Depths Of Winter Quotes

In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.

When you have once seen the glow of happiness on the face of a beloved person, you know that a man can have no vocation but to awaken that light on the faces surrounding him. In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.

Lonely people have enthusiasms which cannot always be explained. When something strikes them as funny, the intensity and length of their laughter mirrors the depth of their loneliness, and they are capable of laughing like hyenas. When something touches their emotions, it runs through them like Paul Revere, awakening feelings that gather into great armies.

I am not delicate. I am skinny dipping at 2am; I am dancing naked under the full moon and playing in the mud. I am the reverberating echoes of a curse word ricocheting off the steeply sloping mountain you thought I couldn’t climb; I am bare skin in the deepest depths of winter; I am the song of courage, and the melody of freedom you long to sing. I am a fearless mother. I am a passionate lover; a devoted friend. I am the healer, the witch, the nurturing of your wounds. I am the heat of a wildfire, the rage of a storm. I am strong. Delicate things are pretty-cute, even. But I am not delicate. I am wild, fierce and unpredictable. I am breathtaking. I am beautiful. I am sacred.

I miss you like the sun misses the flowers, like the sun misses the flowers in the depths of winter, instead of beauty to direct it's light to, the heart hardens like the frozen world which your absence has banished me to.

He seemed a part of the mute melancholy landscape, an incarnation of it's frozen woe, with all that was warm and sentient in him fast bound below the surface; but there was nothing nothing unfriendly in his silence. I simply felt that he lived in a depth of moral isolation too remote for casual access, and I had the sense that his loneliness was not merely the result of his personal plight, tragic as I guessed that to be, but had in it, as Harmon Gow had hinted, the profound accumulated cold of many Starkfield winters.

I-I’m not making advances,” she told him as she flattened herself against his chest. “You’re just an available s-source of heat.” “So you say,” St. Vincent replied lazily, tucking the quilt more tightly around them both. “However, during the past quarter hour you’ve been fondling parts of my anatomy that no one’s ever dared to touch before.” “I v-very much doubt that.” She burrowed even further into the depths of his coat, and added in a muffled voice, “You’ve probably been h-handled more than a hamper at Fortnum and Mason.

For all the environmental troubles single-use shopping bags cause, the much greater impacts are in what they contain. reducing the human footprint means addressing fundamentally unsustainable habits of food consumption, such as expecting strawberries in the depths of winter or buying of seafood that are being fished to the brink of extinction.

No, solitude did not trouble her. She could spend long minutes gazing out the window, hours listening to the BBC on the public radio station. She relished the very texture of her privacy, its depth of space and freedom, much of an entire day hers alone.

But only a person in the depths of despair neglected to look beyond winter to the spring that inevitably followed, bringing back color and life and hope.

Deep silence fell about the little camp, planted there so audaciously in the jaws of the wilderness. The lake gleamed like a sheet of black glass beneath the stars. The cold air pricked. In the draughts of night that poured their silent tide from the depths of the forest, with messages from distant ridges and from lakes just beginning to freeze, there lay already the faint, bleak odors of coming winter. ("The Wendigo")

Let it be told to the future world that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive, that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet it.

I half expected to hear that stupid cackling laugh again, but there was just the fluttering of new leaves blowing in the cooler breeze. The sunken moon sat on the cosmic ledge like a judge sentencing me to doom. In the bright moonlight, I felt the depth of my ineptitude. To throw off my rage at the world, at myself, I picked up a rock and chucked it across the field, and then I went back home.

What is the meaning of life?” “Snow will only appear during winter,” he said quietly, “and can only exist in the cold wind. Therefore, its life exists only during the depths of winter.” He pulled his hand back into the carriage and held it next to the copper oven. The snow began to melt, turning into water, which flowed through the creases of his palm. “Snow can only live in the winter. When it nears a fire, it dies. That is its life. It may yearn for summer, but… it can only desire it. In my hand, the snow becomes water, because this is not its world….

He thinks about how, whatever being alive is, with all its pasts and presents and futures, it is most itself in the moments when you surface from a depth of numbness or forgetfulness that you didn't even know you were at, and break the surface.

Nothing but water -- an ever-moving swell; nothing but waves, swiftly forming and instantly dying; nothing but depths; dark, fathomless depths; and nothing but sky, scudding white clouds, puffy and intangible. This was the living world, nothing besides, nothing else but sea. No winter or summer, no hills or ravines.

The song matches my malaise, and in spite of the heat and the brightness radiating from outside, I could be in the darkest depths of winter, with rain thundering against fragile glass panes.

I am sitting down to write in a state of some confusion; I have been reading a lot of different things that are merging into one another, and if one hopes to find a solution for oneself by this kind of reading, one is mistaken; one comes up against a wall, and cannot proceed. Your life is so very different, dearest. Except in relation to your fellow men, have you ever known uncertainty? Have you ever observed how, within yourself and independent of other people, diverse possibilities open up in several directions, thereby actually creating a ban on your every movement? Have you ever, without giving the slightest thought to anyone else, been in despair simply about yourself? Desperate enough to throw yourself on the ground and remain there beyond the Day of Judgment? How devout are you? You go to the synagogue; but I dare say you have not been recently. And what is it that sustains you, the idea of Judaism or of God? Are you aware, and this is the most important thing, of a continuous relationship between yourself and a reassuringly distant, if possibly infinite height or depth? He who feels this continuously has no need to roam about like a lost dog, mutely gazing around with imploring eyes; he never need yearn to slip into a grave as if it were a warm sleeping bag and life a cold winter night; and when climbing the stairs to his office he never need imagine that he is careering down the well of the staircase, flickering in the uncertain light, twisting from the speed of his fall, shaking his head with impatience. There are times, dearest, when I am convinced I am unfit for any human relationship.

Wakeful Islanded Snow and silence in the streets. Winter in the bone. In silent houses people sleep. each one alone. Self-islanded by thought and dream the solitary soul forgets the deepest depth, the earth that joins us all.

trust is like a broken mirror, you may still see yourself, but you can never dismiss the crack.

There are days when everything I see seems to me charged with meaning: messages it would be difficult for me to communicate to others, define, translate into words, but which for this very reason appear to me decisive. They are announcements or presages that concern me and the world at once: for my part, not only the external events of my existence but also what happens inside, in the depths of me; and for the world, not some particular event but the general way of being of all things.

On an impulse he switched out the light on his desk and sat in the hot darkness of his office; the cold air filled his lungs, and he leaned toward the open window. He heard the silence of the winter night, and it seemed to him that he somehow felt the sounds that were absorbed by the delicate and intricately cellular being of the snow. Nothing moved upon the whiteness; it was a dead scene, which seemed to pull at him, to suck at his consciousness just as it pulled the sound from the air and buried it within a cold white softness. He felt himself pulled outward toward the whiteness, which spread as far as he could see, and which was a part of the darkness from which it glowed, of the clear and cloudless sky without height or depth. For an instant he felt himself go out of the body that sat motionless before the window; and as he felt himself slip away, everything—the flat whiteness, the trees, the tall columns, the night, the far stars—seemed incredibly tiny and far away, as if they were dwindling to a nothingness.

The free spirit again draws near to life - slowly, to be sure, almost reluctantly, almost mistrustfully. It again grows warmer about him, yellower as it were; feeling and feeling for others acquire depth, warm breezes of all kind blow across him. It seems to him as if his eyes are only now open to what is close at hand. he is astonished and sits silent: where had he been? These close and closest things: how changed they seem! what bloom and magic they have acquired! He looks back gratefully - grateful to his wandering, to his hardness and self-alienation, to his viewing of far distances and bird-like flights in cold heights. What a good thing he had not always stayed "at home," stayed "under his own roof" like a delicate apathetic loafer! He had been -beside himself-: no doubt about that. Only now does he see himself - and what surprises he experiences as he does so! What unprecedented shudders! What happiness even in the weariness, the old sickness, the relapses of the convalescent! How he loves to sit sadly still, to spin out patience, to lie in the sun! Who understands as he does the joy that comes in winter, the spots of sunlight on the wall! They are the most grateful animals in the world, also the most modest, these convalescents and lizards again half-turned towards life: - there are some among them who allow no day to pass without hanging a little song of praise on the hem of its departing robe. And to speak seriously: to become sick in the manner of these free spirits, to remain sick for a long time and then, slowly, slowly, to become healthy, by which I mean "healthier," is a fundamental cure for all pessimism.

Here are the sounds of Wear. It rattles stone on stone. It sucks its teeth. It sings. It hisses like the rain. It roars. It laughs. It claps its hands. Sometimes I think it prays. In winter, through the ice, I've seen it moving swift and black as Tune, without a sound. Here are the sights of Wear. It falls in braids. It parts at rocks and tumbles round them white as down or flashes over them in silver quilts. It tosses fallen trees like bits of straw yet spins a single leaf as gentle as a maid. Sometimes it coils for rest in darkling pools and sometimes it leaps its banks and shatters in the air. In autumn, I've seen it breathe a mist so thick and grey you'd never know old Wear was there at all. Each day, for years and years, I've gone and sat in it. Usually at dusk I clamber down and slowly sink myself to where it laps against my breast. Is it too much to say, in winter, that I die? Something of me dies at least. First there's the fiery sting of cold that almost stops my breath, the aching torment in my limbs. I think I may go mad, my wits so outraged that they seek to flee my skull like rats a ship that's going down. I puff. I gasp. Then inch by inch a blessed numbness comes. I have no legs, no arms. My very heart grows still. These floating hands are not my hands. The ancient flesh I wear is rags for all I feel of it. "Praise, Praise!" I croak. Praise God for all that's holy, cold, and dark. Praise him for all we lose, for all the river of the years bears off. Praise him for stillness in the wake of pain. Praise him for emptiness. And as you race to spill into the sea, praise him yourself, old Wear. Praise him for dying and the peace of death. In the little church I built of wood for Mary, I hollowed out a place for him. Perkin brings him by the pail and pours him in. Now that I can hardly walk, I crawl to meet him there. He takes me in his chilly lap to wash me of my sins. Or I kneel down beside him till within his depths I see a star. Sometimes this star is still. Sometimes she dances. She is Mary's star. Within that little pool of Wear she winks at me. I wink at her. The secret that we share I cannot tell in full. But this much I will tell. What's lost is nothing to what's found, and all the death that ever was, set next to life, would scarcely fill a cup.

Be careful what you say and who you say it in front of in this place, every ear is guaranteed to have a running mouth.

Au milieu de l’hiver, j’ai découvert en moi un invincible été … In the depths of winter, I discovered in me an invincible summer. That’s you. Thank you for being my invincible summer.

All through the winter months, Rose kept up the practice of sitting by the fire with Peter and a book telling him stories. The doctor stopped to listen one afternoon out of curiosity, and heard her say, “…then the Mermaid said to the Pirate, ‘I would rather perish with the boy than go with you.’ And the Pirate said, ‘So be it,’ and sealed them both up inside the treasure chest. Then the pirate’s crew got together to lift the chest up, and with a nod from their captain, they cast the chest overboard into the sea. The chest was so heavy, it sank in the water in spite of the air inside, and in seconds it was gone from view, disappearing into the deep blue depths. If the boy and the mermaid were unable to free themselves, they would surely perish.” Peter’s eyes were wide with interest. “But- I can’t tell you what happened- you’ll have to find out next time.” She stopped and closed the book. Peter shook his head and put his hand on the book. She laughed and said, “You want to hear more now, do you?

He seemed a part of the mute melancholy landscape, an incarnation of its frozen woe, with all that was warm and sentient in him fast bound below the surface; but there was nothing unfriendly in his silence. I simply felt that he lived in a depth of moral isolation too remote for casual access, and I had the sense that his loneliness was not merely the result of his personal plight, tragic as I guessed that to be, but had in it, as Harmon Gow had hinted, the profound accumulated cold of many Starkfield winters.

We got married on a cold, gray, damp day, and everything was beautiful. I didn’t need sunbeams because I had her. I didn’t need blue skies or sweet summer breezes, because the depths of winter felt like spring.

The depths of winter longing are ice within my heart The shards of broken covenants lie sharp against my soul The wraiths of long-lost ecstasy still keep us two apart The amen winds of bitterness sill keen from turn to pole. The scares are twisted tendons, the stumps of struck-off limbs, The aching pit of hunger and throb of unset bone, My sanded burning eyeballs, as might within them dims, Add nothin to the torment of lying here alone... The shimmering flames of fever trace out your blessed face My broken eardrums echo yet your voice inside my head I do not fear the darkness that comes to me apace I only dread the loss of you thy comes when I am dead.

Of Scotland, I cherished both the sprawling days of summer, when dusk and dawn were one, and the witching darkness of winter, when I would warm my hands by the hearth while song and company wrapped themselves around me like a cloak against the cold. I loved the height and breadth of the mountains and the mysterious depth of the lochs.

Sune and Peter broke away from the search party in the forest because Sune realized they were looking for a hockey player while everyone else thought they were looking for an ordinary boy. They found Kevin out on the lake at dawn, his cheeks touched by frostbite, the look of the bear in his eyes. It was Peter who carried the seven-year-old back home. Sune walked alongside in silence, inhaling deeply through his nostrils. In the depths of winter the town smelled of cherry blossom again.

it be told to the future world, that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive, that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet and to repulse it. Say not that thousands are gone, turn out your tens of thousands; throw not the burden of the day upon Providence, but "show your faith by your works," that God may bless you.

[...] he would see that birth and death were only two tremendous moments in an eternal waking, and his face would glow with amazement as he understood this; he would feel - gently he grasped the copper handle of the door - the warmth of the mountains, woods, rivers and valleys, would discover the hidden depths of human existence, would finally understand that the unbreakable ties that bound him to the world were not imprisoning chains and condemnation but a kind of clinging to an indestructible sense that he had a home; and he would discover the enormous joys of mutuality which embraced and animated everything: rain, wind, sun and snow, the flight of a bird, the taste of fruit, the scent of grass; and he would suspect that his anxieties and bitterness were merely cumbersome ballast required by the live roots of his past and the rising airship of his certain future, and, then - he started opening the door - he would finally know that our every moment is passed in a procession across dawns and day's-ends of the orbiting earth, across successive waves of winter and summer, threading the planets and the stars. Suitcase in hand, he stepped into the room and stood there blinking in the half-light.

This took place in the depths of a forest, at night, in winter, far from all human sight; she was a child of eight: no one but God saw that sad thing at the moment. And her mother, no doubt, alas! For there are things that make the dead open their eyes in their graves.

The stone basin was crusted with ice now. The courtyard security light illuminated its depths, and as he leaned over it he could make out the fiery glints of goldfish beneath the surface. There, beneath the cover of the ice, their flickering lives went on. He wanted to know how they did it, how they withstood the slowing of their hearts, the chilling of their blood, through the long darkness of winter.

It is a measure of a nation their cunning! It is a measure of a nation their strength! And it is a measure of a nation," I leaned forward and screeched, "their mercy!" I leaned back and surveyed the crowd and for some bizarre reason kept right on shouting. The condemned you see before you have been tried justly and meet their sentence fairly. They have done wrong and they will pay for it. But I am not the Winter Princess of a nation who does not see that even the condemned deserve to be treated with respect as they face death. You may think they do not deserve it but it is your duty as Lunwynians to rise above their actions not fall to their depths. They will hang for their crimes and you will watch this sentence carried out.How could that not be enough for you?" I tore my eyes away from the now whispering crowd as those close sent my words far,feeling Frey’s arm still tight around my middle but I ignored it and looked down at the scaffold. Bring her to her feet,” I ordered the guardstanding around Viola and they shifted andstared up at me in stupefaction so I snapped,“ Bring her to her feet! ”They jumped toward Viola who I avoidedlooking at as they helped her up and movedher to her noose. Instead, I looked back tothe crowd and, yep, you guessed it, kept right on shouting. "Today, you witness something infinitely sad. Three people who have gone wrong somewhere in their lives, done wrong be-cause of it and therefore are paying the ulti-mate price. Do not stand there shouting and jeering, demonstrating that they were right to move against this great nation, those for-tunate enough to inhabit her ice-bound earth and those privileged to wear her crowns.Stand there and, as the Lunwynians I know you to be, stand strong, stand proud and stand filled with mercy.

Advent falls in winter, at the end of the year, in the dark and cold, but its focus is on the coming of light and life, when the Ancient of Days becomes a young child and says, ‘Behold, I make all things new.’ Perhaps only poetry can help us fathom the depths and inhabit the tensions of these paradoxes.

I simply felt that he lived in a depth of moral isolation too remote for casual access, and I had the sense that his loneliness was not merely the result of his personal plight, tragic as I guessed that to be, but had in it, as Harmon Gow had hinted, the profound accumulated cold of many Starkfield winters

In the depths of our winters, we are all wolfish. We want in the archaic sense of the word, as if we are lacking something and need to absorb it in order to be whole again.

depth of winter I finally learned that there was in me an invincible summer. —Albert Camus

Like standing on air, about to plummet into the depths of the crater lake.

Inside us all, in the depths of our winters, things are going on, things we will have no clue of until spring comes, and perhaps not even then.

Just as Cam left Ivo Jenner’s apartments, St. Vincent met him in the hall. There was a scowl on the blond man’s face, and a vein of chilling arrogance in his tone. “If my wife finds comfort in trite Gypsy homilies, I have no objection to your offering them. However, if you ever kiss her again, no matter how platonic the fashion, I’ll make a eunuch of you.” The fact that St. Vincent could stoop to petty jealousy when Ivo Jenner was not yet cold in his bed might have outraged some men. Cam, however, regarded the autocratic viscount with speculative interest. Deliberately calibrating his reply to test the other man, Cam said softly, “Had I ever wanted her that way, I would have had her by now.” There it was— a flash of warning in St. Vincent’s ice-blue eyes that revealed a depth of feeling he would not admit to. Cam had never seen anything like the mute longing that St. Vincent felt for his own wife. No one could fail to observe that whenever Evie entered the room, St.Vincent practically vibrated like a tuning fork. “It is possible to care about a woman without wanting to bed her,” Cam pointed out. “But it appears that you don’t agree. Or are you so obsessed with her that you can’t fathom how anyone else could fail to feel the same?” “I’m not obsessed with her,” St. Vincent snapped. Leaning a shoulder against the wall, Cam stared into the man’s hard eyes, his usual reserve of patience nearly depleted. “Of course you are. Anyone could see it.” St. Vincent gave him a warning glance. “Another word,” he said thickly, “and you’ll go the way of Egan.” Cam raised his hands in a mocking gesture of self-defense. “Warning taken.

Slowly, Delphine began to understand that each dish was created, not merely cooked as one would cook a slice of toast. Each had its own beauty and depth: its own poetry. Course after course, the finished plates were passed among the chefs and sampled with care: small briny oysters from Corsica were nestled into a bed of pink rock salt; white asparagus were trimmed and served alongside a smoked duck salad; cream-fed pork was braised with pears and apples, and new potatoes were browned in duck fat and dusted with late summer truffles. Each dish was more amazing than the last.

While Kelly was as chilly as a baboon’s ass in winter, he could see the spark of desire that had simmered in the depths of her green eyes. The defiant tilt of her chin as he’d told her what to do.

the soul aches as much as the body.there are days when all the scars , all the old and long forgotten hurts" lights up", just like old injuries before winter or bones hurt from blows you have collected in a long life and only forgotten for a short time. in those days you are bad tempered and absorbed in yourself, in your soul whose wound reopened only to remind you that nothing is lost,nothing vanishes, least of all pains and bad memories.they just whither away for a while, withdraw into an unknown depth, just like they will this time and you will put them behind you, until the next time.

His stories were not always new, but there was in the telling of them a special kind of magic. His voice could roll like thunder or hush down into a zepherlike whisper. He could imitate the voices of a dozen men at once; whistle so like a bird that the birds themselves would come to him to hear what he had to say; and when when he imitated the howl of a wolf, the sound could raise the hair on the backs of his listeners' necks and strike a chill into their hearts like the depths of a Drasnian winter. He could make the sound of rain and of wind and even, most miraculously, the sound of snow falling.

The idea of Stonehenge as a realm of the dead, visited by the midwinter Sun, makes sense in light of ... passage tombs such as Newgrange. In both cases, the Neolithic builders used the stones to convert their knowledge ... into dramatic moments of sensory perception. Knowing that the solstice falls on a certain day is one thing. Collectively witnessing it in the depths of winter would have been quite another ...

In the depths of our winters, we are all wolfish. We want in the archaic sense of the word, as if we are lacking something and need to absorb it in order to be whole again. These wants are often astonishingly inaccurate: drugs and alcohol, which poison instead of reintegrate; relationships with people who do not make us feel safe or loved; objects that we do not need, cannot afford, which hang around our necks like albatrosses of debt long after the yearning for them has passed. Underneath this chaos and clutter lies a longing for more elemental things--love, beauty, comfort, a short spell of oblivion once in a while.

We have familiar experience of the order, the constancy, the perpetual renovation of the material world which surrounds us. Frail and transitory as is every part of it, restless and migratory as are its elements, still it abides. It is bound together by a law of permanence, and though it is ever dying, it is ever coming to life again. Dissolution does but give birth to fresh modes of organization, and one death is the parent of a thousand lives. Each hour, as it comes, is but a testimony how fleeting, yet how secure, how certain, is the great whole. It is like an image on the waters, which is ever the same, though the waters ever flow. The sun sinks to rise again; the day is swallowed up in the gloom of night, to be born out of it, as fresh as if it had never been quenched. Spring passes into summer, and through summer and autumn into winter, only the more surely, by its own ultimate return, to triumph over that grave towards which it resolutely hastened from its first hour. We mourn the blossoms of May because they are to wither; but we know that May is one day to have its revenge upon November, by the revolution of that solemn circle which never stops—which teaches us in our height of hope, ever to be sober, and in our depth of desolation, never to despair.

She nuzzled against his chest as she slipped her arms about his waist. “Oh, Christopher, you have become all things to me. I love you, my darling.” He raised her chin, and his eyes drank of the brimming devotion he saw in the amethyst depths. “And I you, milady. Perhaps more than even I was aware of until they took you from me.” He lightly kissed the bruise on her jaw. “I will see that they pay for this.” “It doesn’t matter, Christopher. As long as I have you and your babe within me, nothing else matters.” -Eienne & Christopher

Rudel Correze is far from the first to seek to aid me in my passage to Rian. But I find myself still among the living, and I have discovered that I value this world for itself, not merely as a matter for someone's song. I love it for its heady wines and its battles, for the beauty of its women and their generosity and their pride, for the companionship of brave men and clever ones, the promise of spring in the depths of winter and the even surer promise that Rian and Corannos are waiting for us, whatever we may do. And I find now, your highness, long past the fires of my heart's youth and yours, that there is one thing I love more, even more than the music that remains my release from pain.' 'Love, de Talair? This is a word I did not expect to hear from you. I was told you foreswore it more than twenty years ago. The whole world was speaking of that. This much I am certain I remember. My information, so far distant in our cold north, seems to have been wrong in yet another matter. What is the one thing, then, my lord duke? What is it you still love?' 'Arbonne.

This took place in the depth of a wood, at night, in the winter, far from all human sight; it was a child of eight years; there was none but God at that moment who saw this sad thing. And undoubtedly her mother, alas! For there are things which open the eyes of the dead in their grave.

Maybe because I knew Haze and Kate so well by then the passage leapt out at me, clear and sharp as diamond. “My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods: time will change it, I’m well aware, as winter changes the trees. My love for Heathcliff resembles the eternal rocks beneath…He’s always, always in my mind: not as a pleasure any more than I am always a pleasure to myself, but as my own being.” A love that was terrifying in its depth, but all the more enticing because of that. I thought I understood. Love could be just as destructive as hate if it became poisoned or twisted.

The Congregating of Stars They often meet in mountain lakes, No matter how remote, no matter how deep Down and far they must stream to arrive, Navigating between the steep, vertical piles Of broken limestone and chert, through shattered Trees and dry bushes bent low by winter, Across ravines cut by roaring avalanches Of boulders and ripping ice. Silently, the stars have assembled On the surface of this lost lake tonight, Arranged themselves to match the patterns They maintain in the highest spheres Of the surrounding sky. And they continue on, passing through The smooth, black countenance of the lake, Through that mirror of themselves, down through The icy waters to touch the perfect bottom Stillness of the invisible life and death existing In the nether of those depths. Sky-bound- yet touching every needle In the torn and sturdy forest, every stone, Sharp, cracked along the ragged shore- the stars Appear the same as in ancient human ages On the currents of the old seas and the darkened Trails of desert dunes, Orion’s belt the same As it shone in Galileo’s eyes, Polaris certain above The sails of every mariner’s voyage. An echoing Light from the Magi’s star, that beacon, might even Be shining on this lake tonight, unrecognized. The stars are congregating, perhaps in celebration, passing through their own names and legends, through fogs, airs, and thunders, the vapors of winter frost and summer pollens. They are ancestors of transfiguration, intimate with all the eyes of the night. What can they know?

There are many things that I should say to you all now. Perhaps I should speak of loyalty, honour and friendship. Maybe even mention love, that fickle mistress that rules all our hearts. But I shall not. Instead I choose to offer you words that I hope convey the depth of my profound philosophy on the meaning of life. Life. Ah, my friends, yes. Life is a journey. I know now that the aim of that mystical venture is not to arrive at our respective pyres in a well preserved body but rather to career in wildly, presenting a body ravaged by a life that has been lived to the full, shouting the words, "Damn! That was fun! Can I do it again?" Samson. Eternal Winter.

In summer he was a different person, sprightly and alert, and people took him for a man a decade younger than his years; but in winter he sank as the skies darkened, and by December he was always tired. When he went to bed, he drowned in sleep; when he was wakened from it, dragged from the depths , he was somehow always unrefreshed.

I could feel my aged, hard-won masculinity being eroded each millisecond I stayed. It got to the point that only the depths of their vileness gave them any kind of status, and this was both the most pathetic but most dangerous of all. This was the kernel of my intrigue: did this sort of daring morbidity escalate, cross over from virtual to real? And when?

For the briefest of instants, a miles-wide hole appeared from the middle of the Earth to the top of the sky. The Moho rang like a tuning fork in harmonic response to the billion megaton impact. Seismic waves propagated in all directions, some dampening as normal, others amplified harmonically as Earth’s interior quivered like a bowl of pudding. Seismometers spiked wildly, their needles bouncing back and forth like pin-balls. A billion megatons exploded outward from the depths of the quivering Moho blasting a crater eighty-five miles in diameter and spewing billions of tons of superheated rock twelve hundred miles into space. In the blink of an eye the Earth grew a tail, as a mushroom cloud visible from Mars formed and spread, black as the Devil's eye.

There is of course an extremely good reason for wearing shorts when you’re young, even in the depths of an English winter (and they were colder then, weren’t they?). According to Wired magazine, we can’t expect to see self-repairing fabrics until about the year 2020, but ever since we emerged from whatever trees or swamps we lived in five million years ago, we have had self-repairing knees.

The parson climbed the stairs wearily back to his room. In summer he was a different person, sprightly and alert, and people took him for a man a decade younger than his years; but in winter he sank as the skies darkened, and by December he was always tired. When he went to bed, he drowned in sleep; when he was wakened from it, dragged from the bleak depths, he was somehow always unrefreshed.

They dream of the happiness of stretching out one's legs and of the relief one feels after going to the toilet. In Orotukan the earth thaws only in the summer and only to the depth of three feet—and only then can they bury the bones of those who died during the winter. And you have the right to arrange your own life under the blue sky and the hot sun, to get a drink of water, to stretch, to travel wherever you like without a convoy [escort]. So what's this about unwiped feet? And what's this about a mother-in-law? What about the main thing in life, all its riddles? If you want, I'll spell it out for you right now. Do not pursue what is illusory—property and position: all that is gained at the expense of your nerves decade after decade, and is confiscated in one fell night. Live with a steady superiority over life—don't be afraid of misfortune, and do not yearn after happiness; it is, after all, all the same: the bitter doesn't last forever, and the sweet never fills the cup to overflowing. It is enough if you don't freeze in the cold and if thirst and hunger don't claw at your insides. If your back isn't broken, if your feet can walk, if both arms can bend, if both eyes see, if both ears hear, then whom should you envy? And why? Our envy of others devours us most of all. Rub your eyes and purify your heart—and prize above all else in the world those who love you and who wish you well. Do not hurt them or scold them, and never part from any of them in anger; after all, you simply do not know: it may be your last act before your arrest, and that will be how you are imprinted in their memory!

To the north of them the great continental glacier had dipped southward, as though straining to encompass the beautiful icy mountains within its overwhelming frozen embrace. They were in the most frigid land on earth, between the glistening mountain tors and the immense northern ice, and it was the depths of winter. The air itself was sucked dry by the moisture-stealing glaciers greedily usurping every drop to increase their bloated, bedrock-crushing mass, building up reserves to withstand the onslaught of summer heat. The battle between glacial cold and melting warmth for control of the Great Mother Earth was almost at a standstill, but the tide was turning; the glacier was gaining. It would make one more advance, and reach its farthest southward point, before it was beaten back to polar lands. But even there, it would only bide its time.

An appointment? With whom?” He swept her with a warm, caressing gaze. “With an angel, apparently.” She clucked her tongue. “More teasing.” “No teasing. I am here for you.” “If that’s not teasing, it’s a flat-out lie.” He inched the chair forward, desperate to close the distance between them. He spoke to her quietly, honestly. From the depths of his cold, longsuffering heart. “I’m here for you, mon ange. Violet. I would cross a world for you.

Another One' When you’re a child you learn there are three dimensions Height, width and depth Like a shoebox Then later you hear there’s a fourth dimension Time Hmm Then some say there can be five, six, seven… I knock off work Have a beer at the bar I look down at the glass and feel glad. 'Poem' I’m in the house It’s nice out Warm Sun on cold snow First day of spring Or last day of winter My legs run up the stairs And out the door My top half here writing.

In the depths of our winters, we are all wolfish. We want in the archaic sense of the word, as if we are lacking something and need to absorb it in order to be whole again. These wants are often astonishingly inaccurate: drugs and alcohol, which poison instead of reintegrate; relationships with people who do not make us feel safe or loved; objects that we do not need, cannot afford, which hang around our necks like albatrosses of debt long after the yearning for them has passed.

So why would I want anything to do with this illness? Because I honestly believe that as a result of it I have felt more things, more deeply; had more experiences, more intensely; loved more, and been more loved; laughed more often for having cried more often; appreciated more the springs, for all the winters; worn death “as close as dungarees,” appreciated it—and life—more; seen the finest and the most terrible in people, and slowly learned the values of caring, loyalty, and seeing things through. I have seen the breadth and depth and width of my mind and heart and seen how frail they both are, and how ultimately unknowable they both are. Depressed, I have crawled on my hands and knees in order to get across a room and have done it for month after month. But, normal or manic, I have run faster, thought faster, and loved faster than most I know. And I think much of this is related to my illness—the intensity it gives to things and the perspective it forces on me.

Your parents are bad,” he explained. “Your sister lacks any depth to be interesting, and I hate my house. It’s so dark there.” He paused, then continued. “It all fucking disappeared when you were dancing, though. It made the world prettier. I liked it.” “So, what?” I argued. “You wanna lock me in your basement to dance for you on command? Is that it?” But instead of the creepy, monotone, and calm response I’d been getting, his chest shook with a quiet laugh. “Can I hide there with you?” he asked.

The symbol for that portion of the zodiac in which the sun re-enters the yearly cycle at the time of the winter solstice is Capricorn, originally known as the “Goat-Fish” (aíγóχερωs, ‘goat-horned’): the sun mounts like a goat to the tops of the highest mountains, and then plunges into the depths of the sea like a fish. The fish in dreams occasionally signifies the unborn child,47 because the child before its birth lives in the water like a fish; similarly, when the sun sinks into the sea, it becomes child and fish at once. The fish is therefore a symbol of renewal and rebirth.

But tonight, as he traveled beneath the winter moon like someone who had been pulled out of time and life, just below the rim of eternity, he realized that what he’d heard as a child was true: the sin above all sins was to doubt God’s mercy, to deny the capacity of that heart, pierced through by the lance, to forgive. In the cold and dazzling light, Olav saw that it was this agony he had been tempted to undergo himself, to the extent that a man’s heart could mirror the heart of God—just as puddles of water in the dirt of the road could contain the image of a single star, broken and trembling, beneath the starry depths of the night sky.

The black water nipping at her thrashing heels was freezing. Not the bite of winter chill, or even the burn of solid ice, but something colder. Deeper. The cold of the gaps between stars, teh cold of a world before light. The cold of hell- true hell, she realised as she bucked against the strong hands trying to shove her into the Cauldron. True hell, because that was Elain lying on the stone floor with the red-haired, one-eyed Fae male hovering over her. Because those were pointed ears poking through her sister's sodden gold-brown hair, and an immortal glow radiating from Elain's fair skin. True hell- worse than the inky depths mere inches from her toes.

The first blast of the snowstorm snatched me up like a scrap of torn newspaper and transported me from a practice in the depths of the countryside to the town. What, you may wonder, is so special about a country town? If like me you have ever spent the winters snowbound and the summers deep in a landscape of sparse, monotonous woodland, without a single day off in more than a year; if you have ever torn the wrapper off last week's newspaper with your heart beating as if you were a lover joyfully ripping open a pale blue envelope; if you have ever driven twelve miles in a tandem-harnessed sleigh to a woman in labor, then you may realize what the town mean to me. Kerosene lamps may be very cosy, but I prefer electricity.

For a week the sun had been nothing but a puffy, seamless sheet of white, and this Tuesday had begun the same. But as the day progressed, the grayness receded like a mist, the sky’s white became more illumined from behind, then occasionally a patch of blue would open. Then another here and there, until blue touched blue and they became background for streaks and wisps of cloud. Sunlight, rays of it, gave a brightness like spring, a direct and golden-yellow brightness unlike the trapped, refracted glow of a winter’s day, and to that homogeneous cityscape that lay so inert and wide and flat, just a few spring rays of sunshine gave a sudden depth and dimension to everything. Individual things came alive, as if each stood brightly before you, each with its own story.

References to Te Pō occur in myths and chants throughout Polynesia, including one of the most famous of all, a two-thousand-line Hawaiian creation chant known as the Kumulipo, meaning “Beginning in deep darkness.” Composed at the beginning of the eighteenth century to mark the birth of the high chief Lonoikamakahiki, it begins, in Queen Lili‘uokalani’s translation: At the time that turned the heat of the earth At the time when the heavens turned and changed At the time when the light of the sun was subdued To cause light to break forth At the time of the night of Makalii [winter] Then began the slime which established the earth, The source of deepest darkness Of the depth of darkness, of the depth of darkness, Of the darkness of the sun, in the depth of night, It is night, So night was born.

I am crawling like one of those children who pulled coal wagons in the depths of the earth. I am on my hands and knees and listening to the boom boom above, or is it my pulse, my heart? I don’t know. I must pull this weight strapped behind me, this cart filled with my own fears and inadequacies, and if there is a way out, perhaps I will find it, but not until my hands and knees have worn away the sadness in me, sadness so deep that a whale could swim in its waters and never be found. I do not know anymore what is inside and what is outside. Am I inside the whale or is the whale inside me? He is the largest mammal on the planet. He is a mammal, not a fish. He is a mammal like me. He is me, this whale. Wait. Slowly I stopped thinking of bus-stops and supermarket check-outs and I began to think of spring waiting until winter has done its work, its dark underground work.

A human life has seasons much as the earth has seasons, each time with its own particular beauty and power. And gift. By focusing on springtime and summer, we have turned the natural process of life into a process of loss rather than a process of celebration and appreciation. Life is neither linear nor is it stagnant. It is movement from mystery to mystery. Just as a year includes autumn and winter, life includes death, not as an opposite but as an integral part of the way life is made. The denial of death is the most common way we all edit life. Despite the power of technology to reveal to us the nature of this world, death remains the ultimate unknown, impervious to the prodding finger of science. We might well ask if anything which cannot be addressed in scientific terms is really worthy of our attention. Yet most of the things that give life its depth, meaning, and value are impervious to science.

… A destitute joins me and wants admittance into my soul, and I am thus not destitute enough. Where was my destitution when I did not live it? I was a player at life, one who thought earnestly about life and lived it easily. The destitute was far away and forgotten. Life had become difficult and murkier. Winter kept on going, and the destitute stood in snow and froze. I join myself with him, since I need him. He makes living light and easy. He leads to the depths, to the ground where I can see the heights. Without the depths , I do not have the heights. I may be on the heights, but precisely because of that I do not become aware of the heights. I therefore need the bottommost for my renewal. If I am always on the heights, I wear them out and the best becomes atrocious to me. But because I do not want to have it, my best becomes a horror to me. Because of that I myself become a horror, a horror to myself and to others, and a bad spirit of torment. Be respectful and know that your best has become a horror, with that you save yourself and others from useless torment. A man who can no longer climb down from his heights is sick, and he brings himself and others to torment. If you have reached your depths, then you see your height light up brightly over you, worthy of desire and far-off, as if unreachable, since secretly you would prefer not to reach it since it seems unattainable to you. For you also love to praise your heights when you are low and to tell yourself that you would have only left them with pain, and that you did not live so long as you missed them. It is a good thing that you have almost become the other nature that makes you speak this way. But at bottom you know that it is not quite true. At your low point you are no longer distinct from your fellow beings. You are not ashamed and do not regret it, since insofar as you live the life of your fellow beings and descend to their lowliness you also climb into the holy stream of common life, where you are no longer an individual on a high mountain, but a fish among fish, a frog among frogs. Your heights are your own mountain, which belongs to you and you alone. There you are individual and live your very own life. If you live your own life, you do not live the common life, which is always continuing and never-ending, the life of history and the inalienable and ever-present burdens and products of the human race. There you live the endlessness of being, but not becoming. Becoming belongs to the heights and is full of torment. How can you become if you never are? Therefore you need your bottommost, since there you are. But therefore you also need your heights, since there you become. If you live the common life at your lowest reaches, then you become aware of your self. If you are on your heights, then you are your best, and you become aware only of your best, but not that which you are in the general life as a being. What one is as one who becomes, no one knows. But on the heights, imagination is as its strongest. For we imagine that we know what we are as developing beings, and even more so, the less we want to know what we are as beings. Because of that we do not love the condition of our being brought low, although or rather precisely because only there do we attain clear knowledge of ourselves. Everything is riddlesome to one who is becoming, but not to one who is. He who suffers from riddles should take thought of his lowest condition; we solve those from which we suffer, but not those which please us. To be that which you are is the bath of rebirth. In the depths, being is not an unconditional persistence but an endlessly slow growth. You think you are standing still like swamp water, but slowly you flow into the sea that covers the earth’s greatest deeps, and is so vast that firm land seems only an island imbedded in the womb of the immeasurable sea.

Anxious to bring both the year and New Year’s Day into line with the West, Peter decreed in December 1699 that the next new year would begin on January 1 and that the coming year would be numbered 1700. In his decree, the Tsar stated frankly that the change was made in order to conform to Western practice.* But to blunt the argument of those who said that God could not have made the earth in the depth of winter, Peter invited them “to view the map of the globe, and, in a pleasant temper, gave them to understand that Russia was not all the world and that what was winter with them was, at the same time, always summer in those places beyond the equator.” To celebrate the change and impress the new day on the Muscovites, Peter ordered special New Year’s services held in all the churches on January 1. Further, he instructed that festive evergreen branches be used to decorate the doorposts in interiors of houses, and he commanded that all citizens of Moscow should “display their happiness by loudly congratulating

A dark-haired, pale creature that could have been the relative of the nøkk in Jesiba’s gallery dragged a bound and gagged Fionn into the inky depths of the bog, the once-proud king screaming as he went under. Horror rooted Bryce to the spot. Theia and Pelias stood at the water’s edge, faces impassive. Petals began falling from the trees. Leaves with them. Birds took flight. As if sudden winter gripped the bog. As if the land had died with its king. Then the Starsword was thrust from the center of the pool, sparkling in the gray light. A heartbeat later, a scaled hand lifted a dagger—Truth-Teller. Debris or a gift from the creature, Bryce could only guess as they sparkled in the grayish light, dripping water. It didn’t matter—in the face of such treachery and brutality, who fucking cared? My father had never shown himself to be giving—long had he kept Gwydion and never once offered it to my mother. The dagger that had belonged to his dear friend, slain during the war, hung at his side, unused. But not for long.

It was the ultimate sacrilege that Jesus Christ, the very Son of God, was rejected and even put to death. And it continues. In many parts of the world today we see a growing rejection of the Son of God. His divinity is questioned. His gospel is deemed irrelevant. In day-to-day life, His teachings are ignored. Those who legitimately speak in His name find little respect in secular society. If we ignore the Lord and His servants, we may just as well be atheists—the end result is practically the same. It is what Mormon described as typical after extended periods of peace and prosperity: “Then is the time that they do harden their hearts, and do forget the Lord their God, and do trample under their feet the Holy One” (Helaman 12:2). And so we should ask ourselves, do we reverence the Holy One and those He has sent? Some years before he was called as an Apostle himself, Elder Robert D. Hales recounted an experience that demonstrated his father’s sense of that holy calling. Elder Hales said: "Some years ago Father, then over eighty years of age, was expecting a visit from a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles on a snowy winter day. Father, an artist, had painted a picture of the home of the Apostle. Rather than have the painting delivered to him, this sweet Apostle wanted to go personally to pick the painting up and thank my father for it. Knowing that Father would be concerned that everything was in readiness for the forthcoming visit, I dropped by his home. Because of the depth of the snow, snowplows had caused a snowbank in front of the walkway to the front door. Father had shoveled the walks and then labored to remove the snowbank. He returned to the house exhausted and in pain. When I arrived, he was experiencing heart pain from overexertion and stressful anxiety. My first concern was to warn him of his unwise physical efforts. Didn’t he know what the result of his labor would be? "'Robert,' he said through interrupted short breaths, 'do you realize an Apostle of the Lord Jesus Christ is coming to my home? The walks must be clean. He should not have to come through a snowdrift.' He raised his hand, saying, 'Oh, Robert, don’t ever forget or take for granted the privilege it is to know and to serve with Apostles of the Lord.'" [In CR, April 1992, 89; or “Gratitude for the Goodness of God,” Ensign, May 1992, 64] I think it is more than coincidence that such a father would be blessed to have a son serve as an Apostle. You might ask yourself, “Do I see the calling of the prophets and apostles as sacred? Do I treat their counsel seriously, or is it a light thing with me?” President Gordon B. Hinckley, for instance, has counseled us to pursue education and vocational training; to avoid pornography as a plague; to respect women; to eliminate consumer debt; to be grateful, smart, clean, true, humble, and prayerful; and to do our best, our very best. Do your actions show that you want to know and do what he teaches? Do you actively study his words and the statements of the Brethren? Is this something you hunger and thirst for? If so, you have a sense of the sacredness of the calling of prophets as the witnesses and messengers of the Son of God.

The Outer Cape is famous for a dazzling quality of light that is like no other place on Earth. Some of the magic has to do with the land being surrounded by water, but it’s also because that far north of the equator, the sunlight enters the atmosphere at a low angle. Both factors combine to leave everything it bathes both softer and more defined. For centuries writers, poets, and fine artists have been trying to capture its essence. Some have succeeded, but most have only sketched its truth. That’s no reflection of their talent, because no matter how beautiful the words or stunning the painting, Provincetown’s light has to be experienced. The light is one thing, but there is also the way everything smells. Those people lucky enough to have experienced the Cape at its best—and most would agree it’s sometime in the late days of summer when everything has finally been toasted by the sun—know that simply walking on the beach through the tall seagrass and rose hip bushes to the ocean, the air redolent with life, is almost as good as it gets. If in that moment someone was asked to choose between being able to see or smell, they would linger over their decision, realizing the temptation to forsake sight for even one breath of Cape Cod in August. Those aromas are as lush as any rain forest, as sweet as any rose garden, as distinct as any memory the body holds. Anyone who spent a week in summer camp on the Cape can be transported back to that spare cabin in the woods with a single waft of a pine forest on a rainy day. Winter alters the Cape, but it doesn’t entirely rob it of magic. Gone are the soft, warm scents of suntan oil and sand, replaced by a crisp, almost cruel cold. And while the seagrass and rose hips bend toward the ground and seagulls turn their backs to a bitter wind, the pine trees thrive through the long, dark months of winter, remaining tall over the hibernation at their feet. While their sap may drain into the roots and soil until the first warmth of spring, their needles remain fragrant through the coldest month, the harshest storm. And on any particular winter day on the Outer Cape, if one is blessed enough to take a walk in the woods on a clear, cold, windless day, they will realize the air and ocean and trees all talk the same language and declare We are alive. Even in the depths of winter: we are alive. It

Erienne had avoided the final pat of Lord Talbot and left the flushed and overexcited elder stewing in frustration. She was most happy to welcome the return of her appointed escort and to entrust her virtue to their truce. They met in the maze of guests, and from then on Christopher kept the larger part of the dance floor between them and their host while Talbot stood at the sidelines and, like an anxious stork, craned his neck for a sight of the one who eluded him. “You’re being obvious,” Erienne cautioned her partner. “So is he,” Christopher replied, “and if he persists, he’ll be lucky if I don’t lengthen his stride by a boot in the rear.” “Why are you so determined to harass Lord Talbot?” “You know my reasons for disliking the man.” “Me?” she asked incredulously. “What little time I have with you, I am loath to share with him.” “Why, Christopher,” the blue-violet eyes flashed with puckish humor, and the barest hint of a smile curved her lips to mock him. “Methinks thou dost protest the man overmuch.” He went mechanically through the steps of the dance while his mind plunged to a depth beyond her insight. When his attention returned to her, he nodded and agreed. “Aye, the man! Him, I do protest. I protest his arrogance, his careless flaunting of his power. I protest the wealth he wallows in while his tenants grub for a meager subsistence. Aye, I protest the man, and I decry the possibility that anything entrusted to my care should fall to him.” -Erienne & Christopher

Since I did Selection all those years ago, not much has really changed. The MOD (Ministry of Defence) website still states that 21 SAS soldiers need the following character traits: “Physically and mentally robust. Self-confident. Self-disciplined. Able to work alone. Able to assimilate information and new skills.” It makes me smile now to read those words. As Selection had progressed, those traits had been stamped into my being, and then during the three years I served with my squadron they became molded into my psyche. They are the same qualities I still value today. The details of the jobs I did once I passed Selection aren’t for sharing publicly, but they included some of the most extraordinary training that any man can be lucky enough to receive. I went on to be trained in demolitions, air and maritime insertions, foreign weapons, jungle survival, trauma medicine, Arabic, signals, high-speed and evasive driving, winter warfare, as well as “escape and evasion” survival for behind enemy lines. I went through an even more in-depth capture initiation program as part of becoming a combat-survival instructor, which was much longer and more intense than the hell we endured on Selection. We became proficient in covert night parachuting and unarmed combat, among many other skills--and along the way we had a whole host of misadventures. But what do I remember and value most? For me, it is the camaraderie, and the friendships--and of course Trucker, who is still one of my best friends on the planet. Some bonds are unbreakable. I will never forget the long yomps, the specialist training, and of course a particular mountain in the Brecon Beacons. But above all, I feel a quiet pride that for the rest of my days I can look myself in the mirror and know that once upon a time I was good enough. Good enough to call myself a member of the SAS. Some things don’t have a price tag.

It is a great pity that this tendency towards religious thought can find no better outlet than the Jewish pettifoggery of the Old Testament. For religious people who, in the solitude of winter, continually seek ultimate light on their religious problems with the assistance of the Bible, must eventually become spiritually deformed. The wretched people strive to extract truths from these Jewish chicaneries, where in fact no truths exist. As a result they become embedded in some rut of thought or other and, unless they possess an exceptionally commonsense mind, degenerate into religious maniacs. It is deplorable that the Bible should have been translated into German, and that the whole of the German people should have thus become exposed to the whole of this Jewish mumbo-jumbo. So long as the wisdom, particularly of the Old Testament, remained exclusively in the Latin of the Church, there was little danger that sensible people would become the victims of illusions as the result of studying the Bible. But since the Bible became common property, a whole heap of people have found opened to them lines of religious thought which—particularly in conjunction with the German characteristic of persistent and somewhat melancholy meditation—as often as not turned them into religious maniacs. When one recollects further that the Catholic Church has elevated to the status of Saints a whole number of madmen, one realises why movements such as that of the Flagellants came inevitably into existence in the Middle Ages in Germany. As a sane German, one is flabbergasted to think that German human beings could have let themselves be brought to such a pass by Jewish filth and priestly twaddle, that they were little different from the howling dervish of the Turks and the negroes, at whom we laugh so scornfully. It angers one to think that, while in other parts of the globe religious teaching like that of Confucius, Buddha and Mohammed offers an undeniably broad basis for the religious-minded, Germans should have been duped by a theological exposition devoid of all honest depth.

When we reflect on our daily lives, we might look back at a day that was very stressful and think, “Well, that wasn’t my favorite day this week.” When you’re in the middle of one of those days, you might long for a day with less stress in it. But if you put a wider lens on your life and subtract every day that you have experienced as stressful, you won’t find yourself with an ideal life. Instead, you’ll find yourself also subtracting the experiences that have helped you grow, the challenges you are most proud of, and the relationships that define you. You may have spared yourself some discomfort, but you will also have robbed yourself of some meaning. And yet, it’s not at all uncommon to wish for a life without stress. While this is a natural desire, pursuing it comes at a heavy cost. In fact, many of the negative outcomes we associate with stress may actually be the consequence of trying to avoid it. Psychologists have found that trying to avoid stress leads to a significantly reduced sense of well-being, life satisfaction, and happiness. Avoiding stress can also be isolating. In a study of students at Doshisha University in Japan, the goal to avoid stress predicted a drop, over time, in their sense of connection and belonging. Having such a goal can even exhaust you. For example, researchers at the University of Zurich asked students about their goals, then tracked them for one month. Across two typically stressful periods—end-of-semester exams and the winter holidays—those with the strongest desire to avoid stress were the most likely to report declines in concentration, physical energy, and self-control. One particularly impressive study conducted through the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, in Palo Alto, California, followed more than one thousand adults for ten years. At the beginning of the study, researchers asked the participants about how they dealt with stress. Those who reported trying to avoid stress were more likely to become depressed over the following decade. They also experienced increasing conflict at work and at home, and more negative outcomes, such as being fired or getting divorced. Importantly, avoiding stress predicted the increase in depression, conflict, and negative events above and beyond any symptoms or difficulties reported at the beginning of the study. Wherever a participant started in life, the tendency to avoid stress made things worse over the next decade. Psychologists call this vicious cycle stress generation. It’s the ironic consequence of trying to avoid stress: You end up creating more sources of stress while depleting the resources that should be supporting you. As the stress piles up, you become increasingly overwhelmed and isolated, and therefore even more likely to rely on avoidant coping strategies, like trying to steer clear of stressful situations or to escape your feelings with self-destructive distractions. The more firmly committed you are to avoiding stress, the more likely you are to find yourself in this downward spiral. As psychologists Richard Ryan, Veronika Huta, and Edward Deci write in The Exploration of Happiness, “The more directly one aims to maximize pleasure and avoid pain, the more likely one is to produce instead a life bereft of depth, meaning, and community.

But now, she was in Michael’s arms. When they kissed, the world fell away, fluttering off like soot-dusted moths. She knew only him, and the heat they created even in the depths of winter.

BACK AT THE railway station, Ivan Grigoryevich began to feel that there was no point in wandering about Leningrad any longer. He stood inside the cold, high building and pondered. And it is possible that one or two of the people who passed the gloomy old man looking up at the black departures board may have thought, ‘There – a Russian from the camps, a man at a crossroads, contemplating, choosing which path to follow.’ But he was not choosing a path; he was thinking. During the course of his life dozens of interrogators had understood that he was neither a monarchist, nor a Social Revolutionary, nor a Social Democrat; that he had never been part of either the Trotskyist or the Bukharinist opposition. He had never been an Orthodox Christian or an Old Believer; nor was he a Seventh Day Adventist. There in the station, thinking about the painful days he had just spent in Moscow and Leningrad, he remembered a conversation with a tsarist artillery general who had at one time slept next to him on the bed boards of a camp barrack. The old man had said, ‘I’m not leaving the camp to go anywhere else. It’s warm in here. There are people I know. Now and again someone gives me a lump of sugar, or a bit of pie from a food parcel.’ He had met such old men more than once. They had lost all desire to leave the camp. It was their home. They were fed at regular hours. Kind comrades sometimes gave them little scraps. There was the warmth of the stove. Where indeed were they to go? In the calcified depths of their hearts some of them stored memories of the brilliance of the chandeliers in the palaces of Tsarskoye Selo,37 or of the winter sun in Nice. Others remembered their neighbour, Mendeleyev, coming round to drink tea with them; or they remembered Scriabin, Repin or the young Blok. Others preserved, beneath ash that was still warm, the memories of Plekhanov, Gershuni and Trigoni, of friends of the great Zhelyabov. There had been instances of old men being released from a camp and asking to be readmitted. The whirl of life outside had knocked them off their feet. Their legs were weak and trembling, and they had been terrified by the cold and the solitude of the vast cities. Now Ivan Grigoryevich felt like going back again behind the barbed wire himself. He wanted to seek out those who had grown so accustomed to their barrack stoves, so at home with their warm rags and their bowls of thin gruel. He wanted to say to them, ‘Yes, freedom really is terrifying.’ And he would have told these frail old men how he had visited a close relative, how he had stood outside the home of the woman he loved, how he had bumped into a comrade from his student days who had offered to help him. And then he would have gone on to say to these old men of the camps that there is no higher happiness than to leave the camp, even blind and legless, to creep out of the camp on one’s stomach and die – even only ten yards from that accursed barbed w

In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.—Albert Camus

They may be despised, but God has made them like warriors, like David, who would go down into the pit in the depth of winter, and take the lion by the throat and kill him. We have people like that in our churches--I admit, only a few--who are not afraid to serve their God; who like Abdiel in John Milton’s Paradise Lost can be described as “faithful amongst the faithless found.” We have some who rise above the accepted way of the times, who refuse to bow to the god of money, who will not use the guarded language of too many modern ministers, but stand out for God’s gospel, who unfurl the banner of Christ, spotless and unstained by the doctrines of men. That is when they are mighty! They are mighty because God has put strength in them.

What on earth is happening here in Germany?’ Maud said: ‘We were doing all right in the mid-twenties. We had a democratic government and a growing economy. But everything was ruined by the Wall Street crash of 1929. Now we’re in the depths of a depression.’ Her voice shook with an emotion that seemed close to grief. ‘You can see a hundred men standing in line for one advertised job. I look at their faces. They’re desperate. They don’t know how they’re going to feed their children. Then the Nazis offer them hope, and they ask themselves: What have I got to lose?

The bonding doesn’t make you my weakness, it’s the depths of my feelings for you. If you were to be taken from me again, I would destroy the world.

Kindness to a killer builds coffins.

We had reached the curb when honest to God a1959 pink Cadillac convertible pulled into view. It eased up infont of us and looked like pulsating puddle of peptol bismol.

I have dizzy spells when I least expect them, even if there is no danger in sight…Altitude or depth makes no difference…if I gaze at the sky at night, and I think of the distance of the stars…Or even in the daytime…if I were to lie down here, for example, with my eyes facing up, my head would swim…” And she points to the clouds passing swiftly, driven by the wind. She speaks of her head swimming as of a temptation that somehow attracts her.

Sometimes when there aren't any other options you should just stay crazy.

Why the forty five." "Because they don't make a forty six.

To supply a column of this size, in the depth of winter, was a problem demanding most careful consideration. There was a train of one hundred and sixty-eight wagons and seven ambulances, with two hundred and nineteen drivers and attendants; and a pack-train of four hundred mules cared for by sixty-five expert packers, to follow after the cavalry whenever it should cut loose from the main body. No finer, cleaner-cut expedition was ever known in the annals of the Regular Army.

She felt a soft touch on her ankles. She held very still, feeling no fear even as she sensed something moving beneath the surface of the water. Another touch... a hand... long fingers smoothed over her feet and massaged tenderly, rubbing over the sore insteps until she sighed in pleasure. The big masculine hands slid higher, caressing her calves and knees, while a large, sleek body emerged from the depths of the well. The spirit had taken the form of a man to court her. His arms slipped around her, and the feel of him was strange but so lovely that she kept her eyes closed, fearing that if she tried to look at him, he might vanish. His skin was hot and silken, the muscles of his back rippling beneath her fingers. Her dream lover whispered endearments as he embraced her, his mouth playing over her throat. Everywhere he touched, she felt a glow of sensation. "Shall I take you?" he whispered, carefully drawing away her clothes, baring her skin to the light and air and water. "Don't be afraid, little love, don't..." And as she shivered and held him blindly, he kissed her throat and breasts, and touched her nipples with his tongue. His hands coasted over her front, slipping down to cradle her breasts while his half-parted lips brushed over a budded peak. His tongue darted out to flick the sweetly aching flesh again and again, until a moan rose in her throat and she slid her fingers into his thick hair. Opening his mouth, he covered her nipple and drew on it with a gentle tug, then stroked with his tongue and pulled again... licking and suckling in a soft, clever rhythm. She arched and gasped, helplessly widening her thighs as he moved more tightly between them...

Any memories of other women were banished permanently from his mind... there was only Evie, her red hair streaming and curling over his stomach and thighs, her playful fingers and frolicsome mouth causing him an agony of pleasure like nothing he had ever felt before. When he could no longer hold back his groans, she climbed over him carefully, straddling him, crawling up his body slowly like a sun-warmed lioness. He had one glimpse of her flushed face before she sought his mouth with teasing, sucking kisses. The rosy tips of her breasts dragged through the hair on his chest... she rubbed herself against him, purring with satisfaction at the hard warmth of the male body beneath her. His breath snagged in his throat as he felt her hand slip between their hips. He was so aroused that she had to gently pull his sex away from his stomach before she could fit it between her thighs. The crisp red curls of her mound tickled his exquisitely sensitive skin as she guided him between the hot folds of her body. "No," Sebastian managed, recalling the bet. "Not now. Evie, no---" "Oh, stop protesting. I didn't make nearly this much of a fuss after our wedding, and I was a virgin." "But I don't want---oh God. Holy Mother of God---" She had pushed the head of his sex into her entrance, the sweet flesh so snug and soft that it took his breath away. Evie writhed a little, her hand still grasping the length of his organ as she tried to guide him deeper. Seeing the difficulty she was having in accommodating him caused him to swell even harder, his entire body flushed with prickling excitement. And then came the slow, miraculous slide, hardness within softness. Sebastian's head fell back to the pillow, his eyes drowsy with intense desire as he stared up into her face. Evie made a little satisfied hum in her throat, her eyes tightly closed as she concentrated on taking him deeper. She moved carefully, too inexperienced to find or sustain a rhythm. Sebastian had always been relatively quiet in his passion, but as her lush body lifted and settled, deepening his penetration, and his cock was gripped and stroked by her wet depths, he heard himself muttering endearments, pleas, sex words, love words. Somehow he coaxed her to lean farther over him, resting more of her body against his, adjusting the angle between them. Evie resisted briefly, fearing she would hurt him, but he took her head in his hands. "Yes," he whispered shakily. "Do it this way. Sweetheart. Move on me... yes..." As Evie felt the difference in their position, the increased friction against the tingling peak of her sex, her eyes widened. "Oh," she breathed, and then inhaled sharply. "Oh, that's so---" She broke off as he set a rhythm, nudging deeper, filling her with steady strokes. The entire world dwindled to the place where he invaded her, their most sensitive flesh joined. Evie's long auburn lashes lowered to her cheeks, concealing her unfocused gaze. Sebastian watched a pink flush creep over her face. He was suspended in wonder, suffused with vehement tenderness as he used his body to pleasure hers. "Kiss me," he said in a guttural whisper, and guided her swollen lips to his, slowly ravishing her mouth with his tongue. She sobbed and shuddered with release, her hips bearing greedily against his as she took his full length. The rim of her sex clamped tightly around him, and Sebastian gave himself up to the squeezing, enticing, pulsing flesh, letting her pull the ecstasy from him in great voluptuous surges. As she relaxed over him, trying to catch her breath, he drew his hands over her damp back, his fingertips gently inquiring as they traveled to the plump curve of her bottom. To his delight, she squirmed and tightened around him in helpless response. If he had his usual strength... oh, the things he would have done to her...