Finn The Human Quotes

Human beings can be awful cruel to one another.

No matter how old you are now. You are never too young or too old for success or going after what you want. Here’s a short list of people who accomplished great things at different ages 1) Helen Keller, at the age of 19 months, became deaf and blind. But that didn’t stop her. She was the first deaf and blind person to earn a Bachelor of Arts degree. 2) Mozart was already competent on keyboard and violin; he composed from the age of 5. 3) Shirley Temple was 6 when she became a movie star on “Bright Eyes.” 4) Anne Frank was 12 when she wrote the diary of Anne Frank. 5) Magnus Carlsen became a chess Grandmaster at the age of 13. 6) Nadia Comăneci was a gymnast from Romania that scored seven perfect 10.0 and won three gold medals at the Olympics at age 14. 7) Tenzin Gyatso was formally recognized as the 14th Dalai Lama in November 1950, at the age of 15. 8) Pele, a soccer superstar, was 17 years old when he won the world cup in 1958 with Brazil. 9) Elvis was a superstar by age 19. 10) John Lennon was 20 years and Paul Mcartney was 18 when the Beatles had their first concert in 1961. 11) Jesse Owens was 22 when he won 4 gold medals in Berlin 1936. 12) Beethoven was a piano virtuoso by age 23 13) Issac Newton wrote Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica at age 24 14) Roger Bannister was 25 when he broke the 4 minute mile record 15) Albert Einstein was 26 when he wrote the theory of relativity 16) Lance E. Armstrong was 27 when he won the tour de France 17) Michelangelo created two of the greatest sculptures “David” and “Pieta” by age 28 18) Alexander the Great, by age 29, had created one of the largest empires of the ancient world 19) J.K. Rowling was 30 years old when she finished the first manuscript of Harry Potter 20) Amelia Earhart was 31 years old when she became the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean 21) Oprah was 32 when she started her talk show, which has become the highest-rated program of its kind 22) Edmund Hillary was 33 when he became the first man to reach Mount Everest 23) Martin Luther King Jr. was 34 when he wrote the speech “I Have a Dream." 24) Marie Curie was 35 years old when she got nominated for a Nobel Prize in Physics 25) The Wright brothers, Orville (32) and Wilbur (36) invented and built the world's first successful airplane and making the first controlled, powered and sustained heavier-than-air human flight 26) Vincent Van Gogh was 37 when he died virtually unknown, yet his paintings today are worth millions. 27) Neil Armstrong was 38 when he became the first man to set foot on the moon. 28) Mark Twain was 40 when he wrote "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer", and 49 years old when he wrote "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn" 29) Christopher Columbus was 41 when he discovered the Americas 30) Rosa Parks was 42 when she refused to obey the bus driver’s order to give up her seat to make room for a white passenger 31) John F. Kennedy was 43 years old when he became President of the United States 32) Henry Ford Was 45 when the Ford T came out. 33) Suzanne Collins was 46 when she wrote "The Hunger Games" 34) Charles Darwin was 50 years old when his book On the Origin of Species came out. 35) Leonardo Da Vinci was 51 years old when he painted the Mona Lisa. 36) Abraham Lincoln was 52 when he became president. 37) Ray Kroc Was 53 when he bought the McDonalds Franchise and took it to unprecedented levels. 38) Dr. Seuss was 54 when he wrote "The Cat in the Hat". 40) Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger III was 57 years old when he successfully ditched US Airways Flight 1549 in the Hudson River in 2009. All of the 155 passengers aboard the aircraft survived 41) Colonel Harland Sanders was 61 when he started the KFC Franchise 42) J.R.R Tolkien was 62 when the Lord of the Ring books came out 43) Ronald Reagan was 69 when he became President of the US 44) Jack Lalane at age 70 handcuffed, shackled, towed 70 rowboats 45) Nelson Mandela was 76 when he became President

Do you realize that all great literature — "Moby Dick," "Huckleberry Finn," "A Farewell to Arms," "The Scarlet Letter," "The Red Badge of Courage," "The Iliad and The Odyssey," "Crime and Punishment," the Bible, and "The Charge of the Light Brigade" — are all about what a bummer it is to be a ...human being?

It was a dreadful thing to see. Humans beings can be awful cruel to one another.

The Devil whispered in my ear: ‘You’re not strong enough to withstand the storm.’ I whispered back: ‘I am the storm.

When the power of the shift rips the human body apart and transforms it into its new shape, there lives a second, less than a second, a mere shimmer of time when the mind is without a home, no body to call its own. Existence is painless in there, nothing but formlessness beyond understanding. A secret place, it contains nothing but the essence of self, a lost self. In the fire of pain, Colton found a whisper of that place, its ghost, its echo, and from that echo he withdrew a thread of deepest black.

Running is a brutal and emotional sport. It's also a simple, primal sport. As humans, on a most basic level, we get hungry, we sleep, we yearn for love, we run.

The abnormally large female cut the sandwich into four pieces and gave one to each before taking one for herself. They all took a bite and she grinned at their appreciative groans. “See?” she said around a mouthful of peanut butter and jelly. “Isn’t that good?” “And so decadent,” Berg sighed. “I feel like I’m eating evil. Pure, unadulterated evil.” “But good evil,” Finn added. “The finest evil ever.” “Come!” Carl, the unabashed history fan and future historical “re-creator” of the lot—an activity Irene had always thought was an incredible waste of time for any human being with a brain—cried out,“Let us tell the others of this glory and what we have learned here today from the enemy She-wolf!” “Huzzah!” they all cheered and ran out the kitchen back door.

76. David Hume – Treatise on Human Nature; Essays Moral and Political; An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding 77. Jean-Jacques Rousseau – On the Origin of Inequality; On the Political Economy; Emile – or, On Education, The Social Contract 78. Laurence Sterne – Tristram Shandy; A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy 79. Adam Smith – The Theory of Moral Sentiments; The Wealth of Nations 80. Immanuel Kant – Critique of Pure Reason; Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysics of Morals; Critique of Practical Reason; The Science of Right; Critique of Judgment; Perpetual Peace 81. Edward Gibbon – The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; Autobiography 82. James Boswell – Journal; Life of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D. 83. Antoine Laurent Lavoisier – Traité Élémentaire de Chimie (Elements of Chemistry) 84. Alexander Hamilton, John Jay, and James Madison – Federalist Papers 85. Jeremy Bentham – Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation; Theory of Fictions 86. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe – Faust; Poetry and Truth 87. Jean Baptiste Joseph Fourier – Analytical Theory of Heat 88. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel – Phenomenology of Spirit; Philosophy of Right; Lectures on the Philosophy of History 89. William Wordsworth – Poems 90. Samuel Taylor Coleridge – Poems; Biographia Literaria 91. Jane Austen – Pride and Prejudice; Emma 92. Carl von Clausewitz – On War 93. Stendhal – The Red and the Black; The Charterhouse of Parma; On Love 94. Lord Byron – Don Juan 95. Arthur Schopenhauer – Studies in Pessimism 96. Michael Faraday – Chemical History of a Candle; Experimental Researches in Electricity 97. Charles Lyell – Principles of Geology 98. Auguste Comte – The Positive Philosophy 99. Honoré de Balzac – Père Goriot; Eugenie Grandet 100. Ralph Waldo Emerson – Representative Men; Essays; Journal 101. Nathaniel Hawthorne – The Scarlet Letter 102. Alexis de Tocqueville – Democracy in America 103. John Stuart Mill – A System of Logic; On Liberty; Representative Government; Utilitarianism; The Subjection of Women; Autobiography 104. Charles Darwin – The Origin of Species; The Descent of Man; Autobiography 105. Charles Dickens – Pickwick Papers; David Copperfield; Hard Times 106. Claude Bernard – Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine 107. Henry David Thoreau – Civil Disobedience; Walden 108. Karl Marx – Capital; Communist Manifesto 109. George Eliot – Adam Bede; Middlemarch 110. Herman Melville – Moby-Dick; Billy Budd 111. Fyodor Dostoevsky – Crime and Punishment; The Idiot; The Brothers Karamazov 112. Gustave Flaubert – Madame Bovary; Three Stories 113. Henrik Ibsen – Plays 114. Leo Tolstoy – War and Peace; Anna Karenina; What is Art?; Twenty-Three Tales 115. Mark Twain – The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; The Mysterious Stranger 116. William James – The Principles of Psychology; The Varieties of Religious Experience; Pragmatism; Essays in Radical Empiricism 117. Henry James – The American; The Ambassadors 118. Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche – Thus Spoke Zarathustra; Beyond Good and Evil; The Genealogy of Morals;The Will to Power 119. Jules Henri Poincaré – Science and Hypothesis; Science and Method 120. Sigmund Freud – The Interpretation of Dreams; Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis; Civilization and Its Discontents; New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis 121. George Bernard Shaw – Plays and Prefaces

Hatred is unattractive, but it's also irresistible. If men were honest with themselves, they'd admit it's a stronger passion than lust.

To ennoble is to diminish by robbing people of their complexity, their completeness, of their humanity, which is always clouded by what gets stirred up at the bottom.

We are not always aware of the help we may give by accepting aid, that in this way we may establish a foothold for contact.

Perhaps it is to fulfill this primal urge that runners and joggers get up every morning and pound the streets in cities all over the world. To feel the stirring of something primeval deep down in the pits of our bellies. To feel "a little bit wild." Running is not exactly fun. Running hurts. It takes effort. Ask any runner why he runs, and he will probably look at you with a wry smile and say, "I don't know." But something keeps us going. We may obsess about our PBs and mileage count, but these things alone are not enough to get us out running... What really drives us is something else, this need to feel human, to reach below the multitude of layers of roles and responsibilites that societ y has placed on us, down below the company name tags, and even the father, husband, and son, labels, to the pure, raw human being underneath. At such moments, our rational mind becomes redundant. We move from thought to feeling.

Vi rendete conto che tutta la grande letteratura - Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn, Addio alle armi, La lettera scarlatta, Il segno rosso del coraggio, l' Iliade e l' Odissea, Delitto e castigo, la Bibbia e The Charge of the Light Brigade di Tennyson - parla di che fregatura sia la vita degli esseri umani? (Non è liberatorio che qualcuno lo dica chiaro e tondo?)

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

Trying to think inside Finn's head was like committing what our English master called Pathetic Fallacy, the attribution of human emotions to boulders or trees.

I never knew being fat and lazy was so rewarding.

If happiness wasn’t in comfort, was it somehow to be found in being uncomfortable? Was there some need for those of us with no suffering in our lives, to find some?

I do wish humans could express themselves more clearly. A simple ’yes, what you did hurt me’ would be much preferable to hidden grudges that lead to unpleasant things.

If I could be half the person my dog is, I’d be twice the human I am.

A few days ago I heard a performance of the Sibelius fifth symphony. As the closing bars approached, I experienced exactly the large, swelling emotion that the music was written to elicit. What would it have been like, I wondered, to be a Finn in the audience at the first performance of the symphony in Helsinki nearly a century ago, and feel that swell overtake one? The answer: one would have felt proud, proud that one of us could put together such sounds, proud that out of nothing we human beings can make such stuff. Contrast with that one´s feelings of shame that we, our people, have made Guantanamo. Musical creation on the one hand, a machine for inflicting pain and humiliation on the other: the best and the worst that human beings are capable of.

More precisely, it is a stretching out and serial transformation of a single event until that event disappears, swallowed in allusions, as humanity is destined to be swallowed in the eternity of the universe.

I remember being struck by a photograph I saw of the Spanish ultra athlete Azara García, who has a tattoo on her leg that reads (in Spanish): The Devil whispered in my ear: ‘You’re not strong enough to withstand the storm.’ I whispered back: ‘I am the storm.

Just when a jaundiced view of humanity was about to infect my soul with cynicism and resentment, fate dealt me the opposite hand to mess yet again with my worldview. The contrasts I regularly deal with would be so much more fun if I could just learn to roll with them

Hunting Down the Secular Humanists" "...What makes them so dangerous is that Secular Humanists look just like you and me. Some of them could be your best friends without you knowing that they are Humanists. They could come into your house, play with your children, eat your food and even watch football with you on television, and you'd never know they have read Catcher in the Rye, Brave New World, and Huckleberry Finn.... No one is safe until Congress sets up an Anti-Secular Humanism Committee to get at the rot. Witnesses have to be called, and they have to name names.

Because I’m not enhanced?” Finn said incredulously. “Because I’m not as perfect as you? Because an ordinary human can’t match up to your exacting standards, or because I can’t kill people just by thinking about it?” Talon hissed in a breath. “I didn’t mean—” Shit, he just wanted Finn safe. “Finn,” he took hold of his arms. “Babe, please.

5.4 The question of accumulation. If life is a wager, what form does it take? At the racetrack, an accumulator is a bet which rolls on profits from the success of one of the horse to engross the stake on the next one. 5.5 So a) To what extent might human relationships be expressed in a mathematical or logical formula? And b) If so, what signs might be placed between the integers?Plus and minus, self-evidently; sometimes multiplication, and yes, division. But these sings are limited. Thus an entirely failed relationship might be expressed in terms of both loss/minus and division/ reduction, showing a total of zero; whereas an entirely successful one can be represented by both addition and multiplication. But what of most relationships? Do they not require to be expressed in notations which are logically improbable and mathematically insoluble? 5.6 Thus how might you express an accumulation containing the integers b, b, a (to the first), a (to the second), s, v? B = s - v (*/+) a (to the first) Or a (to the second) + v + a (to the first) x s = b 5.7 Or is that the wrong way to put the question and express the accumulation? Is the application of logic to the human condition in and of itself self-defeating? What becomes of a chain of argument when the links are made of different metals, each with a separate frangibility? 5.8 Or is "link" a false metaphor? 5.9 But allowing that is not, if a link breaks, wherein lies the responsibility for such breaking? On the links immediately on the other side, or on the whole chain? But what do you mean by "the whole chain"? How far do the limits of responsibility extend? 6.0 Or we might try to draw the responsibility more narrowly and apportion it more exactly. And not use equations and integers but instead express matters in the traditional narrative terminology. So, for instance, if...." - Adrian Finn

Few people would realise that it is much harder to write one of Owen Seaman's "funny" poems in Punch than to write one of the Archbishop of Canterbury's sermons. Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn is a greater work than Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, and Charles Dickens's creation of Mr. Pickwick did more for the elevation of the human race—I say it in all seriousness—than Cardinal Newman's Lead, Kindly Light, Amid the Encircling Gloom. Newman only cried out for light in the gloom of a sad world. Dickens gave it.

I found no muse on Hyperion during those first years. For many, the expansion of distance because of limited transportation—EMVs were unreliable, skimmers scarce—and the contraction of artificial consciousness due to absence of datasphere, no access to the All Thing, and only one fatline transmitter—all led to a renewal of creative energies, a new realization of what it meant to be human and an artist. Or so I heard. No muse appeared. My verse continued to be technically proficient and dead as Huck Finn’s cat. I decided to kill myself.

This false or co-dependent self appears to be universal among humans. It has been described or referred to countless times in print and in our daily lives. It has been called such diverse names as a survival tool, psychopathology, the egocentric ego and the impaired or defensive self (Masterson 1985). It can be destructive to self, others and intimate relationships. However, it is a double-edged sword. It has some uses. But just how useful is it? And under what circumstances? The following poem by Charles C. Finn describes many of our struggles with our false self.

Finally (and here is a sentence I never imagined writing), I thank my conversation partners on Facebook. A couple of years ago, my friend Finn Ryan set up a Facebook author page for me. Grateful as I was, my skepticism about the medium kept me from posting anything there until six months before I finished this book. I am very glad that I took the leap. The folks who share that space with me have helped me refine a number of key ideas, allowing me to write a better book than I could have written alone. Many thanks to all my Facebook “friends” as well as my face-to-face friends.

The closer Finn`s island come to extinction, the more I wandered back in my mind to the lives that come before us, the huts and the houses, the remains of animals and clothing, the coins and the latrines and cooking pots, the messages from the past left in bones and kitchen dumps. And the people. Sometimes I thought about the content of those lives, the intangible things that leave no fossils and no marks, no history. Would people from the future excavate traces of passion? Of hope, disappointment, despair? Or would the entire human race end up drowned and forgotten, buried under waves of melting ice, with no on left to dig us up or wonder at what was or what might have been?

This is why it would be nice to hear more about principles and less about ruffled feelings. What thoughtful person has not felt the hurt expressed by the Jews over some performances of The Merchant of Venice? A whole anthology of black writing exists in the United States, protesting with quite unfeigned horror about the teaching of Huckleberry Finn in the schools, for the good and sufficient reason that the book employs the word ‘nigger’ as natural. A mature and sensitive response to such tenderness of feeling and consciousness of historic wrong would run much like this, and could be uttered by a person of any race or religion ... We know why you feel as you do, but – too bad. Your thinness of skin, however intelligible, will not be healed by the amputation of the literary and theatrical and musical canon. You just have to live with Shakespeare and Dickens and Twain and Wagner, mainly because they are artistically integral but also, as it happens, because they represent certain truths about human nature. Think for a second. Would prejudice diminish with the banning of Shylock? Concern for the emotions of others cannot license a category mistake on this scale.

Suggested Reading Nuha al-Radi, Baghdad Diaries Margaret Atwood, The Blind Assassin Jane Austen, Emma, Mansfield Park, and Pride and Prejudice Saul Bellow, The Dean’s December and More Die of Heartbreak Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland Joseph Conrad, Under Western Eyes Henry Fielding, Shamela and Tom Jones Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary Anne Frank, The Diary of Anne Frank Henry James, The Ambassadors, Daisy Miller, and Washington Square Franz Kafka, In the Penal Colony and The Trial Katherine Kressman Taylor, Address Unknown Herman Melville, The Confidence Man Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita, Invitation to a Beheading, and Pnin Sarah Orne Jewett, The Country of the Pointed Firs Iraj Pezeshkzad, My Uncle Napoleon Diane Ravitch, The Language Police Julie Salamon, The Net of Dreams Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis Scheherazade, A Thousand and One Nights F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby W. G. Sebald, The Emigrants Carol Shields, The Stone Diaries Joseph Skvorecky, The Engineer of Human Souls Muriel Spark, Loitering with Intent and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie Italo Svevo, Confessions of Zeno Peter Taylor, A Summons to Memphis Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn Anne Tyler, Back When We Were Grownups and St. Maybe Mario Vargas Llosa, Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter Reading

—a slave was owned by a Continental Army soldier who'd been killed in the French and Indian War. The slave looked after the soldier's widow. He did everything, from dawn to dark didn't stop doing what needed to be done. He chopped and hauled the wood, gathered the crops, excavated and built a cabbage house and stowed the cabbages there, stored the pumpkins, buried the apples, turnips, and potatoes in the ground for winter, stacked the rye and wheat in the barn, slaughtered the pig, salted the pork, slaughtered the cow and corned the beef, until one day the widow married him and they had three sons. And those sons married Gouldtown girls whose families reached back to the settlement's origins in the 1600s, families that by the Revolution were all intermarried and thickly intermingled. One or another or all of them, she said, were descendants of the Indian from the large Lenape settlement at Indian Fields who married a Swede—locally Swedes and Finns had superseded the original Dutch settlers—and who had five children with her; one or another or all were descendants of the two mulatto brothers brought from the West Indies on a trading ship that sailed up the river from Greenwich to Bridgeton, where they were indentured to the landowners who had paid their passage and who themselves later paid the passage of two Dutch sisters to come from Holland to become their wives; one or another or all were descendants of the granddaughter of John Fenwick, an English baronet's son, a cavalry officer in Cromwell's Commonwealth army and a member of the Society of Friends who died in New Jersey not that many years after New Cesarea (the province lying between the Hudson and the Delaware that was deeded by the brother of the king of England to two English proprietors) became New Jersey.

From Walt: The Grapes of Wrath, Les Misérables, To Kill a Mockingbird, Moby-Dick, The Ox-Bow Incident, A Tale of Two Cities, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, The Three Musketeers, Don Quixote (where your nickname came from), The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, and anything by Anton Chekhov. From Henry: Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, Cheyenne Autumn, War and Peace, The Things They Carried, Catch-22, The Sun Also Rises, The Blessing Way, Beyond Good and Evil, The Teachings of Don Juan, Heart of Darkness, The Human Comedy, The Art of War. From Vic: Justine, Concrete Charlie: The Story of Philadelphia Football Legend Chuck Bednarik, Medea (you’ll love it; it’s got a great ending), The Kama Sutra, Henry and June, The Onion Field, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Zorba the Greek, Madame Bovary, Richie Ashburn’s Phillies Trivia (fuck you, it’s a great book). From Ruby: The Holy Bible (New Testament), The Pilgrim’s Progress, Inferno, Paradise Lost, My Ántonia, The Scarlet Letter, Walden, Poems of Emily Dickinson, My Friend Flicka, Our Town. From Dorothy: The Gastronomical Me, The French Chef Cookbook (you don’t eat, you don’t read), Last Suppers: Famous Final Meals From Death Row, The Bonfire of the Vanities, The Scarlet Pimpernel, Something Fresh, The Sound and the Fury, The Maltese Falcon, Pride and Prejudice, Brides-head Revisited. From Lucian: Thirty Seconds over Tokyo, Band of Brothers, All Quiet on the Western Front, The Virginian, The Basque History of the World (so you can learn about your heritage you illiterate bastard), Hondo, Sackett, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Bobby Fischer: My 60 Memorable Games, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, Quartered Safe Out Here. From Ferg: Riders of the Purple Sage, Kiss Me Deadly, Lonesome Dove, White Fang, A River Runs Through It (I saw the movie, but I heard the book was good, too), Kip Carey’s Official Wyoming Fishing Guide (sorry, kid, I couldn’t come up with ten but this ought to do).

She tossed and turned on her straw mat, too filled with restless energy to leave the waking world. It was the first time since Garenoch that Finn had slept inside, and she had mixed feelings about the situation. She found that she was actually grateful for the shelter, and that thought alone worried her. What worried her even more, was that she hadn't thought about being a tree all day. She was, in fact, beginning to like life as a human. She liked being a part of what people did, beyond lending them shade, or a trunk to lean against. She liked dancing and conversing. More than the sense of community, she enjoyed adventure and having the ability to move about as she pleased, meeting new humans and creatures along the way.

The soup on the wood stove smelled divine. Finn had never understood what hunger was. She had known thirst, and felt a certain lacking during the winter months when the sun was out less, but it was nothing like the pain she was feeling inside her belly right then. She wondered how humans ever got anything done with such incessant pain.

All in all, most of the customers, both vampire and human, had read far too many novels. They had watched the vampire media and they took their cues from there. They indulged in black leather, took to kinky sex, and did their best to imitate a Laurel K Hamilton book. Half of the audience routinely tried ceremonies, Black Masses, dark rituals, but they typically ended up as sex orgies -less Satan, more basic hedonism. Everyone else had pastimes that generally included drinking blood from drug addicts, petty theft, and generally making a nuisance of themselves.

As an instructor, when making such a decision for someone else, you always ask yourself, would I work with that dog? I asked it now, knowing the qualities I look for. I want a dog who is brave, indefatigable and obedient, but also one with enough will and personality to make some decisions themselves. I want a dog who’ll have the confidence to tell me when I’m wrong. Who’ll keep pulling on even when I’m trying to pull the other way because some well-meaning human has given me duff info. In short I’d want a Finn. A dog who never walked in a perfectly straight line for any trials judge but who I knew would protect me till his very last breath. A dog who’d drag me through rivers and streams, thick mud and tangled undergrowth – drag me anywhere, if it meant we’d get our man.

In general, forced migration study reveals the stunning and gradually increasing adherence of the Soviet system to ethnically rather than socially determined repression criteria (the policy in question reached its apogee during Stalin’s rule). In other words, the state declares its loyalty to international and class awareness publicly, while in practice gravitates towards essentially nationalistic goals and methods. The deportation of so-called punished peoples can provide a most prominent example of this approach, the deportation itself serving as the punishment. All such peoples were deported not merely from their historical homeland, but also from other cities and districts, as well as demobilized from the army, which shows that such ethnic deportations embraced the entire country (we term this type of repression “total deportation”). Apart from their homeland, the “punished people” were deprived of their autonomy if they had any before, in other words, of their relative sovereignty. In essence, ten peoples in the USSR were subjected to total deportation. Seven of them—Germans, Karachais, Kalmyks, Ingushetians, Chechens, Balkars, and Crimean Tatars—lost their national autonomy too (their total number amounted to 2 million, and the land populated by them before the deportation exceeded 150,000 square kilometers). According to the criteria formulated above, another three peoples—namely Finns, Koreans, and Meskhetian Turks—fall under the category of “totally deported peoples.

...the late Mr. Seymour himself has already served as a cautionary tale that happiness as a matter of course does not follow wealth. We cannot fulfill ourselves by worldly possessions. Wealth is but a tool that can be put to use for better or worse, but material wealth pales next to the bounty of human connection....Without connection this life is meaningless. [Nora Bergen, Letter to brother Finn]

Do you realize that all great literature - Moby Dick, Huckleberry Finn, A Farewell to Arms, The Scarlet Letter, The Red Badge of Courage, The Iliad and The Odyssey, Crime and Punishment, The Bible, and "The Charge of the Light Brigade"-are all about what a bummer it is to be a human being? (Isn't it such a relief to have somebody say that?)

Seamus Deane has defined the Wake as the fall of man into language—designating both the writer’s and the reader’s fall.16 As an elaboration of this, we may add that one of the Wakean falls is the fall of the human, or the idea of the human, under language and culture, under their proliferating representations.

People fear what they don’t understand, Finn had said once. You’re not an open book, so they can’t read you. And if they can’t read you, they fill in the blanks with their own ideas. Human nature is distrustful.

But when you’re a lemon who happens to be human, everyone tries to help you out

The Devil whispered in my ear: ‘You’re not strong enough to withstand the storm.’ I whispered back: ‘I am the storm.” ― The Rise of the Ultra Runners: A Journey to the Edge of Human Endurance

Finn and Phoebe’s dog is a lot different. She is small and adorable. Soon after the Bleus adopted Mocha from the shelter, she achieved equal status with Esme, their human daughter. When she goes on a walk, Mocha, not the humans, chooses the path, sniffing every fire hydrant and mailbox along the way. The “parents” follow behind her. Sometimes a kindly older neighbor will walk by and say hello. But he always makes the same joking remark, which is starting to annoy them—“Sure looks like your dog is walking you, not the other way around,” he’ll chuckle. Finn and Phoebe have started to mutter under their breath to each other that he probably voted for Trump. Sometimes they lament that they didn’t train their dog better—she jumps on visitors when they come to the house and tries to sniff all the other dogs’ butts when they pass. It’s embarrassing, but that is just how it has to be. They lack the heart to do anything that might break Mocha’s warm, positive spirit. When it comes to being inside, the pooch has the run of the place. The Bleus can’t help but be tickled when Mocha jumps up on the couch and nuzzles their faces and licks them. That’s something the more germ-averse Redds find disgusting. And there was probably a time when Finn and Phoebe tried to keep Mocha from sleeping in bed with them, but they gave up on that long ago.

Perhaps the pain of running helps numb the pain of the past. In all those hours pushing yourself on the trail, perhaps the feelings of despair, loss, rejection, whatever they are, start to soften, and things get put into perspective" (The Rise of Ultra Runners, 75)

humanism was a false universalism, however. Its concept of ‘the person’ was an abstraction modelled on the singular coherence of the intellect, rather than on the diversity of bodies, feelings, values and longings. The prestige of reason was itself founded on an irrational repudiation of the different and the strange, of cultures, practices and appearances that diverged from the narrow norms of a Western male monoculture whose internal uniformity was misconceived as a harmonious and inclusive objectivity.

Every time someone asks if I’m on or off the market, I want to give them a lecture on human trafficking and the slave trade.

author Dean Karnazes had once said, that people mistake comfort for happiness. ‘Happiness needs to be earned,

Once you descend into that dark place out on the trail, where everything is crashing down around you, you need to find something real to keep you moving. It could be love or pain, but it has to be real. It certainly won’t be Facebook likes.

We are Circles is an attempt to bring all of our choices into focus, discussion, analysis, and change. Into our center. Which is overwhelming! I know. So hopefully the simple metaphors and groupthink aspect of our evolving humanity circles up our collective choices into the here and now for love and life on Earth. We always start with a single choice.

Our choices are us. Envisioning choices as sea blue circles places a sticker across our days: every word, each coffee, every button, and choices in between. The blue stickers across our days are reflection points and moments of consideration. This is a choice is the breath before you look fully at loved ones or strangers and the breath before you change and reframe a pattern so as to not misplace a moment. The breath before you say I love you to you. Again and again. This is a choice.

Sekularismen har tre stadier. Först inser du att alla religioner ber till samma Gud. För det andra, inser du, Gud existerar bara i det mänskliga hjärtat. Till sist försvinner allt tal om Gud, och det som finns kvar bland människorna är en naturlig känsla av enhet.

Det finns en märklig paradox i en spirande kärlekshistoria. Man blir ängslig. Rädd för att tala om för den andra parten att man inte kan låta bli att tänka på henne eller honom hela tiden. Man vill ge allt, men man snålar, hushållar med lyckan som om den gick att spara, lägga på hög. Kärlekens begynnelse är lika idiotisk som bräcklig.

Där det finns lidande finns det ljus. Där det finns lidande finns det liv.

Already the messages of citizens were flashed along the wires of the world. . . . To those multitudes, not as yet in the wombs of humanity but surely engenderable there, he would give the word: Man and woman, out of you comes the nation that is to come, the lightening of your masses in travail.

In America, the people decided that God granted Freedoms to human beings. They got around that by deciding that what made a human being was flexible—first with slaves, then with abortion. In Europe, they skipped over that step when they decided that freedom came to people from the state, and anyone the state decided was a non-person had no freedom.

Most of the time we exist in a constructed world where everything is designed to keep us comfortable, keep us away from the rawness of life. But we evolved to exist in an environment that would often be tough, difficult, dangerous, and deep down I think we long for a connection to that ancestral existence.

As soon as you honour the present moment, all unhappiness and struggle dissolve, and life begins to flow with joy and ease.

Gudar finns inte, bara godhet gör det.

One of the dirty secrets of the moving business is that a shipper has no idea what kind of human offal a driver might pick up for day labor.

Godhet finnes, medfølelse og solidaritet er lett å observere for eksempel hos elefanter, aper, fugler. Noen ganger også hos mennesker.

If you hadn’t been there, I’m not entirely sure I would’ve been able to stop myself from hurting the guy worse. That’s why I need to get to the lake house and be alone.” She sniffed. There was so much in that one little derisive sound that he had to look her way. “What?” Her expression went deadpan. “You realize that is a completely ridiculous plan, right?” He frowned. “Come on, Finn.” She pursed those red-glossed lips like she could barely tolerate his foolishness. “That is such a man plan.” “A man plan.” “Yes. You don’t know how to be among the living anymore so you’re going to…go live alone in a cave. Right. Good thinking. That will pop your how-to-be-human skills right back into place.” He made a frustrated sound and pulled into the lot of the hotel to park so he could face her, make her understand. “You saw what happened today. I’m not fit to be around other people right now. I beat a guy down for taking a picture. And I was…aggressive with you last night.” “Aggressive?” Her mouth flattened, and she put a finger to her chest. “I kissed you. I was the aggressor. You were just…complicit in the aggressiveness. And you’re lucky I haven’t gone two years’ celibate, because had I been in your shoes, I would’ve convinced you to go up to my room and used you eight ways to Sunday and back again by now. You’d be limping.” His libido gave a hard kick and knocked the logical thoughts out of his head for a moment. “I—” “You need to be around people.” That snapped his attention back to where it needed to be—mostly. “No.” “You promised your boss you’d be around friends. You made me promise your boss that I’d make sure you did that. You made me lie to the FBI. That’s got to be a federal offense or something.” “Made is a strong word.” “Finn.” He groaned. “What would you have me do? You want to babysit me, Livvy? Come stay at my lake house and make sure I don’t turn into a deviant?” She stared at him, her gaze way too sharp, and then tipped her chin up in challenge. “Is that an invitation? Because you know you shouldn’t test me. I could babysit the hell out of you, Finn Dorsey. I know who you used to be. You don’t get to become a bad guy. I will make you do slumber-party things like play charades or watch crappy nineties movies or incessant reruns of Friends. You won’t be able to fight your old goofy side. It will emerge like a freaking butterfly and smother scary Finn.” He blinked and stared, and then he couldn’t help it—he laughed. “A freaking butterfly?” She smiled triumphantly. “A goofy freaking butterfly.” He let out a long breath, some of the tension from the morning draining out of him. “You’re weird.” “So are you.

Baby Registry Please give this child a strong stomach, an infectious laugh, an independent spirit. A love of words, numbers, people, and solitude. A fear of poisons, reckless driving, guns—and nothing else. Make him or her contemplative but not to the point of fretfulness. Make him or her generous but not to the point of self-effacement. Let this child inherit Finn’s features, especially his eyes, nose, and mouth. And his trim, athletic limbs. His capable hands. Will-taste-anything tongue. Un-noteworthy feet. Ability to not shower for several days and still smell okay, even good in an earthy way. His musical talent—yes, especially that. Even his resistance to being pinned down, because why settle for anything less than a life full of great adventure? Let this child inherit an enduring faith in the power of secular humanism in a world full of racism, sexism, terrorism, and greed. If you must, my teeth and/or earlobes would be fine.

Mr. Finn Toller in his natural condition was no engaging sight. In his present state he was a revolting object. He was a sandy-haired individual with a loose, straggly, pale-coloured beard. He gave the impression of being completely devoid of both eyebrows and eyelashes, so bleached and whitish in his case were those normal appendages to the human countenance. His mouth was always open and always slobbering, but although his whole expression was furtive and dodging, his teeth were large and strong and wolfish. Mr. Toller looked, in fact, like a man weak to the verge of imbecility who had been ironically endowed with the teeth of a strong beast of prey.

There are no unfinished lives, because there are no single lives. Life goes on and on. If you knew how many lives there were to work with, you would learn to be patient and know that some things just take time. Lives are being given to you—more lives than you could imagine—over and over again. Those who learn to manage time gracefully will be happy from one lifetime to the next. Those who are thrown off-balance by time will live with anxiety and confusion. You must know that this is not the only life, and not the only time. You can learn this if you will. Just as the birds move easily from tree to tree with nothing to block their passage, I can teach you to move freely from one lifetime to the next. With this confidence, much that seems difficult in this lifetime will become possible for you. Healings and reconciliations that seem unlikely can easily be obtained, and the joy that has eluded you can be found close at hand. You cannot trace the path of your soul from life to life in the same way that you follow your days from week to week, your months from year to year. But know that your lives are longer than you realize, and pray and remain open to the wisdom that is yours. That wisdom is the birthright of having a body. It is best for this learning, however, not to be anxious or afraid. There is nothing you have now that cannot be given to you again. There is no one you have loved who is forever lost to you. Nor are you condemned to repeat the same mistakes and follies. The long story of your soul is wiser and more generous than you know. The human concept of the soul is like a shiny coin faceup on the ground. It is flat. The most you can imagine is flipping it over to see what is on the other side. I want to show you the full length and brightness of a soul. I want you to feel its amplitude. It is incalculably long and old. A soul is so much deeper, so much brighter than you imagine. The universe is astounded by every soul. The universe is not big enough to contain a soul. Know that you can pick up the thread of your own soul in this lifetime the moment you pick up the rosary. So don’t lose heart, and never give in to fear. Live with confidence, knowing that there are reasons for all things that happen. You do not live in a random universe because you do not live in a Motherless universe. You know by now that it was I Who, through your mothers, gave birth to your bodies. Know also that I have given birth to your souls—and a soul may never be destroyed.

Our greatest glory is not in never falling, but in rising every time we fall.