘Concerning Hobbits’ from The Fellowship of the Ring”—toward his long-term goal of mastering the fiddle.

In less than an hour, Sophia had efficiently arranged and copied the notes in a neat hand that would delight the printer to no end. She was so quiet and economical in her movements that Ross would have forgotten she was there, except that her scent filtered through the air. It was a tantalizing distraction that he could not dismiss. Breathing deeply, he tried to identify the fragrance. He detected tea and vanilla, blended with the elixir of warm female skin. Stealing glances at her delicate profile, he was fascinated by the way the light moved over her hair. She had small ears, a sharply defined chin, a soft snippet of a nose, and eyelashes that cast spiky shadows on her cheeks.

It is natural for a man to desire what he reckons better than that which he has already, and be satisfied with nothing which lacks that special quality which he misses. Thus, if it is for her beauty that he loves his wife, he will cast longing eyes after a fairer woman. If he is clad in a rich garment, he will covet a costlier one; and no matter how rich he may be he will envy a man richer than himself. Do we not see people every day, endowed with vast estates, who keep on joining field to field, dreaming of wider boundaries for their lands? Those who dwell in palaces are ever adding house to house, continually building up and tearing down, remodeling and changing. Men in high places are driven by insatiable ambition to clutch at still greater prizes. And nowhere is there any final satisfaction, because nothing there can be defined as absolutely the best or highest. But it is natural that nothing should content a man's desires but the very best, as he reckons it. Is it not, then, mad folly always to be craving for things which can never quiet our longings, much less satisfy them? No matter how many such things one has, he is always lusting after what he has not; never at peace, he sighs for new possessions.

When she looked up and smiled at him–a genuine, wide-open smile–it took his breath away. It lit up her face and those beautiful tawny eyes and made her more than just beautiful. Stunning. He’d never thought about the meaning of that word when it came to looks before, but at this moment he’d define it as feeling like he’d been hit with a two by four. Paralyzed but still breathing. Knocked on his ass, but still standing.

He was again struck by her good looks...only it occurred to him now that she might actually be beau tiful. It had never really occurred to him until that moment that there might be beautiful girls outside of the movies, or that he himself might know one. Perhaps it was the bruise that allowed him to see the possibility of her beauty- an essential contrast, a particular flaw which first drew attention to itself and then somehow defined the rest.

She did neither, but she remembered the scene, and gave the Professor her heartiest respect, for she knew it cost him an effort to speak out then and there, because his conscience would not let him be silent. She began to see that character is a better possession than money, rank, intellect, or beauty, and to feel that if greatness is what a wise man has defined it to be, 'truth, reverence, and good will', then her friend Friedrich Bhaer was not only good, but great.

I saw Kate becoming a jointed doll on which certain rags are hung,” Mantel wrote, adding that the duchess appeared like a “shop-window mannequin, with no personality of her own, entirely defined by what she wore.” A harsh observation to be sure, but also a truth most find hard to swallow. Like Diana, Kate became a sparkling showpiece for the Firm, a symbol of refined beauty and those white, English Rose genetics the British newspapers love so much. Freya in an Emilia Wickstead coat dress.

If you are not spending all of your waking life in discontent, worry, anxiety, depression, despair, or consumed by other negative states; if you are able to enjoy simple things like listening to the sound of the rain or the wind; if you can see the beauty of clouds moving across the sky or be alone at times without feeling lonely or needing the mental stimulus of entertainment; if you find yourself treating a complete stranger with heartfelt kindness without wanting anything from him or her... it means that a space has opened up, no matter how briefly, in the otherwise incessant stream of thinking that is the human mind. When this happens, there is a sense of well-being, of alive peace, even though it may be subtle. The intensity will vary from a perhaps barely noticeable background sense of contentment to what the ancient sages of India called ananda - the bliss of Being. Because you have been conditioned to pay attention only to form, you are probably not aware of it except indirectly. For example, there is a common element in the ability to see beauty, to appreciate simple things, to enjoy your own company, or to relate to other people with loving kindness. This common element is a sense of contentment, peace, and aliveness that is the invisible background without which these experiences would not be possible. Whenever there is beauty, kindness, the recognition of the goodness of simple things in your life, look for the background to that experience within yourself. But don't look for it as if you were looking for something. You cannot pin it down and say, "Now I have it," or grasp it mentally and define it in some way. It is like the cloudless sky. It has no form. It is space; it is stillness, the sweetness of Being and infinitely more than these words, which are only pointers. When you are able to sense it directly within yourself, it deepens. So when you appreciate something simple - a sound, a sight, a touch - when you see beauty, when you feel loving kindness toward another, sense the inner spaciousness that is the source and background to that experience.

That’s not something I am capable of doing.” I make my voice gentle, and I stroke a wet lock of hair from her face and tuck it behind her ear. She stares up at me, eyes shining. So beautiful. My precious, lovely Toy. “I don’t want to lie to you again, and to say that I was sorry would be a lie. Being sorry would require a conscience, and I’m not wired that way. In my world, I define right and wrong. For me to apologize would mean that I was saying I thought what I did was…bad. You want me to be honest with you? I’m not sorry. What is right is what benefits me. End of story. But I am saying that I should not have gone so far when I punished you. And we’re going to have to work out a new set of rules and a new way to get along. Because I’m not going to lose you.” “Why?” she demands despairingly, her face twisting with anguish. “I just want to be free. I hate it here. I hate you, and if I could kill you, I would. I will keep trying to kill you, myself, and Elizabeth, until I succeed. Do you not understand that?” “I do. And all I can do is watch you day and night so I can protect you from yourself,

But the face I saw this time was beautiful, luminous. My eyes were big, but soft, haunting. My cheekbones were defined and full of stories. My lips didn't scream for attention; they were available, but still mine. A secret, barely whispered; the prologue to a book you could get lost in. I'd say it didn't look like me, but it did- a me I'd never thought I'd reach. "Wow," I breathed. Victoria smiled, pleased with her work. She turned to the makeup saleswoman. "It's all about subtlety," she explained. "The best seduction is the one you never see coming.

Does she bring you happiness, make you laugh?" Gideon had asked. When Caleb confessed that she did, his father then asked, "Do you like who you are when you are with her?" Again Caleb answered in the affirmative. He confessed she was not what he had planned, that at first she was just a case to solve. Then his father said something Caleb couldn't get out of his head. "Our whole lives people try to tell us what beautiful is. As young boys we think we know exactly which women are the loveliest. Then we meet one who doesn't fit the mold and we know we were taught wrong our whole lives." While his pa talked, Caleb envisioned Em's freckled face. "Beauty is something we get to define. We may not see it right away, but when we do, we have trouble remembering the other definition. We wonder how we were ever to misled. All we can see is the one person who defines it for us." Then his father put a hand on his shoulder and said, "Don't let anyone else decide which kind of beautiful is right for you. You find a girl who brings out the best in you. Who you can see a happy future with. That's your kind of beautiful.

Hey Pete. So why the leave from social media? You are an activist, right? It seems like this decision is counterproductive to your message and work." A: The short answer is I’m tired of the endless narcissism inherent to the medium. In the commercial society we have, coupled with the consequential sense of insecurity people feel, as they impulsively “package themselves” for public consumption, the expression most dominant in all of this - is vanity. And I find that disheartening, annoying and dangerous. It is a form of cultural violence in many respects. However, please note the difference - that I work to promote just that – a message/idea – not myself… and I honestly loath people who today just promote themselves for the sake of themselves. A sea of humans who have been conditioned into viewing who they are – as how they are seen online. Think about that for a moment. Social identity theory run amok. People have been conditioned to think “they are” how “others see them”. We live in an increasing fictional reality where people are now not only people – they are digital symbols. And those symbols become more important as a matter of “marketing” than people’s true personality. Now, one could argue that social perception has always had a communicative symbolism, even before the computer age. But nooooooothing like today. Social media has become a social prison and a strong means of social control, in fact. Beyond that, as most know, social media is literally designed like a drug. And it acts like it as people get more and more addicted to being seen and addicted to molding the way they want the world to view them – no matter how false the image (If there is any word that defines peoples’ behavior here – it is pretention). Dopamine fires upon recognition and, coupled with cell phone culture, we now have a sea of people in zombie like trances looking at their phones (literally) thousands of times a day, merging their direct, true interpersonal social reality with a virtual “social media” one. No one can read anymore... they just swipe a stream of 200 character headlines/posts/tweets. understanding the world as an aggregate of those fragmented sentences. Massive loss of comprehension happening, replaced by usually agreeable, "in-bubble" views - hence an actual loss of variety. So again, this isn’t to say non-commercial focused social media doesn’t have positive purposes, such as with activism at times. But, on the whole, it merely amplifies a general value system disorder of a “LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT HOW GREAT I AM!” – rooted in systemic insecurity. People lying to themselves, drawing meaningless satisfaction from superficial responses from a sea of avatars. And it’s no surprise. Market economics demands people self promote shamelessly, coupled with the arbitrary constructs of beauty and success that have also resulted. People see status in certain things and, directly or pathologically, use those things for their own narcissistic advantage. Think of those endless status pics of people rock climbing, or hanging out on a stunning beach or showing off their new trophy girl-friend, etc. It goes on and on and worse the general public generally likes it, seeking to imitate those images/symbols to amplify their own false status. Hence the endless feedback loop of superficiality. And people wonder why youth suicides have risen… a young woman looking at a model of perfection set by her peers, without proper knowledge of the medium, can be made to feel inferior far more dramatically than the typical body image problems associated to traditional advertising. That is just one example of the cultural violence inherent. The entire industry of social media is BASED on narcissistic status promotion and narrow self-interest. That is the emotion/intent that creates the billions and billions in revenue these platforms experience, as they in turn sell off people’s personal data to advertisers and governments. You are the product, of course.

I had no sister, but I felt as if she were one." "A sister? You think of a woman that gorgeous as a sister, but you fell in love with me?" "You are more beautiful than Asha. I see this inside of you as well as outside." Mari shook her head. "Have I told you that you sound totally crazy sometimes? You expect me to believe that she never lit any fires in you, and I did?" "Yes," Alain replied, his tone faintly bewildered as he looked at her. "Asha never changed the way I saw things, as you have." That reminded her of something. "What did you tell her about me? That I define your world or something? I couldn't believe you said that." Alain nodded. "You define the world I see. Yes. I needed to explain what you mean to me in terms another Mage would understand." Mari could feel her lips quivering but tried to fight of laughter. "Alain, I 'define the world' for you? That's too much." "Too much?" "It's so sweet, it's nauseating." Alain pondered her words. "What is wrong with that statement? I see the false world through my own illusions. You are now my reference for those illusions. Why should that make you feel ill? You define the world I see.

And thus how frequently, in my intense scrutiny of Ligeia's eyes, have I felt approaching the full knowledge of their expression — felt it approaching — yet not quite be mine — and so at length entirely depart! And (strange, oh strangest mystery of all!) I found, in the commonest objects of the universe, a circle of analogies to that expression. I mean to say that, subsequently to the period when Ligeia's beauty passed into my spirit, there dwelling as in a shrine, I derived, from many existences in the material world, a sentiment such as I felt always aroused, within me by her large and luminous orbs. Yet not the more could I define that sentiment, or analyze, or even steadily view it. I recognized it, let me repeat, sometimes in the survey of a rapidly-growing vine — in the contemplation of a moth, a butterfly, a chrysalis, a stream of running water. I have felt it in the ocean; in the falling of a meteor. I have felt it in the glances of unusually aged people. And there are one or two stars in heaven... in a telescopic scrutiny of which I have been made aware of the feeling. I have been filled with it by certain sounds from stringed instruments, and not unfrequently by passages from books.

After all, a kiss between real lovers is not some type of contract, a neatly defined moment of pleasure, something obtained by greedy conquest, or any kind of clear saying of how it is. It is a grief-drenched hatching of two hearts into some ecstatic never-before-seen bird whose new uncategorizable form, unrecognized by the status quo, gives the slip to Death's sure rational deal. For love is a delicious and always messy extension of life that unfrantically outgrows mortality's rigid insistence on precise and efficient definition. Having all the answers means you haven't really ecstatically kissed or lived, thereby declaring the world defined and already finished. Loving all the questions on the other hand is a vitality that makes any length of life worth living. Loving doesn't mean you know all the notes and that you have to play all the notes, it just means you have to play the few notes you have long and beautifully. Like the sight of a truly beautiful young woman, smooth and gliding, melting hearts at even a distant glimpse, that no words, no matter how capable, can truly describe; a woman whose beauty is only really known by those who take a perch on the vista of time to watch the years of life speak out their long ornate sentences of grooves as they slowly stretch into her smoothness, wrinkling her as she glides struggling, decade by decade, her gait mitigated by a long trail of heavy loads, joys, losses, and suffering whose joint-aching years of traveling into a mastery of her own artistry of living, becomes even more than beauty something about which though we are even now no more capable of addressing than before, our admiration as original Earth-loving human beings should nonetheless never remain silent. And for that beauty we should never sing about, but only sing directly to it. Straightforward, cold, and inornate description in the presence of such living evidence of the flowering speech of the Holy in the Seed would be death of both the beauty and the speaker. Even if we always fail when we speak, we must be willing to fail magnificently, for even an eloquent failure, if in the service of life, feeds the Divine. Is it not a magical thing, this life, when just a little ash, cinder, and unclear water can arrange themselves into a beautiful old woman who sways, lifts, kisses, loves, sickens, argues, loses, bears up under it all, and, wrinkling, still lives under all that and yet feeds the Holy in Nature by just the way she moves barefoot down a path? If we can find the hearts, tongues, and brightness of our original souls, broken or not, then no matter from what mess we might have sprung today, we would be like those old-time speakers of life; every one of us would have it in our nature to feel obligated by such true living beauty as to know we have to say something in its presence if only for our utter feeling of awe. For, finally learning to approach something respectfully with love, slowly with the courtesy of an ornate indirectness, not describing what we see but praising the magnificence of her half-smiles of grief and persistent radiance rolling up from the weight-bearing thumping of her fine, well-oiled dusty old feet shuffling toward the dawn reeds at the edge of her part of the lake to fetch a head-balanced little clay jar of water to cook the family breakfast, we would know why the powerful Father Sun himself hurries to get his daily glimpse of her, only rising early because she does.

Can I come look?” He sat back on his heels and gestured to his artwork. “By all means. I’m done.” I got up, happily noting that my ankle was now pain free. I carefully tiptoed around the two square feet of floor over which his drawing sprawled, and settled in next to him. “It’s beautiful,” I told him. “I’m flattered. I’ve never had anyone draw a picture of me before.” Sage cocked his head and studied what he’d etched. “You think it looks like you?” Again a hot crawl of embarrassment raced up my neck and flooded my face. I looked more closely at the etching. The image did look like me, but only if you really wanted to see the resemblance. The woman in it had the same hair, and slept in the same position I had, but on closer inspection her features were quite different. Her eyes were farther apart, her nose more pointed, her cheekbones less defined…differences that seemed insignificant when I’d assumed the picture was of me, but knowing it wasn’t… I was an egocentric idiot. My dreams about this man may have been vivid, but they were dreams. They had nothing to do with reality; not mine, and clearly not his. I stammered, groping for some kind of explanation. I had nothing. “She does look like you, a little,” Sage admitted. His eyes lingered on the contours of the drawing’s face. I was eager to change the subject, but I felt like I had to ask. “Who is she?” “Someone I loved a long time ago,” he murmured.

After a deep silence, mingled with sweet dreams, I asked, "Speak to me of that beauty which the people interpret and define, each one according to his own conception; I have seen her honoured and worshipped in different ways and manners." She answered, "Beauty is that which attracts your soul, and that which loves to give and not to receive. When you meet Beauty, you feel that the hands deep within your inner self are stretched forth to bring her into the domain of your heart. It is the magnificence combined of sorrow and joy; it is the Unseen which you see, and the Vague which you understand, and the Mute which you hear−−it is the Holy of Holies that begins in yourself and ends vastly beyond your earthly imagination.

Night fell. The full moon shone sweetly and tremulously, bewitching and foreboding with rays which were cold and funereally silent. The heart of the Youth was filled with an apprehensive fear as he went up to his window. His hand, clutching the edge of the yellow curtain, hesitated and vacillated for a long time before he resolved to draw the curtain slowly aside. The yellow linen rustled as it slowly gathered, and its rustle was like the barely audible hissing of a serpent in the forest's undergrowth; and the thin brass rings jingled and scraped against the brass curtain rod. The Beauty stood beneath the window and looked at the window and waited. And the heart of the Youth shuddered, and he could not make out whether his heart was seized by ecstasy or terror. The black braids of the Beauty were undone and fell on her naked shoulders. A sharply outlined shadow lay on the ground beside her. Illuminated from the side by the moon, she stood like some distinct and well-defined spectre. That half of her face which was illuminated by the moon, as well as her shoulders and her arms, were deathly white, as white as her robe. The folds of her white robe were severe and dark. Dark was the azure of her eyes, mysterious her frozen smile. A smooth, burnished clasp, fastened at the shoulder, gleamed dully against the strange tranquility of her body and garments. She began to speak softly, and her words, ringing like the fine silver chains of a lighted censer, gave forth a fragrance of ambergris, musk and lily. ("The Poison Garden

I burned the memo that defined selflessness as the pinnacle of womanhood, but first I forgave myself for believing that lie for so long. I had abandoned myself out of love. They’d convinced me that the best way for a woman to love her partner, family, and community was to lose herself in service to them. In my desire to be of service, I did myself and the world a great disservice. I’ve seen what happens out in the world and inside our relationships when women stay numb, obedient, quiet, and small. Selfless women make for an efficient society but not a beautiful, true, or just one. When women lose themselves, the world loses its way. We do not need more selfless women. What we need right now is more women who have detoxed themselves so completely from the world’s expectations that they are full of nothing but themselves.

In your process of removing the unneeded excess, you’ll want to develop your own working definition of clutter. Early in our minimizing journey, my wife and I began to define clutter as (a) too much stuff in too small a space, (b) anything that we no longer used or loved, and (c) anything that led to a feeling of disorganization. Feel free to rip off that definition if you want. But there are other definitions you might find resonate better with your ideals. For example, Joshua Fields Millburn defines clutter as anything that does not “add value” to his life.1 Marie Kondo describes clutter as those things in her home that do not “spark joy.” 2 Peter Walsh goes even further, saying that clutter is anything that “interferes with the life you could be living.” 3 And William Morris says it this way: “Have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.” 4

Gracie Allen wasn’t as dumb as she seemed on the air. She proved that in 1939, appearing on the intellectual quiz show Information, Please, and holding her own with the experts. It takes a keen intelligence to play a dumb role that long and well, but Gracie had more than that. From the beginning, she had a singular ability to make audiences love her. “The audience found her, I didn’t,” said George Burns in a Playboy interview years after her death. The crowds they played to in the early ’20s, when they were “just a lousy small-time act,” defined what Gracie Allen was and would be for the next 35 years. The audience wouldn’t stand for it if her lines required sarcasm or spite. Burns learned that if he blew a puff of cigar smoke in Gracie’s direction, “the audience would hate me.” As he told the interviewer: “She was too dainty, too ladylike,” for malice or mean humor. “She was a beautiful little girl, like a little doll, a little Irish doll.

The argument is not simply that some women are not beautiful, therefore it is not fair to judge women on the basis of physical beauty; or that men are not judged on that basis, therefore women also should not be judged on that basis; or that men should look for character in women; or that our standards of beauty are too parochial in and of themselves; or even that judging women according to their conformity to a standard of beauty serves to make them into products, chattels, differing from the farmer’s favorite cow only in terms of literal form. The issue at stake is different, and crucial. Standards of beauty describe in precise terms the relationship that an individual will have to her own body. They prescribe her mobility, spontaneity, posture, gait, the uses to which she can put her body. They define precisely the dimensions of her physical freedom. And, of course, the relationship between physical freedom and psychological development, intellectual possibility, and creative potential is an umbilical one.

The woman who comes to know the goddess grows in the understanding of that divine aspect of her feminine nature that is part of the Self, the archetype of wholeness and the regulating center of the personality. She is not contaminated by external circumstances or overly affected by criticism. The woman conscious of the goddess cares for her body with proper nutrition and exercise and enjoys the ceremonies of bathing, cosmetics and dress. This is not just for the superficial purpose of personal appeal, which is related to ego gratification, but out of respect for the nature of the feminine. Her beauty derives from a vital connection to the Self. Such a woman is virginal. This has nothing to do with a physical state, but with an inner attitude. She is not dependent on the reactions of others to define her own being. The virginal woman is not just a counterpart to the male, whether father, lover or husband. She stands as an equal in her own right. She is not governed by an abstract idea of what she "should" be like or "what people will think.

Ah! Mr. Osborne, you should have been there! I said to myself many a time how you really should have been there—you and, your brother of course.' 'I thought of you very often during the evening!' 'Did you? Now that I call very kind of you. Cynthia, darling! Do you hear what Mr. Osborne Hamley was saying?' as Cynthia came into the room just then. 'He thought of us all on the evening of the ball.' 'He did better than merely remember us then,' said Cynthia, with her soft slow smile. 'We owe him thanks for those beautiful flowers, mamma.' 'Oh!' said Osborne, 'you must not thank me exclusively. I believe it was my thought, but Roger took all the trouble of it.' 'I consider the thought as everything,' said Mrs. Gibson. 'Thought is spiritual, while action is merely material.' This fine sentence took the speaker herself by surprise; and in such conversation as was then going on, it is not necessary to accurately define the meaning of everything that is said. 'I'm afraid the flowers were too late to be of much use though,' continued Osborne. 'I met Preston the next morning, and of course we talked about the ball. I was sorry to find he had been beforehand with us,

Ah, my friends, that innocent afternoon with Larry provoked me into thought in a way my own dicelife until then never had. Larry took to following the dice with such ease and joy compared to the soul-searching gloom that I often went through before following a decision, that I had to wonder what happened to every human in the two decades between seven and twenty-seven to turn a kitten into a cow. Why did children seem to be so often spontaneous, joy-filled and concentrated while adults seemed controlled, anxiety-filled and diffused? It was the Goddam sense of having a self: that sense of self which psychologists have been proclaiming we all must have. What if - at the time it seemed like an original thought - what if the development of a sense of self is normal and natural, but is neither inevitable nor desirable? What if it represents a psychological appendix: a useless, anachronistic pain in the side? - or, like the mastodon's huge tusks: a heavy, useless and ultimately self-destructive burden? What if the sense of being some-one represents an evolutionary error as disastrous to the further development of a more complex creature as was the shell for snails or turtles? He he he. What if? indeed: men must attempt to eliminate the error and develop in themselves and their children liberation from the sense of self. Man must become comfortable in flowing from one role to another, one set of values to another, one life to another. Men must be free from boundaries, patterns and consistencies in order to be free to think, feel and create in new ways. Men have admired Prometheus and Mars too long; our God must become Proteus. I became tremendously excited with my thoughts: 'Men must become comfortable in flowing from one role to another' - why aren't they? At the age of three or four, children were willing to be either good guys or bad guys, the Americans or the Commies, the students or the fuzz. As the culture molds them, however, each child comes to insist on playing only one set of roles: he must always be a good guy, or, for equally compulsive reasons, a bad guy or rebel. The capacity to play and feel both sets of roles is lost. He has begun to know who he is supposed to be. The sense of permanent self: ah, how psychologists and parents lust to lock their kids into some definable cage. Consistency, patterns, something we can label - that's what we want in our boy. 'Oh, our Johnny always does a beautiful bower movement every morning after breakfast.' 'Billy just loves to read all the time...' 'Isn't Joan sweet? She always likes to let the other person win.' 'Sylvia's so pretty and so grown up; she just loves all the time to dress up.' It seemed to me that a thousand oversimplifications a year betrayed the truths in the child's heart: he knew at one point that he didn't always feel like shitting after breakfast but it gave his Ma a thrill. Billy ached to be out splashing in mud puddles with the other boys, but... Joan wanted to chew the penis off her brother every time he won, but ... And Sylvia daydreamed of a land in which she wouldn’t have to worry about how she looked . . . Patterns are prostitution to the patter of parents. Adults rule and they reward patterns. Patterns it is. And eventual misery. What if we were to bring up our children differently? Reward them for varying their habits, tastes, roles? Reward them for being inconsistent? What then? We could discipline them to be reliably various, to be conscientiously inconsistent, determinedly habit-free - even of 'good' habits.

Tresses of lustrous, snow-white hair tumbled from their cloth-bound imprisonment, streaming like a waterfall down the young woman’s back. In an effort to make his student more at ease, Alexi did his best to appear wholly disinterested as she carefully removed her protections with delicate, private ceremony. But then she turned to face him, clutching those items that had held her unusual features in mystery : glasses, gloves, long scarf. "As you would have it so, Professor, here is your pupil in all her ghastliness." Though Miss Parker's hands clearly trembled, her voice did not. Luminous crystal eyes held streaks of pale blue shooting from tiny black pupils. A face youthful but devoid of color, smooth and unblemished like porcelain, had graceful lines as well-defined and proportioned as a marble statue. Her long, blanched locks shimmered in the candlelight like spider silk. Upon high cheekbones lay hints of rouge : any more would have appeared garish against her blindingly white skin, but she had been artful in her application. Her rosebud lips were tinted in the same manner. "You see, Professor, even you, so stern and stoic, cannot hide your shock, surprise, distaste-" "Distaste ?" he interrupted quietly. "Is that what you see ?

A school-girl may be found in every school who attracts and influences all the others, not by her virtues, nor her beauty, nor her sweetness, nor her cleverness, but by something that can neither be described nor reasoned upon. It is the something alluded to in the old lines:— 'Love me not for comely grace, For my pleasing eye and face; No, nor for my constant heart,— For these may change, and turn to ill, And thus true love may sever. But love me on, and know not why, So hast thou the same reason still To dote upon me ever.' A woman will have this charm, not only over men but over her own sex; it cannot be defined, or rather it is so delicate a mixture of many gifts and qualities that it is impossible to decide on the proportions of each. Perhaps it is incompatible with very high principle; as its essence seems to consist in the most exquisite power of adaptation to varying people and still more various moods; 'being all things to all men.' At any rate, Molly might soon have been aware that Cynthia was not remarkable for unflinching morality; but the glamour thrown over her would have prevented Molly from any attempt at penetrating into and judging her companion's character, even had such processes been the least in accordance with her own disposition.

You risked your own life to save me,” she said. “I won’t forget that.” His face grew expressionless again. “I told you, Becca. You belong to me. I will not let you go until my father is released.” You belong to me. You belong to me. The words echoed in her mind. “I belong to no one but myself,” she said throatily. But deep inside, she wished . . . “You are my captive.” “I could have left you to bleed to death,” she reminded him. “Ahikta. It is true. But my father is old. If I do not save him, he will die. It shames me to use a woman for a weapon, but sometimes a man must do what he must.” “I think I understand that now,” she said. As I must return to a husband that I can never love, as I might have loved this man were we not born mortal enemies. Talon did not speak again, and in a little while he drifted off to sleep. She sat beside him, hands in her lap, gazing at his sleeping face. How alien he is, she thought, and how beautiful. His skin tone was a warm red-bronze, his cheekbones high and prominent. His lips were thin but sensual, his eyes slightly slanted beneath raven-black brows. His forehead was high and broad, his chin and nose ruggedly defined. It was all she could do to keep from touching his face again. She wanted to stroke the smooth lines of his beardless jaw, to trace those fierce arching brows and commit them all to memory.

What do woman say to little boys? " Stop fighting. Stop being so rough. Stop rough housing." They're boys you know, that's kinda what they're sapossed to do. So, men are sapossed to overcome all these biological drives and I'm just really interested in helping women overcome theirs caus' I think the spotlight of " Outgrow your bestial nature." has been pointed just a little bit too long at men and I think it's time to swivel that motherfucker around and point it at woman and say stop making yourself look like fucking sex clowns to milk money out of men's dicks. Stop lying about who you are and what you're about. Stop being flirty, manipulative, and trying to be sexy. Just stop doing it. It's time for women to outgrow biology just as men have been instructed to for about the last 20,000 years to outgrow their biology. "Stop slamming doors. Stop yelling. Stop climbing trees. Stop being rude. Stop farting. Stop enjoying fart jokes. Just stop being men." Ok, Well; women stop being women. Be people. Be people who have sex, absolutely but, don't be caricatures. Don't aim to be like a woman who looks like the outline of some playboy mudflap on a trucker's rig. Just be people. Be sexual. Enjoy your sexuality and bodies but, stop trying to bury us in tits so that we pass out and you can rifle through our bank accounts. Just stop doing that shit. I won't enable it anymore. Why does your face have to look like some half rained on Picasso water color? I don't need rainbows on the face of a woman. I don't need these weird butterfly wing goth eyebrows and shit like that. Male sexuality is demonized and female sexuality is elevated. That's bullshit. Then women wonder why men prefer porn to them. It's caus' porn doesn't nag you for wanting stuff that's defined as "kinky" or "weird". Male sexuality is demonized and held in low esteem. Woman's sexuality is always beautiful. Woman's sexuality is unremitting shallow. I'm not saying men's isn't but, we know that about men, right? What turns women on? Women say confidence. Do you know what that means? Money. Do women say " He is really confident about his sidewalk art. He is really confident about his subway busking. That's such a turn on!" Why do men like looking at naked women and women get turned on looking at clothed men? Because if a man's clothes aren't on you don't know how expensive his wardrobe is. This is what Mohammad Ali said. I'm going to throw on some old jeans and a old t-shirt and I'm just gonna walk down into some little town and find some woman who doesn't know who the hell I am and then when she's fallen in love with me and we get married, I'm going to take her to my million dollar mansion and my yacht. This is the reality. Once you start having money, once you start having power, then the true nature of massive swaths of female sexuality becomes clear.

All men are in some degree impressed by the face of the world; some men even to delight. This love of beauty is Taste. Others have the same love in such excess, that, not content with admiring, they seek to embody it in new forms. The creation of beauty is Art. The production of a work of art throws a light upon the mystery of humanity. A work of art is an abstract or epitome of the world. It is the result or expression of nature, in miniature. For, although the works of nature are innumerable and all different, the result or the expression of them all is similar and single. Nature is a sea of forms radically alike and even unique. A leaf, a sun-beam, a landscape, the ocean, make an analogous impression on the mind. What is common to them all,—that perfectness and harmony, is beauty. The standard of beauty is the entire circuit of natural forms,—the totality of nature; which the Italians expressed by defining beauty "il piu nell' uno." Nothing is quite beautiful alone: nothing but is beautiful in the whole. A single object is only so far beautiful as it suggests this universal grace. The poet, the painter, the sculptor, the musician, the architect, seek each to concentrate this radiance of the world on one point, and each in his several work to satisfy the love of beauty which stimulates him to produce. Thus is Art, a nature passed through the alembic of man. Thus in art, does nature work through the will of a man filled with the beauty of her first works.

We often talk about being kind, but how do we define "kind" at its very root? Where is the root and what is the root of "kind" and "kindness"? I truly believe that kindness is rooted in the acceptance of the flaws of life, the acceptance of the turns life has taken which we couldn't have planned for and that we didn't hope for. Kindness is rooted in the acceptance of the fact that life is a wild thing that cannot ever be caged. Some people are going to get married and divorced seven times before they find the one they are meant to be with; that's okay. Some people are going to be born with disabilities; that's okay. Some people are born in heaven while others are born in hell; both are okay. Some people are born in hell later ending up in heaven while others are born in heaven later ending up in hell; it's all okay. Life, whether belonging to you or to others, is never going to be a painting fitting into your prepared picture frame. How dare we come into this monstrous, joyous, incredible, terrible world, thinking that we can dictate what's wrong and right, what's better and what's lesser? Come into this world with your wings and your claws and your paws and your laughters! With your feathers and your fur! Because you're going to need all of it! And when you look at other people, sometimes they are going to be donning feathers and other times they are going to be clawing things, jumping in and out, screaming or laughing or crying or being quiet; it's all okay. Because we are ALL living with this monstrous and beautiful creature called Life! So, kindness is the realisation of this, the readiness to see this in others, the willingness to embrace everything that happens-- whether it is happening to yourself or to other people. Kindness is waking up to the true and full nature of life, looking her in the eyes, and being ready to embrace her.

It is natural for a man to desire what he reckons better than that which he has already, and be satisfied with nothing which lacks that special quality which he misses. Thus, if it is for her beauty that he loves his wife, he will cast longing eyes after a fairer woman. If he is clad in a rich garment, he will covet a costlier one; and no matter how rich he may be he will envy a man richer than himself. Do we not see people every day, endowed with vast estates, who keep on joining field to field, dreaming of wider boundaries for their lands? Those who dwell in palaces are ever adding house to house, continually building up and tearing down, remodeling and changing. Men in high places are driven by insatiable ambition to clutch at still greater prizes. And nowhere is there any final satisfaction, because nothing there can be defined as absolutely the best or highest. But it is natural that nothing should content a man's desires but the very best, as he reckons it. Is it not, then, mad folly always to be craving for things which can never quiet our longings, much less satisfy them? No matter how many such things one has, he is always lusting after what he has not; never at peace, he sighs for new possessions. Discontented, he spends himself in fruitless toil, and finds only weariness in the evanescent and unreal pleasures of the world. In his greediness, he counts all that he has clutched as nothing in comparison with what is beyond his grasp, and loses all pleasure in his actual possessions by longing after what he has not, yet covets. No man can ever hope to own all things. Even the little one does possess is got only with toil and is held in fear; since each is certain to lose what he hath when God's day, appointed though unrevealed. shall come. But the perverted will struggles towards the ultimate good by devious ways, yearning after satisfaction, yet led astray by vanity and deceived by wickedness. Ah, if you wish to attain to the consummation of all desire, so that nothing unfulfilled will be left, why weary yourself with fruitless efforts, running hither and thither, only to die long before the goal is reached? It is so that these impious ones wander in a circle, longing after something to gratify their yearnings, yet madly rejecting that which alone can bring them to their desired end, not by exhaustion but by attainment. They wear themselves out in vain travail, without reaching their blessed consummation, because they delight in creatures, not in the Creator. They want to traverse creation, trying all things one by one, rather than think of coming to him who is Lord of all. And if their utmost longing were realized, so that they should have all the world for their own, yet without possessing him who is the Author of all being, then the same law of their desires would make them contemn what they had and restlessly seek him whom they still lacked, that is, God himself.

But sleep tha pondereth and is not to be and there oh may my weary spirit dwell apart forms heaven's eternity and yet how far from hell. other friends have flown before on the morrow he will leave me as my hopes have flown before the bird said nevermore. leave my loneliness unbroken. how dark a woe yet how sublimes a hope. And the fever called living is conquered at last. I stand amid the roar of a surf tormented shore and i hold within my hand grains of the golden sand how few yet how they creep through my fingers to the deep while i weep while i weep o god can i not grasp them with a tighter clasp o god can i not save one from the pitiless wave is all that we see or seem but a dream within a dream. Hell rising form a thousand thrones shall do it reverence. It was the dead who groaned within lest the dead who is forsaken may not be happy now. even for thy woes i love thee even for thy woes thy beauty and thy woes think of all that is airy and fairy like and all that is hideous and unwieldy. hast thou not dragged Diana from her car. I care not though it perishes with a thought i then did cherish. For on its wing was dark alley and as it fluttered fell an essence powerful to destroy a soul that knew it well. (Talking about death) the intense reply of hers to our intelligence. Then all motion of whatever nature creates most writers poets in especial prefer having it understood that they compose by a species of fine frenzy an ecstatic intuition and would positively shudder at letting the public take a peep behind the scenes at the elaborate and vacillating crudities of thought at the true purposes seized only at the last moment at the innumerable glimpses of idea that arrived not at the maturity of full view at the fully matured fancies discarded in despair as unmanageable at the cautions selection and rejections at the painful erasures and interpolations in a word at the wheels and pinions the tackle for scene shifting the steep ladders and demon traps the cock[s feathers a the red pain and the black patches which in ninety nine cases out of the hundred constitute the properties of the literary _histiro. Wit the Arabians there is a medium between heaven and hell where men suffer no punishment but yet do not attain that tranquil and even happiness which they supposed to be characteristic of heavenly enjoyment. If i could dwell where israfel hath dwelt and he where i he might not sing so wildly well mortal melody, while a bolder note than this might swell form my lyre within the sky. And i am drunk with love of the dead who is my bride. And so being young and dipt in folly , I feel in love with melancholy. I could not love except where death was mingling his with beauty's breath or hymen, Time, and destiny were stalking between her and me. Yet that terror was not friegt but a tremulous delight a feeling not the jeweled mine could teach or bribe me to define nor love although the love were thine. Whose solitary soul could make an Eden of that dim lake. that my young life were a lasting dream my spirit not awakening till the beam of an eternity should bring the morrow. An idle longing night and day to dream my very life away. As others saw i could not bring my passions from a comman spring from the sam source i have not taken my sorrow and all i loved i loved alone La solitude est une belle chose; mais il faut quelqu'un pour vous dire que la solitude estune belle chose impulse upon the ether the source of all motion is thought and the source of all thought. Be of heart and fear nothing your allotted days of stupor have expired and tomorrow i will myself induct you into the full joys and wonders of your novel existence. unknown now known of the speculative future merged in the august and certain present.

We were driving up to Palos Verdes from Long Beach after a day of second grade. I was eight years old. I had written, illustrated, and turned in a story that required my grandmother’s presence at school, a substitution for my mother who was always at work. We met with Sister Mary, the principal, and Sister Bernadette, the nice one, and the school nurse. As we drove home, my grandmother asked me to read the offending piece aloud. In the story, it is an October night. Five girls are invited to a slumber party. Each girl has a defining characteristic: one of them is sporty, one is brainy, one is shy, one of them is the most beautiful and the leader. One of them is the orphan. During the slumber party the girls play with a Ouija board and detect the existence of spirits. They perform a séance to entreat the spirits to come closer. They perform “Light as a Feather, Stiff as a Board,” lifting the Orphan with their fingertips because she is the smallest. All the lights go out and she ascends toward the ceiling. They are successful. The Orphan drops down to the floor, unconscious. She wakes up and realizes that she is not alone. She has been possessed by an evil spirit, her twin who died when they were in the womb. The Evil Twin begins to twist her thoughts, then her words. The Orphan knows it will make her do awful things, turn her into someone she doesn’t want to be. She goes to the kitchen, where the mother of one of the girls is cooking. The Evil Twin tells her to pick up a knife. The Orphan picks it up. The Evil Twin tells her to use the knife to kill the mother, then her friends. The Orphan stabs herself in the chest instead. The End, I said. I watched for my grandmother’s reaction. From this vantage point it doesn’t take a psychologist to see how terrified I was by what might seize me. There was already a split in me: disorder, abandonment. I leaned into the gothic to illustrate what I couldn’t articulate. At eight years old, I unconsciously understood the function of symbols. I mimicked my favorite writer, Poe, but with this story I had taken the perilous and grandiose first step of making it my own. Did I already know that art could make sense of madness? Did my grandmother? Her navy Cadillac was at a stoplight. There was a Pavilions supermarket behind her, a row of eucalyptus trees, an air-conditioned stream through the car that made my nose run. She looked at me, so directly I flinched, and she said, Never stop writing.

This dress was a tube of finely pleated silk, each pleat as fine as a harp string... driven by an urge she didnt question, she quickly shed her clothes and slipped the dress over her head. Knotting the belt around her waist, she went to the mirror. Her reflection stunned her. The natural elasticity of the pleats defined her curves molding like rows of vines to the contours of the land... Shauna stared at her face before her, growing leaner and far more beautiful. Unable to blink or move, she felt an unbearable sadness swinging through her. Tears began to course down her cheeks. Where did this grief come from? ... It came from a cause more terrible and one without remedy. The woman in the mirror flared her airs back at her in desperate appeal.

burned the memo that defined selflessness as the pinnacle of womanhood, but first I forgave myself for believing that lie for so long. I had abandoned myself out of love. They’d convinced me that the best way for a woman to love her partner, family, and community was to lose herself in service to them. In my desire to be of service, I did myself and the world a great disservice. I’ve seen what happens out in the world and inside our relationships when women stay numb, obedient, quiet, and small. Selfless women make for an efficient society but not a beautiful, true, or just one. When women lose themselves, the world loses its way. We do not need more selfless women. What we need right now is more women who have detoxed themselves so completely from the world’s expectations that they are full of nothing but themselves. What we need are women who are full of themselves. A woman who is full of herself knows and trusts herself enough to say and do what must be done. She lets the rest burn.

It dawns on me when she laughs, the warmth in her voice sounding so familiar that my attraction to Sunny isn’t just about her body, her age, her innocence but how she makes every goddamn cell in my body come to life. She defines me, accepts me, sees me, and I swear to Christ, it fucking feels like love. And it scares the ever-loving piss out of me.

I look at the augusteum and I think that perhaps my life has not actually been so chaotic after all it is merely this world that is chaotic b ringing changes to us all threat nobody could have anticipated. The augusteum warns me not to get attached to any obsolete ideas about who i am what i represent whom i belong to or what function I may once have intended to serve. Yesterday i might have been a glorious monument to somebody, true enough but tomorrow i could be a firework's depository, even in the eternal city says the silent augusteum . one must always be prepared for riotous and endless waves of transformation. pizzaeria da michele Passato remoto In her world the roman forum is not remote nor is it past. It is exactly as present and close to her as i am. The bhagavata Gita that ancient Indian yogic test says that it is better to live your own destiny imperfectly than to live an imitation of somebody else's life with perfection. So now i have started living my own life, perfected clumsy as it may look it is resembling me now thoroughly. It was in a bathtub back in new York reading Italian words aloud from a dictionary that i first started mending my soul. My life had gone to bits, and I was so unrecognizable to myself that i probably couldn't have picked me out of a police lineup. But i felt a glimmer of happiness when i started studying Italian, and when you sense a faint potentiality for happiness after such dark times you must grip onto the ankles of that happiness and not let go until it drags you face first out of the dirt this is not selfishness but obligation you were given life it is your duty and also your entitlement as a human being to find somehtign beautiful within life no mattter how slight But i do know that i have collected me of late through the enjoyment of harmless pleasures into somebody much more intact . I have e put on weight I exist more now than i did four months ago. I will leave Italy noticeably bigger than when i arrived here. And i will leave with the hope that the expansion of one person the magnification of one life is indeed an act of worth in this world, Even if that life, just this one time, happens to be nobody s but my own . Hatha yoga one limb of the philosophy the ancients developed these physical stretches not for personal fitness but to loosen up their muscles and minds in order to prepare them for meditation, Yoga can also mean trying to find God through meditation through scholarly study. The yogic path is about disentangling the built-in glitches of the human condition which i[m going to very simply define here as the heartbreaking inability to sustain contentment. Taoists call it imbalance Buddhism calls it ignorance Islam blames our misery on rebellion against god and the jedio Christian tradition attributes all our suffering to original sin, Graduands say that unhappiness is that inevitable result of the clash between our natural drives and civilization needs and my friend Deborah the psychologist explains it desire is the design flaw the yogis however say that human discontentment is a simple case of mistaken identity we're miserable because we think that we are mere individuals alone with our fears and flaws an d resentment sand mortality we wrongly believe that our limited little egos constitute our whole entire nature, We have failed to recognize our deeper divine character we don't realize that somewhere within us all there does exist a supreme self is our true identity universal and divine . you bear God within your poor wretch and know it not.

Who is who? In the silence that sinks into you, In the seclusion that excludes you, You begin to realise without her you are not you, And you begin to believe in her more than you do in you, Wherever you might be, her thoughts seem stubbornly pervasive, And in this state of her pervasiveness you let her memories become invasive, And now you are no more you and this happens to you in phases successive, Now everything appears yonder and so inconclusive, But you love her because now she is a part of you, You exist in her and not in you, Even your heart revolts as it begins to beat for her and not for you, You no longer exist in days or months, you just exist in moments where you wonder without her what are you? In life everything seems pertinent because you have evolved into a poker face, Because no matter how hard you try, in the mirror, in your own reflection you see her face, A sort of a purgatory for true lover’s face, Where through some intermediary grace you now kiss her face, Because now it is difficult to tell who is who, Whether it is you, it is her, and you wonder who can tell; who? After struggling to define who is who, You let her face, her memories, her feelings, her heart beats define you. Because this is who you are, the real you! So let me love you Irma with this poker face, And see if you can find the grace in this superimposed face, And when million reflections are cast in the mirror of life let me see if you can identify the face, That loved you for your beautiful heart and your inward grace!

Only with her - PART I Dealing with estranged feelings and the heart’s missing heart beats, Feels like a world that its horizon never meets, It maybe what one experiences in the moment of continuous disbelief, Because without her the mind finds no solace and the heart fails to play the symphonies of relief, As the estrangement grows and the feeling deepens in those prolonged spells of darkness, The night grows over the mind eclipsing its every thought with a slight crassness, Where it feels abandoned by the heart, because it seems to beat only for those estranged feelings, And ah the herculean effort for the mind to nurture the heart’s darling seedlings, From where the heart grows reasons to keep throbbing, and every flexing of muscle seems to be a harbinger of new emotional outage, And it somehow always convinces the mind not to let her feelings be cast into scrappage, The heart, the poor beating heart, suffers from this expensive essentialism, To sustain her estranged feelings in its love chambers and in the mind’s thoughts, despite their widening chasm, But the heart loves her unconditionally, and the mind too finally gives in to the heart’s will voluntarily, And now the heart beats for her softly as the mind once again begins to think of her so lovingly, Now both the mind and the heart deal with a different reality, That of establishing her memories, her feelings as the principal deity, But who shall hold her entirely? Because the heart loves her deeply and now the mind too loves her no less, And in their strife; I, who owns them both, has to deal with a new kind of stress, And I only care less, because in their desire to love her forever, the heart will beat endlessly and the mind will think of her ceaselessly, While I collate the extract of their feelings about her, and I live everyday in her thoughts fearlessly, And the mystery grows deeper, that who loves who, they love her, I love her too, and they know, But without them I cannot love her, and without me they cannot exist, this is a reality we all know, However, the desire to love someone so beautiful has made them my foe, and my willingness to keep living for her, Has encouraged them to exploit my weakness, that to always live loving her, As long as the heart beats, the mind doesn't mind, and as long as my mind only her thoughts creates, I too do not mind, Living in a body, where my own heart only beats for her, my mind only thinks about her, while I am busy living for her with feelings well defined, CONTINUED IN PART II.........

Only with her - PART I Dealing with estranged feelings and the heart’s missing heart beats, Feels like a world that its horizon never meets, It maybe what one experiences in the moment of continuous disbelief, Because without her the mind finds no solace and the heart fails to play the symphonies of relief, As the estrangement grows and the feeling deepens in those prolonged spells of darkness, The night grows over the mind eclipsing its every thought with a slight crassness, Where it feels abandoned by the heart, because it seems to beat only for those estranged feelings, And ah the herculean effort for the mind to nurture the heart’s darling seedlings, From where the heart grows reasons to keep throbbing, and every flexing of muscle seems to be a harbinger of new suffrage, And it somehow always convinces the mind not to let her feelings be cast into scrappage, The heart, the poor beating heart, suffers from this expensive essentialism, To sustain her estranged feelings in its love chambers and in the mind’s thoughts, despite their widening chasm, But the heart loves her unconditionally, and the mind too finally gives in to the heart’s will voluntarily, And now the heart beats for her softly as the mind once again begins to think of her so lovingly, Now both the mind and the heart deal with a different reality, That of establishing her memories, her feelings as the principal deity, But who shall hold her entirely? Because the heart loves her deeply and now the mind too loves her no less, And in their strife; I, who owns them both, has to deal with a new kind of stress, And I only care less, because in their desire to love her forever, the heart will beat endlessly and the mind will think of her ceaselessly, While I collate the extract of their feelings about her, and I live everyday in her thoughts fearlessly, And the mystery grows deeper, that who loves who, they love her, I love her too, and they know, But without them I cannot love her, and without me they cannot exist, this is a reality we all know, However, the desire to love someone so beautiful has made them my foe, and my willingness to keep living for her, Has encouraged them to exploit my weakness, that to always live loving her, As long as the heart beats, the mind doesn't mind, and as long as my mind only her thoughts creates, I too do not mind, Living in a body, where my own heart only beats for her, my mind only thinks about her, while I am busy living for her with feelings well defined, Continued in part II........

Beauty lies within ourselves. It grows as we further love ourselves. It isn't defined by the clothes we don or the shape of our bodies. A succubus can be slim or curvy and yet command a room to all look her way. She has that ability from her walk to the way she smiles with pure confidence.

Your scars don’t define how beautiful you are.” Slowly her eyes open, locking on mine. “They define how fucking strong you are. Never doubt for a second you’re anything less than perfect to me. To us.

An Eden’s Girl is every man’s deepest, darkest fantasy. She’s soft and beautiful and unique. She’s real, with real flaws, scars, and curves. An Eden’s Girl creates her own definition of beautiful. She’s not defined by her femininity, she defines it. Strong. Independent. Entertaining. Intelligent. Secretive.

In her memoir, Expecting Adam, Martha Beck writes, “If you’ll cast your mind back to high school biology, you may remember that a species is defined, in part, by the number of chromosomes in every individual. Adam’s extra chromosome makes him as dissimilar from me as a mule is from a donkey. Adam doesn’t just do less than a ‘normal’ child his age might; he does different things. He has different priorities, different tastes, different insights.” Beck writes of the transformations her son has wrought in her own life. “The immediacy and joy with which he lives his life make rapacious achievement, Harvard-style, look a lot like quiet desperation. Adam has slowed me down to the point where I notice what is in front of me, its mystery and beauty, instead of thrashing my way through a maze of difficult requirements toward labels and achievements that contain no joy in themselves.” Children with Down syndrome tend to retain what the experts call babyfaceness. These children have “a small, concave nose with a sunken bridge, smaller features, larger forehead and shorter chin, and fuller cheeks and rounder chin, resulting in a rounder face.” A recent study found that both the register in which parents speak to their DS child and the variances in pitch resembled the voice patterns parents use to speak to infants and young children.

Question the Fairytale What if Cinderella had an attitude problem and Snow White just liked the idea of strangers and poisons too much? What if the Little Mermaid always enjoyed human company more than her own kind’s and Sleeping Beauty just liked her solitude more than human touch? What if the only rabbit hole Alice ever fell down was a terrible mistake with an awful substance, never discussed as such? What if they locked Wendy away for hallucinating about Neverland and a boy who never grew up? What if fairytales aren’t as innocent as they sound and even princesses aren’t perfect? What if I told you that your damage doesn’t define you and the way you survive is no one else’s damned business?

Let my heart and mind The heart loves, The mind thinks, The heart wants to believe in what it loves, But the mind denies to feel before it thinks, The day brings her forth in beauty’s all possible forms, The night hides her from the eyes desperate to see her, Then the mind creates her in all known and felt forms, While the heart begins to only beat for her, The pulse of life seeks her in everything, While the fear of death scares the mind, But the heart is busy creating her life’s impressions in everything, So that when the mind dies, it loves her with its own mind, But neither the heart nor the mind bother to consult me, For the mind believes what it thinks and the heart believes only what it feels, And my mind constantly thinks of her, my heart only loves to feel her, and ah what a joy they both bring to me, Because only when my heart is loving her, my mind the true pulse of life feels, So I finally get to know the heart in love, My mind that loves to think only her thoughts, And finally I allow my heart to be the heart of love, And my mind the mind of loving thoughts, Her thoughts, her love, her feelings, her everything, Until I lose every sense that defines me, Because now just like my heart, wherever I might be, I only see her in everything, Even her sensation now fills a major part of me, And finally I manage to give all these feelings a name, That always feels and sounds the same, She, her beauty, her feelings and her name, The world around me has not evolved, but certainly has changed, but her feeling and my love for her remain the same, So my love Irma, let my heart feel you long enough, For it loves beating for you, Let my mind think of you long enough, For I love it, when it only thinks of you!

Let my heart and mind The heart loves, The mind thinks, The heart wants to believe in what it loves, But the mind denies to feel before it thinks, The day brings her forth in beauty’s all possible forms, The night hides her from the eyes desperate to see her, Then the mind creates her in all known and felt forms, While the heart begins to only beat for her, The pulse of life seeks her in everything, While the fear of death scares the mind, But the heart is busy creating her life’s impressions in everything, So that when the mind dies, it loves her with its own mind, But neither the heart nor the mind bother to consult me, For the mind believes what it thinks and the heart believes only what it feels, And my mind constantly thinks of her, my heart only loves to feel her, and ah what a joy they both bring to me, Because only when my heart is loving her, my mind the true pulse of life feels, So I finally get to know the heart in love, My mind that loves to think only her thoughts, And finally I allow my heart to be the heart of love, And my mind the mind of loving thoughts, Her thoughts, her love, her feelings, her everything, Until I lose every sense that defines me, Because now just like my heart, wherever I might be, I only see her in everything, Even her sensation now fills a major part of me, And finally I manage to give all these feelings a name, That always feels and sounds the same, She, her beauty, her feelings and her name, The world around me has not evolved, but it certainly has changed, but her feeling and my love for her remain the same, So my love Irma, let my heart feel you long enough, For it loves beating for you, Let my mind think of you long enough, For I love it, when it only thinks of you!

Botox" In a friendly exchange with a shopper in a grocery story line, she joyfully declared: “Today is my 50th birthday!” I said, “It looks like the hands of Time have touched your face gently. Happy birthday!” “The hands of Time weren’t gentle on me, my dear. What you see are the wonders of botox,” she said. “They say it freezes face features and expressions. Is that true?” I inquired half-jokingly. “At this stage of my life, it makes no difference. I no longer need any expressions. There is nothing worth smiling for or frowning upon. I spent decades expressing in every physical and verbal way possible, all in vain,” she said. Her words were followed by a hopeless giggle that reminded me of the philosopher who wrote that as we advance in age, our fears are replaced with giggles. She then continued, “There is a time when you discover that all verbal and physical expressions are futile. In everyone’s life, there’s one defining event that freezes everything in their lives. Anything that happens after that event is no more than desperate and hopeless attempts to pretend that we are okay.” Before I managed to find the appropriate words, the cashier called on her. The timing was ideal as words froze on my tongue just like the botox freezes features and expression in a world in which words and expressions are of no use anymore. [Original text published in Arabic on October 14, 2024 at ahewar.org]

Amnon went with it. When his half sister came in to cook for him, he said to her, “Tell the servants we won’t be needing them this evening.” Then he instructed her to come to the bedroom and feed him the bread. What happened next is heartbreaking. He pushed the food aside and declared what was on his mind. She resisted. She pled for him to think about what he was doing, to think about the disgrace it would inflict upon her and his own reputation. The Bible says, “But he refused to listen to her, and since he was stronger than she, he raped her” (2 Samuel 13:14). Tamar did what the people of her time did to demonstrate great mourning and suffering. She put ashes on her head and tore the beautiful robe she was wearing. These actions also symbolized her loss of virginity. She left weeping and broken. Amnon’s sexual sin brought incredible destruction and devastation, not just upon his family but on the entire nation. The disruption to a royal family means disruption to a country. Everything spiraled wildly out of control.

His voice had a rough note to it as he said, “Tienes una chocha tan linda.” “What?” she mumbled behind her gag. “I said you have a beautiful pussy. And it is. Do you want me to suck on that pretty pussy?” She nodded vigorously and drew in a deep breath of anticipation as he rolled her over to her front. “If I untie your hands, do you promise to behave?” Giving him a pleading look she nodded again. “If you’re a bad girl I’ll just tie you up again and continue teasing you.” She tried to keep from glaring at him, but he must have noticed because he chuckled as he unbound her hands. <...>She smiled at him, feeling too good to fight. “I do.” He laughed and cuddled her close, his dick jumping inside of her when she involuntarily squeezed him. “Good God, woman, you’re going to kill me.” A giggle escaped her and she wondered at the light, happy sound. “Stop being such a whiner.” ''Mmm, feisty,” he gave her neck a sharp nip. “I like it.” “You won’t like it when I kill you for letting her touch you,” she grumped, but cuddled closer. “Why do you love me?” “Fishing for compliments?” she teased. “No…I just want to know why so I can keep doing whatever it is that makes you love me.” “Oh, baby,” she lifted her head to kiss his chin, the note of vulnerability in his voice touching her deeply. “Just be you. You’re the man I fell in love with. All of you. The UFC fighter, the businessman, the asshole—” “Hey now.” She shook her head against his chest. “Admit it, you can be an asshole.” “I plead the fifth.” “All of you,” she continued. “I love all of you.” He made a pleased sound and began to move inside of her again. The man must be snacking on Viagra because he seemed to have a permanent hard-on. His voice had a teasing tone as he said, “Do you love my dick?” Warm tingles raced through her and she licked at the slightly salty skin of his chest. “It’s one of my favorite parts.” “Hmmm, what are your other favorite parts?” Once again she wondered if he was fishing for compliments, but it occurred to her that he’d dated woman who always wanted something from him, not Dallas himself. “I love your lips because they kiss me, your hands because they touch me, but most of all I love your mind and your heart because they define who you are, a strong, smart, and compassionate man. My man.” His grunt made her smile as she continued to kiss her way across his chest as he moved slowly inside of her, a constant stroke that made her want to moan with pleasure. “My Amanda.” Kissing her way up to his lips, she whispered against his mouth, “Love you.” “Love you too, mi querida.

She had magnificent eyes to go with that hair, and a rather strong nose. The nose suited her, as did the defined jaw and chin. As his pen moved over the paper, he watched the image taking form on the page. Magdalene Windham was beautiful. Not in the pale, mousey English mold, but in an earthier, more dramatic way. Her brows and lashes were darker than her hair, and having held her in his arms he could attest to a few freckles across her nose and on her shoulders. Just a few. They made a man want to kiss… He tossed the pen down, for he’d drawn the woman not in her ballroom attire but as he’d seen her previously, with her hair tumbling down, her eyes alit with mischief as she prepared to stab him with his lapel pin. A

His breath halted as he stared at her. Why hadn't he seen it before? The woman in his carriage, the one who'd emerged from his carriage like a Botticelli Venus, was beautiful. Not in the way Cassandra had been beautiful, with glittering eyes and full, red lips. Cassandra's blond beauty might have faded in time, become handsomeness instead. This woman's beauty was simple; well-defined cheekbones, a high forehead, slender nose, and stubborn chin. As the years passed she might grow even more attractive. He suspected that her laugh would captivate, just as her tears would act like a razor to whomever brought them forth. Her smile had already charmed him, and now her silence incited his curiosity. Not about who she was and why she was here, but about more. Who was the woman behind the smile?

As author Shauna Niequist describes in her book Cold Tangerines, it takes a kind of courage to choose the genre of your own story: When you realize that the story of your life could be told a thousand different ways, that you could tell it over and over as a tragedy, but you choose to call it an epic, that’s when you start to learn what celebration is. When what you see in front of you is so far outside of what you dreamed, but you have the belief, the boldness, the courage to call it beautiful instead of calling it wrong, that’s celebration.31 When you are the author of your own life, you get to decide what makes it into your story—what defines you and drives you and paints the scenes of your existence. And through your actions and your reactions, you also get to decide what scenes don’t make the cut.

Each day, Shukumar noticed, her beauty, which had once overwhelmed him, seemed to fade. The cosmetics that had seemed superfluous were necessary now, not to improve her but to define her somehow.

EUPHORIA   Holding her in my arms makes me feel young and makes me feel old. Here there is no question as to how strong our love is and always will be. Reaching for her face, both my hands now caress her above the eyes before drawing a single finger down the side of her face in close examination of her perfect beauty. She now takes each breath in congruence to my every touch. Holding her close to me I follow the main artery reaching up into her brain cavity, ever so gently grabbing a hold of her shape with each amalgamating crimp of my lip’s kiss. Her honeyed lips now overlap in a mesmerizing sequence of twists and turns defining all of nature within this gravitating romance. Beautifully naked in a sciatic squirm of innate belonging her igneous hourglass-like figure curls up against mine in a deliquescent manner formulating the equilibrium of our edifying.   She woos me with her altruism and her childlike glow. Gliding over the emollient ewer of her extricating kiss our hearts conjoin in this luminescent rectitude of irrepressible euphoria. Sketching down her solar plexus by my touch abreast we bask in the bounteous espy of everlasting jubilance. When we kiss it’s as if we are dancing in the serene existence of Mother Nature’s melody. Her slender arms and hands revolve around my face and shoulders with an enchanting gentleness like gracious fireflies gleaming against the starry dusk of a fervid fantasia. Intertwined within the gradient of our love’s desiderated gavotte her second nature becomes aware of herself in me–and I in her.

She was beautiful in a neutral way, emitting no light, defining herself in terms of attrition, a skinny thing, near blond, far beyond recall from the hard-edged rhythms of her life, Southwestern woman, hard to remember and forget. She went on tour with the band and we lived together in houses, motels and apartments, Bucky and Opel, rarely minus an entourage, the beds piled high with androgynous debris. There was never a moment between us that did not measure the extent of our true connection. To go harder, take more, die first. But before it could happen, Opel began her travel to timeless lands.

People in books were always so charming, and all their thoughts and actions so comprehensible. They all invariably had a clear, well-defined object in life, and strove through a few hundred engrossing pages to attain this object. They were all noble and generous, and their lives were bright and beautiful. What interesting and delightful moments Irene had passed in their society! They had made her laugh and cry and suffer and rejoice, and had entertained her with the brilliancy of their wit. How dull and colourless real people had appeared beside these heroes and heroines of fiction.

The Light Fae. As a race, they were supposed to be all about good and decency, but there wasn’t a shred of either emotion within the walls of Usaeil’s castle. Neve observed Talin examining everything around him – from the castle, the Fae walking outside, the trees, and even the sky. His pale silver eyes missed nothing. She wondered what he saw, and how he catalogued things. His long, black hair had the barest hint of a wave to it as it hung to the shoulders of his pale blue shirt. He shoved one side behind an ear and tilted his head as if listening. She didn’t think he realized she was still beside him, not that she minded. It gave her a chance to fill her gaze with his sharply chiseled features. The hard planes of his jaw and chin were in direct contrast to his wide lips and thick eyelashes. It was difficult to look at Talin and notice anything but those beautiful eyes. Except when she did look down, she saw a body that made her hands itch to touch him. His shirt barely contained wide shoulders that tapered to narrow hips where navy pants encased his legs. Every muscle was honed and defined. As eye-catching as Talin’s personal package was, it didn’t hold a candle to what drew her interest – his bearing. The way he stood, walked, talked. In a castle full of Light who believed themselves above others, the only one who had the attitude and demeanor to carry it off was Talin.

A real woman will embrace her beauty, modesty, she is not defined by appearance nor exposure of private body parts to impress a public pole opinion. Her confidence is measured by brain not clothing".

Human beings in the globe are so caught up with proving their worth to others whether it's through physical beauty, financial successes or achievements that many people become so consumed with hatred when they are not given respect. It is wise that although people do it on a daily basis, never let anyone define you or have low self-esteem if you feel rejected or ostracized. Learn to ignore people because truly they're insignificant. Although the world is extremely evil, you don't need to take out yourself or anybody else who hurt or mocked you. If you were/are in a relationship and that person cheated on you or left you when you were so accustomed to him/her, learn to be strong and never look back. They are and never were worth it.

Since her separation she had slowly, cautiously--perhaps even unconsciously--performed a kind of striptease, unpeeling the veils of convention which had surrounded her. During the 1980s she had been defined only by her fashions, seen merely as a glamorous clothes horse, a royal adjunct, a wife and mother. Since the separation, however, her regal wardrobe, which defined her royal mystique, had been left in the closet. Indeed, her decision, inspired by Prince William, to hold an auction of her royal wardrobe for Aids charities in New York in the summer of 1997 was a very public farewell to that old life. She no longer wanted to be seen as just a beautiful model for expensive clothes. Moreover, during her days as a semi-detached royal she had deliberately stripped away other trappings of monarchy, her servants, her ladies-in-waiting, her limousines and, most controversially, her bodyguards. The casting off of her royal title was one giant step on that journey. She had spent much time grieving a failed relationship, lost hopes and broken ambitions. She had once said: ‘I had so many dreams as a young girl. I hoped for a husband to look after me, he would be a father figure to me, he would support me, encourage me, say “Well done” or “That wasn’t good enough”. I didn’t get any of that. I couldn’t believe it.’ The days of betrayal, anguish and hurt lay in the past. Now it was time to move on, to make the most of her position and her personality. Opportunity beckoned. As the Princess admitted: ‘I have learned much over the last years. From now on I am going to own myself and be true to myself. I no longer want to live someone else’s idea of what and who I should be.’ ‘I am going to be me.

Do you want to go out with me?” he asks. He looks surprised by his own question, and I assume he wants to take it back. But he doesn’t. He just looks at me expectantly. “Define out?” I say. He grins. “You and me on a date.” He doesn’t have a car, and he just got out of prison. A date might be kind of difficult. But I can’t say that. I’ll hurt his feelings. “What kind of date?” I ask instead. “The kind where you and I spend some time together,” he says with a shrug. “We’re doing that now,” I inform him. “Well, damn,” he sings. “You’re right.” He looks around at the horses. “Next time, remind me to take you someplace nicer.” I laugh. He smiles at me. “That’s a beautiful sound,” he says quietly. I look at Tequila and pat her behind. “Did you pass gas, girl?” I ask. I grin at him. “Sorry, but she can be kind of noisy.” He smiles and rubs his chin. I bet it’s scratchy under his fingertips, and if I were another person, I would want to touch it to find out. “And she’s funny, too,” he says under his breath.

Pinned shoulder to shoulder, t-shirts extended in lines, The power of expression, is what "THE CLOTHESLINE" defines. Although each color symbolic, the threads weave the same, Each shirt a picture of violence, each shirt a witness to pain. The color white a memorial, for a victim who died, Simply, because of her gender, precious life was denied. Yellow signifies a victim, embraced by batter and assault, When intimacy turned into violence, as if loving was a fault. Shades of pink, red, and orange - when passion turned into rape, Denied the right to say "NO", by either stranger, or date. The blue and green bear nightmares, when a child of incest and misuse Was forced not to tell the "SECRETS", endured from physical and sexual abuse. See the beautiful shades of lavender, to the one not afraid to voice, A different sexual orientation, condemned, when in public made the choice. In the beginning they first choose the color, then allowing pain to flow from inside, Using buttons, bows, paints, and prose, self-expression no longer denied. As you walk through the line of color, emotional pain may fill your heart, But to the victim this personal creation, permits an inner healing to start. Pinned shoulder to shoulder, t-shirts extended in lines, The power of expression, is what "THE CLOTHESLINE" defines.

Why are you so eager, anyway? We just met this girl—this Kat. What makes her so special that you’re already thinking of claiming her?” Lock ran a hand through his dark blond hair. “Because she is, as you said, gorgeous. But it isn’t just that—she’s special, Deep. Couldn’t you feel it when you spoke to her?” “I didn’t feel a damn thing and there’s no way you could have either,” Deep growled. “Our minds aren’t even aligned with hers—we haven’t shared a single dream.” “But we could.” Lock glared at his twin in frustration. Deep had always been a pessimist, but ever since Miranda he’d closed himself off almost entirely. It was like he thought if he didn’t allow himself to feel anything he could never be hurt again. “Kat has potential,” he told his twin. “If you don’t scare her off, that is.” Deep narrowed his eyes. “Define potential.” “She’s beautiful, single, and she can stand up to you. The way she slapped you when you scented her…” Lock shook his head, laughing softly. “If that’s not potential, I don’t know what is.” “She does have spirit, I’ll give you that.” Deep smiled grudgingly and Lock felt something loosen in his heart. He seldom saw a genuine smile on his twin’s face anymore. “But Brother,” Deep continued, “If you don’t want to scare her off, you shouldn’t have agreed to let her act as our focus. If there’s anything more frightening than having two males inside her body, it would have to be having two males inside her mind. She’ll have to have a will of iron to withstand our joining.” Lock nodded, feeling troubled. “You’re right. But you saw her, Deep—she wouldn’t be denied.” He went and dropped down onto the extra long couch which was standard for all Twin Kindred suites. “And she’s right—she may make the difference between finding Sylvan in time or losing him and the Earth female he was with forever.” “True.” Deep seated himself beside his twin and put an arm over the other man’s shoulders in a rare gesture of affection. “Take heart, Brother. If she survives the joining and still comes back for more, I’ll admit she has potential.” “Very

Deciphering through the gray" - a quote from my book, It's Just Broken, but it describes me completely. Lavina pronounced La-Vine-A and means strong and beautiful. Took me a while to grow into that name, but now, like it is time for my book to discover her wings, it's time for me to as well. English teacher, my definition for fourteen years, is moving aside, and WRITER is the new black and white of defining Lavina Bond.