Distinguish Mother Quotes

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Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.
Carl Sagan (Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space)
My mother's gifts of courage to me were both large and small. The latter are woven so subtly into the fabric of my psyche that I can hardly distinguish where she stops and I begin.
Maya Angelou (Mom & Me & Mom)
From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here, that's home, that's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.
Carl Sagan (Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space)
Thanks to my mother, I was raised to have a morbid imagination. When I was a child, she often talked about death as warning, as an unavoidable matter of fact. Little Debbie's mom down the block might say, 'Honey, look both ways before crossing the street.' My mother's version: 'You don't look, you get smash flat like sand dab.' (Sand dabs were the cheap fish we bought live in the market, distinguished in my mind by their two eyes affixed on one side of their woebegone cartoon faces.) The warnings grew worse, depending on the danger at hand. Sex education, for example, consisted of the following advice: 'Don't ever let boy kiss you. You do, you can't stop. Then you have baby. You put baby in garbage can. Police find you, put you in jail, then you life over, better just kill youself.
Amy Tan (The Opposite of Fate: Memories of a Writing Life)
We must distinguish between ‘sentimental’ and ‘sensitive’. A sentimentalist may be a perfect brute in his free time. A sensitive person is never a cruel person. Sentimental Rousseau, who could weep over a progressive idea, distributed his many natural children through various poorhouses and workhouses and never gave a hoot for them. A sentimental old maid may pamper her parrot and poison her niece. The sentimental politician may remember Mother’s Day and ruthlessly destroy a rival. Stalin loved babies. Lenin sobbed at the opera, especially at the Traviata.
Vladimir Nabokov (Lectures on Russian Literature)
Lux’s frequent forged excuses from phys. ed. She always used the same method, faking the rigid t’s and b’s of her mother’s signature and then, to distinguish her own handwriting, penning her signature, Lux Lisbon, below, the two beseeching L’s reaching out for each other over the ditch of the u and barbed-wire x.
Jeffrey Eugenides (The Virgin Suicides)
What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery? (Just to give you an idea, Proust's reply was 'To be separated from Mama.') I think that the lowest depth of misery ought to be distinguished from the highest pitch of anguish. In the lower depths come enforced idleness, sexual boredom, and/or impotence. At the highest pitch, the death of a friend or even the fear of the death of a child.
Christopher Hitchens (Hitch 22: A Memoir)
The child comes home and the parent puts the hooks in him. The old man, or the woman, as the case may be, hasn’t got anything to say to the child. All he wants is to have that child sit in a chair for a couple of hours and then go off to bed under the same roof. It’s not love. I am not saying that there is not such a thing as love. I am merely pointing to something which is different from love but which sometimes goes by the name of love. It may well be that without this thing which I am talking about there would not be any love. But this thing in itself is not love. It is just something in the blood. It is a kind of blood greed, and it is the fate of a man. It is the thing which man has which distinguishes him from the happy brute creation. When you got born your father and mother lost something out of themselves, and they are going to bust a hame trying to get it back, and you are it. They know they can’t get it all back but they will get as big a chunk out of you as they can.
Robert Penn Warren (All the King's Men)
WAKE Dealing with an alcoholic single mother and endless hours of working at Heather Nursing Home to raise money for college, high-school senior Janie Hannagan doesn’t need more problems. But inexplicably, since she was eight years old, she has been pulled in to people’s dreams, witnessing their recurring fears, fantasies and secrets. Through Miss Stubin at Heather Home, Janie discovers that she is a dream catcher with the ability to help others resolve their haunting dreams. After taking an interest in former bad boy Cabel, she must distinguish between the monster she sees in his nightmares and her romantic feelings for him. And when she learns more about Cabel’s covert identity, Janie just may be able to use her special dream powers to help solve crimes in a suspense-building ending with potential for a sequel. McMann lures teens in by piquing their interest in the mysteries of the unknown, and keeps them with quick-paced, gripping narration and supportive characters.
Lisa McMann
Mama?" "Yes, Emmy." She traced a rivulet of rain with her finger as it made its journey down the glass. "How do you know when it's been long enough?" Emmy could sense her mother smiling into the phone. "When you relaize that love doesn't have a time span. Only pain does. I think sometimes it's hard to distinguish between the two, so we just hold on to both of them like they're inseparable.
Karen White (On Folly Beach)
I used to be twenty. Then I was twenty-one, twenty-two, and so on. And then I became a mother and could no longer even distinguish the difference between twenty-one and twenty-two or the difference between thirty-eight and thirty-nine.
Sarah Manguso (Ongoingness: The End of a Diary)
Nature has so much to do in this world, and is engaged in generating such a vast variety of co-existent productions, that she must surely be now and then too flurried and confused to distinguish between the different processes that she is carrying on at the same time. Starting from this point of view, it will always remain my private persuasion that Nature was absorbed in making cabbages when Mrs. Vesey was born, and that the good lady suffered the consequences of a vegetable preoccupation in the mind of the Mother of us all.
Wilkie Collins (The Woman in White)
The wide world was changing, and she wanted a different place in it. Not just wanted, but felt she deserved. If the world didn't owe her a living, as her mother repeatedly warned her, it owed her a break. She had a strong sense that a better, more exciting, more rewarding life than that which had been the lot of her parents and grandparents was hers by right. In this she was guilty of nothing more serious than the arrogance of youth, from which every generation suffers and by which it distinguishes itself from the preceding one.
James Robertson (And the Land Lay Still)
There were two things, they told Doremus, that distinguished this prairie Demosthenes. He was an actor of genius. There was no more overwhelming actor on the stage, in the motion pictures, nor even in the pulpit. He would whirl arms, bang tables, glare from mad eyes, vomit Biblical wrath from a gaping mouth; but he would also coo like a nursing mother, beseech like an aching lover, and in between tricks would coldly and almost contemptuously jab his crowds with figures and facts - figures and facts that were inescapable even when, as often happened, they were entirely incorrect.
Sinclair Lewis (It Can't Happen Here)
How immense must be the force of life which turns a baby , who can just distinguish a great blot of blue and purple on a black background, into the child who thirteen years later can feel all that I felt on May 5th 1895 - now almost exactly to a day, forty-four years ago - when my mother died.
Virginia Woolf
For the anarch, little has changed; flags have meaning for him, but not sense. I have seen them in the air and on the ground like leaves in May and November; and I have done so as a contemporary and not just as a historian. The May Day celebration will survive, but with a different meaning. New portraits will head up the processions. A date devoted to the Great Mother is re-profaned. A pair of lovers in the wood pays more homage to it. I mean the forest as something undivided, where every tree is still a liberty tree. For the anarch, little is changed when he strips off a uniform that he wore partly as fool’s motley, partly as camouflage. It covers his spiritual freedom, which he will objectivate during such transitions. This distinguishes him from the anarchist, who, objectively unfree, starts raging until he is thrust into a more rigorous straitjacket.
Ernst Jünger (Eumeswil)
Mothers should tell little girls and boys about the importance of dreams,' Aunt Habiba said. 'They give a sense direction. It is not enough to reject this courtyard--you need to have a vision of the meadows with which you want to replace it.' But how, I asked Aunt Habiba, could you distinguish among all the wishes, all the cravings which besieged you, and find the one on which you ought to focus, the important dream that gave you vision? She said that little children had to be patient, the key dream would emerge and bloom within, and then, from the intense pleasure it gave you, you would know that that it was the genuine little treasure which would give you direction and light. (p. 214)
Fatema Mernissi (Dreams of Trespass: Tales of a Harem Girlhood)
I shouldn't be held responsible for my acts, since I was a political idiot, an artist who could not distinguish between reality and dreams
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (Mother Night)
We succeeded in taking that picture from [deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideaologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam. The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitands of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity--in all this vastness-- there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us... To my mind, there is perhaps no better demostration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.
Carl Sagan (Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space)
He gained height, grew thin, the hair on his temples had begun to grey, but, now as then, he had none of that useful sense of proportion, nor could he ever develop anything of the sort, which might have helped him distinguish between the continuous flux of the universe of which he constituted a part (though a necessarily fleeting part) and the passage of time, the perception of which might have led to an intuitive and wise acceptance of fate. Despite vain efforts to understand and experience what precisely his 'dear friends' wanted from each other, he confronted the slow tide of human affairs with a sad incomprehension, dispassionately and without any sense of personal involvement, for the greater part of his consciousness, the part entirely given over to wonder, had left no room for more mundane matters, and (to his mother's inordinate shame and the extreme amusement of the locals) had ever since then trapped him in a bubble of time, in one eternal, impenetrable and transparent moment. He walked, he trudged, he flitted - as his great friend once said, not entirely without point - 'blindly and tirelessly... with the incurable beauty of his personal cosmos' in his soul [...]
László Krasznahorkai (The Melancholy of Resistance)
Even shelving that more immediate concern, neither you nor I have any confidence that human civilisation as we know it is going to persist beyond our lifetimes. But then again, no matter what I do, hundreds of thousands of babies will be born on the same day as this hypothetical baby of mine. Their futures are surely just as important as the future of my hypothetical baby, who is distinguished only by its relationship to me and also to the man I love. I suppose I mean that children are coming anyway, and in the grand scheme of things it won’t matter much whether any of them are mine or his. We have to try either way to build a world they can live in. And I feel in a strange sense that I want to be on the children’s side, and on the side of their mothers; to be with them, not just an observer, admiring them from a distance, speculating about their best interests, but one of them. I’m not saying, by the way, that I think that’s important for everyone. I only think, and I can’t explain why, that it’s important for me.
Sally Rooney (Beautiful World, Where Are You)
An intellectual is usually someone who isn't exactly distinguished by his intellect," Corelli asserted. "he claims that label to compensate for his inadequacies. It's as old as that saying : "Tell me what you boast of and I'll tell you what you lack. Our daily bread. The incompetent always present themselves as experts, the cruel as pious, sinners as devout, usurers as benefactors, the small-minded as patriots, the arrogant as humble, the vulgar as elegant, and the feeble-minded as intellectual. Once again, it's all the work of nature. Far from being the sylph to whom poets sing, nature is a cruel, voracious mother who needs to feed on the creatures she gives birth to in order to stay alive.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón (The Angel's Game (The Cemetery of Forgotten Books, #2))
All Indo-European languages have the capacity to form compounds. Indeed, German and Dutch do it, one might say, to excess. But English does it more neatly than most other languages, eschewing the choking word chains that bedevil other Germanic languages and employing the nifty refinement of making the elements reversible, so that we can distinguish between a houseboat and a boathouse, between basketwork and a workbasket, between a casebook and a bookcase. Other languages lack this facility.
Bill Bryson (The Mother Tongue: English and How It Got That Way)
Awakening is about introducing a child to sensory experiences, including tastes. It doesn't always require the parent's active involvement. It can come from staring at the sky, smelling dinner as it's being prepared, or playing alone on a blanket. It's a way of sharpening the child's senses and preparing him to distinguish between different experiences. It's the first step toward teaching him to be a cultivated adult who knows how to enjoy himself. Awakening is a kind of training for children in how to profiter - to soak up the pleasure and richness of the moment.
Pamela Druckerman (Bringing Up Bébé: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting)
The happiness of my existence, its unique character perhaps can be found in its fatefulness: to speak in a riddle, as my father I have already died, as my mother I still live and grow old. This double origin taken as it were from the highest and lowest rungs of the ladder of life at once decadent and beginning — this if anything explains that neutrality, that freedom from bias in regard to the general problem of existence which perhaps distinguishes me. My nose is more sensitive than any man that has yet lived as to signs of ascent or decline. In this domain I am a true master — I know both sides for I am both sides.
Friedrich Nietzsche (Ecce Homo)
My mother is very like William Blake, she has visions and dreams and she cannot always distinguish a flea's head from a king. Luckily she can't paint.
Jeanette Winterson (Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit)
My mother’s gifts of courage to me were both large and small. The latter are woven so subtly into the fabric of my psyche that I can hardly distinguish where she stops and I begin.
Maya Angelou (Mom & Me & Mom)
Never give up the freeness of your soul. Live your duty to mankind, nurture creatures of this world as a true mother of the earth, but never shut your imagination off from those desires that distinguish you from the ordinary. Never allow yourself to be sapped of that extraordinary energy that is the necessary ingredient for creating something new and progressive.
Janvier Chouteu-Chando (The Girl on the Trail)
'how then does soul differ from spirit?' you're probably asking yourself. although he must have been reasonably sure nobody was. "Well, soul is darker of color, denser of volume, saltier of flavor, rougher of texture, and tends to be more maternalistic than paternalistic: soul is connected to Mother Earth just as spirit is connected to Father Sky. Of course, mothers and fathers are prone to copulation, and in their commingled state, soul and spirit often can be difficult to distinguish the one from the other. Generally, if spirit is the fresh air cent and ambient lighting in the house of consciousness, if the spirit is the electrical system that illuminates that house, then soul is the smoky fireplace, the fragrant oven, the dusty wine cellar, the strange creeks we hear in the floorboards late at night. "It's a bit of a cliche to say it, but when you think of soul, you should think of things that are authentic and things that are deep. Anything superficial is not soulful. Anything artificial, imitative, or overly refined is not soulful. Wood has a stronger connection to soul than does plastic, although, paradoxically, thanks to human interface, a funky wooden table or chair can sometimes exceed in soulfulness the soul that may be invoked by a living tree.
Tom Robbins (Villa Incognito)
But where were my friends and relations? No father had watched my infant days, no mother had blessed me with smiles and caresses; or if they had, all my past life was no a blot, a blind vacancy in which I distinguished nothing.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (Frankenstein)
But where were my friends and relations? No father had watched my infant days, no mother had blessed me with smiles and careness; or if the had, all my past life was now a blot, a blind vacancy in which I distinguished nothing.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (Frankenstein (Penguin Clothbound Classics))
Pepper it was that brought Vasco da Gama's tall ships across the ocean, from Lisbon's Tower of Belem to the Malabar Coast: first to Calicut and later, for its lagoony harbour, to Cochin. English and French sailed in the wake of that first-arrived Portugee, so that in the period called Discovery-of-India — but how could we be discovered when we were not covered before? — we were 'not so much sub-continent as sub-condiment', as my distinguished mother had it.
Salman Rushdie (The Moor's Last Sigh)
But where were my friends and relations? No father had watched my infant days, no mother had blessed me with smiles and caresses; or if they had, all my past life was now a blot, a blind vacancy in which I distinguished nothing. From my earliest remembrance I had been as I then was in height and proportion. I had never yet seen a being resembling me or who claimed any intercourse with me. What was I? The question again recurred, to be answered only with groans.
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (Frankenstein)
One rule on the handout was that parents should not hold, rock, or nurse a baby to sleep in the evenings, in order to help him learn the difference between day and night. Another instruction for week-old babies was that if they cried between midnight and five A.M., parents should reswaddle, pat, rediaper, or walk the baby around, but that the mother should offer the breast only if the baby continued crying after that. An additional instruction was that, from the child’s birth, the mothers should distinguish between when their babies were crying and when they were just whimpering in their sleep. In other words, before picking up a noisy baby, the mother should pause to make sure he’s awake.
Pamela Druckerman (Bringing Up Bébé: One American Mother Discovers the Wisdom of French Parenting)
The Wishing Bones A thousand grandmothers ago Pyrrha and Deucalion repopulated the world with rocks, bones of mother Earth, a generation of my ancestors strained from the mud of a drowned planet. But I’m more interested in my earliest grandmothers, their gills and wetness, before they crawled from that blue expanse and learned to carry the sea within them, in their cells, between their cells, in their eyes. The buoyancy of ocean has never left us. It hides in skin’s complex reservoir where we're selectively permeable and our bodies exchange the smallest life. If we had no need to distinguish ourselves from others we’d be missing the skin that defines lovers and enemies and opens itself to both.
Jalina Mhyana (Spikeseed)
Just why it should have happened, or why it should have happened just when it did, he could not, of course, possibly have said; nor perhaps could it even have occurred to him to ask. The thing was above all a secret, something to be preciously concealed from Mother and Father; and to that very fact it owed an enormous part of its deliciousness. It was like a peculiarly beautiful trinket to be carried unmentioned in one's trouser-pocket - a rare stamp, an old coin, a few tiny gold links found trodden out of shape on the path in the park, a pebble of carnelian, a sea shell distinguishable from all others by an unusual spot or stripe-and, as if it were anyone of these, he carried around with him everywhere a warm and persistent and increasingly beautiful sense of possession. Nor was it only a sense of possession - it was also a sense of protection. It was as if, in some delightful way, his secret gave him a fortress, a wall behind which he could retreat into heavenly seclusion. ("Silent Snow, Secret Snow")
Conrad Aiken (Great Tales of Terror and the Supernatural (Modern Library))
The stranger’s presence alerts him to his mother’s absence. For Spitz, this behavioral reaction signaled the attainment of psychological capacities that make a singular, personal attachment possible. “There is no love until the loved one can be distinguished from all others” (1965,
Stephen A. Mitchell (Freud and Beyond: A History of Modern Psychoanalytic Thought)
Words were like an invisible skin, enwrapping the world and giving it reality. Yet you could not say the world would not be there, would not be real if you took away the words. At best it seemed that things might bless the words that distinguished them, and that words might bless everything.
Graham Swift (Mothering Sunday)
What keeps [friends] together? Common history, some shared conquests, a delight in ideas and people and living. But they will also be distinguished by their ability to listen to you. They will not be uncritical, but they will understand and accept you. You will be interested in each other's happiness and well-being.
Margaux Bergen (Navigating Life: Things I Wish My Mother Had Told Me)
BOOK I 1     [184a] When the objects of an inquiry, in any department, have principles, (10) conditions, or elements, it is through acquaintance with these that knowledge, that is to say scientific knowledge, is attained. For we do not think that we know a thing until we are acquainted with its primary conditions or first principles, and have carried our analysis as far as its simplest elements. Plainly therefore in the science of Nature, (15) as in other branches of study, our first task will be to try to determine what relates to its principles. The natural way of doing this is to start from the things which are more knowable and obvious to us and proceed towards those which are clearer and more knowable by nature; for the same things are not ‘knowable relatively to us’ and ‘knowable’ without qualification. So in the present inquiry we must follow this method and advance from what is more obscure by nature, (20) but clearer to us, towards what is more clear and more knowable by nature. Now what is to us plain and obvious at first is rather confused masses, the elements and principles of which become known to us later by analysis. Thus we must advance from generalities to particulars; for it is a whole that is best known to sense-perception, (25) and a generality is a kind of whole, comprehending many things within it, like parts. [184b] Much the same thing happens in the relation of the name to the formula. (10) A name, e. g. ‘round’, means vaguely a sort of whole: its definition analyses this into its particular senses. Similarly a child begins by calling all men ‘father’, and all women ‘mother’, but later on distinguishes each of them.
Aristotle (The Basic Works of Aristotle)
Dwayne's bad chemicals made him take a loaded thirty-eight caliber revolver from under his pillow and stick it in his mouth. This was a tool whose only purpose was to make holes in human beings. It looked like this: In Dwayne's part of the planet, anybody who wanted one could get one down at his local hardware store. Policemen all had them. So did the criminals. So did the people caught in between. Criminals would point guns at people and say, "Give me all your money," and the people usually would. And policemen would point their guns at criminals and say, "Stop" or whatever the situation called for, and the criminals usually would. Sometimes they wouldn't. Sometimes a wife would get so mad at her husband that she would put a hole in him with a gun. Sometimes a husband would get so mad at his wife that he would put a hole in her. And so on. In the same week Dwayne Hoover ran amok, a fourteen-year-old Midland City boy put holes in his mother and father because he didn't want to show them the bad report card he had brought home. His lawyer planned to enter a plea of temporary insanity, which meant that at the time of the shooting the boy was unable to distinguish the difference between right and wrong. · Sometimes people would put holes in famous people so they could be at least fairly famous, too. Sometimes people would get on airplanes which were supposed to fly to someplace, and they would offer to put holes in the pilot and co-pilot unless they flew the airplane to someplace else.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (Breakfast of Champions)
Shorten is one of that interesting pack of politicians born of determined mothers and largely absent fathers. There are so many: Barack Obama, Bill Clinton and Tony Blair are distinguished alumni. Among recent Labor leaders in Australia are Rudd, Albanese and Shorten. Among the qualities these men share are self-discipline, boundless ambition and an appetite for approval on a national scale.
David Marr (Faction Man: Bill Shorten's Path to Power (Quarterly Essay #59))
As for the other experiences, the solitary ones, which people go through alone, in their bedrooms, in their offices, walking the fields and the streets of London, he had them; had left home, a mere boy, because of his mother; she lied; because he came down to tea for the fiftieth time with his hands unwashed; because he could see no future for a poet in Stroud; and so, making a confidant of his little sister, had gone to London leaving an absurd note behind him, such as great men have written, and the world has read later when the story of their struggles has become famous. London has swallowed up many millions of young men called Smith; thought nothing of fantastic Christian names like Septimus with which their parents have thought to distinguish them. Lodging off the Euston Road, there were experiences, again experiences, such as change a face in two years from a pink innocent oval to a face lean, contracted, hostile. But of all this what could the most observant of friends have said except what a gardener says when he opens the conservatory door in the morning and finds a new blossom on his plant: — It has flowered; flowered from vanity, ambition, idealism, passion, loneliness, courage, laziness, the usual seeds, which all muddled up (in a room off the Euston Road), made him shy, and stammering, made him anxious to improve himself, made him fall in love with Miss Isabel Pole, lecturing in the Waterloo Road upon Shakespeare. Was he not like Keats? she asked; and reflected how she might give him a taste of Antony and Cleopatra and the rest; lent him books; wrote him scraps of letters; and lit in him
Virginia Woolf (Complete Works of Virginia Woolf)
Servitude and freedom—this is in the last and deepest analysis the differentia by which we distinguish vegetable and animal existence. A herd that huddles together trembling in the presence of danger, a child that clings weeping to its mother, a man desperately striving to force a way into his God—all these are seeking to return out of the life of animal freedom into the vegetal servitude from which they were emancipated.
Oswald Spengler
During infancy, a child does not distinguish between milk and tenderness, between solid food and love. Without food, a child will starve. Without love, a child will starve emotionally and can become impaired for life. A great deal of research indicates that the emotional foundation of life is laid in the first eighteen months of life, particularly in the mother/child relationship. The “food” for future emotional health is physical touch, kind words, and tender care.
Gary Chapman (The 5 Love Languages of Children)
By December 1975, a year had passed since Mr. Harvey had packed his bags, but there was still no sign of him. For a while, until the tape dirtied or the paper tore, store owners kept a scratchy sketch of him taped to their windows. Lindsey and Samuel walked in the neighboorhood or hung out at Hal's bike shop. She wouldn't go to the diner where the other kids went. The owner of the diner was a law and order man. He had blown up the sketch of George Harvey to twice its size and taped it to the front door. He willingly gave the grisly details to any customer who asked- young girl, cornfield, found only an elbow. Finallly Lindsey asked Hal to give her a ride to the police station. She wanted to know what exactly they were doing. They bid farewell to Samuel at the bike shop and Hal gave Lindsey a ride through a wet December snow. From the start, Lindsey's youth and purpose had caught the police off guard. As more and more of them realized who she was, they gave her a wider and wider berth. Here was this girl, focused, mad, fifteen... When Lindsey and Hal waited outside the captain's office on a wooden bench, she thought she saw something across the room that she recognized. It was on Detective Fenerman's desk and it stood out in the room because of its color. What her mother had always distinguished as Chinese red, a harsher red than rose red, it was the red of classic red lipsticks, rarely found in nature. Our mother was proud of her ability fo wear Chinese red, noting each time she tied a particular scarf around her neck that it was a color even Grandma Lynn dared not wear. Hal,' she said, every muscle tense as she stared at the increasingly familiar object on Fenerman's desk. Yes.' Do you see that red cloth?' Yes.' Can you go and get it for me?' When Hal looked at her, she said: 'I think it's my mother's.' As Hal stood to retrieve it, Len entered the squad room from behind where Lindsey sat. He tapped her on the shoulder just as he realized what Hal was doing. Lindsey and Detective Ferman stared at each other. Why do you have my mother's scarf?' He stumbled. 'She might have left it in my car one day.' Lindsey stood and faced him. She was clear-eyed and driving fast towards the worst news yet. 'What was she doing in your car?' Hello, Hal,' Len said. Hal held the scarf in his head. Lindsey grabbed it away, her voice growing angry. 'Why do you have m mother's scarf?' And though Len was the detective, Hal saw it first- it arched over her like a rainbow- Prismacolor understanding. The way it happened in algebra class or English when my sister was the first person to figure out the sum of x or point out the double entendres to her peers. Hal put his hand on Lindsey's shoulder to guide her. 'We should go,' he said. And later she cried out her disbelief to Samuel in the backroom of the bike shop.
Alice Sebold
It is his bottomless interest in other people, famous and unfamous, his loving immersion in their pasts, in what their mothers said to them when they were children, and what their childhood bedrooms looked like, that distinguishes him from the run-of-the-mill journalist. For him the story is not over when the book is sent off to the publishers. He stays in touch with many of his sources for years, for decades, still interested in what happens to them, still gathering information, still involved.
Gay Talese (Thy Neighbor's Wife)
He had again and again made out for himself that he might have kept his little boy, his little dull boy who had died at school of rapid diphtheria, if he had not in those years so insanely given himself to merely missing the mother. It was the soreness of his remorse that the child had in all likelihood not really been dull—had been dull, as he had been banished and neglected, mainly because the father had been unwittingly selfish. This was doubtless but the secret habit of sorrow, which had slowly given way to time; yet there remained an ache sharp enough to make the spirit, at the sight now and again of some fair young man just growing up, wince with the thought of an opportunity lost. Had ever a man, he had finally fallen into the way of asking himself, lost so much and even done so much for so little? There had been particular reasons why all yesterday, beyond other days, he should have had in one ear this cold enquiry. His name on the green cover, where he had put it for Mrs. Newsome, expressed him doubtless just enough to make the world—the world as distinguished, both for more and for less, from Woollett—ask who he was. He had incurred the ridicule of having to have his explanation explained. He was Lambert Strether because he was on the cover, whereas it should have been, for anything like glory, that he was on the cover because he was Lambert Strether. He would have done anything for Mrs. Newsome, have been still more ridiculous—as he might, for that matter, have occasion to be yet; which came to saying that this acceptance of fate was all he had to show at fifty-five.
Henry James (The Ambassadors)
These simple words reveal Rahab’s amazing destiny: Salmon the father of Boaz, whose mother was Rahab (Matthew 1:5). In other words, Salmone and Rahab were married and had a son. The Bible gives us a glimpse into Salmone’s background through several genealogies (1 Chronicles 2:11; Ruth 4:20–21). Clearly, he comes from a highly distinguished family in the house of Judah; his father Nahshon is the leader of the people of Judah, and his father’s sister is wife to Aaron (Numbers 2:3–4). Of Salmone’s own specific accomplishments and activities nothing is known. But the verse in Matthew is still shocking. How could a man who is practically a Jewish aristocrat, significant enough to get his name recorded in the Scriptures, marry a Canaanite woman who has earned her living entertaining gentlemen? Much of this novel deals with that question. Needless to say, this aspect of the story is purely fictional. We only know that Salmone married Rahab and had a son by her, and that Jesus Himself counts this Canaanite harlot as one of His ancestors. On how such a marriage came about or what obstacles it faced, the Bible is silent.
Tessa Afshar (Pearl In The Sand)
It is often said that what most immediately sets English apart from other languages is the richness of its vocabulary. Webster’s Third New International Dictionary lists 450,000 words, and the revised Oxford English Dictionary has 615,000, but that is only part of the total. Technical and scientific terms would add millions more. Altogether, about 200,000 English words are in common use, more than in German (184,000) and far more than in French (a mere 100,000). The richness of the English vocabulary, and the wealth of available synonyms, means that English speakers can often draw shades of distinction unavailable to non-English speakers. The French, for instance, cannot distinguish between house and home, between mind and brain, between man and gentleman, between “I wrote” and “I have written.” The Spanish cannot differentiate a chairman from a president, and the Italians have no equivalent of wishful thinking. In Russia there are no native words for efficiency, challenge, engagement ring, have fun, or take care [all cited in The New York Times, June 18, 1989]. English, as Charlton Laird has noted, is the only language that has, or needs, books of synonyms like Roget’s Thesaurus. “Most speakers of other languages are not aware that such books exist” [The Miracle of Language, page 54]. On the other hand, other languages have facilities we lack. Both French and German can distinguish between knowledge that results from recognition (respectively connaître and kennen) and knowledge that results from understanding (savoir and wissen). Portuguese has words that differentiate between an interior angle and an exterior one. All the Romance languages can distinguish between something that leaks into and something that leaks out of. The Italians even have a word for the mark left on a table by a moist glass (culacino) while the Gaelic speakers of Scotland, not to be outdone, have a word for the itchiness that overcomes the upper lip just before taking a sip of whiskey. (Wouldn’t they just?) It’s sgriob. And we have nothing in English to match the Danish hygge (meaning “instantly satisfying and cozy”), the French sang-froid, the Russian glasnost, or the Spanish macho, so we must borrow the term from them or do without the sentiment. At the same time, some languages have words that we may be pleased to do without. The existence in German of a word like schadenfreude (taking delight in the misfortune of others) perhaps tells us as much about Teutonic sensitivity as it does about their neologistic versatility. Much the same could be said about the curious and monumentally unpronounceable Highland Scottish word sgiomlaireachd, which means “the habit of dropping in at mealtimes.” That surely conveys a world of information about the hazards of Highland life—not to mention the hazards of Highland orthography. Of
Bill Bryson (The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got that Way)
If all art is conceptual, the issue is rather simple. For concepts, like pictures, cannot be true or false. They can only be more or less useful for the formation of descriptions. The words of a language, like pictorial formulas, pick out from the flux of events a few signposts which allow us to give direction to our fellow speakers in that game of "Twenty Questions" in which we are engaged. Where the needs of users are similar, the signposts will tend to correspond. We can mostly find equivalent terms in English, French, German, and Latin, and hence the idea has taken root that concepts exist independently of language as the constituents of "reality." But the English language erects a signpost on the roadfork between "clock" and "watch" where the German has only "Uhr." The sentence from the German primer, "Meine Tante hat eine Uhr," leaves us in doubt whether the aunt has a clock or watch. Either of the two translations may be wrong as a description of a fact. In Swedish, by the way, there is an additional roadfork to distinguish between aunts who are "father's sisters," those who are "mother's sisters," and those who are just ordinary aunts. If we were to play our game in Swedish we would need additional questions to get at the truth about the timepiece.
E.H. Gombrich
Also – for there had been more than a few migrants aboard, yes, quite a quantity of wives who had been grilled by reasonable, doing-their-job officials about the length of and distinguishing moles upon their husbands’ genitalia, a sufficiency of children upon whose legitimacy the British Government had cast its ever-reasonable doubts – mingling with the remnants of the plane, equally fragmented, equally absurd, there floated the debris of the soul, broken memories, sloughed-off selves, severed mother-tongues, violated privacies, untranslatable jokes, extinguished futures, lost loves, the forgotten meaning of hollow, booming words, land, belonging, home.
Salman Rushdie (The Satanic Verses)
Dreams are spirits’ way of communicating with us directly. It is important to say that not every dream of a dead relative is a visit; many are our way of dealing with the loss. But there is a fairly simple way to distinguish between a dream that is a visit from someone on the Other Side and a dream that is just a dream. A visit is profound, a gift. It feels incredibly vivid and real, and stays with us much longer than a standard dream. While the details of most dreams dissolve from memory within a few hours, a visit will be remembered clearly years later. But it doesn’t mean that everything in a dream-visit will make perfect sense. In her visit, my mother came to me
John Edward (One Last Time: A Psychic Medium Speaks to Those We Have Loved and Lost)
That fact that motherhood overwhelms us is not a sign of weakness but an indicator of importance. It distinguishes mothering as one of the few endeavors in our lifetime worthy of such an enormous and all-encompassing investment. We are similarly overwhelmed by such things as love, beauty, justice, and the pursuit of a meaningful existence. When we honor the immensity of motherhood as we do other powerful gifts—instead of resisting or trying to tame it—it changes us. Like native trees on a tropical coastline, we have the potential to grow stronger with every storm, thrive when we grow in groups, dance with the wind and waves, and draw our strength from a well deep within.
Beth Berry (Motherwhelmed)
hundreds of thousands of babies will be born on the same day as this hypothetical baby of mine. Their futures are surely just as important as the future of my hypothetical baby, who is distinguished only by its relationship to me and also to the man I love. I suppose I mean that children are coming anyway, and in the grand scheme of things it won’t matter much whether any of them are mine or his. We have to try either way to build a world they can live in. And I feel in a strange sense that I want to be on the children’s side, and on the side of their mothers; to be with them, not just an observer, admiring them from a distance, speculating about their best interests, but one of them.
Sally Rooney (Beautiful World, Where Are You)
Our study of psychoneurotic disturbances points to a more comprehensive explanation, which includes that of Westermarck. When a wife loses her husband, or a daughter her mother, it not infrequently happens that the survivor is afflicted with tormenting scruples, called ‘obsessive reproaches’ which raises the question whether she herself has not been guilty through carelessness or neglect, of the death of the beloved person. No recalling of the care with which she nursed the invalid, or direct refutation of the asserted guilt can put an end to the torture, which is the pathological expression of mourning and which in time slowly subsides. Psychoanalytic investigation of such cases has made us acquainted with the secret mainsprings of this affliction. We have ascertained that these obsessive reproaches are in a certain sense justified and therefore are immune to refutation or objections. Not that the mourner has really been guilty of the death or that she has really been careless, as the obsessive reproach asserts; but still there was something in her, a wish of which she herself was unaware, which was not displeased with the fact that death came, and which would have brought it about sooner had it been strong enough. The reproach now reacts against this unconscious wish after the death of the beloved person. Such hostility, hidden in the unconscious behind tender love, exists in almost all cases of intensive emotional allegiance to a particular person, indeed it represents the classic case, the prototype of the ambivalence of human emotions. There is always more or less of this ambivalence in everybody’s disposition; normally it is not strong enough to give rise to the obsessive reproaches we have described. But where there is abundant predisposition for it, it manifests itself in the relation to those we love most, precisely where you would least expect it. The disposition to compulsion neurosis which we have so often taken for comparison with taboo problems, is distinguished by a particularly high degree of this original ambivalence of emotions.
Sigmund Freud (Totem and Taboo Resemblances Between the Psychic Lives of Savages and Neurotics)
The Proctors relied on geometry and Jacobean literature, and I used the poems of Emily Dickinson, but it was Fleetwood Mac who inspired my mother’s gramarye. There wasn’t much to distinguish between William Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, and Stevie Nicks. They were all bards, after all, with magic in their pens. I showed Gwyneth the annotated lyrics. “She hid it in plain sight—in the words of her favorite songs. This is what she used to refresh old spells and keep them sharp.” Gwyneth gasped. “Rebecca used music?” “Apparently,” I replied, running my fingers across the underlining in “I Don’t Want to Know.” She’d written A powerful method for uncovering old secrets next to Finally baby / The truth has come down now.
Deborah Harkness (The Black Bird Oracle (All Souls #5))
His short nose, and fair hair, and reddish beard and moustache made him look all the more like a goat because he was small and thin, and his tarnished yellow eyes caught you with that oblique look which Virgil celebrates. How came he, in spite of such obvious disadvantages, to possess really exquisite manners and a distinguished air? The problem is solved partly by the care and elegance of his dress, and partly by the training given him by his mother, a Radziwill. His courage amounted to daring, but his mind was not more than was needed for the ephemeral talk and pleasantry of Parisian conversation. And yet it would have been difficult to find among the young men of fashion in Paris a single one who was his superior.
Honoré de Balzac (Works of Honore de Balzac)
We have already learned that she had come to like people’s liking her to ‘know’. Before he could reply at all, none the less, her mother opened a pair of arms of extraordinary elegance, and then she felt the loosening of his grasp. ‘My own child,’ Ida murmured in a voice—a voice of sudden confused tenderness—that it seemed to her she heard for the first time. She wavered but an instant, thrilled with the first direct appeal, as distinguished from the mere maternal pull, she had ever had from lips that, even in the old vociferous years, had always been sharp. The next moment she was on her mother’s breast, where, amid a wilderness of trinkets, she felt as if she had suddenly been thrust, with a smash of glass, into a jeweller’s shop-front, but only to be as suddenly ejected with a push and the brisk injunction: ‘Now go to the Captain!
Henry James (What Maisie Knew)
Neither you nor I have any confidence that human civilization as we know it is going to persist beyond our lifetimes. But then again, no matter what I do, hundreds of thousands of babies will be born on the same day as this hypothetical baby of mine. Their futures are surely just as important as the future of my hypothetical baby, who is distinguished only by its relationship to me and also to the man I love. I suppose I mean that children are coming anyway, and in the grand scheme of things it won't matter much whether any of them are mine or his. We have to try either way to build a world they can live in. And I feel in a strange sense that I want to be on the children's side, and on the side of their mothers; to be with them, not just an observer, admiring them from a distance, speculating about their best interests, but one of them.
Sally Rooney (Beautiful World, Where Are You)
We must distinguish between "sentimental" and "sensitive." A sentimentalist may be a perfect brute in his free time. A sensitive person is never a cruel person. Sentimental Rousseau, who could weep over a progressive idea, distributed his many natural children through various poorhouses and workhouses and never gave a hoot for them. A sentimental old maid may pamper her parrot and poison her niece. The sentimental politician may remember Mother's Day and ruthlessly destroy a rival. Stalin loved babies. Lenin sobbed at the opera, especially at the Traviata. A whole century of authors praised the simple life of the poor, and so on. Remember that when we speak of sentimentalists, among them Richardson, Rousseau, Dostoevski, we mean the non-artistic exaggeration of familiar emotions meant to provoke automatically traditional compassion in the reader.
Vladimir Nabokov (Lectures on Russian Literature)
THE STORY GOES THAT I sucked too avidly at my mother’s breast, and caused an abscess to bloom in the tender flesh of her left nipple. My grandmother, less kind in those days than afterward, disapproved strongly when at seventeen my mother had married, and managed to instill her daughter with a powerful sense of ill-equipment for the task of mothering me; the failure of her breast to bear up to the ardor of my infant lips filled my mother with shame. She didn’t go to the doctor as quickly as she ought to have. By the time my father found her, collapsed across the keys of the hotel’s piano, and got her into the county hospital, a staph infection had already taken hold of her blood. She died on February 18, 1951, five weeks after giving birth, and thus, naturally, I’ve no memory of her. I can, however, manage to recall a few things about my father, George Tripp, called Little George to distinguish him from my paternal grandfather, his namesake, from whom I’m supposed to
Michael Chabon (Wonder Boys)
The areas of the cortex responsible for attention and self-regulation develop in response to the emotional interaction with the person whom we may call the mothering figure. Usually this is the birth mother, but it may be another person, male or female, depending on circumstances. The right hemisphere of the mother’s brain, the side where our unconscious emotions reside, programs the infant’s right hemisphere. In the early months, the most important communications between mother and infant are unconscious ones. Incapable of deciphering the meaning of words, the infant receives messages that are purely emotional. They are conveyed by the mother’s gaze, her tone of voice and her body language, all of which reflect her unconscious internal emotional environment. Anything that threatens the mother’s emotional security may disrupt the developing electrical wiring and chemical supplies of the infant brain’s emotion-regulating and attention-allocating systems. Within minutes following birth, the mother’s odors stimulate the branching of millions of nerve cells in the newborn’s brain. A six-day-old infant can already distinguish the scent of his mother from that of other women. Later on, visual inputs associated with emotions gradually take over as the major influences. By two to seven weeks, the infant will orient toward the mother’s face in preference to a stranger‘s — and also in preference to the father’s, unless the father is the mothering adult. At seventeen weeks, the infant’s gaze follows the mother’s eyes more closely than her mouth movements, thus fixating on what has been called “the visible portion of the mother’s central nervous system.” The infant’s right brain reads the mother’s right brain during intense eye-to-eye mutual gaze interactions. As an article in Scientific American expressed it, “Embryologically and anatomically the eye is an extension of the brain; it is almost as if a portion of the brain were in plain sight.” The eyes communicate eloquently the mother’s unconscious emotional states.
Gabor Maté (Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do About It)
fear of death.” Our study of psychoneurotic disturbances points to a more comprehensive explanation, which includes that of Westermarck. When a wife loses her husband, or a daughter her mother, it not infrequently happens that the survivor is afflicted with tormenting scruples, called ‘obsessive reproaches’ which raises the question whether she herself has not been guilty through carelessness or neglect, of the death of the beloved person. No recalling of the care with which she nursed the invalid, or direct refutation of the asserted guilt can put an end to the torture, which is the pathological expression of mourning and which in time slowly subsides. Psychoanalytic investigation of such cases has made us acquainted with the secret mainsprings of this affliction. We have ascertained that these obsessive reproaches are in a certain sense justified and therefore are immune to refutation or objections. Not that the mourner has really been guilty of the death or that she has really been careless, as the obsessive reproach asserts; but still there was something in her, a wish of which she herself was unaware, which was not displeased with the fact that death came, and which would have brought it about sooner had it been strong enough. The reproach now reacts against this unconscious wish after the death of the beloved person. Such hostility, hidden in the unconscious behind tender love, exists in almost all cases of intensive emotional allegiance to a particular person, indeed it represents the classic case, the prototype of the ambivalence of human emotions. There is always more or less of this ambivalence in everybody’s disposition; normally it is not strong enough to give rise to the obsessive reproaches we have described. But where there is abundant predisposition for it, it manifests itself in the relation to those we love most, precisely where you would least expect it. The disposition to compulsion neurosis which we have so often taken for comparison with taboo problems, is distinguished by a particularly high degree of this original ambivalence of emotions.
Sigmund Freud (Totem and Taboo Resemblances Between the Psychic Lives of Savages and Neurotics)
Poet is Priest Money has reckoned the soul of America Congress broken thru to the precipice of Eternity the president built a War machine which will vomit and rear Russia out of Kansas The American Century betrayed by a mad Senate which no longer sleeps with its wife. Franco has murdered Lorca the fairy son of Whitman just as Maykovsky committed suicide to avoid Russia Hart Crane distinguished Platonist committed suicide to cave in the wrong America just as millions of tons of human wheat were burned in secret caverns under the White House while India starved and screamed and ate mad dogs full of rain and mountains of eggs were reduced to white powder in the halls of Congress no godfearing man will walk there again because of the stink of the rotten eggs of America and the Indians of Chiapas continue to gnaw their vitaminless tortillas aborigines of Australia perhaps gibber in the eggless wilderness and I rarely have an egg for breakfast tho my work requires infinite eggs to come to birth in Eternity eggs should be eaten or given to their mothers and the grief of the countless chickens of America is expressed in the screaming of her comedians over the radio
Allen Ginsberg (Kaddish and Other Poems)
The illusions of childhood had vanished, so also had the ideas he brought with him from the provinces; he had returned thither with an intelligence developed, with loftier ambitions, and saw things as they were at home in the old manor house. His father and mother, his two brothers and two sisters, with an aged aunt, whose whole fortune consisted in annuities, lived on the little estate of Rastignac. The whole property brought in about three thousand francs; and though the amount varied with the season (as must always be the case in a vine-growing district), they were obliged to spare an unvarying twelve hundred francs out of their income for him. He saw how constantly the poverty, which they had generously hidden from him, weighed upon them; he could not help comparing the sisters, who had seemed so beautiful to his boyish eyes, with women in Paris, who had realized the beauty of his dreams. The uncertain future of the whole family depended upon him. It did not escape his eyes that not a crumb was wasted in the house, nor that the wine they drank was made from the second pressing; a multitude of small things, which it is useless to speak of in detail here, made him burn to distinguish himself, and his ambition to succeed increased tenfold.
Honoré de Balzac (Works of Honore de Balzac)
My mouth- always so active, alert- could now generally identify forty of fifty states in the produce or meat I ate. I had taken to tracking those more distant elements on my plate, and each night, at dinner, a U.S. map would float up in my mind as I chewed and I'd use it to follow the nuances in the parsley sprig, the orange wedge, and the baked potato to Florida, California, and Kansas, respectively. I could sometimes trace eggs to the county. All the while, listening to my mother talk about carpentry, or spanking the bottle of catsup. It was a good game for me, because even though it did command some of my attention, it also distracted me from the much louder and more difficult influence of the mood of the food maker, which ran the gamut. I could be half aware of the conversation, cutting up the meat, and the rest of the time I was driving truck routes through the highways of America, truck beds full of yellow onions. When I went to the supermarket with my mother I double-checked all my answers, and by the time I was twelve, I could distinguish an orange slice from California from an orange slice from Florida in under five seconds because California's was rounder-tasting, due to the desert ground and the clear tangy water of far-flung irrigation.
Aimee Bender (The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake)
Here are two institutions that have always been fundamental with mankind, the family and the state. Anarchists, I believe, disbelieve in both. It is quite unfair to say that Socialists believe in the state, but do not believe in the family; thousands of Socialists believe more in the family than any Tory. But it is true to say that while anarchists would end both, Socialists are specially engaged in mending (that is, strengthening and renewing) the state; and they are not specially engaged in strengthening and renewing the family. They are not doing anything to define the functions of father, mother, and child, as such; they are not tightening the machine up again; they are not blackening in again the fading lines of the old drawing. With the state they are doing this; they are sharpening its machinery, they are blackening in its black dogmatic lines, they are making mere government in every way stronger and in some ways harsher than before. While they leave the home in ruins, they restore the hive, especially the stings. Indeed, some schemes of labor and Poor Law reform recently advanced by distinguished Socialists, amount to little more than putting the largest number of people in the despotic power of Mr. Bumble. Apparently, progress means being moved on—by the police.
G.K. Chesterton (What's Wrong with the World)
As Mollie said to Dailey in the 1890s: "I am told that there are five other Mollie Fanchers, who together, make the whole of the one Mollie Fancher, known to the world; who they are and what they are I cannot tell or explain, I can only conjecture." Dailey described five distinct Mollies, each with a different name, each of whom he met (as did Aunt Susan and a family friend, George Sargent). According to Susan Crosby, the first additional personality appeared some three years after the after the nine-year trance, or around 1878. The dominant Mollie, the one who functioned most of the time and was known to everyone as Mollie Fancher, was designated Sunbeam (the names were devised by Sargent, as he met each of the personalities). The four other personalities came out only at night, after eleven, when Mollie would have her usual spasm and trance. The first to appear was always Idol, who shared Sunbeam's memories of childhood and adolescence but had no memory of the horsecar accident. Idol was very jealous of Sunbeam's accomplishments, and would sometimes unravel her embroidery or hide her work. Idol and Sunbeam wrote with different handwriting, and at times penned letters to each other. The next personality Sargent named Rosebud: "It was the sweetest little child's face," he described, "the voice and accent that of a little child." Rosebud said she was seven years old, and had Mollie's memories of early childhood: her first teacher's name, the streets on which she had lived, children's songs. She wrote with a child's handwriting, upper- and lowercase letters mixed. When Dailey questioned Rosebud about her mother, she answered that she was sick and had gone away, and that she did not know when she would be coming back. As to where she lived, she answered "Fulton Street," where the Fanchers had lived before moving to Gates Avenue. Pearl, the fourth personality, was evidently in her late teens. Sargent described her as very spiritual, sweet in expression, cultured and agreeable: "She remembers Professor West [principal of Brooklyn Heights Seminary], and her school days and friends up to about the sixteenth year in the life of Mollie Fancher. She pronounces her words with an accent peculiar to young ladies of about 1865." Ruby, the last Mollie, was vivacious, humorous, bright, witty. "She does everything with a dash," said Sargent. "What mystifies me about 'Ruby,' and distinguishes her from the others, is that she does not, in her conversations with me, go much into the life of Mollie Fancher. She has the air of knowing a good deal more than she tells.
Michelle Stacey (The Fasting Girl: A True Victorian Medical Mystery)
Many kinds of animal behavior can be explained by genetic similarity theory. Animals have a preference for close kin, and study after study has shown that they have a remarkable ability to tell kin from strangers. Frogs lay eggs in bunches, but they can be separated and left to hatch individually. When tadpoles are then put into a tank, brothers and sisters somehow recognize each other and cluster together rather than mix with tadpoles from different mothers. Female Belding’s ground squirrels may mate with more than one male before they give birth, so a litter can be a mix of full siblings and half siblings. Like tadpoles, they can tell each other apart. Full siblings cooperate more with each other than with half-siblings, fight less, and are less likely to run each other out of the territory when they grow up. Even bees know who their relatives are. In one experiment, bees were bred for 14 different degrees of relatedness—sisters, cousins, second cousins, etc.—to bees in a particular hive. When the bees were then released near the hive, guard bees had to decide which ones to let in. They distinguished between degrees of kinship with almost perfect accuracy, letting in the closest relatives and chasing away more distant kin. The correlation between relatedness and likelihood of being admitted was a remarkable 0.93. Ants are famous for cooperation and willingness to sacrifice for the colony. This is due to a quirk in ant reproduction that means worker ants are 70 percent genetically identical to each other. But even among ants, there can be greater or less genetic diversity, and the most closely related groups of ants appear to cooperate best. Linepithema humile is a tiny ant that originated in Argentina but migrated to the United States. Many ants died during the trip, and the species lost much of its genetic diversity. This made the northern branch of Linepithema humile more cooperative than the one left in Argentina, where different colonies quarrel and compete with each other. This new level of cooperation has helped the invaders link nests into supercolonies and overwhelm local species of ants. American entomologists want to protect American ants by introducing genetic diversity so as to make the newcomers more quarrelsome. Even plants cooperate with close kin and compete with strangers. Normally, when two plants are put in the same pot, they grow bigger root systems, trying to crowd each other out and get the most nutrients. A wild flower called the Sea Rocket, which grows on beaches, does not do that if the two plants come from the same “mother” plant. They recognize each others’ root secretions and avoid wasteful competition.
Jared Taylor
He sometimes thought that the real thing that distinguished him and Malcolm from Jude and Willem was not race or wealth, but Jude’s and Willem’s depthless capacity for wonderment: their childhoods had been so paltry, so gray, compared to his, that it seemed they were constantly being dazzled as adults. The June after they graduated, the Irvines had gotten them all tickets to Paris, where, it emerged, they had an apartment—“a tiny apartment,” Malcolm had clarified, defensively—in the seventh. He had been to Paris with his mother in junior high, and again with his class in high school, and between his sophomore and junior years of college, but it wasn’t until he had seen Jude’s and Willem’s faces that he was able to most vividly realize not just the beauty of the city but its promise of enchantments. He envied this in them, this ability they had (though he realized that in Jude’s case at least, it was a reward for a long and punitive childhood) to still be awestruck, the faith they maintained that life, adulthood, would keep presenting them with astonishing experiences, that their marvelous years were not behind them. He remembered too watching them try uni for the first time, and their reactions—like they were Helen Keller and were just comprehending that that cool splash on their hands had a name, and that they could know it—made him both impatient and intensely envious. What must it feel like to be an adult and still discovering the world’s pleasures?
Hanya Yanagihara (A Little Life)
Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there—on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
Carl Sagan (Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space)
Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
Carl Sagan
We will always be black, you and I, even if it means different things in different places. France is built on its own dream, on its collection of bodies, and recall that your very name is drawn from a man who opposed France and its national project of theft by colonization. It is true that our color was not our distinguishing feature there, so much as the Americanness represented in our poor handle on French. And it is true that there is something particular about how the Americans who think they are white regard us—something sexual and obscene. We were not enslaved in France. We are not their particular “problem,” nor their national guilt. We are not their niggers. If there is any comfort in this, it is not the kind that I would encourage you to indulge. Remember your name. Remember that you and I are brothers, are the children of trans-Atlantic rape. Remember the broader consciousness that comes with that. Remember that this consciousness can never ultimately be racial; it must be cosmic. Remember the Roma you saw begging with their children in the street, and the venom with which they were addressed. Remember the Algerian cab driver, speaking openly of his hatred of Paris, then looking at your mother and me and insisting that we were all united under Africa. Remember the rumbling we all felt under the beauty of Paris, as though the city had been built in abeyance of Pompeii. Remember the feeling that the great public gardens, the long lunches, might all be undone by a physics, cousin to our rules and the reckoning of our own country, that we do not fully comprehend.
Ta-Nehisi Coates
Hekate, the third of this group, was always closest to us—although her name perhaps means “the Distant One”. It is not only her name that links her with Apollon and Artemis, who are also named Hekatos and Hekate, but also her family origin—if Hesiod is right in his account of it. She is elsewhere supposed to have been one of the Daughters of Night.{58} Hesiod, however, gives us the following genealogy:{59} the Titan couple Phoebe and Koios had two daughters: Leto, the mother of Apollon and Artemis, and Asteria, a star-goddess who bore Hekate to Persaios or Perses, the son of Eurybia. Hekate is therefore the cousin of Apollon and Artemis, and at the same time a reappearance of the great goddess Phoibe, whose name poets often give to the moon. Indeed, Hekate used to appear to us carrying her torch as the Moon-Goddess, whereas Artemis, although she, too, sometimes carries a torch, never did so. Hesiod seeks further to distinguish Hekate from Artemis by repeatedly emphasising that the former is monogenes, “an only child”. In this respect, too, Hekate resembled Persephone, the goddess of the Underworld. For the rest, she was an almighty, threefold goddess. Zeus revered her above all others,{60} and let her have her share of the earth, the sea and the starry sky; or rather, he did not deprive her of this threefold honour, which she had previously enjoyed under the earlier gods, the Titans, but let her retain what had been awarded to her at the first distribution of honours and dignities. She was therefore a true Titaness of the Titans, even though this is never expressly stated.
Karl Kerényi (The Gods of The Greeks)
Rennie looked again and his hand attached itself to his arm, which was part of him. He wasn’t very far away. She fell in love with him because he was the first thing she saw after her life had been saved. This was the only explanation she could think of. She wished, later, when she was no longer feeling dizzy but was sitting up, trying to ignore the little sucking tubes that were coming out of her and the constant ache, that it had been a potted begonia or a stuffed rabbit, some safe bedside object. Jake sent her roses but by then it was too late. I imprinted on him, she thought; like a duckling, like a baby chick. She knew about imprinting; once, when she was hard up for cash, she’d done a profile for Owl Magazine of a man who believed geese should be used as safe and loyal substitute for watchdogs. It was best to be there yourself when the goslings came out of the eggs, he said. Then they’d follow you to the ends of the earth. Rennie had smirked because that man seemed to think that being followed to the ends of the earth by a flock of adoring geese was both desirable and romantic, but she’d written it all down in his own words. Now she was behaving like a goose, and the whole thing put her on foul temper. It was inappropriate to have fallen in love with Daniel, who had no distinguishing features that Rennie could see. She hardly even knew what he looked like, since, during the examinations before the operation, she hadn’t bothered to look at him. One did not look at doctors; they were functionaries, they were what your mother one hoped you would marry, they were fifties, they were passe. It wasn’t only inappropriate, it was ridiculous. It was expected. Falling in love with your doctor was something middle-aged married women did, women in soaps, women in nurse novels and sex-and-scalpel epics with titles like Surgery and nurse with big tits and doctors who looked like Dr. Kildare on the covers. It was the sort of thing Toronto Life did stories about, soft-core gossip masquerading as hard-nosed research expose. Rennie could not stand being guilty of such a banality.
Margaret Atwood (Bodily Harm)
That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam. The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors, so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known
Carl Sagan
For years now I have heard the word “Wait!” It rings in the ear of every Negro with piercing familiarity. This “Wait” has almost always meant “Never.” We must come to see, with one of our distinguished jurists, that “justice too long delayed is justice denied.” We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jet-like speed toward gaining political independence, but we still creep at horse-and-buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, “Wait.” But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick, and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son who is asking: “Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?”; when you take a cross-county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading “white” and “colored”; when your first name becomes “nigger,” your middle names becomes “boy” (however old you are), and your last name becomes “John,” and your wife and mother are never given the respected title “Mrs.”; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodiness”—then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait.
Martin Luther King Jr. (The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr.)
As for the other experiences, the solitary ones, which people go through alone, in their bedrooms, in their offices, walking the fields and the streets of London, he had them; had left home, a mere boy, because of his mother; she lied; because he came down to tea for the fiftieth time with his hands unwashed; because he could see no future for a poet in Stroud; and so, making a confidant of his little sister, had gone to London leaving an absurd note behind him, such as great men have written, and the world has read later when the story of their struggles has become famous. London has swallowed up many millions of young men called Smith; thought nothing of fantastic Christian names like Septimus with which their parents have thought to distinguish them. Lodging off the Euston Road, there were experiences, again experiences, such as change a face in two years from a pink innocent oval to a face lean, contracted, hostile. But of all this what could the most observant of friends have said except what a gardener says when he opens the conservatory door in the morning and finds a new blossom on his plant: — It has flowered; flowered from vanity, ambition, idealism, passion, loneliness, courage, laziness, the usual seeds, which all muddled up (in a room off the Euston Road), made him shy, and stammering, made him anxious to improve himself, made him fall in love with Miss Isabel Pole, lecturing in the Waterloo Road upon Shakespeare. Was he not like Keats? she asked; and reflected how she might give him a taste of Antony and Cleopatra and the rest; lent him books; wrote him scraps of letters; and lit in him such a fire as burns only once in a lifetime, without heat, flickering a red gold flame infinitely ethereal and insubstantial over Miss Pole; Antony and Cleopatra; and the Waterloo Road. He thought her beautiful, believed her impeccably wise; dreamed of her, wrote poems to her, which, ignoring the subject, she corrected in red ink; he saw her, one summer evening, walking in a green dress in a square. “It has flowered,” the gardener might have said, had he opened the door; had he come in, that is to say, any night about this time, and found him writing; found him tearing up his writing; found him finishing a masterpiece at three o’clock in the morning and running out to pace the streets, and visiting churches, and fasting one day, drinking another, devouring Shakespeare, Darwin, The History of Civilisation, and Bernard Shaw.
Virginia Woolf (Complete Works of Virginia Woolf)
Doremus Jessup, so inconspicuous an observer, watching Senator Windrip from so humble a Boeotia, could not explain his power of bewitching large audiences. The Senator was vulgar, almost illiterate, a public liar easily detected, and in his "ideas" almost idiotic, while his celebrated piety was that of a traveling salesman for church furniture, and his yet more celebrated humor the sly cynicism of a country store. Certainly there was nothing exhilarating in the actual words of his speeches, nor anything convincing in his philosophy. His political platforms were only wings of a windmill. Seven years before his present credo—derived from Lee Sarason, Hitler, Gottfried Feder, Rocco, and probably the revue Of Thee I Sing—little Buzz, back home, had advocated nothing more revolutionary than better beef stew in the county poor-farms, and plenty of graft for loyal machine politicians, with jobs for their brothers-in-law, nephews, law partners, and creditors. Doremus had never heard Windrip during one of his orgasms of oratory, but he had been told by political reporters that under the spell you thought Windrip was Plato, but that on the way home you could not remember anything he had said. There were two things, they told Doremus, that distinguished this prairie Demosthenes. He was an actor of genius. There was no more overwhelming actor on the stage, in the motion pictures, nor even in the pulpit. He would whirl arms, bang tables, glare from mad eyes, vomit Biblical wrath from a gaping mouth; but he would also coo like a nursing mother, beseech like an aching lover, and in between tricks would coldly and almost contemptuously jab his crowds with figures and facts—figures and facts that were inescapable even when, as often happened, they were entirely incorrect. But below this surface stagecraft was his uncommon natural ability to be authentically excited by and with his audience, and they by and with him. He could dramatize his assertion that he was neither a Nazi nor a Fascist but a Democrat—a homespun Jeffersonian-Lincolnian-Clevelandian-Wilsonian Democrat—and (sans scenery and costume) make you see him veritably defending the Capitol against barbarian hordes, the while he innocently presented as his own warm-hearted Democratic inventions, every anti-libertarian, anti-Semitic madness of Europe. Aside from his dramatic glory, Buzz Windrip was a Professional Common Man. Oh, he was common enough. He had every prejudice and aspiration of every American Common Man. He believed in the desirability and therefore the sanctity of thick buckwheat cakes with adulterated maple syrup, in rubber trays for the ice cubes in his electric refrigerator, in the especial nobility of dogs, all dogs, in the oracles of S. Parkes Cadman, in being chummy with all waitresses at all junction lunch rooms, and in Henry Ford (when he became President, he exulted, maybe he could get Mr. Ford to come to supper at the White House), and the superiority of anyone who possessed a million dollars. He regarded spats, walking sticks, caviar, titles, tea-drinking, poetry not daily syndicated in newspapers and all foreigners, possibly excepting the British, as degenerate. But he was the Common Man twenty-times-magnified by his oratory, so that while the other Commoners could understand his every purpose, which was exactly the same as their own, they saw him towering among them, and they raised hands to him in worship.
Sinclair Lewis (It Can't Happen Here)
At forty-two, he’d aged well. The slight greying at the temples served to make him look distinguished rather than older. This seemed to be the case for men. For women it wasn’t so easy. Mother Nature had a lot to answer for, but if truth be told, it was probably a man in disguise.
Pippa Franks (Grace Me With Your Presents)
She’s watching me in the dawn’s first light with an intensity that melts me. Her face a vivid world, I no longer know if I exist inside a photograph or if I once existed in the whiteness of the morning in front of this slow-gesturing woman who, never taking her eyes off me, is lying there in front of me, naked more naked than the night, more physical than a whole life spent caressing the beauty of the world. Sustaining her gaze is painful. I imagine, I breathe and imagine her once more. A few centimetres below the manubrium glints a little diamond that seems to stay on her chest by magic. The diamond, no doubt held there by a little ring inserted into the flesh, sparkles like a provocation, an object of light that lies in wait for desire, engulfs the other. I am that other. I am pure emotion lying in wait for the fate crouched inside this woman. The woman offers her desire, sows sentences in me whose syntax is unfamiliar and which I’m unable to follow and pronounce. Words there I cannot clearly distinguish – breasts, gusts, ships, stext – and, in between them, the woman’s lips move like some life-giving water that cleanses away all clichés, promises that every imprint of the gaze will be sexual, will be repeated and fluid as vivid as the morning light absorbing one’s most intimate thoughts. Her arms are open. She opens herself to the embraces that, in mother tongue, suspend reality. The woman has turned her head slightly and her throat astonishes. Her gaze contains traces of that water which, it is said, gushes when memory becomes verb and rekindles desire at the edge of the labia. The woman’s gaze sweeps into the future. Simone sometimes finds herself comparing herself to the woman of action, of business and of spirit, wise to intrigue, that was Marie de l’Incarnation.
Nicole Brossard (Yesterday, at the Hotel Clarendon)
The modified Mozart used by Tomatis, Paul, iLs, and others over time in an individualized therapy must be distinguished from claims made in the media in the 1990s that mothers could raise the IQ of their children by having them briefly listen to unfiltered Mozart. This claim was based on a study not of mothers and babies but of college students who listened to Mozart ten minutes a day and improved IQ scores on spatial reasoning tests—an effect that lasted only ten to fifteen minutes! Hype aside, different studies by Gottfried Schlaug, Christo Pantev, Laurel Trainor, Sylvain Moreno, and Glenn Schellenberg have shown that sustained music training, such as learning to play an instrument, can lead to brain change, enhance verbal and math skills, and even modestly increase IQ.]
Norman Doidge (The Brain's Way of Healing: Remarkable Discoveries and Recoveries from the Frontiers of Neuroplasticity)
George Moonlight had introduced his only son to the woods before Charlie could walk. He’d taught him to hunt, trap, fish, make squirrel stew, skin a deer, build a birchbark canoe, construct a wigwam for shelter, distinguish the edible mushrooms from the poisonous ones, start a blazing fire without matches, find his way through fifty miles of virgin forest without compass or map. He’d taught him to appreciate the sound of a mother quail protecting her babies, the rich smell of a fall day, the crispness of a winter night, the majesty of a hawk soaring across a cloudless sky, the gentle tranquility and harmony of snow blanketing a field. He’d taught him to respect Mother Earth, drilling into his head the Quidnecks’ three commandments: Take only what you need; use all that you take; leave something for tomorrow.
Chet Williamson (A Haunting of Horrors: A Twenty-Novel eBook Bundle of Horror and the Occult)
The truth is that both sets of parents are “real.” During the developmental stages of early childhood, when a child’s thinking is concrete, an adopted child needs to understand that there are two mothers and two fathers, but there is only one set of, or one parent. The role of parent must be made clear and distinguished from that of mother and father.
Joyce Maguire Pavao (The Family of Adoption: Completely Revised and Updated)
Thus there is need of deeper reflection. Before entering into an examination of individual texts, we must direct our attention to the whole picture, the question of structure. Only in this way can a meaningful arrangement of individual elements be obtained. Is there any place at all for something like Mariology in Holy Scripture, in the overall pattern of its faith and prayer? Methodologically, one can approach this question in one of two ways, backwards or forwards, so to speak: either one can read back from the New Testament into the Old or, conversely, feel one’s way slowly from the Old Testament into the New. Ideally both ways should coincide, permeating one another, in order to produce the most exact image possible. If one begins by reading backwards or, more precisely, from the end to the beginning, it becomes obvious that the image of Mary in the New Testament is woven entirely of Old Testament threads. In this reading, two or even three major strands of tradition can be clearly distinguished which were used to express the mystery of Mary. First, the portrait of Mary includes the likeness of the great mothers of the Old Testament: Sarah and especially Hannah, the mother of Samuel. Second, into that portrait is woven the whole theology of daughter Zion, in which, above all, the prophets announced the mystery of election and covenant, the mystery of God’s love for Israel. A third strand can perhaps be identified in the Gospel of John: the figure of Eve, the “woman” par excellence, is borrowed to interpret Mary.
Pope Benedict XVI
Have you ever struggled through a fight but kept pushing on? Kara Tippetts, who is a mother of four had died of breast cancer. She had written The Hardest Peace to show how she was living the best way she could in her situation. She had never expressed any sort emotion that was never any positive feeling. Starting chapter one Tippetts combines both the mind and the heart in her writing. She does not give the reader any way of comparing their life to her story, having to look back on their own. Her book distinguishes many of her hardships that she had before her passing. Abuse, drugs, and broken relationships all lead up to her talk of cancer. Throughout this whole story Tippetts calls her cancer “hard”. She describes her fight with each hard, while demonstrating her feelings of grace. She had never once let her children or husband see her as unhappy. She wanted them to remember her as being this loving wife and mother that cared deeply for them. I feel that this books stands out before all other when speaking of the fight against cancer. Having to always look in the positives shows that you accept what you have. Kara Tippetts has shown that living with happiness, means to enjoy life. When always focusing on the negatives you always feel like you need to please others rather than yourself. Her life, I feel resembles the Catholic Social teaching, “Call to family, community, and participations.” This teaching, I feel resembles her because it shows that marriage and family must be supported and strengthened. Tippetts wanted to show her happiness to her family, wanting to show that she is not in any case, worried. She wanted them to know that she was going to be home soon, meaning with God in Heaven. So what I have taken out of her story is this one thing, “Always keep a positive mind and never show that you are unhappy, for at the end of life there is always a silver lining.
Kara Tippetts
Physical appearance was an unreliable criterion for maintaining this boundary, because the light-skinned children of White slave masters and enslaved Black women sometimes resembled their fathers more than their mothers. Ancestry, rather than appearance, became the important criterion. In both legal and social practice, anyone with any known African ancestry (no matter how far back in the family lineage) was considered Black, while only those without any trace of known African ancestry were called Whites. Known as the “one-drop rule,” this practice solidified the boundary between Black and White. The use of the one-drop rule was institutionalized by the US Census Bureau in the early twentieth century. Prior to 1920, “pure Negroes” were distinguished from “mulattoes” in the census count, but in 1920 the mulatto category was dropped and “Black” was defined as any person with known Black ancestry. In 1960, the practice of self-definition began, with heads of household indicating the race of household members. However, the numbers of Black families remained essentially the same, suggesting that the heads of household were using the same one-drop criteria that the census takers had been using. Though it is estimated that 75–90 percent of Black Americans have White ancestors and about 25 percent have Native American ancestry, the widespread use of the one-drop rule meant that people with known Black ancestry, regardless of appearance, were classified by society and self-classified as Black.8 During that time period, the choice of a biracial or multiracial identity was not a viable option. The one-drop rule essentially meant that a “multiracial identity was equivalent to black identity.
Beverly Daniel Tatum (Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria?)
One has to learn how to distinguish real gold from tinsel. It is hard because tinsel sometimes glitters so dazzlingly.
Shaun Usher (Letters of Note: Mothers)
Distinguish yourself. [Mama] wanted me to be more like her. But Papa had always wanted me to be my own woman. He wanted me to distinguish myself from my mother.
Serena Valentino
To get at the heart of the social superego, we must locate its effects in the way subjects believe in the same command of its dictates. What distinguishes the break Lasch aptly points out, between the Fordist era of stable ego ideals to the rise of the social superego of neoliberalism, is how belief in the injunction serves as a pre-condition of the social superego. This point is illuminated by the anti-liberal polemicist and French intellectual Jean-Claude Michéa, who argues that today’s superego is the bad mother: possessive and castrating. The superego functions in two forms: the first is to establish a disciplinary order of submission, and the second is to cede the desire of the subject. The maternal has no other way of expressing its devotion other than by “love and sacrificial devotion.” Hence, the cruelty of the superego today resides in the ambiguous and necessary internalization of injunctions. Instead of the same repressive “double bind” of the father’s injunction in the prior era: “follow my advice, don’t follow my advice,” presenting a contradictory law, the contemporary period presents injunctions which follow a different logic: “you will visit your grandma, and you will like it.” There is thus an extra demand to internally act as if the subject conforms with the injunction itself.
Daniel Tutt (Psychoanalysis and the Politics of the Family: The Crisis of Initiation)
Your mother asked about his family, because we are southern and asking about someone’s family is the only way we can distinguish the chaff from the wheat.
Karin Slaughter (Pretty Girls)
THIRTY-THREE MUNICH, GERMANY 1:00 PM WILKERSON HAD SLEPT WELL, SATISFIED BOTH WITH HOW HE’D handled himself at the lodge and with Dorothea afterward. Having access to money, few responsibilities, and a beautiful woman weren’t bad substitutes for not being an admiral. Provided, of course, that he could stay alive. In preparation for this assignment, he’d back-checked the Oberhauser family thoroughly. Assets in the billions, and not old money—ancient money that had lasted through centuries of political upheavals. Opportunists? Surely. Their family crest seemed to explain it all. A dog clutching a rat in its mouth, encased inside a crested cauldron. What myriad contradictions. Much like the family itself. But how else could they have survived? Time, though, had taken a toll. Dorothea and her sister were all the Oberhausers left. Both beautiful, high-strung creatures. Nearing fifty. Identical in appearance, though each tried hard to distinguish herself. Dorothea had pursued business degrees and actively worked with her mother in the family concerns. She’d married in her early twenties and birthed a son, but he was killed five years ago, a week after his twentieth birthday, in a car accident. All reports indicated that she changed after that. Hardened. Became enslaved to deep anxieties and unpredictable moods. To shoot a man with a shotgun, as she’d done last night, then make love afterward with such an unfettered intensity, proved that dichotomy. Business had never interested Christl, nor had marriage or children. He’d met her only once, at a social function Dorothea and
Steve Berry (The Charlemagne Pursuit (Cotton Malone, #4))
once confided to him late at night after a game of billiards and rather a lot of excellent port that his wife hated it so much that she’d only let him do it when she wanted a baby. She was a damned attractive woman, too, and a wonderful wife, as Martyn had said. In other ways. They had five children, and Martyn didn’t think she was going to wear a sixth. Rotten for him. When Edward had suggested that he find consolation elsewhere, Martyn had simply gazed at him with mournful brown eyes and said, ‘But I’m in love with her, old boy, always have been. Never looked at anyone else. You know how it is.’ And Edward, who didn’t, said of course he did. That conversation had warned him off Marcia Slocombe-Jones anyhow. It didn’t matter, because although he could have gone for her there were so many other girls to go for. How lucky he was! To have come back from France not only alive, but relatively unscathed! In winter, his chest played him up a bit due to living in trenches where the gas had hung about for weeks, but otherwise . . . Since then he’d come back, gone straight into the family firm, met Villy at a party, married her as soon as her contract with the ballet company she was with expired and as soon as she’d agreed to the Old Man’s dictate that her career should stop from then on. ‘Can’t marry a gal whose head’s full of something else. If marriage isn’t the woman’s career, it won’t be a good marriage.’ His attitude was thoroughly Victorian, of course, but all the same, there was quite a lot to be said for it. Whenever Edward looked at his own mother, which he did infrequently but with great affection, he saw her as the perfect reflection of his father’s attitude: a woman who had serenely fulfilled all her family responsibilities and at the same time retained her youthful enthusiasms – for her garden that she adored and for music. At over seventy, she was quite capable of playing double concertos with professionals. Unable to discriminate between the darker, more intricate veins of temperament that distinguish one person from another, he could not really see why Villy should not be as happy and fulfilled as the Duchy. (His mother’s Victorian reputation for plain living – nothing rich in food and no frills or pretensions about her own appearance or her household’s had long ago earned her the nickname of Duchess – shortened by her own children to
Elizabeth Jane Howard (The Light Years (Cazalet Chronicles, #1))
We need only groan. As I read Paul's words, an image comes to mind of a mother tuning in to her child's wordless cry. I know mothers who, through years of experience, have learned to distinguish a cry for food from a cry for attention, an earache cry from a stomachache cry. To me the sounds are identical, but not to the mother, who instinctively discerns the meaning of the helpless child's cry. The Spirit of God has resources of sensitivity beyond those of even the wisest mother. Paul says that Spirit lives inside us, detecting needs we cannot articulate and expressing them in a language we cannot comprehend.
Philip Yancey (Where Is God When It Hurts?)
The gradual change, from her [Victoria] dominance to his [Albert], was taking place not just in ballrooms but more widely in British society. The genders became more clearly and hierarchically distinguished as the 1830s gave way to the 1840s. A successful marriage, thought Sarah Ellis, writing in 1843, was founded on one important truth. "It is," she counselled her female readers, "the superiority of your husband as a man." "You may have more talent, with higher attainments," she advised them, "but this has nothing whatever to do with your position as a woman, which is, and must be, inferior to his as a man.
Lucy Worsley (Queen Victoria: Daughter, Wife, Mother, Widow)
Kundalini is a primitive spirit, a creative force that typically resides in a dormant state within our bodies. We realize our innate power and completeness upon awakening. We know there is everything within us that we need to be happy and fulfilled. Kundalini is not a physical reality but a perceptible reality. Once we have been awakened, we are shedding our old tendencies, and negativity like a snake sheds off its old skin. The kundalini is said to empower us with Shakti — that Divine Mother's primordial energy. Charged with this feminine creative force, we get filled with the vigor, enthusiasm, willpower, and self-confidence that we need to shake off negative memories and emotions hidden deep within our subconscious mind. Our mind is getting dormant. Issues and issues that had once held our focus now seem insignificant. Such a mind-state automatically produces intuitive wisdom.  Released from the endless chain of uncertainty and misunderstanding, insight is our guardian and guide.  The strength of discernment is unfailing. The reason kundalini awakening is such a remarkable aspect of spiritual awakening is that it is not based on complex theological arguments or religious norms that are culturally defined. Instead, Kundalini concentrates on the divine's immediate, ultimate experience within us. And regardless of your particular religious background and values, we can all use kundalini yoga to assist in our spiritual evolution. Most ancient myths allude to the meaning of kundalini. Tiresias narrative is a prime example. If Tiresias–the ancient Greek seer discovered two copulating snakes, he would stick his staff between them to distinguish them. He was immediately turned into a woman and remained like that for seven years until he was able to repeat his action and turn back into a male. In this novel, the force of change, powerful enough to completely reverse both male and female physical polarities, emerges from the fusion of the two serpents, passed on by the ring. Tiresias staff was later passed on to Hermes along with serpents. Several medical organizations use the ancient Greek icon of Hermes, the Greek god and messenger of all gods, called “Karykeion.” In occult Hermetic philosophy, Hermes Caduceus represents the masculine's potential as a central phallic rod surrounded by two coupling serpents ' writhing, woven Shakti energies. The rod also represents the spine (sushumna), while the serpents perform metaphysical currents (pranas) along the inda and pingala channels from the chakra at the base of the spine to the pineal gland in a double helix pattern.
Adrian Satyam (Energy Healing: 6 in 1: Medicine for Body, Mind and Spirit. An extraordinary guide to Chakra and Quantum Healing, Kundalini and Third Eye Awakening, Reiki and Meditation and Mindfulness.)
The jar her hand had chosen—and it was an odd old wooden jar, a recognizable crooked shape under her fingers, a reject because it would not sit straight on a shelf, the only empty jar she could find when at the last minute she’d decided to take a little more honey on her journey, a little of the mysterious honey, the honey that seemed to suggest laughter and joy and a long bright horizon, the strong-tasting honey whose distinguishing source she could not identify. She’d almost laughed when she decanted it because the bigger crock it lived in was also very crooked, not merely a reject but so lopsided that her mother had kept trying to throw it out, and her father kept rescuing it; and when her father died her mother kept it after all, for those memories of him. Mirasol had thought, as she carefully poured, that perhaps this honey had an affinity for those who do not sit securely, who do not rest peacefully, who limp instead of walk. She hadn’t quite been able to laugh, but she’d been smiling when she tucked it into its corner of a saddlebag, and the smile had been as refreshing as cold water Ron a hot day. This was the honey that had given her energy in the sennight past when she had none, the honey she had put last into the cup for her last-of-all stop on the pavilion hill.
Robin McKinley (Chalice)
If parents do believe in enforcing a lot of regulations, the way they explain them matters a great deal. New research shows that teenagers defy rules when they’re enforced in a controlling manner, by yelling or threatening punishment. When mothers enforce many rules but offer a clear rationale for why they’re important, teenagers are substantially less likely to break them, because they internalize them. In Donald MacKinnon’s study comparing America’s most creative architects with a group of highly skilled but unoriginal peers, a factor that distinguished the creative group was that their parents exercised discipline with explanations. They outlined their standards of conduct and explained their grounding in a set of principles about right and wrong, referencing values like morality, integrity, respect, curiosity, and perseverance. But “emphasis was placed upon the development of one’s ethical code,” MacKinnon wrote. Above all, the parents who raised highly creative architects granted their children the autonomy to choose their own values.
Adam M. Grant (Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World)
to an impaired emotional regulation system, a limited facilitation for empathy, and problems in distinguishing present reality from irrelevant memories. In the long-term there is an increased risk of developing future psychopathologies and personality disorders. As opposed to secure attachments, organized forms of insecure attachments reflect inefficient stragetgies for coping with attachment emotional stress. In cases of avoidant attachment the mother may be averse to physical contact and block her child’s attempt to get close to her. She may be intensely ambivalent about being a mother. Her avoidance of the infant is more than behavioral – psychological harm can occur through the mother who is emotionally unavailable when her infant is distressed, even if she remains in physical contact with her child. In parallel, due to the lack of interactive regulation, the child learns how to disengage from the mother under stress, as well as from his own emotional responses to her rejection. To avoid this, the stressed infant will signal his need to disengage by looking away. On the other hand unpredictable and intrusive mothering often leads to ambivalent-anxious attachment where infants can only cope with a certain limited intensity of emotional arousal before they move beyond their window of tolerance into a state of stressful emotional dysregulation. These infants are overly dependent on the attachment figure (presumably desperately seeking interactive regulation) but also angry with the caregiver’s unpredictable regulation. In the most unfortunate situation, the infant/toddler is exposed to the most intense social stressors, such as physical and/or emotional abuse. This also includes neglect, which is proving to be the most serious threat to the development of the emotional brain. The most severe forms of attachment trauma, both abuse and neglect, create “disorganized-disoriented attachment.” It occurs when an infant has no strategy that will help him to cope with his caregiver, causing the infant to be profoundly confused, physically aroused, yet emotionally paralyzed. This context thus generates
Eva Rass (The Allan Schore Reader: Setting the course of development)