Doomed By The Narrative Quotes

Let us break the deadlock and stop doom-scrolling into the narrative of a fluctuating landscape of dispiriting thoughts...but, instead, invite the flowers of compassion to blossom in our hearts and our minds and overwhelm us with a spray of vibrant petals of well-being. ("Absence of Desire" )

They lived in a great city, a metropolis of many narratives that converged briefly and then separated for ever, discovering their different dooms in that crowd of stories through which all of us, following our own destinies, had to push and shove to find our way through, or out.

Following our " own" we marched on towards our own holocaust , our own extinction. For we forgot that entrapped in our own mind are the seeds of a clueless "kamikaze " which will bring this nation to its doom !

The narcissist cannot admit that he had toiled and sweated to achieve his goal and, with this confession, shatter his alleged omnipotence and grandiose False Self. He must belittle every accomplishment of his and make it appear to have been a routine triviality. This is intended to support the dreamland quality of his fragmented personality. But it also prevents him from deriving the psychological benefits which usually accrue to to goal attainment… The narcissist is doomed to roam a circular labyrinth. When he does achieve something, he underestimates it in order to enhance his own sense of omnipotence, perfection, and brilliance. When he fails, he dare not face reality. He escapes to the land of no narratives where life is nothing but a meaningless wasteland. The narcissist whiles his life away.

My mother once told me that trauma is like Lord of the Rings. You go through this crazy, life-altering thing that almost kills you (like say having to drop the one ring into Mount Doom), and that thing by definition cannot possibly be understood by someone who hasn’t gone through it. They can sympathize sure, but they’ll never really know, and more than likely they’ll expect you to move on from the thing fairly quickly. And they can’t be blamed, people are just like that, but that’s not how it works. Some lucky people are like Sam. They can go straight home, get married, have a whole bunch of curly headed Hobbit babies and pick up their gardening right where they left off, content to forget the whole thing and live out their days in peace. Lots of people however, are like Frodo, and they don’t come home the same person they were when they left, and everything is more horrible and more hard then it ever was before. The old wounds sting and the ghost of the weight of the one ring still weighs heavy on their minds, and they don’t fit in at home anymore, so they get on boats go sailing away to the Undying West to look for the sort of peace that can only come from within. Frodos can’t cope, and most of us are Frodos when we start out. But if we move past the urge to hide or lash out, my mother always told me, we can become Pippin and Merry. They never ignored what had happened to them, but they were malleable and receptive to change. They became civic leaders and great storytellers; they we able to turn all that fear and anger and grief into narratives that others could delight in and learn from, and they used the skills they had learned in battle to protect their homeland. They were fortified by what had happened to them, they wore it like armor and used it to their advantage. It is our trauma that turns us into guardians, my mother told me, it is suffering that strengthens our skin and softens our hearts, and if we learn to live with the ghosts of what had been done to us, we just may be able to save others from the same fate.

Siddhartha wants liberation, Dante wants Beatrice, Frodo wants to get to Mount Doom—we all want something. Quest is elemental to the human experience. All road narratives are to some extent built on quest. If you’re a woman, though, this fundamental possibility of quest is denied. You can’t go anywhere if you can’t step out onto a road… …(T)here is no female counterpart in our culture to Ishmael or Huck Finn. There is no Dean Moriarty, Sal, or even a Fuckhead. It sounds like a doctoral crisis, but it’s not. As a fifteen-year-old hitchhiker, my survival depended upon other people’s ability to envision a possible future for me. Without a Melvillean or Kerouacian framework, or at least some kind of narrative to spell out a potential beyond death, none of my resourcefulness or curiosity was recognizable, and therefore I was unrecognizable.

when I see the same enormities practiced upon beings whose complexion and blood claim kindred with my own, I curse the perpetrators, and weep over the wretched victims of their rapacity. Indeed, truth and justice demand from me the confession that the Christian slaves among the barbarians of Africa are treated with more humanity than the African slaves among the professing Christians of civilized America; and yet here sensibility bleeds at every pore for the wretches whom fate has doomed to slavery." Such testimony would seem to furnish

There was a time to take refuge in the arms of those you loved, and there was a time to stand up to great evil and be not bowed. If you didn’t know the difference, then you were doomed to perish about two-thirds of the way through the story, when the narrative needed a jolt of violence and emotion.

The two things clearest in my mind were, that a remoteness had come upon the old Blunderstone life—which seemed to lie in the haze of an immeasurable distance; and that a curtain had for ever fallen on my life at Murdstone and Grinby's. No one has ever raised that curtain since. I have lifted it for a moment, even in this narrative, with a reluctant hand, and dropped it gladly. The remembrance of that life is fraught with so much pain to me, with so much mental suffering and want of hope, that I have never had the courage even to examine how long I was doomed to lead it. Whether it lasted for a year, or more, or less, I do not know. I only know that it was, and ceased to be; and that I have written, and there I leave it.

For two good reasons, I will not enter deeply into this scientific branch of my confession. First, because I have been made to learn that the doom and burthen of our life is bound for ever on man’s shoulders, and when the attempt is made to cast it off, it but returns upon us with more unfamiliar and more awful pressure. Second, because, as my narrative will make, alas! too evident, my discoveries were incomplete.

much of our suffering often arises from living a lifestyle that is out of sync with our inner needs. This implies that a genuine path to healing often lies in making fundamental shifts within our lifestyles and thought patterns. Only by reevaluating and recalibrating our approach to life can we address the root causes of our discomfort and stagnation. Regrettably, mainstream medicine often fails to endorse such transformative approaches. Instead, a deceptive narrative has been meticulously crafted by pharmaceutical giants, promoting the idea that pills capable of altering brain chemistry are the panacea for all our struggles. This untruthful and misleading notion has ensnared many, encouraging them to seek solutions in drugs rather than in meaningful changes. This can explain why many people remain stuck in toxic and self-destructive lifestyles that only bring gloom and doom into their lives.

No one has ever raised that curtain since. I have lifted it for a moment, even in this narrative, with a reluctant hand, and dropped it gladly. The remembrance of that life is fraught with so much pain to me, with so much mental suffering and want of hope, that I have never had the courage even to examine how long I was doomed to lead it. Whether it lasted for a year, or more, or less, I do not know. I only know that it was, and ceased to be; and that I have written, and there I leave it.

The enemy of my soul didn't want me painting that day. To create meant that I would look a little bit like my Creator. To overcome the terrifying angst of the blank canvas meant I would forever have more compassion for other artists. You better believe as I placed the first blue and gray strokes onto the white emptiness before me, the "not good enough" statement was pulsing through my head in almost deafening tones... This parlaying lie is one of his favorite tactics to keep you disillusioned by disappointments. Walls go up, emotions run high, we get guarded, defensive, demotivated, and paralyzed by the endless ways we feel doomed to fail. This is when we quit. This is when we settle for the ease of facebook.... This is when we get a job to simply make money instead of pursuing our calling to make a difference. This is when we put the paintbrush down and don't even try. So there I was. Standing before my painted blue boat, making a choice of which voice to listen to. I'm convinced God was smiling. Pleased. Asking me to find delight in what is right. Wanting me to have compassion for myself by focusing on that part of my painting that expressed something beautiful. To just be eager to give that beauty to whoever dared to look at my boat. To create to love others. Not to beg them for validation. But the enemy was perverting all that. Perfection mocked my boat. The bow was too high, the details too elementary, the reflection on the water too abrupt, and the back of the boat too off-center. Disappointment demanded I hyper-focused on what didn't look quite right. It was my choice which narrative to hold on to: "Not good enough" or "Find delight in what is right." Each perspective swirled, begging me to declare it as truth. I was struggling to make peace with my painting creation, because I was struggling to make make peace with myself as God's creation. Anytime we feel not good enough we deny the powerful truth that we are a glorious work of God in progress. We are imperfect because we are unfinished. So, as unfinished creations, of course everything we attempt will have imperfections. Everything we accomplish will have imperfections. And that's when it hit me: I expect a perfection in me and in others that not even God Himself expects. If God is patient with the process, why can't I be? How many times have I let imperfections cause me to be too hard on myself and too harsh with others? I force myself to send a picture of my boat to at least 20 friends. I was determined to not not be held back by the enemy's accusations that my artwork wasn't good enough to be considered "real art". This wasn't for validation but rather confirmation that I could see the imperfections in my painting but not deem it worthless. I could see the imperfections in me and not deem myself worthless. It was an act of self-compassion. I now knew to stand before each painting with nothing but love, amazement, and delight. I refused to demand anything more from the artist. I just wanted to show up for every single piece she was so brave to put on display.. Might I just be courageous enough to stand before her work and require myself to find everything about it I love? Release my clenched fist and pouty disappointments, and trade my "live up" mentality for a "show up" one? It is so much more freeing to simply show up and be a finder of the good. Break from the secret disappointments. Let my brain venture down the tiny little opening of love.. And I realized what makes paintings so delightful. It's there imperfections. That's what makes it art. It's been touched by a human. It's been created by someone whose hands sweat and who can't possibly transfer divine perfection from what her eyes see to what her fingertips can create. It will be flawed.

If you didn’t know the difference, then you were doomed to perish about two-thirds of the way through the story, when the narrative needed a jolt of violence and emotion. (As a reader who hoped one day to be a writer, she was always alert to authors’ techniques.) She couldn’t yet figure out the identity of the current evil, but she had met its minions when Falkirk and his toadies had come calling. Whoever Spooky Ed might be and whatever the key to everything could do, she and her father were in deep merde, and extraordinary courage would be required of them.

For example, the idea that Owen Meany is God’s instrument, or that he believes he is—and so does the narrator—is specifically connected not only to Owen’s diminutive size but to the illusion of his weightlessness. That image of how the children can lift Owen over their heads in Sunday school—how he is light enough so they can easily pass him back and forth when the teacher is out of the room—is not only as near to the beginning of the novel as I could find a place for it; that image is echoed at the end of the novel, where Owen’s seeming weightlessness is interpreted to mean that he was always in God’s hands. But the penultimate paragraph of the novel is naturally the passage I wrote first. “When we held Owen Meany above our heads, when we passed him back and forth—so effortlessly—we believed that Owen weighed nothing at all. We did not realize that there were forces beyond our play. Now I know they were the forces that contributed to our illusion of Owen’s weightlessness; they were the forces we didn’t have the faith to feel, they were the forces we failed to believe in—and they were also lifting up Owen Meany, taking him out of our hands.” I added the last paragraph, only two sentences long, a day later. “O God—please give him back! I shall keep asking You.” I didn’t arrive at the first sentence (“I am doomed to remember . . .”) until a year or eighteen months after that.

The story of the Lady of Shalott created an extraordinarily resonant echo in the Victorian and Edwardian imagination; Pre-Raphaelite artists, looking for images that expressed what they saw as a truly medieval perspective, returned to it time and time again. Tennyson provided them with the narrative, a story in which the lady is cursed only to see the world through a mirror. When she spies Lancelot she is smitten and looks directly at him: the mirror shatters and she is doomed. She sets out on a pathetic boat trip to Camelot, but by the time she arrives the curse has had its effect and she is dead. It is an image of womanhood as essentially confined and restricted; full participation in the world is forbidden and fatal. This is sentimentally regretted, but tragically unalterable. Tennyson was retelling a genuine medieval tale, but he transformed it utterly. In the original story the lady was not weak and helpless at all, and she was not under any curse. Nor was she passive and pathetic. She was a wilful, stubborn woman who boldly declared her passionate love for Lancelot. Her tragedy was that it was not returned. The story was retold in Malory’s Morte d’Arthur in the fifteenth century, and there too the Lady of Shalott was portrayed as a real, flesh and blood woman whose declaration of love was unashamed (‘Why should I leave such thoughts? Am I not an earthly woman?’) and who wrote to Lancelot as an equal. In fact, pretty well every time we find an apparently helpless woman in medieval literature she turns out to be not quite what we were looking for.

Now at all hours, I could watch the conservative news network or the liberal news network or the centrist news network. They all told me we were doomed, but for different reasons. The news networks were run by billionaires, and the on-air talent were wealthy New Yorkers who ate at the same restaurants and pledged allegiance to their ratings. They looked the same and they represented no meaningful ideology. They aided and abetted the shooters by confusing the narrative. They didn’t know anything about the world but we trusted them because they dressed nicely and spoke with such certainty. I

Our fascination with the gothic peaks in times of anxiety, panic, and upheaval. The Victorian gothic revival of the 1890s was stoked by scientific, technological, and social change. Industrialization and urbanization sparked feelings of alienation. Darwin's theories of evolution and the changing roles of women fanned racist, misogynistic, homophobic, and colonialist fears of 'primitivism,' moral decay, and sexual depravity. In the nineteenth century, terror-inducing imagery had shifted away from crumbling castles to crime-infested cities, and fear of villains and ghosts was supplanted by a fear of madness and degeneration. In the twentieth century, we celebrated/mourned the death of authorship, of the grand narrative, of the self, 'going-one-better in eschatological eloquence,' as Jacques Derrida put it, 'the end of history...the end of subject, the end of man, the end of the West, the end of Oedipus, the end of the earth, Apocalypse Now.' A few years into the new millennium, we were zombie hordes, stalking social media for brains. The gothic is the fucked-either-way-and-freaking-the-fuck-out school of artistic interpretation, the hysterical framework of doom. And this tension between horror as morality tale and horror as decadent spectacle is, I believe, what fueled the pandemic of tabloid stories about wayward starlets that raged throughout 2006 and 2007. Celebrity train wreck stories begin, conservatively, as cautionary tales. A young woman, unprotected or legally emancipated, has moved alone from the relatively sheltered and secluded condition of parent-managed child stardom (because who, nowadays, is more cut off from the world than a child star?) into a corrupt and dangerous world, where her beauty, fame, youth, fortune, and sexual allure are regarded with a charged, ambivalent awe. She is instantly besieged with dangers, and preyed upon by unscrupulous adults. Until they can be contained again, by marriage or paternal protection, she exists in a constant state of uncertainty and peril. The peril is created, of course, by the 'author' - the media outlets that shape the train wreck's life, again and again, into thrilling, chilling tales of suspense.

It’s not just cliché to acknowledge that those who do not learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them. It is fact.

Doomed to perpetually contrast themselves with the unmatchable splendor of their predecessors, Greeks often confront a nagging sense of inadequacy and strain under the weight of their own historical narrative like few other people on the planet. This sentiment is expressed by a common Greek quip: “We gave light to the world and held on to the darkness.” And yet Greeks also often see themselves, on account of their ancient legacy, as a kind of chosen people, superior to others. “We had culture when they were still living in caves!” I have repeatedly heard Greeks say of their northern European counterparts. Greeks consequently often feel that Europeans should be grateful for being shown the way out of the cave and into the light. This sometimes grand self-image has also had the effect of making the country’s perceived subjugation at the hands of its creditors all the more bitter. After all, the Europeans owed them.

The Cubs are a major league baseball team based in Chicago. Apparently, the team was once cursed by a goat and is doomed now to never win the World Series. The 71 seats [auctioned by the Chicago Board of Exchange] are adjacent to the Cubs' dugout on the third-base line. This is an unnecessary detail needed to give color to what would otherwise be a dull and uninspiring narrative.

The Composition of Death Upon Your Breath" About the Song: The Composition of Death Upon Your Breath delves into the dark and haunting theme of a lover poisoned by a sinister concoction found in the medieval Grand Grimoire. The song narrates the tragic tale of love tainted by the cruel hand of death, where a forbidden potion is meticulously prepared with arcane ingredients. The song's lyrics evoke a gothic atmosphere, intertwining elements of medieval alchemy and romantic tragedy. The potion's ingredients—Red Copper, Nitric Acid, Verdigris, Arsenic, Oak Bark, Rose Water, and Black Soot—are transformed into metaphors for the slow, inevitable demise of the lover. This deadly recipe becomes a symbol of both the destructive power and the twisted beauty of forbidden love. The music captures the essence of gothic black metal with its somber melodies, eerie harmonies, and intense, brooding instrumentals. Each note and lyric serve to illustrate the dark journey of love poisoned by betrayal and malice. The song's atmosphere is thick with melancholy and dread, inviting listeners into a world where passion and death intertwine in a tragic dance. Copyright Notice: The Composition of Death Upon Your Breath © 2024 Umbrae Sortilegium. All rights reserved. Unauthorized copying, reproduction, or distribution of this song or its lyrics is prohibited. The Composition of Death Upon Your Breath. (Verse 1) In an ancient tome of shadowed lore, A secret poison to settle the score, A lover’s whisper, a deadly art, The composition to tear us apart. (Pre-Chorus) Red copper gleaming, nitric acid's burn, Verdigris and arsenic, from which there’s no return, Oak bark and rose water, a fatal serenade, Black soot to bind it, in darkness, it’s made. (Chorus) The composition of death upon your breath, A kiss that leads to the silent depths, In your arms, I fall to eternal rest, Poisoned by the love that you professed. (Verse 2) A new, glazed pot, the spell's design, A potion brewed, in shadows confined, Your lips, a chalice of cold despair, In each embrace, a whispered prayer. (Pre-Chorus) Red copper gleaming, nitric acid's burn, Verdigris and arsenic, from which there’s no return, Oak bark and rose water, a fatal serenade, Black soot to bind it, in darkness, it’s made. (Chorus) The composition of death upon your breath, A kiss that leads to the silent depths, In your arms, I fall to eternal rest, Poisoned by the love that you professed. (Bridge) In your gaze, the twilight's fall, A lover's kiss, the end of all, The Grand Grimoire, its secrets told, In every kiss, the poison’s cold. (Breakdown) A potion brewed from darkest sin, Your breath the gateway, let death begin, A recipe of doom, our fates entwined, In your arms, I lose my mind. (Chorus) The composition of death upon your breath, A kiss that leads to the silent depths, In your arms, I fall to eternal rest, Poisoned by the love that you professed. (Outro) The final breath, a lover's sigh, In your arms, I’m doomed to die, The composition, a lover’s theft, Death upon your breath, my final bequest. Lyrics and ALL Vocals yours truly. Lead Guitar & Symphonics Raz Wolfgang Drums Alexander Novichkov Bass Auron Nightshade Guitarist Kael Thornfield

In the postmortem, Hillary and her aides identified dozens of reasons she had lost: low African American turnout in some key areas; a boost in the white vote for Trump in suburbs, small towns, and rural areas; misogyny; the Comey letters; and the Russians, among them. Most of them could be divided into the interrelated categories of narratives and turnout.

Once Favreau came on board, he was paired with longtime Clinton speechwriter Lissa Muscatine to put some extra punch into the speech, by then scheduled for June 13. They both knew how to put words in someone else’s mouth. They understood the essence and curves of great oratory, how to connect the memorable one-liners with the true substance of an argument, how to twine the speaker with her narrative, and how to talk into history. It was Muscatine who had written Clinton’s landmark speech to a Beijing women’s conference in 1995, with its signature line—“human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights.” Muscatine knew Hillary’s voice as well as Hillary did.

The speech started as an acknowledgment of political icons—Roosevelt, Obama, and Bill Clinton—and mixed in applause lines for constituencies Hillary wanted to court, including African Americans, Hispanics, the LGBT community, and women of all races and sexual orientations. She sprinkled in bromides about economic opportunity and how “prosperity can’t just be for CEOs.” But there was no overarching narrative explaining her candidacy, no framing of Hillary as the point of an underdog spear, no emotive power. “America can’t succeed unless you succeed,” she offered in a trite tautology. “That is why I am running for president of the United States.” Even those in her camp who defended the speech acknowledged that there were too many cooks in the kitchen, that the text was too watered down to serve as a call to action, and that Hillary was less than inspiring. And these were the kinder criticisms. “That speech had a simple mission, which was a requirement,” said one source close to Hillary. “This was the chance to make a credible persuasive case for why she wants to be president. She had to answer the why question. It’s not because of her mother. Her mother’s an inspiration, but that is not why. It has to sort of feel like kind of a call to action, a galvanizing, ‘I’m bringing us together around this larger-than-all-of-us’ idea or cause, and I don’t think it did that. I don’t think it did either of those.

In early March, just as she was planning to reintroduce herself to a nation that felt it knew her all too well with a video announcement of her campaign, the New York Times reported that Hillary had used an e-mail address tied to a personal server at her family home in Chappaqua to conduct official State Department business. The e-mail story would bedevil her straight through Election Day, robbing her of the ability to create a positive narrative for her candidacy and, as one top adviser put it, returning to her like a cold sore. “You never know when it’s going to pop up,” this adviser said. “You think you’re over it and then [it pops]up again.

Without these narratives—without developing a clear vision of the future we desire, of the values we want to adopt, of the identities we want to shed or step into—we are forever doomed to repeat the failures of our past pain. The stories of our past define our identity. The stories of our future define our hopes. And our ability to step into those narratives and live them, to make them reality, is what gives our lives meaning.

Today DARK TIMES received a nice review from Literary Titan: “In Dark Times Michael Gerhartz explores the delicate yet sadly relevant organ trade problem. In this fascinating novel readers get a glance into the complicated and cruel organ trade business. The narrative is constantly changing its perspective, from the lucky recipient to the doomed donor while following the incredible adventures of the engrossing main character, Natascha. Michael Gerhartz creates a globe-trotting and energetic crime drama that is full of unexpected twists and deadly turns...I can confidently say that I had a great time reading Dark Times by Michael Gerhartz. The story is perfect for readers who like to follow clues to solve intriguing mysteries. Dark Times reminds me of Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan where agents embark on clandestine and deadly missions to overcome a terror menacing the world. Perfect for readers who embrace a bit of romance in their action adventure stories.” Reviewed by Literary Titan