Easily Affected Quotes

The past did affect the present and the future, in ways you could see and a million ones you couldn't. Time wasn't a thing you could divide easily; there was no defined middle or beginning or end. I could pretend to leave the past behind, but it would not leave me.

Godliness is more easily feigned in words than in actions

A proverb in the Old Testament states: 'He that is slow to anger is better than the mighty; and he that ruleth his spirit than he that taketh a city'. It is when we become angry that we get into trouble. The road rage that affects our highways is a hateful expression of anger. I dare say that most of the inmates of our prisons are there because they did something when they were angry. In their wrath they swore, they lost control of themselves, and terrible things followed, even murder. There were moments of offense followed by years of regret. . . . So many of us make a great fuss of matters of small consequence. We are so easily offended. Happy is the man who can brush aside the offending remarks of another and go on his way.

I always want him. Always. It’s always like this between us, too. We come together and we simply…combust. So easily. Beautifully. Does he even know how he affects me? Does he realize how my heart now rests in his hands? I belong to him completely

Mature affection, homage, devotion, does not easily express itself. Its voice is low. It is modest and retiring, it lies in ambush, waits and waits. Such is the mature fruit. Sometimes a life glides away, and finds it still ripening in the shade.

Afraid?" he growled, irritated she could affect his senses so easily. "No," she snapped. "Not even just a little?

There is something in natural affection which will lead it on to eternal love more easily than natural appetite could be led on. But there's also something in it which makes it easier to stop at the natural level and mistake it for the heavenly. Brass is mistaken for gold more easily than clay is. And if it finally refuses conversion its corruption will be worse than the corruption of what ye call the lower passions. It is a stronger angel, and therefor, when it falls, a fiercer devil.

The second wave is now in their late 20s and 30s. They have made the transition to life on Earth much more easily than the first wave. The second wave souls tend to work behind the scenes, often on their own, creating little or no Karma. In the sessions I conduct as a hypnotist, they have been described as antennas that unconsciously channel energy onto the Earth. They do not have to do anything; they just have to be. Their energy affects everyone they come into contact with. Their paradox is they are supposed to be sharing their energy, but they do not like being around people.

On my saying, What have I to do with the sacredness of traditions, if I live wholly from within? my friend suggested,--"But these impulses may be from below, not from above." I replied, "They do not seem to me to be such; but if I am the Devil's child, I will live then from the Devil." No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution, the only wrong what is against it. A man is to carry himself in the presence of all opposition as if everything were titular and ephemeral but he. I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions. Every decent and well-spoken individual affects and sways me more than is right. I ought to go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways.

These are the voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the world. Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is a joint stock company in which the members agree for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It [That is, conformity.] loves not realities and creators, but names and customs. "Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist. He who would gather immortal palms must not be hindered by the name of goodness, but must explore if it be goodness. Nothing is at last sacred but the integrity of our own mind. Absolve you to yourself, and you shall have the suffrage of the world. I remember an answer which when quite young I was prompted to make to a valued adviser who was wont to importune me with the dear old doctrines of the church. On my saying, What have I to do with the sacredness of traditions, if I live wholly from within? my friend suggested--'But these impulses may be from below, not from above.' I replied, 'They do not seem to me to be such; but if I am the devil's child, I will live them from the devil.' No law can be sacred to me but that of my nature. Good and bad are but names very readily transferable to that or this; the only right is what is after my constitution, the only wrong what is against it. A man is to carry himself in the presence of all opposition as if everything were titular and ephemeral but he. I am ashamed to think how easily we capitulate to badges and names, to large societies and dead institutions. Every decent an well-spoken individual affects and sways me more than is right. I ought to go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways.

a grin that wasn't natural, and that combined in a strange way affection and arrogance, the arrogance of the idealist who doesn't realize how easily he can be fooled.

Thyon could easily imagine Ruza as a little boy on a pony. He looked at him and saw the child he'd been, and he saw the man he was--warrior, prankster, friend--and he felt a warmth that he had never felt before for any other person. It was affection, and something that frightened him, too, that he could feel in his knees and fingertips and face. It made him unsure what to do with his hands. He noticed things like knuckles and eyelashes that he didn't notice on other people, and sometimes he had to look away and pretend to be thinking of something else.

I can easily believe it. Women of that class have great opportunities, and if they are intelligent may be well worth listening to. Such varieites of human nature as they are in the habit of witnessing! And it is not merely in its follies, that they are read; for they see it occasionally under every circumstance that can be most interesting or affecting. What instances must pass before them of ardent, disinterested, self-denying attachment, of heroism, fortitude, patience, resignation-- of all the sacrifices that ennoble us most. A sick chamber may often furnish the worth of volumes.

What - what - what are you doing?" he demanded. "I am almost six hundred years old," Magnus claimed, and Ragnor snorted, since Magnus changed his age to suit himself every few weeks. Magnus swept on. "It does seem about time to learn a musical instrument." He flourished his new prize, a little stringed instrument that looked like a cousin of the lute that the lute was embarrassed to be related to. "It's called a charango. I am planning to become a charanguista!" "I wouldn't call that an instrument of music," Ragnor observed sourly. "An instrument of torture, perhaps." Magnus cradled the charango in his arms as if it were an easily offended baby. "It's a beautiful and very unique instrument! The sound box is made from an armadillo. Well, a dried armadillo shell." "That explains the sound you're making," said Ragnor. "Like a lost, hungry armadillo." "You are just jealous," Magnus remarked calmly. "Because you do not have the soul of a true artiste like myself." "Oh, I am positively green with envy," Ragnor snapped. "Come now, Ragnor. That's not fair," said Magnus. "You know I love it when you make jokes about your complexion." Magnus refused to be affected by Ragnor's cruel judgments. He regarded his fellow warlock with a lofty stare of superb indifference, raised his charango, and began to play again his defiant, beautiful tune. They both heard the staccato thump of frantically running feet from within the house, the swish of skirts, and then Catarina came rushing out into the courtyard. Her white hair was falling loose about her shoulders, and her face was the picture of alarm. "Magnus, Ragnor, I heard a cat making a most unearthly noise," she exclaimed. "From the sound of it, the poor creature must be direly sick. You have to help me find it!" Ragnor immediately collapsed with hysterical laughter on his windowsill. Magnus stared at Catarina for a moment, until he saw her lips twitch. "You are conspiring against me and my art," he declared. "You are a pack of conspirators." He began to play again. Catarina stopped him by putting a hand on his arm. "No, but seriously, Magnus," she said. "That noise is appalling." Magnus sighed. "Every warlock's a critic." "Why are you doing this?" "I have already explained myself to Ragnor. I wish to become proficient with a musical instrument. I have decided to devote myself to the art of the charanguista, and I wish to hear no more petty objections." "If we are all making lists of things we wish to hear no more . . . ," Ragnor murmured. Catarina, however, was smiling. "I see," she said. "Madam, you do not see." "I do. I see it all most clearly," Catarina assured him. "What is her name?" "I resent your implication," Magnus said. "There is no woman in the case. I am married to my music!" "Oh, all right," Catarina said. "What's his name, then?" His name was Imasu Morales, and he was gorgeous.

Passion for something can easily tip into obsession, which is a dangerous thing, especially when those affected are they very people who so loyally stand and wait. -Henry Worsley

All husbands are unfaithful in one way or another.” Lillian and Daisy glanced at each other with raised brows. “Father isn’t,” Lillian replied smartly. Mercedes responded with a laugh that sounded like crackling leaves being crushed underfoot. “Isn’t he, dear? Perhaps he has stayed true to me physically—one can never be certain about these things. But his work has proved a more jealous and demanding mistress than a flesh-and-blood woman could ever be. All his dreams are invested in that collection of buildings and employees and legalities that absorb him to the exclusion of all else. If my competition had been a mortal woman, I could have borne it easily, knowing that passion fades and beauty lasts but an instant. But his company will never fade or sicken—it will outlast us all. If you have a year of your husband’s interest and affection, it will be more than I have ever had.

People who are contented and serene sleep well. They fall asleep easily, stay asleep, and wake refreshed. Conversely, people who are anxious, stressed, or depressed do not sleep well, and chronic insomnia is strongly associated with mood disorders. These are clear correlations, but what is cause and what is effect is not clear. Most experts agree that sleep and mood are closely related, that healthy sleep can enhance emotional well-being, while insufficient quantity or quality of sleep can adversely affect it.

Every autobiography is concerned with two characters, a Don Quixote, the Ego, and a Sancho Panza, the Self. […] If the same person were to write his autobiography twice, first in one mode and then in the other, the two accounts would be so different that it would be hard to believe that they referred to the same person. In one he would appear as an obsessed creature, a passionate Knight forever serenading Faith or Beauty, humorless and over-life-size; in the other as coolly detached, full of humor and self-mockery, lacking in a capacity for affection, easily bored and smaller than life-size. As Don Quixote seen by Sancho Panza, he never prays; as Sancho Panza seen by Don Quixote, he never giggles.

The easy confidence with which I know another man's religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also. I would not interfere with any one's religion, either to strengthen it or to weaken it. I am not able to believe one's religion can affect his hereafter one way or the other, no matter what that religion may be. But it may easily be a great comfort to him in this life--hence it is a valuable possession to him.

It often happens that in situations of unrestraint, where there is no thought of the eye of criticism, real feeling glides into a mode of manifestation not easily distinguishable from rodomontade. A veneer of affectation overlies a bulk of truth, with the evil consequence, if perceived, that the substance is estimated by the superficies, and the whole rejected.

It’s amazing how easily someone can leave your life. It’s standing on a beach and stepping back to see the hole of your footprint subsumed by the sand and the sea as if it were never there. Grief, it turns out, is a lot like a one-sided video conversation on an iPad. It’s the call with no response, the echo of affection, the shadow cast by love. But just because you can’t see it anymore doesn’t make it any less real.

That she loved me I should not have doubted; and I might have been easily aware that, in a bosom such as hers, love would have regained no ordinary passion. But in death only was I fully impressed with the strength of her affection.

when she was 7, a boy pushed her on the playground she fell headfirst into the dirt and came up with a mouthful of gravel and lines of blood chasing each other down her legs when she told her teacher what happened, she laughed and said ‘boys will be boys honey don’t let it bother you he probably just thinks you’re cute’ but the thing is, when you tell a little girl who has rocks in her teeth and scabs on her knees that hurt and attention are the same you teach her that boys show their affection through aggression and she grows into a young woman who constantly mistakes the two because no one ever taught her the difference ‘boys will be boys’ turns into ‘that’s how he shows his love’ and bruises start to feel like the imprint of lips she goes to school with a busted mouth in high school and says she was hit with a basketball instead of his fist the one adult she tells scolds her ‘you know he loses his temper easily why the hell did you have to provoke him?’ so she shrinks folds into herself, flinches every time a man raises his voice by the time she’s 16 she’s learned her job well be quiet, be soft, be easy don’t give him a reason but for all her efforts, he still finds one ‘boys will be boys’ rings in her head ‘boys will be boys he doesn’t mean it he can’t help it’ she’s 7 years old on the playground again with a mouth full of rocks and blood that tastes like copper love because boys will be boys baby don’t you know that’s just how he shows he cares she’s 18 now and they’re drunk in the split second it takes for her words to enter his ears they’re ruined like a glass heirloom being dropped between the hands of generations she meant them to open his arms but they curl his fists and suddenly his hands are on her and her head hits the wall and all of the goddamn words in the world couldn’t save them in this moment she touches the bruise the next day boys will be boys aggression, affection, violence, love how does she separate them when she learned so early that they’re inextricably bound, tangled in a constant tug-of-war she draws tally marks on her walls ratios of kisses to bruises one entire side of her bedroom turns purple, one entire side of her body boys will be boys will be boys will be boys when she’s 20, a boy touches her hips and she jumps he asks her who the hell taught her to be scared like that and she wants to laugh doesn’t he know that boys will be boys? it took her 13 years to unlearn that lesson from the playground so I guess what I’m trying to say is i will talk until my voice is hoarse so that my little sister understands that aggression and affection are two entirely separate things baby they exist in different universes my niece can’t even speak yet but I think I’ll start with her now don’t ever accept the excuse that boys will be boys don’t ever let him put his hands on you like that if you see hate blazing in his eyes don’t you ever confuse it with love baby love won’t hurt when it comes you won’t have to hide it under long sleeves during the summer and the only reason he should ever reach out his hand is to hold yours

Then the imitative poet who aims at being popular is not by nature made, nor is his art intended, to please or to affect the rational principle in the soul; but he will prefer the passionate and fitful temper, which is easily imitated? Clearly. And

Sara said she has feelings for me. He had no reason to doubt it. But there are countless things in the world for which affection is not enough. Life is long, and sometimes cruel . Sometimes victims are needed. Someone has to take on that role. And human bodies are fragile, easily damaged. Cut them, and they bleed.

It's easy to be cynical about death when you're young. When you are young, death is an anomaly. It's not real. It only affects other people. It's a bullet you'll dodge easily. It's why young people can go into battle: they really will live forever. They know. As you stick around, as you go around the Earth, you realize that life is an ever-narrowing conveyor belt. Slowly, inexorably, it takes us all along with it, and one by one we tumble off the side of the conveyor belt into darkness. . . They fall off the conveyor belt into the darkness, our friends, and we cannot talk to them anymore.

A poor man is not disposed to quick and high resentment when he is among the rich: he is apt to yield to others, for he knows others are above him: he is not stiff and self-willed; he is patient with hard fare; he expects no other than to be despised, and takes it patiently; he does not take it heinously that he overlooked and but little regarded; he is prepared to be in a lowly place; he readily honours his superiors; he takes reproofs quietly; he readily honours others as above him; he easily yields to be taught, and does not claim much to his understanding and judgment; he is not over nice or humoursome, and has his spirit subdued to hard things; he is not assuming, nor apt to take much upon him, but it is natural for him to be subject to others. Thus it is with the humble Christian.

{President] Kayibanda's government [in Rwanda] continued the persecution against the Tutsis and began to make use of the media it controlled to launch a propaganda campaign against us. In a country where more than half the people cannot read or write and very few have televisions, radio is the dominant media. The fact that some newspapers were still printing the truth didn't matter much to the part of the population that couldn't read. Most of the literate people were already politically aware. While an educated person might question what they read or hear from the media, the uneducated tend to accept it. The uneducated are more easily affected by threats and the emotional trauma that propaganda like this can create.

The Stain That Conner left on our lives will not vanish as easily. I don’t care about Mom and her birds. Their estimation of my brother doesn’t bother me at all. Neither do I worry about Dad and what his lobbyist buddies think. His political clout has not diminished. As twins go, Conner and I don’t share a deep affection, but we do have a nine-months-in-the-same-womb connection. Not to mention a crowd of mutual friends. God, I’ll never forget going to school the day after that ugly scene. The plan was to sever the gossip grapevine from the start with an obvious explanation— accident. Mom’s orders were clear. Conner’s reputation was to be protected at all costs. When I arrived, the rumors had already started, thanks to our neighbor, Bobby Duvall. Conner Sykes got hurt. Conner Sykes was shot. Conner Sykes is in the hospital. Is Conner Sykes, like, dead? I fielded every single question with the agreed fabrication. But eventually, I was forced to concede that, though his wounds would heal, he was not coming back to school right away. Conner Sykes wasn’t dead. But he wasn’t exactly “okay.

Some people (like singularly unhelpful and clearly underqualified physical therapists, unsympathetic GPs, and that supremely irritating second cousin who ate all the stuffing at Christmas) assumed that a lack of feeling in certain body parts shouldn’t affect sleep at all. Her insomnia in such situations, they said, was something she could easily overcome. Chloe liked to remind those people that the human brain tended to keep track of all body parts, and was prone to panic when one of those parts went offline. Actually, what Chloe liked to do was imagine hitting those people with a brick.

I did not sleep well that night. I was not used to having the power to affect someone’s life so and did not easily carry its weight, as a man might have done.

People carry their loved ones with them. They are forever present, and life is full of easily grasped opportunities to show them one’s affection. It costs so little and achieves so much.

Don’t expect good things to come easily, we must work at them. Easy is to think about improving. Difficult is to put these thoughts into action. Easy is to stumble and fall. Difficult is to get back up. Easy is to judge the mistakes of others. Difficult is to recognize your own mistakes. Easy is to receive. Difficult is to give. Easy is to promise something. Difficult is to fulfill that promise. Easy is to say “I love you.” Difficult is to show it every day. Most of the things we need in life are simple, but not easy. But things that are difficult are often the most worthwhile!

Reaction is dominated by the other person. He insults you: you get angry, and then you act out of anger. This is reaction. You are not an independent person; anybody can pull you this way or that way. You are easily affected; you can be blackmailed emotionally. Reaction is an emotional blackmail. You were not angry. The man insulted you and his insult created anger; now out of anger comes your action.

He speaks to Klamm, but is it Klamm? Isn’t it rather someone who merely resembles Klamm? Perhaps at the very most a secretary who is a little like Klamm and goes to great lengths to be even more like him and tries to seem important by affecting Klamm’s drowsy, dreamlike manner. That part of his being is easiest to imitate, many try to do so; as for the rest of his being, though, they wisely steer clear of it. And a man such as Klamm, who is so often the object of yearning and yet so rarely attained, easily takes on a variety of shapes in the imagination of people. For instance, Klamm has a village secretary here called Momus. Really? You know him? He too keeps to himself but I have seen him a couple of times. A powerful young gentleman, isn’t he? And so he probably doesn’t look at all like Klamm? And yet you can find people in the village who would swear that Momus is Klamm and none other than he. That’s how people create confusion for themselves. And why should it be any different at the Castle?

Sexuality of any kind never exists in a vacuum. It is not broken down easily but is affected by biology and culture, by our emotional state and mental health, by race and class and gender and the passing of time.

The lesson of a love that should display itself easily in spoken word and open look was one Marilla could never learn. But she had learned to love this slim, gray-eyed girl with an affection all the deeper and stronger from its very undemonstrativeness. Her love made her afraid of being unduly indulgent, indeed. She had an uneasy feeling that it was rather sinful to set one's heart so intensely on any human creature as she had set hers on Anne, and perhaps she performed a sort of unconscious penance for this by being stricter and more critical than if the girl had been less dear to her.

Count Ayakura’s abstraction persisted. He believed that only a vulgar mentality was willing to acknowledge the possibility of catastrophe. He felt that taking naps was much more beneficial than confronting catastrophes. However precipitous the future might seem, he learned from the game of kemari that the ball must always come down. There was no call for consternation. Grief and rage, along with other outbursts of passion, were mistakes easily committed by a mind lacking in refinement. And the Count was certainly not a man who lacked refinement. Just let matters slide. How much better to accept each sweet drop of the honey that was Time, than to stoop to the vulgarity latent in every decision. However grave the matter at hand might be, if one neglected it for long enough, the act of neglect itself would begin to affect the situation, and someone else would emerge as an ally. Such was Count Ayakura’s version of political theory.

Bodies can catch feelings as easily as catch fire: affect leaps from one body to another, evoking tenderness, inciting shame, igniting rage, exciting fear-in short, communicable affect can inflame nerves and muscles in a conflagration of every conceivable kind of passion

In the state of abandonment the only rule is the duty of the present moment. In this the soul is light as a feather, liquid as water, simple as a child, active as a ball in receiving and following all the inspirations of grace. Such souls have no more consistence and rigidity than molten metal. As this takes any form according to the mould into which it is poured, so these souls are pliant and easily receptive of any form that God chooses to give them. In a word, their disposition resembles the atmosphere, which is affected by every breeze; or water, which flows into any shaped vessel exactly filling every crevice. They are before God like a perfectly woven fabric with a clear surface; and neither think, nor seek to know what God will be pleased to trace thereon, because they have confidence in Him, they abandon themselves to Him, and, entirely absorbed by their duty, they think not of themselves, nor of what may be necessary for them, nor of how to obtain it.

First, strive for a solid foundation of trust, loyalty, respect, and security. Your spouse is your closest relative and is entitled to depend on you as a committed ally, supporter, and champion.   Second, cultivate the tender, loving part of your relationship: sensitivity, consideration, understanding, and demonstrations of affection and caring. Regard each other as confidante, companion, and friend.   Third, strengthen the partnership. Develop a sense of cooperation, consideration, and compromise. Sharpen your communication skills so that you can more easily make decisions about practical issues, such as division of work, preparing and implementing a family budget, and planning leisure-time activities.

For me that's the only way of understanding a particular term that everyone here bandies about quite happily, but which clearly can't be quite that straight forward because it doesn't exist in many languages, only in Italian and Spanish, as far as I know, but then again, I don't know that many languages. Perhaps in German too, although I can't be sure: el enamoramiento--the state of falling or being in love, or perhaps infatuation. I'm referring to the noun, the concept; the adjective, the condition, are admittedly more familiar, at least in French, although not in English, but there are words that approximate that meaning ... We find a lot of people funny, people who amuse and charm us and inspire affection and even tenderness, or who please us, captivate us, and can even make us momentarily mad, we enjoy their body and their company or both those things, as is the case for me with you and as I've experienced before with other women, on other occasions, although only a few. Some become essential to us, the force of habit is very strong and ends up replacing or even supplanting almost everything else. It can supplant love, for example, but not that state of being in love, it's important to distinguish between the two things, they're easily confused, but they're not the same ... It's very rare to have a weakness, a genuine weakness for someone, and for that someone to provoke in us that feeling of weakness.

Barret thinks- he thinks, briefly- of turning around and leaving the park; of being, this time, the vanisher, the man who leaves you wondering, who offers no explanation, not even the sour satisfaction of a real fight; who simply drifts away, because (it seems) there's affection and there's sex but there's no urgency, no little hooks clasping little eyes; no binding, no dogged devotions, no prayers for mercy, not when mercy can be so easily self-administered. What would it be like, Barrett wonders, to be the other, the man who's had the modest portion he thinks of as enough, who slips away before the mess sets in, before he's available to accusation and recrimination, before the authorities start demanding of him When, and Why, and With Whom

In my case, the effort for these years to live in the dress of Arabs, and to imitate their mental foundation, quitted me of my English self, and let me look at the West and its conventions with new eyes: they destroyed it all for me. At the same time I could not sincerely take on the Arab skin: it was an affectation only. Easily was a man made an infidel, but hardly might he be converted to another faith. I had dropped one form and not taken on the other, and has become like Mohammed's coffin in our legend, with a resultant feeling of intense loneliness in life, and a contempt, not for other men, but for all they do. Such detachment came at times to a man exhausted by prolonged physical effort and isolation. His body plodded on mechanically, while his reasonable mind left him, and from without looked down critically on him, wondering what that futile lumber did and why. Sometimes these selves would converse in the void; and then madness was very near, as I believe it would be near the man who could see things through the veils at once of two customs, two educations, two environments.

Apology Letter from the Brain Hey there. I’m sorry. OK? But can I say something? Look. I admit I wasn’t perfect. No one is perfect. That’s a fact. Speaking of facts, don’t you think we all need to take a minute and decide who is right and who is wrong? Every side is different; it’s just that my side seems more right. I’m not just saying that because it’s my side. I think a lot of other people would agree with me, given the chance. If I upset you in some way, please know that wasn’t my intention. I didn’t know how sensitive you were. It’s obvious I can set you off very easily. That’s not an insult; it’s just an observation. I think it would help if we talked about this more and argued about who was telling the truth. I would like to see you in person and tell you how the situation has affected me. I may use this opportunity to bring up other times you have hurt me in the past. If possible, I would like to hurt you back. Either way, I want to be in control. Until then, take care. And please, remember I reached out first. I remain, THE BRAIN Apology Letter from the Heart Hey there. I’m sorry. I’ve found it hard to tell you this, and I realize my apology may be too little or come too late. It is important for me to let you know that I am sorry for what I did or said or didn’t do or say. I was wrong. I make mistakes. I HATE that I made one with you. I’m reaching out because life goes by so fast and I just don’t want my one life to go by without expressing this to you. I want to do and be better. This apology is yours. Feel free to do whatever you want with it. My hope is that it gives you comfort, but my goal is that it doesn’t cause you any pain. Again, I am TRULY sorry. Thank you for taking the time to read this. Love, THE HEART P.S. I’m sorry.

There was a girl, and her uncle sold her, wrote Mr. Ibis in his perfect copperplate handwriting. That is the tale; the rest is detail. There are stories that are true, in which each individual’s tale is unique and tragic, and the worst of the tragedy is that we have heard it before, and we cannot allow ourselves to feel it too deeply. We build a shell around it like an oyster dealing with a painful particle of grit, coating it with smooth pearl layers in order to cope. This is how we walk and talk and function, day in, day out, immune to others’ pain and loss. If it were to touch us it would cripple us or make saints of us; but, for the most part, it does not touch us. We cannot allow it to. Tonight, as you eat, reflect if you can: there are children starving in the world, starving in numbers larger than the mind can easily hold, up in the big numbers where an error of a million here, a million there, can be forgiven. It may be uncomfortable for you to reflect upon this or it may not, but still, you will eat. There are accounts which, if we open our hearts to them, will cut us too deeply. Look—here is a good man, good by his own lights and the lights of his friends: he is faithful and true to his wife, he adores and lavishes attention on his little children, he cares about his country, he does his job punctiliously, as best he can. So, efficiently and good-naturedly, he exterminates Jews: he appreciates the music that plays in the background to pacify them; he advises the Jews not to forget their identification numbers as they go into the showers—many people, he tells them, forget their numbers, and take the wrong clothes, when they come out of the showers. This calms the Jews: there will be life, they assure themselves, after the showers. And they are wrong. Our man supervises the detail taking the bodies to the ovens; and if there is anything he feels bad about, it is that he still allows the gassing of vermin to affect him. Were he a truly good man, he knows, he would feel nothing but joy, as the earth is cleansed of its pests. Leave him; he cuts too deep. He is too close to us and it hurts.

there was something scary and anxiety-inducing about being in a space where nothing seemed to be forbidden to him, where everything was offered to him and nothing was asked in return. He tried to give them what he could; he was aware it wasn’t much. And the things Harold gave him so easily—answers, affection—he couldn’t reciprocate.

Human beings remember "firsts"- the first time something happens, or the begining of an experience- and we tend to remember "lasts" as well. So when you are about to make a critical/negative delivery , start your criticism with a positive begining, it will affect the rest of the experience. Start by giving them solid ground to stand by expressing the fact that you value them and they matter. Once they are reassured of their own worth, people will accept your comments far more easily and they'll get less defensive.

I have nothing to do with him,” L said. “To be completely accurate, I do not even know B. He is simply someone I am aware of. But none of this affects my judgment. Certainly, I was interested in this case, and began to investigate it because I knew who the killer was. But that did not alter the way I investigated it, or the manner in which my investigation proceeded. Naomi Misora, I cannot overlook evil. I cannot forgive it. It does not matter if I know the person who commits evil or not. I am only interested in justice.” “Only... in justice…” Misora gasped. “Then... nothing else matters?” “I wouldn’t say that, but it is not a priority.” “You won’t forgive any evil, no matter what the evil is?” “I wouldn’t say that, but it is not a priority.” “But...” Like a thirteen-year-old victim. “There are people who justice cannot save.” Like a thirteen-year old criminal. “And there are people who evil can save.” “There are. But even so,” L said, his tone not changing at all, as if gently admonishing Naomi Misora. “Justice has more power than anything else.” “Power? By power... you mean strength?” “No. I mean kindness.” He said it so easily.

...you make it sound like this is work. I’m having a hard time thinking about sex as a project to manage.” He barely touched the cheeks of her ass, just a little tickle on her flesh, and her muscles clenched. “Only because you don’t take it seriously.” “I take it very seriously,” she shot back. “No, you take the choice of your partner seriously, but not the sex itself. The sex itself you view as something you have to give up to get to what you really want, and that’s companionship and affection. You can’t buy those with sex, Avery. Those will come or not, and it doesn’t mean a damn thing to any man. Not really. He’ll take sex from you even if he doesn’t particularly like you. He’ll take it because you offer it up so easily. Again—not the relationship, but the sex. You’re offering me easy sex. Sex where I don’t have to work, but I want to work because I do like you and I do feel affection for you. Do you understand?” “You think I should ask for more.” “No, I think you should demand more.” “That doesn’t sound very submissive...

There’s something in natural affection which will lead it on to eternal love more easily than natural appetite could be led on. But there’s also something in it which makes it easier to stop at the natural level and mistake it for the heavenly. Brass is mistaken for gold more easily than clay is. And if it finally refuses conversion its corruption will be worse than the corruption of what ye call the lower passions.

It's also not uncommon for Old Souls to develop some level of clairvoyance or sixth sense in their lifetimes. This is not necessarily the psychic ability to predict events in the future – although that is not beyond the Old Soul – but rather the ability to intuitively and perceptively understand the people around them at a very profound level. This is often referred to as “seeing through people.” In other words, this is the ability to see beyond the external masks, pretentions and affectations of a person or group of people to see into their deeper hidden characters, thoughts, feelings and motives. For this reason, it's very hard to fool the Old Soul, who can easily differentiate the charlatan from the truth teller, the malicious from the kind-hearted, the unstable from the balanced, and the shallow man from the thoughtful man.

Affection, homage, devotion, does not easily express itself. Its voice is low. It is modest and retiring, it lies in ambush, waits and waits. Sometimes a life glides away, and finds it still ripening in the shade0

...a family wanting no more than to live without challenge or drama could easily find a quiet street, and "peace," provided they were fortunate enough to live in a comparatively sheltered and favoured geographical area, and provided they were able to make the mental adjustment to relegate war - and its consequences - into something that happened elsewhere and did not affect them; or something that had happened to them, but between such and such dates, and then taken itself off.

A letter from a French cleric to Nicholas of St. Albans, written c. 1178, rehearsed what was already a familiar perception: Your island is surrounded by water, and not unnaturally its inhabitants are affected by the nature of the element in which they live. Unsubstantial fantasies slide easily into their minds. They think their dreams to be visions, and their visions to be divine. We cannot blame them, for such is the nature of their land. I have often noticed that the English are greater dreams than the French.

In an aggressive culture, non-HSPs are favored, and that fact will be obvious everywhere. Even in the study of pumpkinseed sunfish described above, the U.S. biologists writing the article described the sunfish that went into the traps as the “bold” fish, who behaved “normally.” The others were “shy.” But were the untrapped fish really feeling shy? Why not smug? After all, one could as easily describe them as the smart sunfish, the others as the stupid ones. No one knows what the sunfish felt, but the biologists were certain because their culture had taught them to be. Those who hesitate are afraid; those who do not are normal. (Science is always filtered through culture—the true image is not lost but sure can be tinted.) Here’s a good study to remember: Research comparing elementary school children in Shanghai to those in Canada found that sensitive, quiet children in China were among the most respected by their peers, and in Canada they were among the least respected. HSPs growing up in cultures in which they are not respected have to be affected by this lack of respect.

When he wrote back, he pretended to be his old self, he lied his way into sanity. For fear of his psychiatrist who was also their censor, they could never be sensual, or even emotional. His was considered a modern, enlightened prison, despite its Victorian chill. He had been diagnosed, with clinical precision, as morbidly oversexed, and in need of help as well as correction. He was not to be stimulated. Some letters—both his and hers—were confiscated for some timid expression of affection. So they wrote about literature, and used characters as codes. All those books, those happy or tragic couples they had never met to discuss! Tristan and Isolde the Duke Orsino and Olivia (and Malvolio too), Troilus and Criseyde, Once, in despair, he referred to Prometheus, chained to a rock, his liver devoured daily by a vulture. Sometimes she was patient Griselde. Mention of “a quiet corner in a library” was a code for sexual ecstasy. They charted the daily round too, in boring, loving detail. He described the prison routine in every aspect, but he never told her of its stupidity. That was plain enough. He never told her that he feared he might go under. That too was clear. She never wrote that she loved him, though she would have if she thought it would get through. But he knew it. She told him she had cut herself off from her family. She would never speak to her parents, brother or sister again. He followed closely all her steps along the way toward her nurse’s qualification. When she wrote, “I went to the library today to get the anatomy book I told you about. I found a quiet corner and pretended to read,” he knew she was feeding on the same memories that consumed him “They sat down, looked at each other, smiled and looked away. Robbie and Cecilia had been making love for years—by post. In their coded exchanges they had drawn close, but how artificial that closeness seemed now as they embarked on their small talk, their helpless catechism of polite query and response. As the distance opened up between them, they understood how far they had run ahead of themselves in their letters. This moment had been imagined and desired for too long, and could not measure up. He had been out of the world, and lacked the confidence to step back and reach for the larger thought. I love you, and you saved my life. He asked about her lodgings. She told him. “And do you get along all right with your landlady?” He could think of nothing better, and feared the silence that might come down, and the awkwardness that would be a prelude to her telling him that it had been nice to meet up again. Now she must be getting back to work. Everything they had, rested on a few minutes in a library years ago. Was it too frail? She could easily slip back into being a kind of sister. Was she disappointed? He had lost weight. He had shrunk in every sense. Prison made him despise himself, while she looked as adorable as he remembered her, especially in a nurse’s uniform. But she was miserably nervous too, incapable of stepping around the inanities. Instead, she was trying to be lighthearted about her landlady’s temper. After a few more such exchanges, she really was looking at the little watch that hung above her left breast, and telling him that her lunch break would soon be over.

To experiment with this principle, take a white piece of cloth and a brilliantly colored piece and lay them out on the grass where you can study them under different light conditions: sunlight, grey day, moonlight, twilight. The tone of the white piece will be more easily noticed, but you may be sure that the changes that affect the white are also present in the brilliant color, but seen with greater difficulty. Much will be gained through this study. It makes no difference what kind of art work you are employed in doing; the study will sensitize your “color-eye.

Technology, hardware, and capital can be copied easily. What can't be copied easily is the culture and human capacity that create those in the first place and does so in a way that engages not just functionally with people, but also emotionally so that people want what your organization offers.

The art of fiction has not changed much since prehistoric times. The formula for telling a powerful story has remained the same: create a strong character, a person of great strengths, capable of deep emotions and decisive action. Give him a weakness. Set him in conflict with another powerful character -- or perhaps with nature. Let his exterior conflict be the mirror of the protagonist's own interior conflict, the clash of his desires, his own strength against his own weakness. And there you have a story. Whether it's Abraham offering his only son to God, or Paris bringing ruin to Troy over a woman, or Hamlet and Claudius playing their deadly game, Faust seeking the world's knowledge and power -- the stories that stand out in the minds of the reader are those whose characters are unforgettable. To show other worlds, to describe possible future societies and the problems lurking ahead, is not enough. The writer of science fiction must show how these worlds and these futures affect human beings. And something much more important: he must show how human beings can and do literally create these future worlds. For our future is largely in our own hands. It doesn't come blindly rolling out of the heavens; it is the joint product of the actions of billions of human beings. This is a point that's easily forgotten in the rush of headlines and the hectic badgering of everyday life. But it's a point that science fiction makes constantly: the future belongs to us -- whatever it is. We make it, our actions shape tomorrow. We have the brains and guts to build paradise (or at least try). Tragedy is when we fail, and the greatest crime of all is when we fail even to try. Thus science fiction stands as a bridge between science and art, between the engineers of technology and the poets of humanity.

Barrett said that when we’re dehydrated, we don’t necessarily feel thirsty—we feel exhausted. When we have something odd happening in our stomach, our body doesn’t quite know if we have a menstrual cramp or a stomachache or if we need to poop. We might not even be aware for a long period of time that our stomach hurts. And this isn’t unique to people with PTSD. It’s normal, everyday bodily dissociation that we all suffer from. If we find ourselves in a shitty mood, we might not necessarily be mad about a certain trigger. We could just be running at a metabolic deficit. Our body might be screaming “I NEED FUNYUNS” while we project our hangriness onto, say, this poor sweaty schmuck who’s breathing too loud in the elevator. But Barrett said that PTSD does make these inclinations worse. It affects a variety of systems in the body, throwing them all out of whack. Our hearts might beat faster. Our lungs might pump harder. Our body budget can get tipped off-balance more easily. And when it does, our reactions to these deficits can feel outsized. “Make sure that you get enough sleep, make sure you exercise, make sure that you eat in a healthful way,” she told me when I asked her what I could do to be a better person. When I countered that that didn’t seem like enough, she kindly offered, “You know, all you can do is take as much responsibility as you can. And sometimes it’s the attempt that matters, you know, more than the success.” Then she chuckled at herself. “That’s a very Jewish mother response!” So, first step of hacking my brain: sustaining it with enough oxygen and nutrients

Our life is like a journey…’ – and so the journey seems to me less an adventure and a foray into unusual realms than a concentrated likeness of our existence: residents of a city, citizens of country, beholden to a class or a social circle, member of a family and clan and entangled by professional duties, by the habits of an ‘everyday life’ woven from all these circumstances, we often feel too secure, believing our house built for all the future, easily induced to believe in a constancy that makes ageing a problem for one person and each change in external circumstances a catastrophe for another. We forget that this is a process, that the earth is in constant motion and that we too are affected by ebbs and tides, earthquakes and events far beyond our visible and tangible spheres: beggars, kings, figures in the same great game. We forget it for our would-be peace of mind, which then is built on shifting sand. We forget it so as not to fear. And fear makes us stubborn: we call reality only what we can grasp with our hands and what affects us directly, denying the force of the fire that’s sweeping our neighbour’s house, but not yet ours. War in other countries? Just twelve hours, twelve weeks from our borders? God forbid – the horror that sometimes seizes us, you feel it too when reading history books, time or space, it doesn’t matter what lies between us and it. But the journey ever so slightly lifts the veil over the mystery of space – and a city with a magical, unreal name, Samarkand the Golden, Astrakhan or Isfahan, City of Rose Attar, becomes real the instant we set foot there and touch it with our living breath.

I rarely bring a date along to family functions, because more than two or three of us in one room can be hazardous, especially if you are shy, offend easily, clean and sober, or don’t eat meat. The way my family demonstrates our love and affection for each other has occasionally been mistaken for verbal abuse by outsiders, so I usually don’t take the risk.

Ostensibly it would seem that the further apart these enemy forces, the easier it must be to achieve a decisive success. In terms of time, space, and number, this is undoubtedly true. But once more the moral element intrudes. When the enemy forces are widely separated each is self-contained and tends to be consolidated by pressure. When they are close together they tend to coalesce and 'become members one of another', mutually dependent in mind, morale, and matter. The minds of the commanders affect each other, moral impressions are quickly transfused, and even the movements of each force easily hinder or disorganized those of others. Thus while the antagonist has less time and space for his action, the dislocating results of it take effect more quickly and easily. Further, when forces are close together the enemy's mere divergence from his approach to one of them may become an unexpected, and therefore truly indirect approach to another. In contrast, when forces are widely separated there is more time to prepare to meet, or avoid, the second blow of the army which is exploiting its central position.

No, no. I understand that. And I quite agree with you. But you know I've always contended that the affections could be made to combine pleasure and profit. I wouldn't have a man marry for money,--that would be rather bad,--but I don't see why, when it comes to falling in love, a man shouldn't fall in love with a rich girl as easily as a poor one. Some of the rich girls are very nice, and I should

The Newtonian vision describes a reliable place inhabited by well-behaved and easily identifiable matter. The world view arising from these discoveries is also bolstered by the philosophical implications of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution, with its suggestion that survival is available only to the genetically rugged individual. These, in their essence, are stories that idealize separateness. From the moment we are born, we are told that for every winner there must be a loser. From that constricted vision we have fashioned our world. The Field tells a radically new scientific story. The latest chapter of that story, written by a group of largely unknown frontier scientific explorers, suggests that at our essence we exist as a unity, a relationship – utterly interdependent, the parts affecting the whole

Churchill warned them now: “When you are drifting down the stream of Niagara, it may easily happen that from time to time you run into a reach of quite smooth water, or that a bend in the river or a change in the wind may make the roar of the falls seem far more distant. But”—his voice dropped a register, and only those who strained could hear—“your hazard and your preoccupation are in no way affected thereby.

Lord, what will I be? Where will the careless conglomeration of environment, heredity and stimulus lead me? Someday I may say: It was of great significance that I sat and laughed at myself in a convertible with the rain coming down in rattling sheets on the canvas roof. It influenced my life that I did not find content immediately and easily - - and now I am I because of that. It was inestimably important for me to look at the lights of Amherstn town in the rain, with the wet black tree-skeletons against the limpid streetlights and gray November mist, and then look at the boy beside me and feel all the hurting beauty go flat because he wasn't the right one - not at all. And I may say that my philosophy has been deeply affected by the fact that windshield wipers ticked off seconds too loudly and hopelessly, that my clock drips loud sharp clicks too monotonously on my hearing. I can hear it even through the pillow I muffle it with - the tyrannical drip drip drip drip of seconds along the night. And in the day, even when I'm not there, the seconds come out in little measured strips of time. And I wind the clock. And I look at the windshield wipers cutting an arch out of the sprinkled raindrops on the glass. Click-click. Clip-clip. Tick-tick. snip-snip. And it goes on and on. I could smash the measured clicking sound that haunts me - draining away life, and dreams, and idle reveries. Hard, sharp, ticks. I hate them. Measuring thought, infinite space, by cogs and wheels. Can you understand? Someone, somewhere, can you understand me a little, love me a little? For all my despair, for all my ideals, for all that - I love life. But it is hard, and I have so much - so very much to learn.

But in this latter event the cause probably lies in a lack of self-confidence due to early misfortune. The man who feels himself unloved may take various attitudes as a result. He may make desperate efforts to win affection, probably by means of exceptional acts of kindness. In this, however, he is very likely to be unsuccessful, since the motive of the kindnesses is easily perceived by their beneficiaries, and human nature is so constructed that it gives affection most readily to those who seem least to demand it. The man, therefore, who endeavors to purchase affection by benevolent actions becomes disillusioned by experience of human ingratitude. It never occurs to him that the affection which he is trying to buy is of far more value than the material benefits which he offers as its price, and yet the feeling that this is so is at the basis of his actions.

These initially adaptive responses to immediate danger turn into inflexible and pervasive procedural tendencies when trauma is unresolved. Once these actions have been procedurally encoded, individuals are left with regulatory deficits and “suffer both from generalized hyperarousal [and hypoarousal] and from physiological emergency reactions to specific reminders” (van der Kolk, 1994, p. 254). Traumatized clients often experience rapid, dramatic, exhausting, and confusing shifts of intense emotional states, from dysregulated fear, anger, or even elation, to despair, helplessness, shame, or flat affect. They may continue to feel frozen, numb, tense, or constantly ready to fight or flee. They may be hyperalert, overly sensitive to sounds or movements and easily startled by unfamiliar stimuli. Or they may underreact to stimuli, feel distant from their experience and their bodies, or even feel dead inside.

Since we began with a felt sense of safety this day, several neural streams are initially supporting the renewal of our connection. In our midbrain, the energies of the SEEKING system are animating the CARE system, which can both foster the good feelings between us and support offers of repair should we have a rupture (Panksepp & Biven, 2012). Once in connection, our ventral vagal parasympathetic system is affecting the prosody of our voices, our facial mobility, and the attentiveness of our listening, maintaining social engagement (Porges, 2011). Since ventral lateralizes to the right hemisphere, we more easily stay rooted in the right-centric way of attending that keeps us in connection with this moment and with each other (McGilchrist, 2009). In this intimacy, our brains are coupling in many regions, so there is an experience of social emotional engagement and embodied communication as we become a single system in two bodies (Hasson, 2010). Because we are trustworthy partners in this healing process, social baseline theory tells us that our amygdalae are calming just because we are together (Beckes & Coan, 2011). All of this is happening without doing anything, even without saying anything, in microseconds below conscious awareness because of the safe space we have cultivated over time. We can more clearly understand why Porges says, "Safety IS the treatment".

Looking at her with a wolf’s gaze, with a hunger satiated only by violence and destruction, he pulled back only slightly with the sight of blood trickling from her nose. When she smiled at him, her teeth stained red, her tongue running over her gums, however, Blossom’s entire body juxtaposed the idea between sweet and innocent to malicious and coarse. She was as sharp as a blade, yet as sweet as a flowering bruise. And his affection for her was as equally a perfect mixture—balance—between the desire to destroy her, tear her limb from limb, devour her, and protect, nurture, save her from all the evil in the world, including himself. But what he didn’t realize, as she batted her lashes back up at him, her body molding under his fingertips so easily he for a minute was convinced she had been created for the sole purpose of him, was that she was a wolf, too. A wolf in sheep’s clothing, a false prey. A predator of equal conviction.

WHAT EES ALL DEES STUFF? IN AFRICA WE DOAN HAVE ALL DEES STUFF!! WE HAVE DEE BABEE!!!" His message was simple. It goes to the heart of what we in HypnoBirthing frequently puzzle over: Why has all the "stuff" that denies the normalcy of birth and portrays it as an inevitably risky and dangerous medical event become a routine part of most childbirth education classes? Why are couples in a low- or no-risk category being prepared for circumstances that only rarely occur? Even more puzzling, why do parents accept the negative premise that birth is a dangerous, painful ordeal at best or a medical calamity at worst? Why do they blindly accept the "one-size-fits-all" approach?" If what couples are hearing in childbirth classes is far removed from what they want their birthing experiences to be, why do they spend so much time entertaining negative outcomes that can color and shape their birth expectations and ultimately affect their birth experience? In other words, if it's not what they're wanting, why would they "go there"? In HypnoBirthing, we doan have all dees stuff, and deliberately so." HypnoBirthing helps you to frame a positive expectation and to prepare for birth by developing a trust and belief in your birthing body and in nature's undeniable orchestration of birthing. By teaching you the basic physiology of birth and explaining the adverse effect that fear has upon the chemical and physiological responses of your body we help you to learn simple, self-conditioning techniques that will easily bring you into the optimal state of relaxation you will use during birthing. This will allow your birthing muscles to fully relax. In other words, we will help you prepare for the birth your plan and want for yourselves and your baby, rather than the birth that someone else directs. We will help you look forward to your pregnancy and birthing with joy and love, rather than fear and anxiety.

There are stories that are true, in which each individual’s tale is unique and tragic, and the worst of the tragedy is that we have heard it before, and we cannot allow ourselves to feel it too deeply. We build a shell around it like an oyster dealing with a painful particle of grit, coating it with smooth pearl layers in order to cope. This is how we walk and talk and function, day in, day out, immune to others’ pain and loss. If it were to touch us it would cripple us or make saints of us; but, for the most part, it does not touch us. We cannot allow it to. Tonight, as you eat, reflect if you can: there are children starving in the world, starving in numbers larger than the mind can easily hold, up in the big numbers where an error of a million here, a million there, can be forgiven. It may be uncomfortable for you to reflect upon this or it may not, but still, you will eat. There are accounts which, if we open our hearts to them, will cut us too deeply. Look—here is a good man, good by his own lights and the lights of his friends: he is faithful and true to his wife, he adores and lavishes attention on his little children, he cares about his country, he does his job punctiliously, as best he can. So, efficiently and good-naturedly, he exterminates Jews: he appreciates the music that plays in the background to pacify them; he advises the Jews not to forget their identification numbers as they go into the showers—many people, he tells them, forget their numbers, and take the wrong clothes, when they come out of the showers. This calms the Jews: there will be life, they assure themselves, after the showers. And they are wrong. Our man supervises the detail taking the bodies to the ovens; and if there is anything he feels bad about, it is that he still allows the gassing of vermin to affect him. Were he a truly good man, he knows, he would feel nothing but joy, as the earth is cleansed of its pests. Leave him; he cuts too deep. He is too close to us and it hurts.

Now when the soul by its efforts to abandon outward objects and gather itself inwards, is brought into the influence of the central tendency, without any other exertion, it falls gradually by the weight of Divine Love into its proper centre; and the more passive and tranquil it remains, and the freer from self-motion and self-exertion, the more rapidly it advances, because the energy of the central attractive virtue is unobstructed and has full liberty for action. All our care and attention should, therefore, be to acquire inward recollection: nor let us be discouraged by the pains and difficulties we encounter in this exercise, which will soon be recompensed on the part of our God by such abundant supplies of grace as will render the exercise perfectly easy, provided we be faithful in meekly withdrawing our hearts from outward distractions and occupations, and returning to our centre with affections full of tenderness and serenity. When at any time the passions are turbulent, a gentle retreat inwards into a Present God easily deadens and pacifies them; and any other way of contending with them rather irritates than appeases them.

As I pondered over the facts that the light of reason is not only despised, but by many even execrated as a source of impiety, that human commentaries are accepted as divine records, and that credulity is extolled as faith; as I marked the fierce controversies of philosophers raging in Church and State, the source of bitter hatred and dissension, the ready instruments of sedition and other ills innumerable, I determined to examine the Bible afresh in a careful, impartial, and unfettered spirit, making no assumptions concerning it, and attributing to it no doctrines, which I do not find clearly therein set down. With these precautions I constructed a method of Scriptural interpretation, and thus equipped proceeded to inquire—What is prophecy? in what sense did God reveal Himself to the prophets, and why were these particular men chosen by Him? Was it on account of the sublimity of their thoughts about the Deity and nature, or was it solely on account of their piety? These questions being answered, I was easily able to conclude, that the authority of the prophets has weight only in matters of morality, and that their speculative doctrines affect us little.

There are stories that are true, in which each individual’s tale is unique and tragic, and the worst of the tragedy is that we have heard it before, and we cannot allow ourselves to feel it too deeply. We build a shell around it like an oyster dealing with a painful particle of grit, coating it with smooth pearl layers in order to cope. This is how we walk and talk and function, day in, day out, immune to others’ pain and loss. If it were to touch us it would cripple us or make saints of us; but, for the most part, it does not touch us. We cannot allow it to. Tonight, as you eat, reflect if you can: there are children starving in the world, starving in numbers larger than the mind can easily hold, up in the big numbers where an error of a million here, a million there, can be forgiven. It may be uncomfortable for you to reflect upon this or it may not, but still, you will eat. There are accounts which, if we open our hearts to them will cut us too deeply. Look – here is a good man, good by his own lights and the lights of his friends: he is faithful and true to his wife, he adores and lavishes attention on his little children, he cares about his country, he does his job punctiliously, as best he can. So, efficiently and good-naturedly, he exterminates Jews: he appreciates the music that plays in the background to pacify them; he advises the Jews not to forget their identification numbers as they go into the showers – many people, he tells them, forget their numbers, and take the wrong clothes, when they come out of the showers. This calms the Jews: there will be life, they assure themselves, after the showers. And they are wrong. Our man supervises the detail taking the bodies to the ovens; and if there is anything he feels bad about, it is that he still allows the gassing of vermin to affect him. Were he a truly good man, he knows, he would feel nothing but joy, as the earth is cleansed of its pests. Leave him; he cuts too deep. He is too close to us and it hurts.

what is a psychopath? The short version.” “A person who is superficially charming and well-spoken; demonstrates inflated self-esteem, arrogance, and a sense of superiority; is consistently deceitful and prone to pathological lying; is cunning and manipulative, maneuvering others for his or her own personal gain; has no remorse and feels no guilt; is callous, inconsiderate, and unconcerned by the pain and suffering of others; shows shallow affect, demonstrating a limited range and depth of emotional responses and feelings; exhibits minimal fear responses and a disinclination to change behavior in response to pain or negative social stimuli; and gets bored easily, needing constant stimulation.

There is much: recognition of the fact that human beings live indeterminate and incomplete lives; recognition of the power exerted over and upon us by our own habits and memories; recognition of the ways in which the world presses in on all of us, for it is an intractable place where many things go awry and go astray, where one may all-too-easily lose one’s very self. The epistemological argument is framed by faith, but it stands on its own as an account of willing, nilling, memory, language, signs, affections, delight, the power and the limits of minds and bodies. To the extent that a prideful philosophy refuses to accept these, Augustine would argue, to that extent philosophy hates the human condition itself.

If Shakespeare be considered as a MAN born in a rude age and educated in the lowest manner, without any instruction either from the world or from books, he may be regarded as a prodigy; if represented as a POET capable of furnishing a proper entertainment to a refined or intelligent audience, we must abate much of this eulogy. In his compositions, we regret that many irregularities, and even absurdities, should so frequently disfigure the animated and passionated scenes intermixed with them; and, at the same time, we perhaps admire the more those beauties on account of their being surrounded by such deformities. A striking peculiarity of sentiment, adapted to a single character, he frequently hits, as it were, by inspiration; but a reasonable propriety of thought he cannot for any time uphold. Nervous and picturesque expressions as well as descriptions abound in him; but it is in vain we look either for purity or simplicity of diction. His total ignorance of all theatrical art and conduct, however material a defect, yet, as it affects the spectator rather than the reader, we can more easily excuse than that want of taste which often prevails in his productions, and which gives way only by intervals to the irradiations of genius. [....] And there may even remain a suspicion that we overrate, if possible, the greatness of his genius; in the same manner as bodies often appear more gigantic on account of their being disproportioned and misshapen.

He stroked the filly's neck, and she sniffed at the pouch on his belt, then turned her head away. "She wants to let me know she doesn't care that I've apples in here.No, doesn't matter a bit to her." He looped the line around the fence and took an apple and his knife from his pocket. Idly he cut it in half. "Maybe I'll just offer this token to this other pretty lady here." He held out the apple to Keeley, and Betty gave him a solid rap with her head that rammed him into the fence. "Now she wants my attention. Would you like some of this then?" He shifted, held the apple out. Betty nipped it from his palm with dignified delicacy. "She loves me." "She loves your apples," Keeley commented. "Oh,it's not just that. See here." Before Keeley could evade-could think to-he cupped a hand at the back of her neck, pulled her close and rubbed his lips provocatively over hers. Betty huffed out a breath and butted him. "You see?" Brian let his teeth graze lightly before he released Keeley. "Jealous.She doesn't care to have me give affection to another woman." "Next time kiss her and save yourself a bruise." "It was worth it.On both counts." "Horses are more easily charmed than women, Donnelly." She plucked the apple out of his hand, bit in. "I just like your apples," she told him, and strolled away. "That one's as contrary as you are." He nuzzled Betty's cheek as he watched Keeley walk to her stables. "What is it that makes me find contrary females so appealing?

Determining when not to overestimate and when not to underestimate is a crucial skill that is not easily acquired. But it's unspeakably important to be able to know when not to underestimate, for example, another person's affections towards you; but then also when not to overestimate the same thing. If only we could all have radar that could tune into these two measures of living, we'd name it something like "humameter" or "give-a-shit-o-meter." Either way, unnamed or named, I've learned that this is among the most important skills accomplishable by mankind. Insecurities should not be allowed to dictate how we determine the amount of value another person has placed on us; fears should not be let in to tell us how much or how little of worth we have in someone else's eyes.

Our brains, for instance, are 70 percent fat, mostly in the form of a substance known as myelin that insulates nerve cells and, for that matter, all nerve endings in the body. Fat is the primary component of all cell membranes. Changing the proportion of saturated to unsaturated fats in the diet, as proponents of Keys’s hypothesis recommended, might well change the composition of the fats in the cell membranes. This could alter the permeability of cell membranes, which determines how easily they transport, among other things, blood sugar, proteins, hormones, bacteria, viruses, and tumor-causing agents into and out of the cell. The relative saturation of these membrane fats could affect the aging of cells and the likelihood that blood cells will clot in vessels and cause heart attacks.

Accordingly, we imagine ourselves to be innocuous, reasonable, and humane. We do not think of distrusting our motives or of asking ourselves how the inner man feels about the things we do in the outside world. But actually it is frivolous, superficial, and unreasonable of us, as well as psychically unhygienic, to overlook the reaction and standpoint of the unconscious. One can regard one’s stomach or heart as unimportant and worthy of contempt, but that does not prevent overeating or overexertion from having consequences that affect the whole man. Yet we think that psychic mistakes and their consequences can be got rid of with mere words, for ‘psychic’ means less than air to most people. All the same, nobody can deny that without the psyche there would be no world at all, and still less a human world. Virtually everything depends on the human psyche and its functions. It should be worthy of all the attention we can give it, especially today, when everyone admits that the weal or woe of the future will be decided neither by the threat of wild animals, nor by natural catastrophes, nor by the danger of world-wide epidemics, but simply and solely by the psychic changes in man. It needs only an almost imperceptible disturbance of equilibrium in a few of our rulers’ heads to plunge the world into blood, fire, and radioactivity. The technical means necessary for this are present on both sides. And certain conscious deliberations, uncontrolled by any inner opponent, can be put into effect all too easily, as we have seen already from the example of one 'Leader.’ The consciousness of modern man still clings so much to external objects that he makes them exclusively responsible, as if it were on them that the decision depended

The Coach’s head was oblong with tiny slits that served as eyes, which drifted in tides slowly inward, as though the face itself were the sea or, in fact, a soup of macromolecules through which objects might drift, leaving in their wake, ripples of nothingness. The eyes—they floated adrift like land masses before locking in symmetrically at seemingly prescribed positions off-center, while managing to be so closely drawn into the very middle of the face section that it might have seemed unnecessary for there to have been two eyes when, quite likely, one would easily have sufficed. These aimless, floating eyes were not the Coach’s only distinctive feature—for, in fact, connected to the interior of each eyelid by a web-like layer of rubbery pink tissue was a kind of snout which, unlike the eyes, remained fixed in its position among the tides of the face, arcing narrowly inward at the edges of its sharp extremities into a serrated beak-like projection that hooked downward at its tip, in a fashion similar to that of a falcon’s beak. This snout—or beak, rather—was, in fact, so long and came to such a fine point that as the eyes swirled through the soup of macromolecules that comprised the man’s face, it almost appeared—due to the seeming thinness of the pink tissue—that the eyes functioned as kinds of optical tether balls that moved synchronously across the face like mirror images of one another. 'I wore my lizard mask as I entered the tram, last evening, and people found me fearless,' the Coach remarked, enunciating each word carefully through the hollow clack-clacking sound of his beak, as its edges clapped together. 'I might have exchanged it for that of an ox and then thought better. A lizard goes best with scales, don’t you think?' Bunnu nodded as he quietly wondered how the Coach could manage to fit that phallic monstrosity of a beak into any kind of mask, unless, in fact, this disguise of which he spoke, had been specially designed for his face and divided into sections in such a way that they could be readily attached to different areas—as though one were assembling a new face—in overlapping layers, so as to veil, or perhaps even amplify certain distinguishable features. All the same, in doing so, one could only imagine this lizard mask to be enormous to the extent that it would be disproportionate with the rest of the Coach’s body. But then, there were ways to mask space, as well—to bend light, perhaps, to create the illusion that something was perceptibly larger or smaller, wider or narrower, rounder or more linear than it was in actuality. That is to say, any form of prosthesis designed for the purposes of affecting remedial space might, for example, have had the capability of creating the appearance of a gap of void in occupied space. An ornament hangs from the chin, let’s say, as an accessory meant to contour smoothly inward what might otherwise appear to be hanging jowls. This surely wouldn’t be the exact use that the Coach would have for such a device—as he had no jowls to speak of—though he could certainly see the benefit of the accessory’s ingenuity. This being said, the lizard mask might have appeared natural rather than disproportionate given the right set of circumstances. Whatever the case, there was no way of even knowing if the Coach wasn’t, in fact, already wearing a mask, at this very moment, rendering Bunnu’s initial appraisal of his character—as determined by a rudimentary physiognomic analysis of his features—a matter now subject to doubt. And thus, any conjecture that could be made with respect to the dimensions or components of a lizard mask—not to speak of the motives of its wearer—seemed not only impractical, but also irrelevant at this point in time.

Hurrying forward, he opened the door a crack to see Little Willy lumbering down the stairs. The man was a giant. His fists were nearly as large as his head, which was admittedly small for his body. Radcliffe supposed he should be grateful that those fists had only squeezed his behind. Had the man hit him with one of them, he probably would have killed him with the first blow. Radcliffe sighed at his own thoughts. Dresses, he decided, were hard on a man’s ego. They affected his confidence poorly. Any other time he would have thought the man was large but slow on his feet and that he could easily have outwitted him. In the dress, all he could think was that he would trip himself up with his own skirts and be lucky to survive. He had to find Charlie, get her out of there, and get the damn thing off. Then he would lecture his wife soundly on never ever getting herself in such a dangerous predicament again…for all the good that would do.

Our overview of lagging skills is now complete. Of course, that was just a sampling. Here’s a more complete, though hardly exhaustive, list, including those we just reviewed: > Difficulty handling transitions, shifting from one mind-set or task to another > Difficulty doing things in a logical sequence or prescribed order > Difficulty persisting on challenging or tedious tasks > Poor sense of time > Difficulty maintaining focus > Difficulty considering the likely outcomes or consequences of actions (impulsive) > Difficulty considering a range of solutions to a problem > Difficulty expressing concerns, needs, or thoughts in words > Difficulty understanding what is being said > Difficulty managing emotional response to frustration so as to think rationally > Chronic irritability and/or anxiety significantly impede capacity for problem-solving or heighten frustration > Difficulty seeing the “grays”/concrete, literal, black-and-white thinking > Difficulty deviating from rules, routine > Difficulty handling unpredictability, ambiguity, uncertainty, novelty > Difficulty shifting from original idea, plan, or solution > Difficulty taking into account situational factors that would suggest the need to adjust a plan of action > Inflexible, inaccurate interpretations/cognitive distortions or biases (e.g., “Everyone’s out to get me,” “Nobody likes me,” “You always blame me,” “It’s not fair,” “I’m stupid”) > Difficulty attending to or accurately interpreting social cues/poor perception of social nuances > Difficulty starting conversations, entering groups, connecting with people/lacking basic social skills > Difficulty seeking attention in appropriate ways > Difficulty appreciating how his/her behavior is affecting other people > Difficulty empathizing with others, appreciating another person’s perspective or point of view > Difficulty appreciating how s/he is coming across or being perceived by others > Sensory/motor difficulties

Having a TV—which gives you the ability to receive information—fails to establish any capacity for sending information in the opposite direction. And the odd one-way nature of the primary connection Americans now have to our national conversation has a profound impact on their basic attitude toward democracy itself. If you can receive but not send, what does that do to your basic feelings about the nature of your connection to American self-government? “Attachment theory” is an interesting new branch of developmental psychology that sheds light on the importance of consistent, appropriate, and responsive two-way communication—and why it is essential for an individual’s feeling empowered. First developed by John Bowlby, a British psychiatrist, in 1958, attachment theory was further developed by his protégée Mary Ainsworth and other experts studying the psychological development of infants. Although it applies to individuals, attachment theory is, in my view, a metaphor that illuminates the significance of authentic free-flowing communication in any relationship that requires trust. By using this new approach, psychologists were able to discover that every infant learns a crucial and existential lesson during the first year of life about his or her fundamental relationship to the rest of the world. An infant develops an attachment pathway based on different patterns of care and, according to this theory, learns to adopt one of three basic postures toward the universe: In the best case, the infant learns that he or she has the inherent ability to exert a powerful influence on the world and evoke consistent, appropriate responses by communicating signals of hunger or discomfort, happiness or distress. If the caregiver—more often than not the mother—responds to most signals from the infant consistently and appropriately, the infant begins to assume that he or she has inherent power to affect the world. If the primary caregiver responds inappropriately and/or inconsistently, the infant learns to assume that he or she is powerless to affect the larger world and that his or her signals have no intrinsic significance where the universe is concerned. A child who receives really erratic and inconsistent responses from a primary caregiver, even if those responses are occasionally warm and sensitive, develops “anxious resistant attachment.” This pathway creates children who feature anxiety, dependence, and easy victimization. They are easily manipulated and exploited later in life. In the worst case, infants who receive no emotional response from the person or persons responsible for them are at high risk of learning a deep existential rage that makes them prone to violence and antisocial behavior as they grow up. Chronic unresponsiveness leads to what is called “anxious avoidance attachment,” a life pattern that features unquenchable anger, frustration, and aggressive, violent behavior.

When we live intensely, we run more risks and we become more fragile. We already know that people who do nothing suffer nothing. But avoiding doing things out of fear of getting hurt is not a path to growth. When we mix our fears with reality, we are limiting ourselves. Don’t forget that the decisions we don’t make also cause us pain. Be careful about how you interpret what happens to you. If you don’t have an explanation that brings you peace, don’t make one up. What causes one kind of emotional pain to be more intense than another? Well, it depends on the emotional attachment to the source of the pain. What hurts more intensely is what directly affects us or the people we love. What hurts more is what affects our greatest aspirations and objectives. We are more easily hurt by what affects our desires or fears, and the more intense our desire, the more painful our frustration when we do not achieve it. The emotional involvement determines and explains the intensity of our pain. The greater the emotional involvement, the greater the pain. When pain comes in the door, perspective goes out the window, taking with it our ability to reason properly, to analyze events, and to make good decisions. Each time you remember what happened you transform what happened. None of our experiences is in vain if we are capable of learning from what happened to us and from the suffering and pain it caused us. But we won’t be able to learn from what happened if we don’t look back and review our experiences. Carrying your past is like carrying a huge backpack full of stones that prevents you from walking freely. But to walk through life all you need is a bit of water and food, a dream, and a destination—and, in a pinch, you can probably do without a destination. Let bygones be bygones, learn from what happened, and bring that chapter to a close. Your beliefs feed your decisions, your fears, and your desires. Knowledge will set you free, so make an effort to learn, study, read, travel.

The automobile, like the all-important domestic façade, is another mechanism for outdoor class display. Or class lack of display we'd have to say, if we focus on the usages of the upper class, who, on the principle of archaism, affect to regard the automobile as very nouveau and underplay it consistently. Class understatement describes the technique: if your money and freedom and carelessness of censure allow you to buy any kind of car, you provide yourself with the meanest and most common to indicate that you're not taking seriously so easily purchasable and thus vulgar a class totem. You have a Chevy, Ford, Plymouth, or Dodge, and in the least interesting style and color. It may be clean, although slightly dirty is best. But it should be boring. The next best thing is to have a "good" car, like a Jaguar or BMW, but to be sure it's old and beat-up. You may not have a Rolls, a Cadillac, or a Mercedes. Especially a Mercedes, a car, Joseph Epstein reports in The American Scholar (Winter 1981-82), which the intelligent young in West Germany regard, quite correctly, as "a sign of vulgarity, a car of the kind owned by Beverly Hills dentists or African cabinet ministers.

The communists believe that they have found the path to deliverance from our evils. According to them, man is wholly good and is well-disposed to his neighbour; but the institution of private property has corrupted his nature. The ownership of private wealth gives the individual power, and with it the temptation to ill-treat his neighbour; while the man who is excluded from possession is bound to rebel in hostility against his oppressor. If private property were abolished, all wealth held in common, and everyone allowed to share in the enjoyment of it, ill-will and hostility would disappear among men. Since everyone’s needs would be satisfied, no one would have any reason to regard another as his enemy; all would willingly undertake the work that was necessary.I have no concern with any economic criticisms of the communist system; I cannot enquire into whether the abolition of private property is expedient or advantageous. But I am able to recognize that the psychological premisses on which the system is based are an untenable illusion. In abolishing private property we deprive the human love of aggression of one of its instruments, certainly a strong one, though certainly not the strongest; but we have in no way altered the differences in power and influence which are misused by aggressiveness, nor have we altered anything in its nature. Aggressiveness was not created by property. It reigned almost without limit in primitive times, when property was still very scanty, and it already shows itself in the nursery almost before property has given up its primal, anal form; it forms the basis of every relation of affection and love among people (with the single exception, perhaps, of the mother’s relation to her male child). If we do away with personal rights over material wealth, there still remains prerogative in the field of sexual relationships, which is bound to become the source of the strongest dislike and the most violent hostility among men who in other respects are on an equal footing. If we were to remove this factor, too, by allowing complete freedom of sexual life and thus abolishing the family, the germ-cell of civilization, we cannot, it is true, easily foresee what new paths the development of civilization could take; but one thing we can expect, and that is that this indestructible feature of human nature, will follow it there.

I pull into the driveway outside of my father's house and shut off the engine. I sit behind the wheel for a moment, studying the house. He'd called me last night and demanded that I come over for dinner tonight. Didn't request. He demanded. What struck me though, was that he sounded a lot more stressed out and harried than he did when he interrupted my brunch with Gabby to demand my presence at a “family”dinner. Yeah, that had been a fun night filled with my father and Ian badgering me about my job. For whatever reason, they'd felt compelled to make a concerted effort to belittle what I do –more so than they usually do anyway -- try to undermine my confidence in my ability to teach, and all but demand that I quit and come to work for my father's company. That had been annoying, and although they were more insistent than normal, it's pretty par for the course with those two. They always think they know what's best for me and have no qualms about telling me how to live my life. When he'd called me last night though, and told me to come to dinner tonight, there was something in my father's voice that had rattled me. It took me a while to put a finger on what it was I heard in his voice, but when I figured it out, it really shook me. I heard fear. Outright fear. My father isn't a man who fears much or is easily intimidated. In fact, he's usually the one doing the intimidating. But, something has him really spooked and even though we don't always see eye-to-eye or get along, hearing that fear in his voice scared me. In all my years, I've never known him to sound so downright terrified. With a sigh and a deep sense of foreboding, I climb out of my car and head to the door, trying to steel myself more with each step. Call me psychic, but I have a feeling that this is going to be a long, miserable night. “Good evening, Miss Holly,”Gloria says as she opens the door before I even have a chance to knock. “Nice to see you again.”“It's nice to see you too, Gloria,”I say and smile with genuine affection. Gloria has been with our family for as far back as I can remember. Honestly, after my mother passed away from ovarian cancer, Gloria took a large role in raising me. My father had plunged himself into his work –and had taken Ian under his wing to help groom him to take over the empire one day –leaving me to more or less fend for myself. It was like I was a secondary consideration to them. Because I'm a girl and not part of the testosterone-rich world of construction, neither my father nor Ian took much interest in me or my life. Unless they needed something from me, of course. The only time they really paid any attention to me was when they needed me to pose for family pictures for company literature.

I believe Nancy said that her aunt married beneath her.” Which you wouldn’t let me do. He went rigid beside her. “Ah. That does happen.” Unless you’re Dom the Almighty. “The marriage seems to have turned out well enough.” Jane would goad him into revealing the truth of what he’d done, no matter what it took. “Nancy said Mrs. Patch misses her late husband dreadfully and refuses to decamp from York, though she could easily live with my uncle. Apparently, she doesn’t miss her life as a knight’s daughter.” “Oh? And exactly how far beneath herself she marry?” Jane colored as she dredged that little detail from her memory. “Her late husband was an architect, I believe.” “So, not a gentleman of leisure but still in a profession respectable enough that Nancy felt no compunction about visiting her.” He smirked as he navigated the phaeton expertly through the narrow streets of York. “There are levels of marrying beneath one, after all.” Oh, she could just smack his face for that. After all these years, that he could still be so certain of the wisdom of the course he’d set them upon…”Yes, just as there are levels of being in love. Some people’s love for each other transcends all obstacles. Some people’s love does not.” His smug expression vanished. “And some people do not understand the meaning of the word.” “Really? I thought love was about enduring any sacrifice to be with the object of one’s affection.” He drove through an archway and reined in the horses. “Here we are. The Elephant and Castle.” So he was avoiding the subject. Again.

As in everything, nature is the best instructor, even as regards selection. One couldn't imagine a better activity on nature's part than that which consists in deciding the supremacy of one creature over another by means of a constant struggle. While we're on the subject, it's somewhat interesting to observe that our upper classes, who've never bothered about the hundreds of thousands of German emigrants or their poverty, give way to a feeling of compassion regarding the fate of the Jews whom we claim the right to expel. Our compatriots forget too easily that the Jews have accomplices all over the world, and that no beings have greater powers of resistance as regards adaptation to climate. Jews can prosper anywhere, even in Lapland and Siberia. All that love and sympathy, since our ruling class is capable of such sentiments, would by rights be applied exclusively—if that class were not corrupt—to the members of our national community. Here Christianity sets the example. What could be more fanatical, more exclusive and more intolerant than this religion which bases everything on the love of the one and only God whom it reveals? The affection that the German ruling class should devote to the good fellow-citizen who faithfully and courageously does his duty to the benefit of the community, why is it not just as fanatical, just as exclusive and just as intolerant? My attachment and sympathy belong in the first place to the front-line German soldier, who has had to overcome the rigours of the past winter. If there is a question of choosing men to rule us, it must not be forgotten that war is also a manifestation of life, that it is even life's most potent and most characteristic expression. Consequently, I consider that the only men suited to become rulers are those who have valiantly proved themselves in a war. In my eyes, firmness of character is more precious than any other quality. A well toughened character can be the characteristic of a man who, in other respects, is quite ignorant. In my view, the men who should be set at the head of an army are the toughest, bravest, boldest, and, above all, the most stubborn and hardest to wear down. The same men are also the best chosen for posts at the head of the State—otherwise the pen ends by rotting away what the sword has conquered. I shall go so far as to say that, in his own sphere, the statesman must be even more courageous than the soldier who leaps from his trench to face the enemy. There are cases, in fact, in which the courageous decision of a single statesman can save the lives of a great number of soldiers. That's why pessimism is a plague amongst statesmen. One should be able to weed out all the pessimists, so that at the decisive moment these men's knowledge may not inhibit their capacity for action. This last winter was a case in point. It supplied a test for the type of man who has extensive knowledge, for all the bookworms who become preoccupied by a situation's analogies, and are sensitive to the generally disastrous epilogue of the examples they invoke. Agreed, those who were capable of resisting the trend needed a hefty dose of optimism. One conclusion is inescapable: in times of crisis, the bookworms are too easily inclined to switch from the positive to the negative. They're waverers who find in public opinion additional encouragement for their wavering. By contrast, the courageous and energetic optimist—even although he has no wide knowledge— will always end, guided by his subconscious or by mere commonsense, in finding a way out.

But among those 150 people, Dunbar stressed that there are hierarchical "layers of friendship" determined by how much time you spend with the person. It's kind of like a wedding cake where the topmost layer consist of only one or two people—say, a spouse and best friend—with whom you are most intimate and interact daily. The next layer can accommodate at most four people for whom you have great affinity, affection, and concern. Friendships at this level require weekly attention to maintain. Out from there, the tiers contain more casual friends who you see less often and thus, your ties are more tenuous. Without consistent contact, they easily fall into the realm of acquaintance. At this point, you are friendly but not really friends, because you've lost touch with who they are, which is always evolving. You could easily have a beer with them, but you wouldn't miss them terribly, or even notice right way, if they moved out of town. Nor would they miss you. An exception might be friends with whom you feel like you can pick up right where you left or even though you haven't talked to them for ages. According to Dunbar, these are usually friendships forged through extensive and deep listening at some point in your life, usually during an emotionally wrought time, like during college or early adulthood, or maybe during a personal crisis like an illness or divorce. It's almost as if you have banked a lot of listening that you can draw on later to help you understand and relate to that person even after significant time apart. Put another way, having listened well and often to someone in the past makes it easier to get back on the same wavelength when you get out of sync, perhaps due to physical separation or following a time of emotional distance caused by an argument.

No one acts in a void. We all take cues from cultural norms, shaped by the law. For the law affects our ideas of what is reasonable and appropriate. It does so by what it prohibits--you might think less of drinking if it were banned, or more of marijuana use if it were allowed--but also by what it approves. . . . Revisionists agree that it matters what California or the United States calls a marriage, because this affects how Californians or Americans come to think of marriage. Prominent Oxford philosopher Joseph Raz, no friend of the conjugal view, agrees: "[O]ne thing can be said with certainty [about recent changes in marriage law]. They will not be confined to adding new options to the familiar heterosexual monogamous family. They will change the character of that family. If these changes take root in our culture then the familiar marriage relations will disappear. They will not disappear suddenly. Rather they will be transformed into a somewhat different social form, which responds to the fact that it is one of several forms of bonding, and that bonding itself is much more easily and commonly dissoluble. All these factors are already working their way into the constitutive conventions which determine what is appropriate and expected within a conventional marriage and transforming its significance." Redefining civil marriage would change its meaning for everyone. Legally wedded opposite-sex unions would increasingly be defined by what they had in common with same-sex relationships. This wouldn't just shift opinion polls and tax burdens. Marriage, the human good, would be harder to achieve. For you can realize marriage only by choosing it, for which you need at least a rough, intuitive idea of what it really is. By warping people's view of marriage, revisionist policy would make them less able to realize this basic way of thriving--much as a man confused about what friendship requires will have trouble being a friend. . . . Redefining marriage will also harm the material interests of couples and children. As more people absorb the new law's lesson that marriage is fundamentally about emotions, marriages will increasingly take on emotion's tyrannical inconstancy. Because there is no reason that emotional unions--any more than the emotions that define them, or friendships generally--should be permanent or limited to two, these norms of marriage would make less sense. People would thus feel less bound to live by them whenever they simply preferred to live otherwise. . . . As we document below, even leading revisionists now argue that if sexual complementarity is optional, so are permanence and exclusivity. This is not because the slope from same-sex unions to expressly temporary and polyamorous ones is slippery, but because most revisionist arguments level the ground between them: If marriage is primarily about emotional union, why privilege two-person unions, or permanently committed ones? What is it about emotional union, valuable as it can be, that requires these limits? As these norms weaken, so will the emotional and material security that marriage gives spouses. Because children fare best on most indicators of health and well-being when reared by their wedded biological parents, the same erosion of marital norms would adversely affect children's health, education, and general formation. The poorest and most vulnerable among us would likely be hit the hardest. And the state would balloon: to adjudicate breakup and custody issues, to meet the needs of spouses and children affected by divorce, and to contain and feebly correct the challenges these children face.

The man was impossible. To her every retort,he had a counter. "A beak you may want to avoid for I will use it." His dimples turned into craters. "Aye, my lady,that you most certainly are not afraid of using. I think I actually see the small scars along your wrists and hands from where you missed your intended target and clipped yourself." Edythe opened her mouth,ready to send out another assualt, when the sparkle in his hazel eyes captured her attention. Tyr was not making fun of her. Rather,he was truly enjoying their conversation, and if she was being honest, so was she. Inclining her head in agreement, she curled her lips mischievously and said, "Inflictions all finches must learn to endure." "Indeed they must," Tyr replied with a bow. "You,Lady Finch,are a genuine surprise. These past few days,your elder sister has been gracious, kind, and all things a lady should be when welcoming a guest, but it seems that only my friend Ranulf can turn her into a fiery tempest. And each time she does, it pulls him farther in.I see now why he is susceptible to such treatment." Edythe briefly closed her eyes and gave a quick shake to her head. "You enjoy being insulted?" "You have not insulted me, you couldn't. You don't know me well enough.Nor I you. We just merely sparred and I am finding that I like wit in a woman, a most uncommon trait where I have been. If I were not so decided in my ways,you,dear Finch, would be in trouble." "Well,then I thank the Lord you are decided, for I am not easily swayed by a pretty face and you have a ways to go before you seem even moderately charming. And before you try to convince me otherwise,I must go see to Lily for she is looking overly animated and all too often the results of such excitement negatively affect me.Excuse me,sir." Tyr bowed and stared as Edythe left his side and headed toward her younger sister. He had not lied. She was probably the most intriguing woman he had ever encountered.But it changed nothing.Marriage was not for him. Still,a pretty redhead with a cunning mind and a sharp tongue would be fun to pass the time with until he had to leave.

Once, I was doing a late-night case with one of the neurosurgery attendings, a suboccipital craniectomy for a brain-stem malformation. It’s one of the most elegant surgeries, in perhaps the most difficult part of the body—just getting there is tricky, no matter how experienced you are. But that night, I felt fluid: the instruments were like extensions of my fingers; the skin, muscle, and bone seemed to unzip themselves; and there I was, staring at a yellow, glistening bulge, a mass deep in the brain stem. Suddenly, the attending stopped me. “Paul, what happens if you cut two millimeters deeper right here?” He pointed. Neuroanatomy slides whirred through my head. “Double vision?” “No,” he said. “Locked-in syndrome.” Another two millimeters, and the patient would be completely paralyzed, save for the ability to blink. He didn’t look up from the microscope. “And I know this because the third time I did this operation, that’s exactly what happened.” Neurosurgery requires a commitment to one’s own excellence and a commitment to another’s identity. The decision to operate at all involves an appraisal of one’s own abilities, as well as a deep sense of who the patient is and what she holds dear. Certain brain areas are considered near-inviolable, like the primary motor cortex, damage to which results in paralysis of affected body parts. But the most sacrosanct regions of the cortex are those that control language. Usually located on the left side, they are called Wernicke’s and Broca’s areas; one is for understanding language and the other for producing it. Damage to Broca’s area results in an inability to speak or write, though the patient can easily understand language. Damage to Wernicke’s area results in an inability to understand language; though the patient can still speak, the language she produces is a stream of unconnected words, phrases, and images, a grammar without semantics. If both areas are damaged, the patient becomes an isolate, something central to her humanity stolen forever. After someone suffers a head trauma or a stroke, the destruction of these areas often restrains the surgeon’s impulse to save a life: What kind of life exists without language? When I was a med student,

The surprise and relief of being held so securely by a friend she had not expected to see overwhelmed Evie completely. She felt the pain in her eyes and throat sharpen, until she could no longer hold back her sobs. Lillian tightened her embrace. “You should have seen my reaction when Annabelle and Daisy told me what you had done,” she said, patting Evie’s back firmly. “I nearly dropped to the floor, and then I called down all sorts of curses on St. Vincent’s head for taking advantage of you. I was tempted to come here and shoot him myself. But it appears that someone else spared me the trouble.” “I love him,” Evie whispered between sobs. “You can’t,” Lillian said flatly. “Yes, I love him, and I’m going to lose him just as I did my father. I can’t bear it…I’ll go mad.” Lillian sighed and muttered, “Only you could love such a vile, selfish peacock, Evie. Oh, I’ll admit, he has his attractions…but you would do better to fix your affections on someone who could actually love you back.” “Lillian,” came Evie’s watery protest. “Oh, all right, I suppose it’s not sporting to disparage a man when he’s bedridden. I’ll hold my tongue for the time being.” She drew back and looked into Evie’s splotched face. “The others wanted to come, of course. But Daisy is unmarried and therefore can’t even sneeze without a chaperone, and Annabelle tires easily because of her condition. Westcliff and I are here, however, and we’re going to make everything all right.” “You can’t,” Evie sniffled. “His wound…he’s so ill…he’s fallen into a c-coma, I think…” Keeping her arm around Evie, Lillian turned to the earl and asked in a strong voice that was entirely inappropriate for a sickroom, “Is he in a coma, Westcliff?” The earl, who was bending over Sebastian’s prone form, threw her a wry glance. “I doubt anyone could be, with the noise the pair of you are making. No, if it were a coma, he couldn’t be roused. And he definitely stirred just now when you shouted.” “I didn’t shout, I called out,” Lillian corrected. “There is a difference.” “Is there?” Westcliff asked mildly, pulling the covers down to Sebastian’s hips. “You raise your voice so often, I can’t tell.” A laugh rustled in Lillian’s throat, and she released Evie.

The key to preventing this is balance. I see the give and take between different constituencies in a business as central to its success. So when I talk about taming the Beast, what I really mean is that keeping its needs balanced with the needs of other, more creative facets of your company will make you stronger. Let me give you an example of what I mean, drawn from the business I know best. In animation, we have many constituencies: story, art, budget, technology, finance, production, marketing, and consumer products. The people within each constituency have priorities that are important—and often opposing. The writer and director want to tell the most affecting story possible; the production designer wants the film to look beautiful; the technical directors want flawless effects; finance wants to keep the budgets within limits; marketing wants a hook that is easily sold to potential viewers; the consumer products people want appealing characters to turn into plush toys and to plaster on lunchboxes and T-shirts; the production managers try to keep everyone happy—and to keep the whole enterprise from spiraling out of control. And so on. Each group is focused on its own needs, which means that no one has a clear view of how their decisions impact other groups; each group is under pressure to perform well, which means achieving stated goals. Particularly in the early months of a project, these goals—which are subgoals, really, in the making of a film—are often easier to articulate and explain than the film itself. But if the director is able to get everything he or she wants, we will likely end up with a film that’s too long. If the marketing people get their way, we will only make a film that mimics those that have already been “proven” to succeed—in other words, familiar to viewers but in all likelihood a creative failure. Each group, then, is trying to do the right thing, but they’re pulling in different directions. If any one of those groups “wins,” we lose. In an unhealthy culture, each group believes that if their objectives trump the goals of the other groups, the company will be better off. In a healthy culture, all constituencies recognize the importance of balancing competing desires—they want to be heard, but they don’t have to win. Their interaction with one another—the push and pull that occurs naturally when talented people are given clear goals—yields the balance we seek. But that only happens if they understand that achieving balance is a central goal of the company.