Descriptive Sadness Quotes

First of all, love is a joint experience between two persons — but the fact that it is a joint experience does not mean that it is a similar experience to the two people involved. There are the lover and the beloved, but these two come from different countries. Often the beloved is only a stimulus for all the stored-up love which had lain quiet within the lover for a long time hitherto. And somehow every lover knows this. He feels in his soul that his love is a solitary thing. He comes to know a new, strange loneliness and it is this knowledge which makes him suffer. So there is only one thing for the lover to do. He must house his love within himself as best he can; he must create for himself a whole new inward world — a world intense and strange, complete in himself. Let it be added here that this lover about whom we speak need not necessarily be a young man saving for a wedding ring — this lover can be man, woman, child, or indeed any human creature on this earth. Now, the beloved can also be of any description. The most outlandish people can be the stimulus for love. A man may be a doddering great-grandfather and still love only a strange girl he saw in the streets of Cheehaw one afternoon two decades past. The preacher may love a fallen woman. The beloved may be treacherous, greasy-headed, and given to evil habits. Yes, and the lover may see this as clearly as anyone else — but that does not affect the evolution of his love one whit. A most mediocre person can be the object of a love which is wild, extravagant, and beautiful as the poison lilies of the swamp. A good man may be the stimulus for a love both violent and debased, or a jabbering madman may bring about in the soul of someone a tender and simple idyll. Therefore, the value and quality of any love is determined solely by the lover himself. It is for this reason that most of us would rather love than be loved. Almost everyone wants to be the lover. And the curt truth is that, in a deep secret way, the state of being beloved is intolerable to many. The beloved fears and hates the lover, and with the best of reasons. For the lover is forever trying to strip bare his beloved. The lover craves any possible relation with the beloved, even if this experience can cause him only pain.

When we are sad—at least I am like this—it can be comforting to cling to familiar objects, to the things that don't change. Your descriptions of the desert—that oceanic, endless glare—are terrible but also very beautiful. Maybe there's something to be said for the rawness and emptiness of it all. The light of long ago is different from the light of today and yet here, in this house, I'm reminded of the past at every turn. But when I think of you, it's as if you've gone away to sea on a ship—out in a foreign brightness where there are no paths, only stars and sky.

It slowly began to dawn on me that I had been staring at her for an impossible amount of time. Lost in my thoughts, lost in the sight of her. But her face didn't look offended or amused. It almost looked as if she were studying the lines of my face, almost as if she were waiting. I wanted to take her hand. I wanted to brush her cheek with my fingertips. I wanted to tell her that she was the first beautiful thing that I had seen in three years. The sight of her yawning to the back of her hand was enough to drive the breath from me. How I sometimes lost the sense of her words in the sweet fluting of her voice. I wanted to say that if she were with me then somehow nothing could ever be wrong for me again. In that breathless second I almost asked her. I felt the question boiling up from my chest. I remember drawing a breath then hesitating--what could I say? Come away with me? Stay with me? Come to the University? No. Sudden certainty tightened in my chest like a cold fist. What could I ask her? What could I offer? Nothing. Anything I said would sound foolish, a child's fantasy. I closed my mouth and looked across the water. Inches away, Denna did the same. I could feel the heat of her. She smelled like road dust, and honey, and the smell the air holds seconds before a heavy summer rain. Neither of us spoke. I closed my eyes. The closeness of her was the sweetest, sharpest thing I had ever known.

You look sad, and tired.' ... 'Of course I do, kid, I'm a teenager, it's in my job description. When I get home from school today I'll teach you how to have an existential crisis.

A strong wind sang sadly as it bent the trees in front of the Hall. A half moon shone through the dark, flying clouds on to the wild and empty moor.

I want you to write like Alice Munro.  Stir the world.  Make people see the horror; show them their suffering relatives; show them that they’re not safe.  Let them know that they can’t even begin to imagine what’s happening here.  By making my reality more compelling than reality television is the only way you’ll get their attention. Psychotic and cynical. Who can tell the difference anymore between a severed head and a special effect?  Can you?  I doubt it, and I know you’ve been in the middle of it all and seen the damage first-hand.

Some boys walk by and you cry, seeing them. They feel good, they look good, they are good. Oh, they're not above peeing off a bridge, or stealing an occasional dime-store pencil sharpener; it's not that. It's just, you know, seeing them pass, that's how they'll be all their life; they'll get hit, hurt, cut, bruised, and always wonder why, why does it happen? how can it happen to them?

I used to wonder why Lucy liked those songs so much. You know what I mean? She sits in the dark and listens and cries. Music does that to her...I didn't understand for a long time. But I do now. The sad songs are a safe hurt. It's a diversion. It's controlled. And maybe it helps you imagine that real pain will be like that. But it's not. Lucy knows that, of course. You can't prepare for real pain. You just have to let it rip you apart.

As I lay there, listening to the soft slap of the sea, and thinking these sad and strange thoughts, more and more and more stars had gathered, obliterating the separateness of the Milky Way and filling up the whole sky. And far far away in that ocean of gold, stars were silently shooting and falling and finding their fates, among these billions and billions of merging golden lights. And curtain after curtain of gauze was quietly removed, and I saw stars behind stars behind stars, as in the magical Odeons of my youth. And I saw into the vast soft interior of the universe which was slowly and gently turning itself inside out. I went to sleep, and in my sleep I seemed to hear a sound of singing.

human mind is sick with a disease called fear. Just like the description of the infected skin, the emotional body is full of wounds, and these wounds are infected with emotional poison. The manifestation of the disease of fear is anger, hate, sadness, envy, and hypocrisy; the result of the disease is all the emotions that make humans suffer.

The lines of her face, turned up to the sky, would have broken your heart.

what stars, what thought and sadness up above, and what ignorance below.

My mother tells Tina that she doesn't like books where the protagonist is established as Sad on page one. Okay, she's sad! We get it, we know what sad is, and then the whole book is basically a description of the million and one ways in which our protagonist is sad. Gimme a break! Get on with it!

She got on a plane to see a client in California and somewhere over Colorado, the pilot somehow missed the sky.

She left two mermaid tears, crystals with a bit of salt embedded in them, on his pillow.

ALONE One of my new housemates, Stacy, wants to write a story about an astronaut. In his story the astronaut is wearing a suit that keeps him alive by recycling his fluids. In the story the astronaut is working on a space station when an accident takes place, and he is cast into space to orbit the earth, to spend the rest of his life circling the globe. Stacy says this story is how he imagines hell, a place where a person is completely alone, without others and without God. After Stacy told me about his story, I kept seeing it in my mind. I thought about it before I went to sleep at night. I imagined myself looking out my little bubble helmet at blue earth, reaching toward it, closing it between my puffy white space-suit fingers, wondering if my friends were still there. In my imagination I would call to them, yell for them, but the sound would only come back loud within my helmet. Through the years my hair would grow long in my helmet and gather around my forehead and fall across my eyes. Because of my helmet I would not be able to touch my face with my hands to move my hair out of my eyes, so my view of earth, slowly, over the first two years, would dim to only a thin light through a curtain of thatch and beard. I would lay there in bed thinking about Stacy's story, putting myself out there in the black. And there came a time, in space, when I could not tell whether I was awake or asleep. All my thoughts mingled together because I had no people to remind me what was real and what was not real. I would punch myself in the side to feel pain, and this way I could be relatively sure I was not dreaming. Within ten years I was beginning to breathe heavy through my hair and my beard as they were pressing tough against my face and had begun to curl into my mouth and up my nose. In space, I forgot that I was human. I did not know whether I was a ghost or an apparition or a demon thing. After I thought about Stacy's story, I lay there in bed and wanted to be touched, wanted to be talked to. I had the terrifying thought that something like that might happen to me. I thought it was just a terrible story, a painful and ugly story. Stacy had delivered as accurate a description of a hell as could be calculated. And what is sad, what is very sad, is that we are proud people, and because we have sensitive egos and so many of us live our lives in front of our televisions, not having to deal with real people who might hurt us or offend us, we float along on our couches like astronauts moving aimlessly through the Milky Way, hardly interacting with other human beings at all.

According to my grandmother’s people, two wolves live inside every creature: one evil and the other good. They spend all their time trying to destroy each other.” It was, Matthew thought, as good a description of blood rage as he was ever likely to hear from someone not afflicted with the disease. “My bad wolf is winning.” Jack looked sad. “He doesn’t have to,” Chris promised. “Nana Bets said the wolf who wins is the wolf you feed. The evil wolf feeds on anger, guilt, sorrow, lies, and regret. The good wolf needs a diet of love and honesty, spiced up with big spoonfuls of compassion and faith. So if you want the good wolf to win, you’re going to have to starve the other one.

Everyone's thought that: maybe even if, maybe we still could, maybe small bits of precious things can be salvaged. No one with cop-on thinks it after the first try. But her voice, quiet and sad, shimmering the air into those pearly colors: for a second I believed it, all over again.

I hiked up a path and into the woods, thinking about what I should be thinking about and almost having a real feeling—a feeling like, this is really sad, this is a sad place to be, a sad part of my life, maybe just a sad life. The woods were not particularly beautiful. I was not impressed by the trees.

There was a time when I quite liked what I saw in the looking-glass, but not anymore. Now I’m startled, and more than startled, by the visage that so abruptly appears there, never at all the one that I expect. I have been elbowed aside by a parody of myself, a sadly dishevelled figure in a Halloween mask made of sagging, pinkish- grey rubber that bears no more than a passing resemblance to the image of what I look like that I stubbornly retain in my head.

Shod Omnivorism; it pretty much sums up the current state of the world. I find the word 'shod' deeply descriptive; it conjures such an archaic barbaric feeling, of being shackled and tamed, captive and downtrodden. Omnivorism is the concept that every living and non-living thing on this planet is a potential meal, and God forbid that anyone should question another’s right to eat whatever, whoever and however they desire. Shod and Omnivorism together truly emphasise the sad disequilibrium of the dominant prevailing human mindset.

She turned back to the spot where Kamala had been, and where the bow she'd held still was. Andrea walked over to it and picked it up. She ran her hands over it gently, feeling the intricate designs carved into it, the elegance of the metal guard. Andrea held it out before her and pulled the string back. It came easily, though with all the tensions of a thousand taut muscles. She relaxed the string and looked at the bow with a sad familiarity, as she uttered one word. “Sister.

If you look at any religious description of hell, it is the same as human society, the way we dream. Hell is a place of suffering, a place of fear, a place of war and violence, a place of judgment and no justice, a place of punishment that never ends. There are humans versus humans in a jungle of predators; humans full of judgment, full of blame, full of guilt, full of emotional poison — envy, anger, hate, sadness, suffering. We create all these little demons in our mind because we have learned to dream hell in our own life.

. . . the superiority of some infinite reserve and the mystery of some infinite sadness.

A sad angel with gentle feminine hands, as red as those of a peasant woman, with lips perfumed with honey, tobacco and green tea.

She resents the chipped paint of the table and the dingy closet they call a dressing room. (Dark City Lights)

immaculate middle-of-the-night quiet rainlessness the late moony sadness of the one specific mosquito dear someone you habituate me to the invisible I exit through you not as myself

When I tried to meet some impossible standard for motherhood, tried to earn my way to a weird sort of Proverbs 31 Woman Club, I collapsed in exhaustion and simmering anger, sadness, and failure. This was not life in the Vine, this exhausting job description; this was not the Kingdom of God, let alone a redeemed woman living full. This was the shell of someone trying to measure up, trying to earn through her mothering what God had already freely given. This was someone feeling the weight of unmet expectations from the Church and her own self and the world all at once.

Try as I might, I have no memory of what we did the rest of the day, or even of saying goodbye, because it's blended in with all my other visits and all the other goodbyes. Sometimes I try to trick myself into remembering, to observe the day casually from the side, trying to get it to roll itself around and reveal to me what we did or said when the visit came to an end. But I can't.

Self-pity isn’t the most accurate description for this feeling because it describes only half of it: sad for me, I’m hurt. What’s missing is the other half: and you need to do something about it.

I believe the signs we are seeing today most certainly point to the rapture of the church. These are indeed end times. I believe that one day very soon, Jesus Christ Himself will come in the clouds and millions of people will see their battles end... I believe that followers of Christ from all around the world, of every race, creed, color, age, economic standing, and religious affiliation will vanish in a single moment of time ... gone. The Word of God describes it as a 'twinkling of an eye.' In an instant, there will be boardrooms without directors, classrooms without teachers, hospitals without doctors and nurses, cars without drivers, airplanes without pilots, and loved ones disappearing mid-sentance and mid-morning coffee. I am sure that complete chaos won't even begin to describe it. I imagine a worldwide crescendo of screaming voices. When the dust clears, everone left on earth will know emptiness beyond description and a greater sense of evil than has ever been thought to exist. It will be the condition of things. Overwhelming sadness, confusion, loss, and insecurity will be worldwide. It will happen at that time, even as it did on that September morning.

Pericles, he reflected, was a sad case. He'd been a postman all his life, a solid, reliable worker, until one Christmas when he had stolen all the gifts he was meant to deliver: wind-chimes, scented candles, Belgian chocolates, cowbells from the Bernese Oberland. Most of the haul had been lavished on his elderly mother; the rest he had stashed in his bedroom, which the old lady, being too frail to climb the stairs, no longer cleaned.

Miss Parkinson lived alone in a big bay-windowed house of Edwardian brick with a vast garden of decaying fruit trees and untidy hedges of gigantic size. She was great at making elderberry wine and bottling fruit and preserves and lemon curd and drying flowers for winter. She felt, like Halibut, that things were not as they used to be. The synthetic curse of modern times lay thick on everything. There was everywhere a sad drift from Nature.

She never saw it again. Day and night the river flows down into England, day after day the sun retreats into the Welsh mountains, and the tower chimes: 'See the Conquering Hero.' But the Wilcoxes have no part in the place, nor in any place. It is not their names that recur in the parish register. It is not their ghosts that sigh among the alders at evening. They have swept into the valley and swept out of it, leaving a little dust and a little money behind.

And in that he shared a common history with most of the men who wandered Folsom and Polk and Market this late afternoon. Men whose mothers and fathers - however loving, however liberal - would never understand them the way they understood their straight children, because these gay sons were genetic cul-de-sacs. Men who would be obliged to make their own families: out of friends, out of lovers, out of divas. Men who were self-invented, for better or worse, makers of styles and mythologies which they constantly cast off with the impatience of souls who would never find a description that quite fitted. If there was a sadness in this there was also a kind of unholy glee.

Searching for a better description of this rotting sadness, I came upon the concept of acedia. In Christian theology, it’s an antecedent to sloth, the least sexy of the seven deadly sins. Thomas Aquinas winnowed it down for me: acedia is sorrow so complete that the flesh prevails completely over the spirit. You don’t just turn your back on the world, you turn your back on God. You don’t care, and you don’t care that you don’t care.

Ultimately, I argue, we need to stop hearing “romantic” as a positive description. It’s actually something that should raise a sceptical eyebrow. I urge that we move towards understanding ideal love as eudaimonic, not romantic. I also think we would do well to stop thinking so much about whether our partners “make us happy” and focus instead on whether they lovingly collaborate with us in the co-creation of meaningful work, and of our selves.

His departure was a sad disappointment to those hands who had been preparing their testimony for the trial. Some of them were old shipmates of Jack's, and they were perfectly ready to swear through a nine-inch plank so long as their evidence led in the right direction: the court would have heard a lively description of the Honourable Sod's furious assault upon the Captain with a brace of pistols, a boarding-axe, a naked sword and a topmast fid, together with all the warm or pathetic expressions used on either side, such as Somers' 'Rot your vitals, you infernal bugger,' and Jack's 'Pray, Mr Somers, consider what you are about.

What is a spaceship compared to an eternally young cyborg who does not breed and has no sexuality, who can share thoughts directly with other beings, whose abilities to focus and remember are a thousand times greater than our own, and who is never angry or sad, but has emotions and desires that we cannot begin to imagine? Science fiction rarely describes such a future, because an accurate description is by definition incomprehensible. Producing a film about the life of some super-cyborg is akin to producing Hamlet for an audience of Neanderthals. Indeed, the future masters of the world will probably be more different from us than we are from Neanderthals. Whereas we and the Neanderthals are at least human, our inheritors will be godlike.

The other aspect of those weekday-evening trips he loved was the light itself, how it filled the train like something living as the cars rattled across the bridge, how it washed the weariness from his seatmates' faces and revealed them as they were when they first came to the country, when thy were young and America seemed conquerable. He'd watch that kind light suffuse the car like syrup, watch it smudge furrows from foreheads, slick gray hairs into gold, gentle the aggressive shine from cheap fabrics into something lustrous and fine. And then the sun would drift, the car rattling uncaringly away from it, and the world would return to its normal sad shapes and colors, the people to their normal sad state, a shift as cruel and abrupt as if it had been made by a sorcerer's wand.

After the departure of her cousin and his companions she roamed more than usual; she carried her somber spirit from one familiar shrine to the other. Even when Pansy and the Countess were with her she felt the touch of a vanished world. The carriage, leaving the walls of Rome behind, rolled through narrow lanes where the wild honeysuckle had begun to tangle itself in the hedges, or waited for her in quiet places where the fields lay near, while she strolled further and further over the flower-freckled turf, or sat on a stone that had once had a use and gazed through the veil of her personal sadness at the splendid sadness of the scene — at the dense, warm light, the far gradations and soft confusions of colour, the motionless shepherds in lonely attitudes, the hills where the cloud-shadows had the lightness of a blush.

You can see self-pity every day if you live near a playground like I do. Little kids trip or get shoved and they fall over all the time. Usually, they don’t appear to be hurt. They look surprised to see that what was just an instant ago beneath their shoes is now pressed up against their nose. Little kids also know that injuries are an opportunity for extra affection. So whenever you see a little kid take a spill, they’ll look around to verify a nearby adult presence and then they’ll let it rip. This Wail of Death causes all the adults in the area to converge on the kid and one of them scoops the kid up and begins the medicinal kisses. Self-pity isn’t the most accurate description for this feeling because it describes only half of it: sad for me, I’m hurt. What’s missing is the other half: and you need to do something about it.

If you can imagine this, perhaps you can understand that someone from another planet who came to visit us would have a similar experience with humans. But it isn’t our skin that is full of wounds. What the visitor would discover is that the human mind is sick with a disease called fear. Just like the description of the infected skin, the emotional body is full of wounds, and these wounds are infected with emotional poison. The manifestation of the disease of fear is anger, hate, sadness, envy, and hypocrisy; the result of the disease is all the emotions that make humans suffer. All humans are mentally sick with the same disease. We can even say that this world is a mental hospital. But this mental disease has been in this world for thousands of years, and the medical books, the psychiatric books, and the psychology books describe the disease as normal. They consider it normal, but I can tell you it is not normal. When the fear becomes too great, the reasoning mind starts to fail and can no longer take all those wounds with all the poison. In the psychology books we call this a mental illness. We call it schizophrenia, paranoia, psychosis, but these diseases are created when the reasoning mind is so frightened and the wounds so painful, that it becomes better to break contact with the outside world. Humans live in continuous fear of being hurt, and this creates a big drama wherever we go. The way humans relate to each other is so emotionally painful that for no apparent reason we get angry, jealous, envious, sad. To even say “I love you” can be frightening. But even if it’s painful and fearful to have an emotional interaction, still we keep going, we enter into a relationship, we get married, and we have children. In order to protect our emotional wounds, and because of our fear of being hurt, humans create something very sophisticated in the mind: a big denial system. In that denial system we become the perfect liars. We lie so perfectly that we lie to ourselves and we even believe our own lies. We don’t notice we are lying, and sometimes even when we know we are lying, we justify the lie and excuse the lie to protect ourselves from the pain of our wounds.

I can't figure you out," she said. "What do you want?" "What I want does not matter." He said it mechanically, if that description could ever fit a Mage, the words coming out as if they had been drilled into him. Remembering some of the harsher harassment she had endured in her Mechanics Guild apprenticeship, Mari wondered what things had been like for this Mage. What had been done to make him seem so inhuman? "Why can't you just act like everyone else?" He gave her an inscrutable look. "I am not like everyone else." For some reason that sounded sad to her. "I ask your pardon, Mage." The formal words almost stuck in her parched throat, but Mari forced them out, seeing real surprise flashing for a moment in the Mage's eyes in response. "I'm a Mechanic, but I'm not closed-minded." Which has gotten me in trouble already more times than I can count. "Thank you for your warning." The Mage shook his head. "Thank...you," he repeated, the words sounding almost rusty as they came out, an intentness again showing in his eyes. "Thank you," he repeated in a murmur to himself, a hint of understanding appearing in his voice. "I...remember. Asha." "Asha?" "Long ago. I do not remember what to say." He gave her a look in which no feeling could be seen. "What do I say?" "Um...you say...you're welcome," Mari replied, feeling oddly anguished by the Mage's reactions. "Yes." He inclined his head toward her. "You...are welcome, Master Mechanic Mari.

Another day, sheltering beneath trees in a rain-shower, I uncovered a doorway long obliterated by undergrowth. After pulling shrubbery aside, I stepped inside a long deserted summerhouse, fronted by cracked marble columns and ironwork, the rear extending deep into the hillside. Though still filthy, even after I cleared away the tenacious vines, the windowpanes gave sufficient greenish light for me to sketch indoors. In a cobwebbed corner stood a gardener's burner that must once have coaxed oranges or other delicate shrubs to life. With that alight, I found a chair and sat with my shawl muffled around me as I sketched. The marble statues that lined the walls were fine copies of the Greek masters, with muscular limbs and serene faces, though sadly disfigured with a blueish-green patina. As an exercise, I copied a figure of a handsome boy, admiring the sculptor's rendering of tensed muscle, the body frozen just an instant before extending in action. My mind drifted to Michael, the uncertainty hanging over us, my urges to please him, my need to move beyond this stupid impasse. As I sketched the statue's blind eyes I half-heartedly followed his line of sight. I stood and looked more closely at the statue. "What are you looking at?" I said out loud. A green stain blotted the boy's cheek, ugly but also strangely beautiful, for the color was a peacock's viridian. For the first time I noticed the description, "HARPOCRATES- SILENCE", engraved on the pediment, and had a vague recollection of a Roman boy-god who personified that virtue. He held one index finger raised coyly to his lips, while his other hand pointed towards a low arch in the wall. I paced over to the spot at which he pointed. The niche was filled with gardener's trellis that I removed with rising excitement. Behind stood an oak doorway set low in the wall. As I lifted the latch, it opened onto a blast of chilly darkness. Lighting the stub of a candle at the stove, I propped the door open and ventured inside. At once I knew this was no gardeners' store, but another tunnel burrowing into the hillside. Setting forth with the excitement of new discovery, my footsteps rang out and my breath fogged before me in clouds. The place had a mossy, mineral smell, and save for the dripping of water, was silent. Though at first the tunnel ran straight, it soon descended an incline, and my feet splashed into muddy puddles. Who, I wondered, had last passed through that door?

I thought of how Midori had once articulated the idea of mono no aware, a sensibility that, though frequently obscured during cherry blossom viewing by the cacophony of drunken doggerel and generator-powered television sets, remains steadfast in one of the two cultures from which I come. She had called it “the sadness of being human.” A wise, accepting sadness, she had said. I admired her for the depths of character such a description indicated. For me, sad has always been a synonym for bitter, and I suspect this will always be so.

Without missing a beat, Andrews passes out a mimeographed worksheet. In one column are faces of boys and girls, each displaying one of the six basic emotions—happy, sad, angry, surprised, afraid, disgusted—and a description of the facial muscle activity underlying each, for example: AFRAID: • The mouth is open and drawn back. • The eyes are open and the inner corners go up. • The eyebrows are raised and drawn together. • There are wrinkles in the middle of the forehead.3

Why so sad?" Zach queries in fairy-tale tones. "Rachel?" "O my brother Ivanushka," she recites. "A heavy stone is round my throat, silken grass grows through my fingers, yellow sand lies on my breast." "That's perishing gloomy," Zach remarks. "It ends happily though. Gracious! Everything sounds depressing this morning," adds Rachel. "There's a teacher at my school, she's very young, but she goes, Gracious! Just like a dowager. Makes me laugh. Except this morning. I can't help it. I am too depressed. I hate those voices so much. In the Gardens." "Stop listening," Zach scolds and put his hands in her hair—silken grass grows through his fingers.

In among the grass were finger-sized burrow holes in the ground. I didn’t know what made them. Steve recognized them as the homes of bird-eating spiders. I was impressed. “There are spiders that eat birds?” “Sure thing, mate,” he said. “Birds, lizards, any little thing they can get their fangs into.” He wrangled two of them out of their underground homes, and I was able to get a close-up look at them. They looked like tarantulas, only their abdomens were much larger. They rarely encountered humans, and so the two Steve handled got all fired up. I could see the venom drip from their fangs. “These little beauties are being collected by the pet trade,” Steve said, gently handling one of the giant spiders. “But they don’t handle captivity well, so a lot of them die.” Henry filmed the whole episode. “When collectors dig up these beautiful spiders,” Steve explained to the camera, “they often destroy their underground homes and completely ruin an entire habitat.” It was the kind of situation that always made Steve sad. He set the big girl down to return to her burrow. “Crikey,” he said, “wasn’t she gorgeous?” I myself had never really considered using the words “gorgeous” and “spider” in a sentence together. After getting to know the bird-eaters, I finally settled on my own description: “cool.

The teacher didn’t make people with disabilities out to be heroes or sad stories. It was just a description of the world in which people with disabilities were real and present.

Oh well, memories," said I. "Yes, even remembering in itself is sad, yet how much more its object! Don't let yourself in for things like that, it's not for you and not for me. It only weakens one's present position without strengthening the former one — nothing is more obvious — quite apart from the fact that the former one doesn't need strengthening. Do you think I have no memories? Oh, ten for every one of yours.

Dragons are very strange creatures. 2. No one can find them. 3. They seem to exist only in the old descriptions, accounts, and drawings! If we don’t know our history, are we doomed to repeat the same mistake? Sadly, in recent times, secular scientists have relegated dragons to myths as well. But unlike the dodo, which is just a particular type of bird, dragons represent a large range of different types of reptilian creatures. Moreover, there exists a massive number of descriptions, drawings, and accounts of dragons from all over the world,

He was a small, chubby little man with a perpetual air of sadness about him, making him look like a baby that has dropped its rattle.

Do you know my name?” “I do.” “Why don’t you ever use it?” He bit down on the inside of his cheek and looked away from me as he thought about what to say. “I stole you away, I didn’t meet you. When you meet someone, if they want you to know their name, they give it to you. It’s like a privilege, and you didn’t give me that privilege.” “I named you,” I admitted softly. He jerked his head back to look at me again, and his brow scrunched together. “What?” “Uh, well, I named you. I was always thinking of you as him or he, and I eventually got tired of it.” When I didn’t offer anything more, he leaned forward and put a hand out, palm up. “Well . . . ? What’s the name you gave me?” “Taylor.” In my head, it’d been easy to think of him as Taylor, but now that it was out there, a blush was creeping up my neck and over my cheeks. He barked out a loud laugh and leaned back. “Oh God, not you too? That’s not the first time I’ve gotten that.” I’d been stunned by his laugh, but then joined in with him at his admission. “Well! You look just like him!” “Thanks . . . I guess?” “It’s a compliment, trust me.” His dark eyes met and held mine, and I looked away momentarily to break the connection. When I looked back at him, I cleared my throat and offered a small smile. “Um, my name’s Rachel.” “I know,” he whispered roughly. “And yours?” He seemed to think for a few seconds before flashing me a sad smile. “You can call me Taylor.” My first reaction was disappointment before I realized the danger for him in this situation. He was a criminal, and I could already give a very detailed description to an FBI sketch artist. Knowing his real name would just add to his likelihood of being caught when this was all over. If it was ever over. Biting back the disappointment, I smiled and offered him a hand. He took it carefully, making sure not to touch my nails. “I would say it’s nice, but that probably isn’t the right word. It’s . . . very interesting to meet you, Taylor.” “I’m glad you decided to ‘meet’ me, Rachel.” “Me too.

I love your loins, that's all,' Rachel says quietly. 'And now I love the word itself, and how words change, I love that too. And all the parts of you, I love them. That's all. And I'm not sad,' she whispers, gasping a little at the shock of her own tears, hot and extravagant, tears that catch the light in her lashes before they drop and roll across Zach's thighs, sparkling capsules, kaleidoscopic, the flow dynamic.

I wanted to be a spy,” Olga said, shrugging. “I applied to the CIA. I was turned down. I did not meet the psychological profile. Oppositional Defiance Disorder. Basically, I have a hard time taking orders from idiots.” “Don’t think of me as an idiot and I won’t give you an idiotic order,” Sophia said. “But if I give you one, you’d better do it. Because it’s probably going to mean surviving or dying.” “You I don’t mind,” Olga said. “Or I wouldn’t have joined your crew. Don’t ask me about Nazar. So I was in Spain with the troupe. When the Plague hit, they shut down travel. And all my guns were in America. In a zombie apocalypse. I was quite upset.” “You should have seen Faith when they told her she had to be disarmed in New York,” Sophia said. “Then they gave her a taser and that was mistake. What kind of guns?” “I like that your family prefers the AK series,” Olga said. “I really do think it’s superior to the M16 series in many ways. Much more reliable. They say it is less accurate but that is at longer ranges. The round is not designed for long range.” “I can hit at a thousand meters with my accurized AK,” Sophia said. “It’s a matter of knowing the ballistics. It’s not real powerful at that range, but try doing the same thing with an M4. I’ll wait.” “Oh, jeeze, you two,” Paula said. “Get a room.” “So continue with how you got on the yacht,” Sophia said. “We don’t want our cook getting all woozy with gun geeking.” “We were called by the agency and asked if anyone wanted to ‘catch a ride’ on a yacht,” Olga said. “When they said who owned the boat… I nearly said no. We all knew Nazar. Or at least of him. Not a nice man, as you might have noticed. We knew what we were getting into. But then we were told he had vaccine… ” she shrugged again. “Accepting Nazar’s offer was perhaps not the worst decision I have made in my life. I survived. Not how I would have preferred to survive, but I was vaccinated and I survived. But I did not even hint that I knew more about his men’s weapons than they did. They were pigs. Tough guys. But none of them were military and none of them really knew what they were doing with them. When they brought out the RPG, I nearly peed myself. Irinei had no idea what he was doing with it. I don’t think he even knew the safety was off.” “You know how to use an RPG?” Sophia said. “My family liked the United States very much,” Olga said, sadly. “We all like guns and anything that goes boom. And in the US, you could find people who had licenses for anything. I’ve fired an RPG, yes.” “Well, if we find an RPG you can have it,” Sophia said. “Oh, thank you, captain!” Olga said, clapping her hands girlishly. “But we’ll be keeping the rounds and the launcher separate,” Sophia said. “Oh, my, yes,” Olga said. “And both will have to be in a well sealed container. This salt air would cause corrosion quickly.” “I guess you miss your guns?” Paula said. “That’s not a request for an inventory and loving description of each, by the way. Got that enough from Faith.” “I do,” Olga said. “But I miss my books more.” “Books,” Paula said. “Now you’re talking my language.” “I have more books than shelves,” Olga said. “And I had many shelves. I collect old manuscripts when I can afford them.” “If we do any land clearance, look in the libraries and big houses,” Sophia said. “I bet around here you can probably pick up some great stuff.” “This is okay?” Olga said. “We can, salvage?” “If there’s time and if we clear the town,” Sophia said. “Sure.” “Oh, thank you, captain!” Olga said, kissing her on the cheek. “Okay, now you definitely need to get a room.

I hate the word fine.  It is descriptive of nothing.  Socially acceptable filler with no true meaning.  It’s what you say when you are checking your feelings, unwilling or unable to let yourself be too happy or too sad.  Fine.  It’s an emotional bookmark.  A pause until you can continue the story.

It was a chicken. He had flown through the hole in the ceiling, and was flapping down. But he didn’t stop at my floor. He went straight through the hole where the blue block had been. He kept on falling and flapping, all the way down into the treasure room. It looked like my test dummy had found me. He landed gently on the gray square.     Nothing happened. I exhaled with relief.   And then…KABOOM!  Yep, I guess I was right after all. It WAS a booby trap. I thanked my lucky stars that I hadn’t tried it out myself. But then I felt kind of bad for the chicken. That brave (and bird-brained) chicken had saved my life! I will forever remember that chicken as Buster, my crash-test dummy. (I think “dummy” may be an especially accurate description in this case.)   Sadly, the chests didn’t make it. There was only a giant crater where they used to be. So long riches and possibly cookies. That’s the way the cookie crumbles. *sigh*   Monday   Good News: I have five emeralds. Bad News: I think another librarian doesn’t like me.   Whew! My pack mule days are finally done. Over the past couple of days, I gathered the last ten blocks of wool I needed to trade for a saddle, and dragged them back to the village. Then, one-by-one I grabbed the blocks of wool from the library, and gave them to the farmer. I don’t think the librarian was too pleased with me. She strung together about nine “Hurrrs” while I removed my blocks of wool. I’ve never heard villagers speak so much. In my experience, that’s usually not a good thing. (Think: Mr. Rimoldi.)   Anyway, it was totally worth it. My wooly trade with the farmer went down without a hitch. Tomorrow I get a saddle!

Only two months after the battle he wrote a sad description of his own fate: "I spend my time building castles in the air, but in the end all of them, and I, blow away in the end." It is an epitaph that might serve all the empire builders of the violent century.

When America Cuts My Daughter’s Hair" every chair in the strip mall salon where she rents a little space of her own reflects a face waiting to make a change. Another mother next to me rips an ad for the full Hollywood wax & here the best graffiti: DON’T DO DRUGS, BE SAD. They’ll grow back, my own mom on the bangs I butchered more than once. Do you think America is pretty? This skinny blonde kid who never really has to ask if she is, asks me as we walk more hot city blocks because by now we’ve chopped the pecans to protect the power lines. I think America is pretty. A pierced Xicana with one side of her own do done in deep brown waves, the other buzzed tight & dyed a bright chemical green. America fits the description & when she’s done holds up her small mirror in the big one turning my girl around so she can see herself. You can call me Erica, she says if you like, but we like America better here.

Naomi's return caused no small stir. Scripture says, All the city was excited because of them; and the women said, Is this Naomi? Naomi means pleasant, and in an earlier time it must have been a perfect description of Naomi. The fact that so many women remembered her and were so glad to see her suggests that she had once been a gregarious soul, beloved by all who knew her. But now her life was so colored with sadness that she told the other women, Do not call me Naomi; call me Mara, meaning bitter, for the Almighty has dealt very bitterly with me. I went out full, and the Lord has brought me home again empty. Why do you call me Naomi, since the Lord has testified against me, and the Almighty has afflicted me? This was not a complaint as much as a heartfelt lament. She knew, as Job did, that ist is the Lord who gives and takes away. She understood the principle of God's sovereignty. In calling herself Mara, she was not suggesting that she had become a bitter person; but, as her words reveal, that Providence had handed her bitter cup to drink. She was the hand of God in her sufferings, but far from complaining, I think she was simply acknowledging her faith in the sovereignty of God, even in the midst of a life of bitter grief. Everything scripture tells us about Naomi indicates that she remained steadfast in the faith throughout her trials. She was not unlike Job---she was a woman of great faith who withstood almost unimaginable testing without ever once wavering in her love for God and her commitment to His will. So hers is actually an impressive expression of faith, without an ounce of resentment in it.

Yet anything less ecstatic than the singing of today’s widows in Vrindavan would be hard to imagine. At the back, the madwomen are shrieking. In the foreground, the exhausted old widows struggle to keep up with the cantor’s pitch, many nodding asleep until given a poke by one of the ashram managers walking up and down the aisles with a stick. It is difficult to think of a sorrier or more pathetic sight. Vrindavan, Krishna’s earthly paradise, is today a place of such profound sadness and distress that it almost defies description.

It is enough to write a few lines about tanks in the streets in some sad country, about a clear injustice, which requires no description; it is enough to move from one side to another, to satisfy someone’s taste, the need of the moment, the need for “big” games to take a peek into everything and to prove everything with cheap opinions formed almost on command, almost as a recipe of measured pain to resolve the crisis, to extinguish the pain based on a few words that don’t change anything except that they flatter vanity and a misguided interest in all dimensions of life and creation, in the air that is being poisoned by smoke from cars, smoke from the television screens, the smoke curtains of politicians, left and right, the smoke of films and pop culture, smokescreens of intelligence that finds an explanation for all this, makes up theories, finds justification for the schizophrenic decisions of the new rulers, for wars, agreements, contracts; finds justification for obedience, for the sale of beliefs under the disguise of conviction, for several awards, for a few moments of illusion in the hocus-pocus world where the truth does not interest anyone anymore, except for ways for lies to be packaged and sold as the greatest truth with the help of big intellectuals that will find a good argument, a good defense and justification for everything, since everything becomes much easier, if a hoax is supported by “scientific” evidence.

It'll be a cold walk home past the shuttered-up shops on the high street, the sad, beery air meaning from Cromwell's, and out toward the river, its refreshing green scent and its movement a slithering in the darkness, to her flat, where she has left all the lights burning.

The whole purpose of the coming of the Word into the world is to produce people in whom the power of the kingdom will bear fruit. But since the kingdom is fully, albeit mysteriously, present in the Word (since, in other words, the Word's fruitfulness is not in question but is already an accomplished fact), it is chiefly for our sakes that the parable enjoins the necessity of response. The biggest difference made by responses to the Word is the difference they make to us, for us, and in us. They decide not whether the Word will achieve his purposes but whether we will enjoy his achievement - or find ourselves in opposition to it. Admittedly, I am leaning once again in the direction of a descriptive rather than a prescriptive interpretation ofJesus' words. What he is saying in this parable seems to me to be of a piece with all his other loving, if often sad, commentaries on our condition. He is not threatening some kind of retaliation by the Word against people who fail to make the best response; rather, he is almost wistfully portraying what we miss when we fall short and fail to bear fruit. And there is the Word. In the case of even the most promising of the deficient responses to the sowing of the Word (namely, in the verse about the seed that fell among thorns - Matt. 13:22; Mark 4:18), the result specified is that it becomes dkarpos, without fruit, unfruitful. For a plant, the failure to bear fruit is not a punishment visited on it by the seed, but an unhappy declination on the plant's part from what the seed had in mind for it. It is a missing of its own fullness, its own maturity - even, in some deep sense, of its own life. So too with us. If we make deficient responses to the Word, we do not simply get ourselves in dutch; rather, we fail to become ourselves at all.

Thomas Gordon coined the term “I-message” and first described it in Parent Effectiveness Training (1970). According to Gordon, a clear I-message has three parts: a nonblameful description of the behavior, the effects it has on you, and your feelings. Describe the behavior. Use simple statements without judgments. For example, “When your hair isn’t brushed…” instead of “Your hair is such a mess!” Describe a specific, tangible effect. What effect does it have on you? This must be on you, not a sibling or another person. What needs of yours are not being met? It’s a tangible effect if it: Costs you time, energy, or money (for example, replacing cushions, mending holes, doing unnecessary errands, etc.) Prevents you from doing something you want or need to do (for example, getting somewhere on time, using the Internet, enjoying your living room, etc.) Upsets your body or senses (for example, loud noise, pain, tension) Share your feelings. What is your honest, authentic response to this behavior? Are you disappointed, resentful, hurt, sad, embarrassed, scared?

What do they know about Jelal?” Galip said. “Someone must have said, do an interview with such and such a famous columnist, he’d be super for your program on Turkey. And they would have written his name on a piece of paper. They’d probably not have asked his age or his description.” Just then, they heard laughter in the corner where the historical film was being shot. They turned around where they sat on the divan and looked. “What are they laughing at?” Galip said. “I didn’t catch it,” İskender said, but he was smiling as if he had. “None of us is himself,” said Galip, whispering as if he were imparting a secret. “None of us can be. Don’t you suspect that others might see you as someone else? Are you quite so certain that you are you? If you are, then are you certain that the person you are certain you are is you? What do these people want anyway? Isn’t the person they are looking for some foreigner whose stories will affect British viewers watching TV after supper, whose troubles will trouble them, whose sorrow will make them feel sad? I have just the story to fit the bill! No one need see my face even. They could keep my face in the dark during the shooting. A mysterious and well-known Turkish journalist—and don’t forget my being a Moslem which is most interesting—fearing the repressive government, politically motivated assassinations, and juntaists, grants the BBC an interview, provided that his identity is kept secret. Isn’t that even better?

Cardiologists obviously care about their “scorecard.” However, the easiest way for a surgeon to improve his mortality rate is not by killing fewer people; presumably most doctors are already trying very hard to keep their patients alive. The easiest way for a doctor to improve his mortality rate is by refusing to operate on the sickest patients. According to a survey conducted by the School of Medicine and Dentistry at the University of Rochester, the scorecard, which ostensibly serves patients, can also work to their detriment: 83 percent of the cardiologists surveyed said that, because of the public mortality statistics, some patients who might benefit from angioplasty might not receive the procedure; 79 percent of the doctors said that some of their personal medical decisions had been influenced by the knowledge that mortality data are collected and made public. The sad paradox of this seemingly helpful descriptive statistic is that cardiologists responded rationally by withholding care from the patients who needed it most.

I’d learned long ago that people had angles. Some were long and complicated, a maze you’d never unravel until they had you thoroughly trapped. Others were painfully obvious. Two turns to the truth. And still others carefully masked the turn, hid it so you didn’t see it until it was too late, and you were too broken to turn around and retreat.

The commercial genre which has developed from Tolkien is probably the most dismaying effect of all. I grew up in a world where Joyce was considered to be the best Anglophone writer of the 20th century. I happen to believe that Faulkner is better, while others would pick Conrad, say. Thomas Mann is an exemplary giant of moral, mythic fiction. But to introduce Tolkien's fantasy into such a debate is a sad comment on our standards and our ambitions. Is it a sign of our dumber times that Lord of the Rings can replace Ulysses as the exemplary book of its century? Some of the writers who most slavishly imitate him seem to be using English as a rather inexpertly-learned second language. So many of them are unbelievably bad that they defy description and are scarcely worth listing individually. Terry Pratchett once remarked that all his readers were called Kevin. He is lucky in that he appears to be the only Terry in fantasy land who is able to write a decent complex sentence. That such writers also depend upon recycling the plots of their literary superiors and are rewarded for this bland repetition isn't surprising in a world of sensation movies and manufactured pop bands. That they are rewarded with the lavish lifestyles of the most successful whores is also unsurprising. To pretend that this addictive cabbage is anything more than the worst sort of pulp historical romance or western is, however, a depressing sign of our intellectual decline and our free-falling academic standards.

When we are actually faced with teens telling us just how very uneasy they are, we need to remember that their descriptions of their emotional pain—which may be vivid and dire-sounding—don’t add to their emotional distress, but usually reduce it. It’s critical to remember that by the time teens are telling us that they feel anxious or angry or sad or any other emotion they choose to put into words, they’re already using an effective strategy for helping themselves cope with

: In the amazing book Moby Dick by the author Herman Melville, the author recounts his story of being at sea. In the first part of his book, the author, calling himself Ishmael, is in a small sea-side town and he is sharing a bed with a man named Queequeg, and I felt saddest of all when I read the boring chapters that were only descriptions of whales, because I knew that the author was just trying to save us from his own sad story, just for a little while.

Živio je nagnut nad požutjeljim knjigama istorije. Za ovog čudnog čoveka, tad sam mu zavidio na tome, kao da je postojalo samo vrijeme koje je prošlo, pa i ovo je vrijeme je samo vrijeme koje će proći. Rijetko je ko bio tako srećno isključen iz života kao on. Godinama je lutao po Istoku, tragajući u čuvenim bibliotekama za istorijskim djelima, i vratio se u svoj rodni kraj, sa velikim zavežljajem knjiga, siromašan a bogat, pun znanja koje nikome nije trebalo, osim njemu. Iz njega je izlazilo znanje kao reka, kao potop, zatrpavala su te imena, zbivanja, strah te hvatao od gužve što je u tom čovjeku živjela kao da sad postoji, kao da to nisu aveti i sjenke već živi ljudi koji neprestano djeluju, u nekoj strašnoj vječnosti postojanja.

Major depression also appears to have become unusually widespread in the late Renaissance. This disorder is diagnosed when a person shows a severely depressed mood, a loss of interest and motivation, and withdraws from usual activities. In Elizabethan Malady, Lawrence Babb analyzes references to melancholy in diverse literary works, finding that while they are almost nonexistent in the early Renaissance, by the 1600s they are a principal theme in prose, drama, and biography. Babb concludes that the late Renaissance was characterized by “an epidemic of melancholy.” The poet John Donne, who offered sonnets to the “Holy Sadness of the Soul,” provided a vivid description of this malady, which he himself knew well: “God has seen fit to give us the dregs of misery, an extraordinary sadness, a predominant melancholy, a faintness of heart, a cheerlessness, a joylessness of spirit.

She was thankful she no longer felt very bad, When you are bludgeoned on the head repeatedly, you naturally and mercifully become more or less insensible and stupid,

Sadly, however, I have met people who are better evangelists for Prozac than they are for the living God. Rather than viewing medication as simply one component of a full-orbed God-centered body-soul treatment approach, they view it almost as if it was their salvation. By definition, this is idolatry: attributing ultimate power and help to something other than our triune God. If a counselee believes that what ultimately matters is fine-tuning the dose of his Paxil, and finds discussion of spiritual things superfluous or irrelevant, that’s a problem. How a person responds when the medication works—or doesn’t work—reveals her basic posture before God. Thanksgiving and a more fervent seeking after God in the wake of medication success say one thing; a lack of gratitude and a comfort-driven forgetfulness of God say another. A commitment to trust God’s faithfulness and goodness in the wake of medication failure says one thing; a bitter, complaining distrust of his ways says another. So, receive the gift but look principally to the Giver. Whether a medication “works” or not, he is always working on your behalf.

To those I spoke with whiteness can be associated with isolation, dissections, and disconnections. Amanda: Well, my first husband was half-Irish and I lived with his family . . . So I got to see how they raised their children and I’ve been in prison and was raised with white girls there too. So I got to see a lot of pictures from poor whites to affluent whites. So I’ve seen that there is a disconnection. I mean, feelings are covered. Michael: One of the ways of sustaining cultural whiteness is isolation, like old Descartes. It’s not a plot, just the resonance of bad ideas. Isolate the individual rather than see the individual as the contributor back to the collective. And the carpool lane is empty and there are four lanes filled with one person in each car and that’s white culture pouring down the road, each isolated inside and hearing the news that reinforces the ideas of isolation and whiteness. Cayce: And white people for the most part have kind of isolated themselves . . . there is like a boundary around white people that a lot of times people of color drop when they are together and white people don’t always drop when they are with other white people. There’s not this sense of community. I would love to say that the above characterizations do not reflect my life, family, white friends, and their families. Unfortunately, there is a lot of it that seems right on. True, on some level these descriptions might reflect the general trend toward decreased social engagement.10 Yet over the past decade, I have spent a lot more time around people from different cultural and racial backgrounds. I am very sad to say that this sense of white people as being less emotionally connected, more isolated, and more guarded even when we are with other people resonates. The pain that comes with admitting this is all the more intense because this is something that I have known deep down for quite some time. The patterns are so ingrained that serious effort is required to break out of habits that keep me alone when in pain and nervous about sharing difficulty with family and friends. I wish that this did not characterize a broader struggle. Unfortunately, there are too many white people who exemplify these characteristics. The significant numbers of whites who seriously battle depression and a sense of aloneness in the midst of seemingly comfortable lives and intact, loving families are too great. It bears repeating that, of course, white people are not the only ones who face these issues. But that does not mean that it is not a pattern characteristic of white people worthy of honest investigation.

Science terminology really falls flat on its face when it comes to describing the differences between [carpometacarpus] bones. For example, part of the description of this owl carpometacarpus reads: "Carpal trochlea ends in a long shallow depression deeper than but continuous with a groove on the lateral surface of metacarpal 3. Metacarpal 3 flares at proximal end. Intermetacarpal tuberosity flaring on the interior side of proximal end of metacarpal 3." By comparison, my description was more like: a sad-looking fellow with a bent back, mousy ears, and a slightly open mouth, looking like a character being yelled at for not bringing home any food today.

Waking up every day and remembering Papa's gone to the front is like biting into a bonbon with nothing in the center.

an oasis of tranquillity in the heart of a nightmare

I don’t know that I can translate word for word.” Katie pinched at her lower lip, her brow furrowing. Joseph fought back a smile but found doing so hard in the face of how appealing she was when thinking so hard. “’Tis the story of a man who falls in love with the woman of his dreams.” He doubted she had any idea how fully she’d captured his attention with that brief description. “But they can’t be together,” Katie continued. “So he loves her in silence. He won’t even whisper her name in order to spare her the pain of a hopeless love.” A hopeless love. He let his gaze drift away from her face. “What keeps them apart? Does she not love him in return?” “I believe their circumstances prevented it. Perhaps their families would not have approved, or she was promised to another.” “Or perhaps something about their situation made it impossible,” he said. That scenario struck far too close to home. “That is a sad song, Katie.