Friends Reference Quotes

You know your problem, Quentin? You keep expecting people not to be themselves. I mean, I could hate you for being massively unpunctual and for never being interested in anything other than Margo Roth Spiegelman, and for, like, never asking me about how it's going with my girlfriend - but I don't give a shit, man, because you're you. My parents have a shit ton of black Santas, but that's okay. They're them. I'm too obsessed with a reference website to answer my phone sometimes when my friends call, or my girlfriend. That's okay, too. That's me. You like me anyway. And I like you. You're funny, and you're smart, and you may show up late, but you always show up eventually.

Butterfly. What a beautiful word What a delicate creature. Delicate like the cruel words that flow right out of your mouths and the food that flies right out of your hands… Does it make you feel better? Does it make you feel good ? Does picking on a girl make you more of a man? Well, I’m standing up for myself Like I should have done before I’m not putting up with your Butterfly anymore." (Kiersten slides the sack off her wrist and opens it, pulling out a handful of hand-made butterflies. She takes the microphone out of the stand and begins walking down the stairs as she continues speaking.) “I’d like to extend to others what others have extended to me.” (She walks up to Mrs. Brill first and holds out a butterfly) “Butterfly you, Mrs. Brill.” (Mrs. Brill smiles at her and takes the butterfly out of her hands. Lake laughs out loud and I have to nudge her to get her to be quiet. Kiersten walks around the room, passing out butterflies to several of the students, including the three from the lunchroom.) “Butterfly you, Mark. Butterfly you, Brendan. Butterfly you, Colby.” (When she finishes passing out the butterflies, she walks back onto the stage and places the microphone back into the stand.) “I have one thing to say to you And I’m not referring to the bullies Or the ones they pursue. I’m referring to those of you that just stand by The ones who don’t take up for those of us that cry Those of you who just…turn a blind eye. After all it’s not you it’s happening to You aren’t the one being bullied And you aren’t the one being rude It isn’t your hand that’s throwing the food But…it is your mouth not speaking up It is your feet not taking a stand It is your arm not lending a hand It is your heart Not giving a damn. So take up for yourself Take up for your friends I challenge you to be someone Who doesn’t give in. Don’t give in. Don’t let them win.

I’ve just never met someone like you," as if I were a stranger from another town or an eccentric guest accompanying a mutual friend to a dinner party. It was a strange thought to hear from the mouth of the woman who had birthed and raised me, with whom I shared a home for eighteen years, someone who was half me. My mother had struggled to understand me just as I struggled to understand her. Thrown as we were on opposite sides of a fault line—generational, cultural, linguistic—we wandered lost without a reference point, each of us unintelligible to the other’s expectations, until these past few years when we had just begun to unlock the mystery, carve the psychic space to accommodate each other, appreciate the differences between us, linger in our refracted commonalities. Then, what would have been the most fruitful years of understanding were cut violently short, and I was left alone to decipher the secrets of inheritance without its key.

You act young," he said, "because you are young. But you know things, Roza. Things people older than you don't even know. That day...." I knew instantly which day he referred to. The one up against the wall. "You were right, about how I fight to stay in control. No one else has ever figured that out- and it scared me. You scare me." "Why? Don't you want anyone to know?" He shrugged. "Whether they know that fact or not doesn't matter. What matters is that someone- that you- know me that well. When a person can see into your soul, it's hard. It forces you to be open. Vulnerable. It's much easier being with someone who's just more of a casual friend." "Like Tasha." "Tasha Ozera is an amazing woman. She's beautiful and she's brave. But she doesn't-" "She doesn't get you," I finished. He nodded. "I knew that. But I still wanted the relationship. I knew it would be easy and that she could take me away from you. I thought she could make me forget you." I'd thought the same thing about Mason. "But she couldn't." "Yes. And, so.....that's a problem.

Lydia was the kind of friend whom people referred to as a 'party favor' -- always fun to be around but she doesn't have any patience for suffering unless it's her own.

Via Joseph Campbell: My friend Heinrich Zimmer of years ago used to say, "The best things can't be told," because they transcend thought. "The second best are misunderstood," because those are the thoughts that are supposed to refer to that which can't be thought about, and one gets stuck in the thoughts."The third best are what we talk about.

A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it! Something of the awfulness, even of Death itself, is referable to this. No more can I turn the leaves of this dear book that I loved, and vainly hope in time to read it all. No more can I look into the depths of this unfathomable water, wherein, as momentary lights glanced into it, I have had glimpses of buried treasure and other things submerged. It was appointed that the book should shut with a a spring, for ever and for ever, when I had read but a page. It was appointed that the water should be locked in an eternal frost, when the light was playing on its surface, and I stood in ignorance on the shore. My friend is dead, my neighbour is dead, my love, the darling of my soul, is dead; it is the inexorable consolidation and perpetuation of the secret that was always in that individuality, and which I shall carry in mine to my life's end. In any of the burial-places of this city through which I pass, is there a sleeper more inscrutable than its busy inhabitants are, in their innermost personality, to me, or than I am to them?

We hear a great deal about the rudeness of the ris- ing generation. I am an oldster myself and might be expected to take the oldsters' side, but in fact I have been far more impressed by the bad manners of par- ents to children than by those of children to parents. Who has not been the embarrassed guest at family meals where the father or mother treated their grown-up offspring with an incivility which, offered to any other young people, would simply have termi- nated the acquaintance? Dogmatic assertions on mat- ters which the children understand and their elders don't, ruthless interruptions, flat contradictions, ridicule of things the young take seriously some- times of their religion insulting references to their friends, all provide an easy answer to the question "Why are they always out? Why do they like every house better than their home?" Who does not prefer civility to barbarism?

Lawson, also known by his call sign of Hiker, had been my best friend since our navy days. He now had the distinction of being the sheriff of Santa Rosaria. “Where the hell are you? It sounds like you’re far away.” “I’m on the top deck of a cruise ship in the Panama Canal.” “Swamp, I’m busy. I don’t have time for your jokes.” “Then why the hell did you call me?” “I’m calling because some hot shot lawyer called my office for a character reference on you.” “Why?” “I’ll ask you the same question. Why? Are you in some kind of trouble?” “Of course I’m not in any kind of trouble! What did you say to him?” “I told him you’re some kind of character.

Now, she could't help but think he was just a big version of a jealous boy friend.

In a speech Abraham Lincoln delivered at the height of the Civil War, he referred to the Southerners as fellow human beings who were in error. An elderly lady chastised him for not calling them irreconcilable enemies who must be destroyed. “Why, madam,” Lincoln replied, “do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?

It has all the right ingredients: rich contents, friendly, personal language, subtle humor, the right references, and a plethora of pointers to resources.

My “Best Woman” speech Good evening everyone, my name is Rosie and as you can see Alex has decided to go down the non-traditional route of asking me to be his best woman for the day. Except we all know that today that title does not belong to me. It belongs to Sally, for she is clearly his best woman. I could call myself the “best friend” but I think we all know that today that title no longer refers to me either. That title too belongs to Sally. But what doesn’t belong to Sally is a lifetime of memories of Alex the child, Alex the teenager, and Alex the almost-a-man that I’m sure he would rather forget but that I will now fill you all in on. (Hopefully they all will laugh.) I have known Alex since he was five years old. I arrived on my first day of school teary-eyed and red-nosed and a half an hour late. (I am almost sure Alex will shout out “What’s new?”) I was ordered to sit down at the back of the class beside a smelly, snotty-nosed, messy-haired little boy who had the biggest sulk on his face and who refused to look at me or talk to me. I hated this little boy. I know that he hated me too, him kicking me in the shins under the table and telling the teacher that I was copying his schoolwork was a telltale sign. We sat beside each other every day for twelve years moaning about school, moaning about girlfriends and boyfriends, wishing we were older and wiser and out of school, dreaming for a life where we wouldn’t have double maths on a Monday morning. Now Alex has that life and I’m so proud of him. I’m so happy that he’s found his best woman and his best friend in perfect little brainy and annoying Sally. I ask you all to raise your glasses and toast my best friend Alex and his new best friend, best woman, and wife, Sally, and to wish them luck and happiness and divorce in the future. To Alex and Sally!

Dearest creature in creation, Study English pronunciation. I will teach you in my verse Sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse. I will keep you, Suzy, busy, Make your head with heat grow dizzy. Tear in eye, your dress will tear. So shall I! Oh hear my prayer. Just compare heart, beard, and heard, Dies and diet, lord and word, Sword and sward, retain and Britain. (Mind the latter, how it’s written.) Now I surely will not plague you With such words as plaque and ague. But be careful how you speak: Say break and steak, but bleak and streak; Cloven, oven, how and low, Script, receipt, show, poem, and toe. Hear me say, devoid of trickery, Daughter, laughter, and Terpsichore, Typhoid, measles, topsails, aisles, Exiles, similes, and reviles; Scholar, vicar, and cigar, Solar, mica, war and far; One, anemone, Balmoral, Kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel; Gertrude, German, wind and mind, Scene, Melpomene, mankind. Billet does not rhyme with ballet, Bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet. Blood and flood are not like food, Nor is mould like should and would. Viscous, viscount, load and broad, Toward, to forward, to reward. And your pronunciation’s OK When you correctly say croquet, Rounded, wounded, grieve and sieve, Friend and fiend, alive and live. Ivy, privy, famous; clamour And enamour rhyme with hammer. River, rival, tomb, bomb, comb, Doll and roll and some and home. Stranger does not rhyme with anger, Neither does devour with clangour. Souls but foul, haunt but aunt, Font, front, wont, want, grand, and grant, Shoes, goes, does. Now first say finger, And then singer, ginger, linger, Real, zeal, mauve, gauze, gouge and gauge, Marriage, foliage, mirage, and age. Query does not rhyme with very, Nor does fury sound like bury. Dost, lost, post and doth, cloth, loth. Job, nob, bosom, transom, oath. Though the differences seem little, We say actual but victual. Refer does not rhyme with deafer. Foeffer does, and zephyr, heifer. Mint, pint, senate and sedate; Dull, bull, and George ate late. Scenic, Arabic, Pacific, Science, conscience, scientific. Liberty, library, heave and heaven, Rachel, ache, moustache, eleven. We say hallowed, but allowed, People, leopard, towed, but vowed. Mark the differences, moreover, Between mover, cover, clover; Leeches, breeches, wise, precise, Chalice, but police and lice; Camel, constable, unstable, Principle, disciple, label. Petal, panel, and canal, Wait, surprise, plait, promise, pal. Worm and storm, chaise, chaos, chair, Senator, spectator, mayor. Tour, but our and succour, four. Gas, alas, and Arkansas. Sea, idea, Korea, area, Psalm, Maria, but malaria. Youth, south, southern, cleanse and clean. Doctrine, turpentine, marine. Compare alien with Italian, Dandelion and battalion. Sally with ally, yea, ye, Eye, I, ay, aye, whey, and key. Say aver, but ever, fever, Neither, leisure, skein, deceiver. Heron, granary, canary. Crevice and device and aerie. Face, but preface, not efface. Phlegm, phlegmatic, ass, glass, bass. Large, but target, gin, give, verging, Ought, out, joust and scour, scourging. Ear, but earn and wear and tear Do not rhyme with here but ere. Seven is right, but so is even, Hyphen, roughen, nephew Stephen, Monkey, donkey, Turk and jerk, Ask, grasp, wasp, and cork and work. Pronunciation (think of Psyche!) Is a paling stout and spikey? Won’t it make you lose your wits, Writing groats and saying grits? It’s a dark abyss or tunnel: Strewn with stones, stowed, solace, gunwale, Islington and Isle of Wight, Housewife, verdict and indict. Finally, which rhymes with enough, Though, through, plough, or dough, or cough? Hiccough has the sound of cup. My advice is to give up!!!

Being faithful and monogamous is not natural for human beings. It takes work. Deep down we all know that. We have all been tempted to stray at some point or another. Even when it was only a fleeting thought and we didn't act on it. Every time we acknowledge that someone of the opposite sex is "attractive" or "sexy" we are doing nothing other than pointing out that they would be a suitable mate. Not acting on that natural impulse to want to mate with a viable mating partner requires a conscious decision. It's a constant struggle between what your body wants, and what the civilized part of your brain says you should do, in order to avoid the negative consequences of cheating on your spouse and ruining your long-term relationship. That's why affairs, and extra-marital sex, are often referred to as "a moment of weakness.

Do you know when I knew we’d be friends?” I’d never seen her vulnerable before. “No. I don’t.” “It was the first day we met. You addressed me as ‘Dr. Putnam’ without having to be prompted. And when Bradley insisted on referring to me as ‘Miss Putnam,’ you…well, you corrected Bradley’s shoes, but I appreciated the gesture.

What I have said respecting and against religion, I mean strictly to apply to the slaveholding religion of this land, and with no possible reference to Christianity proper; for, between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide, that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one, is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity.

Why some people can be smiling and laughing with their friends in one moment yet break down the moment they are alone. To the point where they are so disconnected from their own needs that they mentally refer to themselves in the third-person. And what can happen when they lack the will to break the cycle themselves or seek real support or help. The question of what truly constitutes self-worth ?

There are times when I think that the ideal library is composed solely of reference books. They are like understanding friends—always ready to meet your mood, always ready to change the subject when you have had enough of this or that.

We envy only those whom we feel ourselves to be like; we envy only members of our reference group. There are few successes more unendurable than those of our close friends.

I defy you to try it, Princess. Go ahead. I don’t even know how to sweep a floor. All I know how to do is use my body to please others. I was sick and alone with no references, friends, family, or money. I was so weak from hunger that even a beggar stole your himation from me while I lay on the ground, wanting to die and unable to stop him from taking it. So don’t come here now with your disdainful eyes and look at me like I’m beneath you. I don’t need your charity and I don’t need your pity. I know exactly what you see when you look at me. (Acheron)

Sorry,” I said, realizing I was taking my frustrations out on her. “I’m still getting over Soph,” I said, referring to my old prep school friend. Sophie Price was the most beautiful girl you’d ever met. Seriously. Take it from someone who’s met Bar Refaeli in person. Soph was even more stunning. Especially since she’d had a personality makeover. I’d never regret anything as much as I would not making her fall in love with me. “You can’t make anyone fall, Spence. Either they do or they don’t.” “I said that out loud?” “Duh and it’s been two years, Spencer. You seriously need to get over her. She’s with that Ian guy anyway, right?” “Right.” “That hot South African guy named Ian,” she concluded. “Thanks.” “That hot saffy named Ian who gives his life to mutilated Ugandan orphans and worships the ground Sophie walks on.” I stopped and glared at her. “That’ll do, Bridge.

Actually, nothing hurts like hearing the word slut, unless it is hearing the word rape dropped about carelessly. Again, a word I wouldn't have thought much about, except that when I was in high school a girl gave her senior speech on her best friend's rape. She ended not with an appear for women's rights or self defense, but by begging us to consider our language. We use the word 'rape' so casually, for sports, for a failed test, to spice up jokes. 'The test raped me.' 'His smile went up to justifiable rape.' These references confer casualness upon the word, embedding it into our culture, stripping it of shock value, and ultimately numb us to the reality of rape.

Warning: Contains old friends, old enemies, a dramatic cat rescue, soft drink references and a lot of teasing before the steamy sex. Readers are cautioned against drinking any beverage while reading to avoid accidental snorting or spraying of said beverages.

blankers!’ I winced at the venom in Dad’s voice. And I’d never heard him refer to noughts as blankers before. Blankers … What a horrible word! A nasty word. My friend Callum wasn’t a blanker. He wasn’t …

So, your friends call you Bastian. Your enemies call you asshole. What do lovers call you?” “Why do you want to know?” She smiled up at the stars. “Future reference.

Understanding America for the Non-American Black: Thoughts on the Special White Friend One great gift for the Zipped-Up Negro is The White Friend Who Gets It. Sadly, this is not as common as one would wish, but some are lucky to have that white friend who you don’t need to explain shit to. By all means, put this friend to work. Such friends not only get it, but also have great bullshit-detectors and so they totally understand that they can say stuff that you can’t. So there is, in much of America, a stealthy little notion lying in the hearts of many: that white people earned their place at jobs and schools while black people got in because they were black. But in fact, since the beginning of America, white people have been getting jobs because they were white. Many whites with the same qualifications but Negro skin would not have the jobs they have. But don’t ever say this publicly. Let your white friend say it. If you make the mistake of saying this, you will be accused of a curiosity called “playing the race card.” Nobody quite knows what this means. When my father was in school in my NAB (Non American Black) country, many American Blacks could not vote or go to good schools. The reason? Their skin color. Skin color alone was the problem. Today, many Americans say that skin color cannot be part of the solution. Otherwise it is referred to as a curiosity called “reverse racism.” Have your white friend point out how the American Black deal is kind of like you’ve been unjustly imprisoned for many years, then all of a sudden you’re set free, but you get no bus fare. And, by the way, you and the guy who imprisoned you are now automatically equal. If the “slavery was so long ago” thing comes up, have your white friend say that lots of white folks are still inheriting money that their families made a hundred years ago. So if that legacy lives, why not the legacy of slavery? And have your white friend say how funny it is, that American pollsters ask white and black people if racism is over. White people in general say it is over and black people in general say it is not. Funny indeed. More suggestions for what you should have your white friend say? Please post away. And here’s to all the white friends who get it.

How dare you tell me 'I am not like most girls,' when those 'girls' you refer to are my sisters and mothers, my friends, the very solace and the kindness I have sought when the worst things in my life have happened? How dare you assume I should take that as a compliment, and beam at you like it is praise when you are alienating me from the very core of my proudly female being? There are a thousand ways to tell me you love me, and making my sisters small to make me big isn't one of them. Tell me you love me, but not because I am different. Tell me you love me, just because you do.

It was generally agreed that a coffin-size studio on Avenue D was preferable to living in one of the boroughs. Moving from one Brooklyn or Staten Island neighborhood to another was fine, but unless you had children to think about, even the homeless saw it as a step down to leave Manhattan. Customers quitting the island for Astoria or Cobble Hill would claim to welcome the change of pace, saying it would be nice to finally have a garden or live a little closer to the airport. They’d put a good face one it, but one could always detect an underlying sense of defeat. The apartments might be bigger and cheaper in other places, but one could never count on their old circle of friend making the long trip to attend a birthday party. Even Washington Heights was considered a stretch. People referred to it as Upstate New York, though it was right there in Manhattan.

Suddenly, ahead of us, a group of men ran out of the forest and pulled a thick rope across the road. There was no time to look at them properly, but they didn’t look friendly. I still don’t know why, but my reflex reaction was to foot the accelerator and drive straight through – never a good idea on a dirt track, except perhaps for rally drivers. I’m not sure who was more surprised, me or them, but I found myself looking in the rear-view mirror and seeing men lying on the road, I suppose pulled down by the force of the rope.

Inspiration is everywhere so don't get trapped in reading and watching too much. Get out. Talk to people, friends, family, loved ones. Draw inspiration from everyday life. It has inexhaustible references and is always original.

​I read of a man who stood to speak at the funeral of a friend. He referred to the dates on the tombstone from the beginning…to the end. He noted that first came the date of birth and spoke the following date with tears, but he said what mattered most of all was the dash between those years. For that dash represents all the time that they spent alive on earth. And now only those who loved them know what that little line is worth.

I'd trust you a hell of a lot more if you didn't refer to her as an old friend when we both know she was a hell of a lot more" "What she was is nearly a dozen years in the past. Years before I ever set eyes on you." Now simple bafflement joined the irritation and the ice. "Christ Jesus, are you jealous of a woman I haven't spoken to, seen, or thought of in years?" Even only looked at him for one long moment. "You're thinking of her now

Homer, in the second book of the Iliad says with fine enthusiasm, "Give me masturbation or give me death." Caesar, in his Commentaries, says, "To the lonely it is company; to the forsaken it is a friend; to the aged and to the impotent it is a benefactor. They that are penniless are yet rich, in that they still have this majestic diversion." In another place this experienced observer has said, "There are times when I prefer it to sodomy." Robinson Crusoe says, "I cannot describe what I owe to this gentle art." Queen Elizabeth said, "It is the bulwark of virginity." Cetewayo, the Zulu hero, remarked, "A jerk in the hand is worth two in the bush." The immortal Franklin has said, "Masturbation is the best policy." Michelangelo and all of the other old masters--"old masters," I will remark, is an abbreviation, a contraction--have used similar language. Michelangelo said to Pope Julius II, "Self-negation is noble, self-culture beneficent, self-possession is manly, but to the truly great and inspiring soul they are poor and tame compared with self-abuse." Mr. Brown, here, in one of his latest and most graceful poems, refers to it in an eloquent line which is destined to live to the end of time--"None knows it but to love it; none name it but to praise.

You’ve told me repeatedly now that you find me blindingly attractive.” “That doesn’t mean I like you. Besides, your brand of pretty is like a weapon. You reel victims in with it, just like a vampire does. I wouldn’t be surprised if you sparkle in the sun.” “I cannot believe I’m arguing with a woman who references Twilight.” “The fact that you know I’m referencing Twilight betrays you as a secret Edward-loving fanboy.” His snort is loud and scathing. “Team Jacob all the way.” I can’t help it, my eyes fly open, and I lift a corner of my mask to glare at him. “That’s it. We can never be friends.

Above them, one of the blackened television screens brightens, and there's an announcement about the in-flight movie. It's an animated film about a family of ducks, one that Hadley's actually see, and when Oliver groans, shes about to deny the whole thing. But then she twists around in her seat and eyes him critically. "There's nothing wrong with ducks," she tells him, and he rolls his eyes. "Talking ducks?" Hadley grins. "They sing, too." "Don't tell me," he says. "You've already seen it." She holds up two fingers. "Twice." "You do know it's meant for five-year-olds, right?" "Five- to eight-year-olds, thank you very much." "And how old are you again?" "Old enough to appreciate our web-footed friends." "You," he says, laughing in spite of himself, "are a mad as a hatter." "Wait a second," Hadley says in mock horror. "Is that a reference to a...cartoon?" No, genius. It's a reference to a famous work of literature by Lewis Carroll. But once again, I can see how well that American education is working for you.

I want to open a broken marriage repair shop. I’m not a counselor or psychologist, but I am a fan of the magical bonding that occurs between two people when duct tape binds them together for a long period of time in a dark basement. Refer a friend, and you get a two for one abuse session.

How well they all knew each other now, he thought. In twelve weeks James felt he had come to know more about these three men than any of the so-called friends he'd known for twenty years. For the first time he understood why his father continually referred back to friendships formed during the war with men he normally would never have met. He realised how much he was going to miss Stephen when he returned to America. Success was, in fact, going to split them up.

Something else gets under your skin, keeps you working days and nights at the sacrifice of your sleeping and eating and attention to your family and friends, something beyond the love of puzzle solving. And that other force is the anticipation of understanding something about the world that no one has ever understood before you. Einstein wrote that when he first realized that gravity was equivalent to acceleration -- an idea that would underlie his new theory of gravity -- it was the "happiest thought of my life." On projects of far smaller weight, I have experienced that pleasure of discovering something new. It is an exquisite sensation, a feeling of power, a rush of the blood, a sense of living forever. To be the first vessel to hold this new thing. All of the scientists I've known have at least one more quality in common: they do what they do because they love it, and because they cannot imagine doing anything else. In a sense, this is the real reason a scientist does science. Because the scientist must. Such a compulsion is both blessing and burden. A blessing because the creative life, in any endeavor, is a gift filled with beauty and not given to everyone, a burden because the call is unrelenting and can drown out the rest of life. This mixed blessing and burden must be why the astrophysicist Chandrasekhar continued working until his mid-80's, why a visitor to Einstein's apartment in Bern found the young physicist rocking his infant with one hand while doing mathematical calculations with the other. This mixed blessing and burden must have been the "sweet hell" that Walt Whitman referred to when he realized at a young age that he was destined to be a poet. "Never more," he wrote, "shall I escape.

Sivbarat referred to a person's dearest friend, someone so close that to lose them would be like losing a limb.

The word em refers to the little brother or little sister in a family; or the younger of two friends; or the woman in a couple. I like to think that the word em is the homonym of the verb aimer, “to love,” in French, in the imperative: aime.

Paper has more patience than people.’ I thought of this saying on one of those days when I was feeling a little depressed and was sitting at home with my chin in my hands, bored and listless, wondering whether to stay in or go out. I finally stayed where I was, brooding. Yes, paper does have more patience, and since I’m not planning to let anyone else read this stiff-backed notebook grandly referred to as a ‘diary’, unless I should ever find a real friend, it probably won’t make a bit of difference.

Vee'd been too busy ogling all the bright, shiny trinkets in the marketplace to notice Jamie shadowing us.Visions or not, he was far too bipolar to be a match for my best friend. She deserved a true prince-not some moody poseur with a crown. Yet, if I knew her, his conflicted Edward Cullen act would her hook faster than meth.

... she refused to allow anyone - even Miguel - to refer to Majnoun as 'her' dog. - I'm as much his as he's mine, she'd insist. Her friends - and her husband - thought this an annoying eccentricity. Majnoun knew what she meant - that she was not his master - and he was grateful. But in his heart he felt as if he did belong to her, in the sense that he was a part of Nira and she a part of him.

Cor cordium, heart of hearts,” I replied, referring to the moment when a friend had seized Shelley’s heart before the flames had totally engulfed his swollen body as it was being cremated on the shore.

I suppose this is what i get for building my walls so high. My family never actually knew about my life. Occasionally i'd reference a friend( going out with a friend; got it from a friend). But i don't think they believed me. Especially when i never forked over a name.

Remember all those things you hated about me when you were little? You hated when I sang. You hated when I danced. You really hated when I referred to that homeless guy with the dreadlocks who walked around the streets with a stack of blankets across his shoulders as “my brother.” You hated when I said you were my best friend. I now agree with you on that last one. I’m not your best friend. I’m your mother.

The Japanese have two words: "uchi" meaning inside and "soto" meaning outside. Uchi refers to their close friends, the people in their inner circle. Soto refers to anyone who is outside that circle. And how they relate and communicate to the two are drastically different. To the soto, they are still polite and they might be outgoing, on the surface, but they will keep them far away, until they are considered considerate and trustworthy enough to slip their way into the uchi category. Once you are uchi, the Japanese version of friendship is entire universes beyond the average American friendship! Uchi friends are for life. Uchi friends represent a sacred duty. A Japanese friend, who has become an uchi friend, is the one who will come to your aid, in your time of need, when all your western "friends" have turned their back and walked away.

Stop that Stuart," Patty said as Stuart struggled with the suitcases, which were too heavy for him, she thought. (Almost everything was way too heavy for Stuart.)" Just put those down. Besides," Patty said, "where will you go? You don't have anyplace to go." But Stuart took her hand and held it for a moment against his closed eyes, and despite the many occasions when Patty had wanted him to go, and the several occasions when she had tried to make him go, despite the fact that he was at his most enragingly pathetic, for once she could think of nothing, nothing at all that he could be trying to shame her into or shame her out of, and so it occurred to her that this he would really leave---that he was simply saying good-bye. All along, Patty had been unaware that time is as adhesive as love, and that the more time you spend with someone the greater the likelihood of finding yourself with a permanent sort of thing to deal with that people casually refer to as "friendship," as if that were the end of the matter,when the truth is that even if "your friend" does something annoying, or if you and "your friend" decided that you hate each other, or if "your friend" moves away and you lose each other's address, you still have a friendship, and although it can change shape, look different in different lights, become an embarrassment or an encumbrance or a sorrow, it can't simply cease to have existed, no matter how far into the past it sinks, so attempts to disavow or destroy it will not merely constitute betrayals of friendship but, more practically, are bound to be fruitless, causing damage only to the humans involved rather than to that gummy jungle(friendship)in which those humans have entrapped themselves, so if sometime in the future you're not going to want to have been a particular person's friend, or if you're not going to want to have had that particular friendship you and that person can make with one another, then don't be friends with that person at all, don't talk to that person, don't go anywhere near that person, because as soon as you start to see something from that person's point of view (which, inevitably, will be as soon as you stand next to that person) common ground is sure to slide under your feet.

As a kid I understood that people were different colors, but in my head white and black and brown were like types of chocolate. Dad was the white chocolate, mom was the dark chocolate, and I was the milk chocolate. But we were all just chocolate. I didn’t know any of it had anything to do with “race.” I didn't know what race was. My mother never referred to my dad as white or to me as mixed. So when the other kids in Soweto called me "white", even though I was light brown, I just thought that they had their colors mixed up, like they hadn't learned them properly. "Ah, yes, my friend. You've confused aqua with turquoise. I can see how you made that mistake. You're not the first.

True friends give you encouragement. True friends give you motivation, And inspiration. True friends give you love, And adoration, And respect. True friends invest in you and actively participate in your growth and development. True friends give you their truth, And encourage you To share your truth as well.

Yes, paper does have more patience, and since I’m not planning to let anyone else read this stiff-backed notebook grandly referred to as a “diary,” unless I should ever find a real friend, it probably won’t make a bit of difference.

As much as I try not to engage people in the grocery checkout, I couldn’t resist one day when I overheard one refer to Seattle as “cosmopolitan.” Encouraged, I asked, “Really?” She said, Sure, Seattle is full of people from all over. “Like where?” Her answer, “Alaska. I have a ton of friends from Alaska.” Whoomp, there it is.

Ifemelu would come to realize later that Kimberly used “beautiful” in a peculiar way. “I’m meeting my beautiful friend from graduate school,” Kimberly would say, or “We’re working with this beautiful woman on the inner-city project,” and always, the women she referred to would turn out to be quite ordinary-looking, but always black.

I have often noticed that we are inclined to endow our friends with the stability of type that literary characters acquire in the reader's mind. No matter how many times we reopen 'King Lear,' never shall we find the good king banging his tankard in high revelry, all woes forgotten, at a jolly reunion with all three daughters and their lapdogs. Never will Emma rally, revived by the sympathetic salts in Flaubert's father's timely tear. Whatever evolution this or that popular character has gone through between the book covers, his fate is fixed in our minds, and, similarly, we expect our friends to follow this or that logical and conventional pattern we have fixed for them.

But Terry doesn't touch her, won't touch her, never touches her. In a decade of knowing her, he has kept her at a friendly distance, even in his imagination, has never once considered allowing her into his sexual fantasies. There would be no harm in such a thing, yet he senses he would be placing something at risk all the same. What he would be placing at risk, he cannot say. To Terry the word "soul" first refers to a kind of music.

Do not refer to me as an Edge Lord. You must call me The Exalted Emperor of Edge. Or, if we're friends, you can just call me Your Edgecellency.

I am writing a novel,’ Tolstoy informed his friend the critic Nikolai Strakhov on 11 May 1873, referring to the book that was to become Anna Karenina. ‘I’ve been at it for more than a month now and the main lines are traced out. This novel is truly a novel, the first in my life …

Isn't it nice how we actually enjoy talking to each other now?" I said to her once on a trip home from college, after the bulk of the damage done in my teenage years had been allayed. "It is," she said. "You know what I realised? I've just never met someone like you." I've just never met someone like you, as if I were a stranger from another town or an eccentric guest accompanying a mutual friend to a dinner party. It was a strange thought to hear from the mouth of the woman who had birthed and raised me, with whom I shared a home for eighteen years, someone who was half me. My mother had struggled to understand me just as I struggled to understand her. Thrown as we were on opposite sides of a fault like—generational, cultural, linguistic—we wandered lost without a reference point, each of us unintelligible to the other's expectations, until these past few years when we had just begun to unlock the mystery, carve the psychic space to accommodate each other, appreciate the differences between us, linger in our refracted commonalities.

I scooped up the coins from the floor. “I’m taking these for the Chase Space,” I told Alex, referring to our friend Magnus’s shelter for homeless children. “Anonymous donation for the kiddos.

You speak as if you envied him." "And I do envy him, Emma. In one respect he is the object of my envy." Emma could say no more. They seemed to be within half a sentence of Harriet, and her immediate feeling was to avert the subject, if possible. She made her plan; she would speak of something totally different—the children in Brunswick Square; and she only waited for breath to begin, when Mr. Knightley startled her, by saying, "You will not ask me what is the point of envy.—You are determined, I see, to have no curiosity.—You are wise—but I cannot be wise. Emma, I must tell you what you will not ask, though I may wish it unsaid the next moment." "Oh! then, don't speak it, don't speak it," she eagerly cried. "Take a little time, consider, do not commit yourself." "Thank you," said he, in an accent of deep mortification, and not another syllable followed. Emma could not bear to give him pain. He was wishing to confide in her—perhaps to consult her;—cost her what it would, she would listen. She might assist his resolution, or reconcile him to it; she might give just praise to Harriet, or, by representing to him his own independence, relieve him from that state of indecision, which must be more intolerable than any alternative to such a mind as his.—They had reached the house. "You are going in, I suppose?" said he. "No,"—replied Emma—quite confirmed by the depressed manner in which he still spoke—"I should like to take another turn. Mr. Perry is not gone." And, after proceeding a few steps, she added—"I stopped you ungraciously, just now, Mr. Knightley, and, I am afraid, gave you pain.—But if you have any wish to speak openly to me as a friend, or to ask my opinion of any thing that you may have in contemplation—as a friend, indeed, you may command me.—I will hear whatever you like. I will tell you exactly what I think." "As a friend!"—repeated Mr. Knightley.—"Emma, that I fear is a word—No, I have no wish—Stay, yes, why should I hesitate?—I have gone too far already for concealment.—Emma, I accept your offer—Extraordinary as it may seem, I accept it, and refer myself to you as a friend.—Tell me, then, have I no chance of ever succeeding?" He stopped in his earnestness to look the question, and the expression of his eyes overpowered her. "My dearest Emma," said he, "for dearest you will always be, whatever the event of this hour's conversation, my dearest, most beloved Emma—tell me at once. Say 'No,' if it is to be said."—She could really say nothing.—"You are silent," he cried, with great animation; "absolutely silent! at present I ask no more." Emma was almost ready to sink under the agitation of this moment. The dread of being awakened from the happiest dream, was perhaps the most prominent feeling. "I cannot make speeches, Emma:" he soon resumed; and in a tone of such sincere, decided, intelligible tenderness as was tolerably convincing.—"If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more. But you know what I am.—You hear nothing but truth from me.—I have blamed you, and lectured you, and you have borne it as no other woman in England would have borne it.—Bear with the truths I would tell you now, dearest Emma, as well as you have borne with them. The manner, perhaps, may have as little to recommend them. God knows, I have been a very indifferent lover.—But you understand me.—Yes, you see, you understand my feelings—and will return them if you can. At present, I ask only to hear, once to hear your voice.

I'd like to start this week with a request, and this one goes out to the followers of the three Abrahamic religions: the Muslims, Christians, and Jews. It's just a little thing, really, but do you think that when you've finished smashing up the world and blowing each other to bits and demanding special privileges while you do it, do you think that maybe the rest of us could sort of have our planet back? I wouldn't ask, but I'm starting to think that there must be something written in the special books that each of you so enjoy referring to that it's ok to behave like special, petulant, pugnacious, pricks. Forgive the alliteration, but your persistent, power-mad punch-ups are pissing me off. It's mainly the extremists obviously, but not exclusively. It's a lot of 'main-streamers' as well. Let me give you an example of what I'm talking about. Muslims: listen up my bearded and veily friends! Calm down, ok? Stop blowing stuff up. Not everything that said about you is an attack on the prophet Mohammed and Allah that needs to end in the infidel being destroyed. Have a cup of tea, put on a Cat Stevens record, sit down and chill out. I mean seriously, what's wrong with a strongly-worded letter to The Times? Christians: you and your churches don't get to be millionaires while other people have nothing at all. They're your bloody rules; either stick to them or abandon the faith. And stop persecuting and killing people you judge to be immoral. Oh, and stop pretending you're celibate -- it's a cover-up for being a gay or a nonce. Right, that's two ticked off. Jews! I know you're god's 'Chosen People' and the rest of us are just whatever, but when Israel behaves like a violent, psychopathic bully and someone mentions it that doesn't make them antisemitic. And for the record, your troubled history is not a license to act with impunity now.

I spoke of the tragic illusion of perpetuity, but, no, my friends, it is a comic one. The ludicrous plot in which we are all trapped. The ancient Greeks referred to plot as mythos, attributing the random drift of human affairs to some sort of unknowable but glimpsable divine motion, attempting to attach a certain grandeur to it, the delusion of meaning. But we are characters who do not exist, in a story composed by no one from nothing. Can anything be more pitiable? No wonder we all are grieving.

What? Would I do a ridiculous amount of relativistic math to calculate our relative velocity at any given moment as perceived by my inertial reference frame and then do Lorentz transformations to figure out when the light from his engines will drop out of the Petrovascope’s perception range? Just so I know how much longer I can see my friend in the distance? Wouldn’t that be kind of pathetic? Yeah.

ichi-go ichi-e, which roughly translates to “once in a lifetime.” It could refer to a gathering of friends, a special meal, an epic day of surf, but the idea is to savor that occasion, because it will never come again.

Ms. Terwilliger didn’t have a chance to respond to my geological ramblings because someone knocked on the door. I slipped the rocks into my pocket and tried to look studious as she called an entry. I figured Zoe had tracked me down, but surprisingly, Angeline walked in. "Did you know," she said, "that it’s a lot harder to put organs back in the body than it is to get them out?" I closed my eyes and silently counted to five before opening them again. “Please tell me you haven’t eviscerated someone.” She shook her head. “No, no. I left my biology homework in Miss Wentworth’s room, but when I went back to get it, she’d already left and locked the door. But it’s due tomorrow, and I’m already in trouble in there, so I had to get it. So, I went around outside, and her window lock wasn’t that hard to open, and I—” "Wait," I interrupted. "You broke into a classroom?" "Yeah, but that’s not the problem." Behind me, I heard a choking laugh from Ms. Terwilliger’s desk. "Go on," I said wearily. "Well, when I climbed through, I didn’t realize there was a bunch of stuff in the way, and I crashed into those plastic models of the human body she has. You know, the life size ones with all the parts inside? And bam!" Angeline held up her arms for effect. "Organs everywhere." She paused and looked at me expectantly. "So what are we going to do? I can’t get in trouble with her." "We?" I exclaimed. "Here," said Ms. Terwilliger. I turned around, and she tossed me a set of keys. From the look on her face, it was taking every ounce of self-control not to burst out laughing. "That square one’s a master. I know for a fact she has yoga and won’t be back for the rest of the day. I imagine you can repair the damage—and retrieve the homework—before anyone’s the wiser.” I knew that the “you” in “you can repair” meant me. With a sigh, I stood up and packed up my things. “Thanks,” I said. As Angeline and I walked down to the science wing, I told her, “You know, the next time you’ve got a problem, maybe come to me before it becomes an even bigger problem.” "Oh no," she said nobly. "I didn’t want to be an inconvenience." Her description of the scene was pretty accurate: organs everywhere. Miss Wentworth had two models, male and female, with carved out torsos that cleverly held removable parts of the body that could be examined in greater detail. Wisely, she had purchased models that were only waist-high. That was still more than enough of a mess for us, especially since it was hard to tell which model the various organs belonged to. I had a pretty good sense of anatomy but still opened up a textbook for reference as I began sorting. Angeline, realizing her uselessness here, perched on a far counter and swing her legs as she watched me. I’d started reassembling the male when I heard a voice behind me. "Melbourne, I always knew you’d need to learn about this kind of thing. I’d just kind of hoped you’d learn it on a real guy." I glanced back at Trey, as he leaned in the doorway with a smug expression. “Ha, ha. If you were a real friend, you’d come help me.” I pointed to the female model. “Let’s see some of your alleged expertise in action.” "Alleged?" He sounded indignant but strolled in anyways. I hadn’t really thought much about asking him for help. Mostly I was thinking this was taking much longer than it should, and I had more important things to do with my time. It was only when he came to a sudden halt that I realized my mistake. "Oh," he said, seeing Angeline. "Hi." Her swinging feet stopped, and her eyes were as wide as his. “Um, hi.” The tension ramped up from zero to sixty in a matter of seconds, and everyone seemed at a loss for words. Angeline jerked her head toward the models and blurted out. “I had an accident.” That seemed to snap Trey from his daze, and a smile curved his lips. Whereas Angeline’s antics made me want to pull out my hair sometimes, he found them endearing.

We make love without a condom. AIDS is there though. We even know its true identity. It’s no longer referred to as the “gay cancer.” It’s there but we think we are safe from it. We know nothing of the grand decimation that will follow, depriving us of our best friends and old lovers, that will bring us together in cemeteries and cause us to scratch out names in our address books, enraging us with so many absences, such profound loss. It is there but we aren’t afraid yet. We believe that we are protected by our youth. We are seventeen years old. You don’t die when you are seventeen years old.

I know I told you to go to hell," I say, "but I'm glad you ignored me." "Delia, that newspaper story--" "You know what?" I say, trying to keep my voice from breaking. "Right now, I don't need a journalist. But I sure could use a friend." He hunches his shoulders. "I have references." I offer up the smallest smile, a bridge between us. "Actually," I confess, "you're the only one who applied.

defenestration,” which derives from “fenestra,” the Latin word for “window,” refers to the act of throwing something or someone out of the window. Knowing this, we can impress our friends with statements like, “Sally finished her apple and defenestrated the core.”)

You forgot ‘dashingly handsome.’ Dear friend is nice but hardly covers the extent of my qualities.” Eleanor looks up from her own letter writing. “How did she describe me? Because I have always preferred my eyes to be referred to as the ‘color of a storm-tossed sea.’ If either of you were wondering.” “You did not fare much better. In fact, I think I am ahead. I am a ‘dear friend,’ and you are merely ‘recently ill.

There is always a man eager to explain my mental illness to me. They all do it so confidently, motioning to their Hemingway and Bukowski bookshelf as they compare my depression to their late-night loneliness. There is always someone that rejected them that they equate their sadness to and a bottle of gin (or a song playing, or a movie) close by that they refer to as their cure. Somehow, every soft confession of my Crazy that I hand to them turns into them pulling out pieces of themselves to prove how it really is in my head. So many dudes I’ve dated have faces like doctors ready to institutionalize and love my crazy (but only on Friday nights.) They tell their friends about my impulsive decision making and how I “get them” more than anyone they’ve ever met but leave out my staring off in silence for hours and the self-inflicted bruises on my cheeks. None of them want to acknowledge a crazy they can’t cure. They want a crazy that fits well into a trope and gives them a chance to play Hero. And they always love a Crazy that provides them material to write about. Truth is they love me best as a cigarette cloud of impossibility, with my lipstick applied perfectly and my Crazy only being pulled out when their life needs a little spice. They don’t want me dirty, having not left my bed for days. Not diseased. Not real. So they invite me over when they’re going through writer’s block but don’t answer my calls during breakdowns. They tell me I look beautiful when I’m crying then stick their hands in-between my thighs. They mistake my silence for listening to them attentively and say my quiet mouth understands them like no one else has. These men love my good dead hollowness. Because it means less of a fighting personality for them to force out. And is so much easier to fill someone who has already given up with themselves.

To the same question a 78-year-old Study member replied, “All the many plans for the day. I love life and all I do. I love the out of doors…. It is a joy to be alive and living with my best friend.” He was referring to his wife of fifty years with whom his sex life was still “very satisfying.

A few weeks ago he said to me, completely ou of nowhere, 'You good friend to me, Liss. Loyal friend.' Then he sighed, stared off into space and added mournfully, ' Not like Sharon.' Who the hell is Sharon? What did she do to him? When I tried asking him about it, he would give me no answer. Acted suddenly like he didn't know who I was even referring to. As if I were the one who'd brought up that thieving hussy Sharon in the first place.)

You're just a boy. You don't have the faintest idea what you're talking about. You've never been out of Boston. So if I asked you about art you could give me the skinny on every art book ever written...Michelangelo? You know a lot about him I bet. Life's work, criticisms, political aspirations. But you couldn't tell me what it smells like in the Sistine Chapel. You've never stood there and looked up at that beautiful ceiling. And if I asked you about women I'm sure you could give me a syllabus of your personal favorites, and maybe you've been laid a few times too. But you couldn't tell me how it feels to wake up next to a woman and be truly happy. If I asked you about war you could refer me to a bevy of fictional and non-fictional material, but you've never been in one. You've never held your best friend's head in your lap and watched him draw his last breath, looking to you for help. And if I asked you about love I'd get a sonnet, but you've never looked at a woman and been truly vulnerable. Known that someone could kill you with a look. That someone could rescue you from grief. That God had put an angel on Earth just for you. And you wouldn't know how it felt to be her angel. To have the love be there for her forever. Through anything, through cancer. You wouldn't know about sleeping sitting up in a hospital room for two months holding her hand and not leaving because the doctors could see in your eyes that the term "visiting hours" didn't apply to you. And you wouldn't know about real loss, because that only occurs when you lose something you love more than yourself, and you've never dared to love anything that much. I look at you and I don't see an intelligent confident man, I don't see a peer, and I don't see my equal. I see a boy.

You will encounter resentful, sneering non-readers who will look at you from their beery, leery eyes, as they might some form of sub-hominid anomaly, bookimus maximus. You will encounter redditters, youtubers, blogspotters, wordpressers, twitterers, and facebookers with wired-open eyes who will shout at from you from their crazy hectoring mouths about the liberal poison of literature. You will encounter the gamers with their twitching fingers who will look upon you as a character to lock crosshairs on and blow to smithereens. You will encounter the stoners and pill-poppers who will ignore you, and ask you if you have read Jack Keroauc’s On the Road, and if you haven’t, will lecture you for two hours on that novel and refuse to acknowledge any other books written by anyone ever. You will encounter the provincial retirees, who have spent a year reading War & Peace, who strike the attitude that completing that novel is a greater achievement than the thousands of books you have read, even though they lost themselves constantly throughout the book and hated the whole experience. You will encounter the self-obsessed students whose radical interpretations of Agnes Grey and The Idiot are the most important utterance anyone anywhere has ever made with their mouths, while ignoring the thousands of novels you have read. You will encounter the parents and siblings who take every literary reference you make back to the several books they enjoyed reading as a child, and then redirect the conversation to what TV shows they have been watching. You will encounter the teachers and lecturers, for whom any text not on their syllabus is a waste of time, and look upon you as a wayward student in need of their salvation. You will encounter the travellers and backpackers who will take pity on you for wasting your life, then tell you about the Paulo Coelho they read while hostelling across Europe en route to their spiritual pilgrimage to New Delhi. You will encounter the hard-working moaners who will tell you they are too busy working for a living to sit and read all day, and when they come home from a hard day’s toil, they don’t want to sit and read pretentious rubbish. You will encounter the voracious readers who loathe competition, and who will challenge you to a literary duel, rather than engage you in friendly conversation about your latest reading. You will encounter the slack intellectuals who will immediately ask you if you have read Finnegans Wake, and when you say you have, will ask if you if you understood every line, and when you say of course not, will make some point that generally alludes to you being a halfwit. Fuck those fuckers.

In 1967, the second resolution to the cat problem was formulated by Nobel laureate Eugene Wigner, whose work was pivotal in laying the foundation of quantum mechanics and also building the atomic bomb. He said that only a conscious person can make an observation that collapses the wave function. But who is to say that this person exists? You cannot separate the observer from the observed, so maybe this person is also dead and alive. In other words, there has to be a new wave function that includes both the cat and the observer. To make sure that the observer is alive, you need a second observer to watch the first observer. This second observer is called “Wigner’s friend,” and is necessary to watch the first observer so that all waves collapse. But how do we know that the second observer is alive? The second observer has to be included in a still-larger wave function to make sure he is alive, but this can be continued indefinitely. Since you need an infinite number of “friends” to collapse the previous wave function to make sure they are alive, you need some form of “cosmic consciousness,” or God. Wigner concluded: “It was not possible to formulate the laws (of quantum theory) in a fully consistent way without reference to consciousness.” Toward the end of his life, he even became interested in the Vedanta philosophy of Hinduism. In this approach, God or some eternal consciousness watches over all of us, collapsing our wave functions so that we can say we are alive. This interpretation yields the same physical results as the Copenhagen interpretation, so this theory cannot be disproven. But the implication is that consciousness is the fundamental entity in the universe, more fundamental than atoms. The material world may come and go, but consciousness remains as the defining element, which means that consciousness, in some sense, creates reality. The very existence of the atoms we see around us is based on our ability to see and touch them.

The motto of this city should be the immortal words spoken by that French field marshal during the siege of Sebastopol, “J’y suis, j’y reste”—“I am here, and here I shall remain.” People are born here, they grow up here, they go to the University of Washington, they work here, they die here. Nobody has any desire to leave. You ask them, “What is it again that you love so much about Seattle?” and they answer, “We have everything. The mountains and the water.” This is their explanation, mountains and water. As much as I try not to engage people in the grocery checkout, I couldn’t resist one day when I overheard one refer to Seattle as “cosmopolitan.” Encouraged, I asked, “Really?” She said, Sure, Seattle is full of people from all over. “Like where?” Her answer, “Alaska. I have a ton of friends from Alaska.” Whoomp, there it is.

I suspect that it refers to that friend of our childhood, the prince of the old folk tale; the young man who travels for seven miles and comes to seven gates guarded by seven dragons, and passes through all sorts of perils, which are marked at once by moral heroism and mathematical symmetry. It is he who is to be exhibited in as a despot and oppressor; as a despot of elfland and an oppressor of seven-headed dragons. As he is rather a remote as well as a romantic figure, it may be a little difficult for historians to discover what were his true colours. His true colours, so far as I am concerned, are silver and gold and crimson, and all the colours of the rainbow.

Saints and bodhisattvas may achieve what Christians call mystical union or Buddhists call satori--a perpetual awareness of the force at the heart of the heart of things. For these enlightened few, the world is always lit. For the rest of us, such clarity comes only fitfully, in sudden glimpses or slow revelations. Quakers refer to these insights as openings. When I first heard the term from a Friend who was counseling me about my resistance to the Vietnam War, I though of how on an overcast day, sunlight pours through a break in the clouds. After the clouds drift on, eclipsing the sun, the sun keeps shining behind the veil, and the memory of its light shines on in the mind.

Welcome to Level 2. Or, as it is sometimes affectionately referred to by the Friends: God's Little Joke.

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN we pray? Have you ever really thought about that? When you bow your knee and fold your hands or walk the floor with your eyes closed, opening your heart to heaven, what exactly happens? There are very few references in the Bible about the proper procedures for how to pray, and I believe that is because prayer is more about the heart’s attitude and focus than it is about whether we stand, sit, close our eyes, or any other practice we normally associate with prayer. The truth be told, if we are supposed to pray without ceasing, we should also be able to work on an engine, write an e-mail, give a presentation, change a diaper, write a report, have coffee with a friend, encourage a coworker, pay our bills, and any of the other myriad of things we do in a day while still keeping the communication lines open with heaven. I believe that every day we need focused times of prayer, but at all other times we should be in an attitude of prayer with our spiritual ears open to the thoughts of heaven. There should be seasons of intense, concentrated prayer and fasting with specified hours set aside for intercession, and there should be times when prayer is simply a regular part of our daily routine. A great interest has arisen in the last decade around 24-7 prayer rooms where different church members pray in hour-long blocks so that unbroken intercession is raised up for their city and our world. Other churches dedicate evenings solely to prayer and worship and gather believers to lift their voices in song and petition to the Lord. While all of these are wonderful things to do, at its essence prayer is simply conversation with God. Because we have changed passports from the kingdom of this world to the kingdom of heaven, we are members of God’s family and therefore have the right to talk with our Father anytime we want because He is not limited by time and space. Yet while it isn’t difficult to speak to Him, even as a babe in faith, it does take some maturity to discern His voice from the voice of our own thoughts, dreams, and desires. This is why, when I speak about prayer, I get more questions about hearing the voice of God than anything else.

It has been well said that no man ever sank under the burden of the day. It’s when tomorrow’s burden is added to the burden of today that the weight is more than a man can bear. Never load yourselves so, my friends. If you find yourselves so loaded, at least remember this: it is your own doing, not God’s. He begs you to leave the future to Him and to mind the present.

I didn’t make a nuisance of myself, not until the end, anyway, and I never outstayed my welcome, not while there was still a welcome to be outstayed; but I was kind and sincere and thoughtful and devoted and I remembered things about her and I told her she was beautiful and bought her little presents that usually referred to a conversation we had had recently. None of this was an effort, of course, and none of it was done with any sense of calculation: I found it easy to remember things about her, because I didn’t think about anything else, and I really did think she was beautiful, and I would not have been able to prevent myself from buying her little presents, and I did not have to feign devotion. There was no effort involved. So when one of Charlie’s friends, a girl called Kate, said wistfully one lunchtime that she wished she could find somebody like me, I was surprised and thrilled. Thrilled because Charlie was listening, and it didn’t do me any harm, but surprised because all I had done was act out of self-interest. And yet this was enough, it seemed, to turn me into someone desirable. Weird

had beloved friends whom I sometimes referred to as family, but our commitments to each other were informal and intermittent, more familial in word than in deed. Blood is thicker than water, my mother had always said when I was growing up, a sentiment I’d often disputed. But it turned out that it didn’t matter whether she was right or wrong. They both flowed out of my cupped palms.

In the introduction, Amy Butler the senior minister at Riverside and a friend of Clinton's, referred to the Trump Administration as a source of anguish and confusion, and everyone nodded solemly'.

I call education, not that which smothers a woman with accomplishments, but that which tends to consolidate a firm and regular system of character; that which tends to form a friend, a companion, and a wife. I call education not that which is made up of the shreds and patches of useless arts, but that which inculcates principles, polishes taste, regulates temper, cultivates reason, subdues the passions, directs the feelings, habituates to reflection, trains to self-denial, and, more especially, that which refers all actions, feelings, sentiments, tastes, and passions, to the love and fear of God.

I was extremely curious about the alternatives to the kind of life I had been leading, and my friends and I exchanged rumors and scraps of information we dug from official publications. I was struck less by the West's technological developments and high living standards than by the absence of political witch-hunts, the lack of consuming suspicion, the dignity of the individual, and the incredible amount of liberty. To me, the ultimate proof of freedom in the West was that there seemed to be so many people there attacking the West and praising China. Almost every other day the front page of Reference, the newspaper which carded foreign press items, would feature some eulogy of Mao and the Cultural Revolution. At first I was angered by these, but they soon made me see how tolerant another society could be. I realized that this was the kind of society I wanted to live in: where people were allowed to hold different, even outrageous views. I began to see that it was the very tolerance of oppositions, of protesters, that kept the West progressing. Still, I could not help being irritated by some observations. Once I read an article by a Westerner who came to China to see some old friends, university professors, who told him cheerfully how they had enjoyed being denounced and sent to the back end of beyond, and how much they had relished being reformed. The author concluded that Mao had indeed made the Chinese into 'new people' who would regard what was misery to a Westerner as pleasure. I was aghast. Did he not know that repression was at its worst when there was no complaint? A hundred times more so when the victim actually presented a smiling face? Could he not see to what a pathetic condition these professors had been reduced, and what horror must have been involved to degrade them so? I did not realize that the acting that the Chinese were putting on was something to which Westerners were unaccustomed, and which they could not always decode. I did not appreciate either that information about China was not easily available, or was largely misunderstood, in the West, and that people with no experience of a regime like China's could take its propaganda and rhetoric at face value. As a result, I assumed that these eulogies were dishonest. My friends and I would joke that they had been bought by our government's 'hospitality." When foreigners were allowed into certain restricted places in China following Nixon's visit, wherever they went the authorities immediately cordoned off enclaves even within these enclaves. The best transport facilities, shops, restaurants, guest houses and scenic spots were reserved for them, with signs reading "For Foreign Guests Only." Mao-tai, the most sought-after liquor, was totally unavailable to ordinary Chinese, but freely available to foreigners. The best food was saved for foreigners. The newspapers proudly reported that Henry Kissinger had said his waistline had expanded as a result of the many twelve-course banquets he enjoyed during his visits to China. This was at a time when in Sichuan, "Heaven's Granary," our meat ration was half a pound per month, and the streets of Chengdu were full of homeless peasants who had fled there from famine in the north, and were living as beggars. There was great resentment among the population about how the foreigners were treated like lords. My friends and I began saying among ourselves: "Why do we attack the Kuomintang for allowing signs saying "No Chinese or Dogs" aren't we doing the same? Getting hold of information became an obsession. I benefited enormously from my ability to read English, as although the university library had been looted during the Cultural Revolution, most of the books it had lost had been in Chinese. Its extensive English-language collection had been turned upside down, but was still largely intact.

Some of my wise, more evolved friends say that loathing certain people, henceforth referred to as Them, is not worth the effort, that they are too thin as human forms to actually hate. I say, ‘Not for me, baby.

Vanny, were you gonna want me to help you with your draft list again this year?” I groaned. “I forgot. My brother just messaged me about it. I can’t let him win again this year, Zac. I can’t put up with his crap.” He raised his hand in a dismissive gesture. “I got you. Don’t worry about it.” “Thank—what?” Aiden had his glass halfway to his mouth and was frowning. “You play fantasy football?” he asked, referring to the online role-playing game that millions of people participated in. Participants got to build imaginary teams during a mock draft, made up of players throughout the league. I’d been wrangled into playing against my brother and some of our mutual friends about three years ago and had joined in ever since. Back then, I had no idea what the hell a cornerback was, much less a bye week, but I’d learned a lot since then.

When you say to someone “follow your heart”, it actually refers to the rhetorical representation of various emotions, that are precisely produced from neural activity of the limbic system. So, the metaphoric heart we always boast about while giving advice to our friends, is actually not anywhere near the biological organ known as heart. Rather it too, like all other elements of the human mind exists only in the brain.

Sadly, the dark echoes of our time in Iraq still resonate with many of Echo Company, who battle with the effects of post-traumatic stress (PTS). Including me. I never refer to it as a disorder. A good friend of mine, Charles Adam Walker, taught me that. He wrote an article called “Postcombat Residue” in the December 2013 issue of the Marine Corps Gazette. It shaped the way I look at PTS today. Adam uses a prophetic analogy, likening the effects and residue of combat to those on a stained, well-used coffee mug. Indelibly tainted, yet still capable of performing its intended use day in and day out—but the residue will always remain.

[Judi Dench, referring to departed colleagues] Where are all those people? Can't believe it. How can it happen? They were so alive and -- so present, so vital. That's why we have to love the now, haven't we? Try not to live in the future. [Brendan O'Hea] Or the past. [JD} Well, you have to live a little in the past, because it's part of us, it's who we are. But don't -dwell- in the past. God, we should make the best of every single second we have.

The BBC seems to repay the financial support it receives from the EU (which it receives in addition to the licence fee payments British citizens are forced to pay) by opposing Brexit, by defending unpopular EU policies (such as those on immigration), by insisting that all measurements referred to in its programmes are in EU friendly metric units rather than proper British imperial measurements and by taking every opportunity to disparage England and the English.

Not long ago, having expressed some disagreements in print with an old comrade of long standing, I was sent a response that he had published in an obscure newspaper. This riposte referred to my opinions as ‘racist.’ I would obviously scorn to deny such an allegation on my own behalf. I would, rather, prefer to repudiate it on behalf of my former friend. He had known me for many years and cooperated with me on numerous projects, and I am quite confident that he would never have as a collaborator anyone he suspected of racial prejudice. But it does remind me, and not for the first time, that quarrels on the left have a tendency to become miniature treason trials, replete with all kinds of denunciation. There's a general tendency—not by any means confined to radicals but in some way specially associated with them—to believe that once the lowest motive for a dissenting position has been found, it must in some way be the real one.

When we meet someone new, we quickly answer two questions: “Can I trust this person?” and “Can I respect this person?” In our research, my colleagues and I have referred to these dimensions as warmth and competence respectively. Usually we think that a person we’ve just met is either more warm than competent or more competent than warm, but not both in equal measure. We like our distinctions to be clear—it’s a human bias. So we classify new acquaintances into types. Tiziana Casciaro, in her research into organizations, refers to these types as lovable fools or competent jerks.2 Occasionally we see people as incompetent and cold—foolish jerks—or as warm and competent—lovable stars. The latter is the golden quadrant, because receiving trust and respect from other people allows you to interact well and get things done. But we don’t value the two traits equally. First we judge warmth or trustworthiness, which we consider to be the more important of the two dimensions. Oscar Ybarra and his colleagues found, for instance, that people process words related to warmth and morality (friendly, honest, and others) faster than words related to competence (creative, skillful, and others).3 Why do we prioritize warmth over competence? Because from an evolutionary perspective, it is more crucial to our survival to know whether a person deserves our trust. If he doesn’t, we’d better keep our distance, because he’s potentially dangerous, especially if he’s competent. We do value people who are capable, especially in circumstances where that trait is necessary, but we only notice that after we’ve judged their trustworthiness. Recalling

There are strange friendships,” Dostoevsky writes, with reference to Stepan Trofimovich and Varvara Petrovna in Demons. “Two friends are almost ready to eat each other, they live like that all their lives, and yet they cannot part. Parting is even impossible: the friend who waxes capricious and breaks it off will be the first to fall sick and die.” A marvelous passage, communicating so economically the diabolical undercurrent of certain friendships, their weird fatalism.

I forgot to mention that Paul in person looks just as outlandish as his house—a claim I lay with the utmost aesthetic respect. He has thick dreadlocks, a beaded wizard’s beard, and tattoos. He traveled in a purple velvet frock coat and a top hat with an ermine skull attached to the brim. No one knows his age. He was once described by a mutual friend of ours as “an eighteenth-century highwayman reimagined by Tim Burton.” Paul refers to himself as “a cross between Prince and Vlad the Impaler.

For now, the Simple Daily Practice means doing ONE thing every day. Try any one of these things each day: A) Sleep eight hours. B) Eat two meals instead of three. C) No TV. D) No junk food. E) No complaining for one whole day. F) No gossip. G) Return an e-mail from five years ago. H) Express thanks to a friend. I) Watch a funny movie or a stand-up comic. J) Write down a list of ideas. The ideas can be about anything. K) Read a spiritual text. Any one that is inspirational to you. The Bible, The Tao te Ching, anything you want. L) Say to yourself when you wake up, “I’m going to save a life today.” Keep an eye out for that life you can save. M) Take up a hobby. Don’t say you don’t have time. Learn the piano. Take chess lessons. Do stand-up comedy. Write a novel. Do something that takes you out of your current rhythm. N) Write down your entire schedule. The schedule you do every day. Cross out one item and don’t do that anymore. O) Surprise someone. P) Think of ten people you are grateful for. Q) Forgive someone. You don’t have to tell them. Just write it down on a piece of paper and burn the paper. It turns out this has the same effect in terms of releasing oxytocin in the brain as actually forgiving them in person. R) Take the stairs instead of the elevator. S) I’m going to steal this next one from the 1970s pop psychology book Don’t Say Yes When You Want to Say No: when you find yourself thinking of that special someone who is causing you grief, think very quietly, “No.” If you think of him and (or?) her again, think loudly, “No!” Again? Whisper, “No!” Again, say it. Louder. Yell it. Louder. And so on. T) Tell someone every day that you love them. U) Don’t have sex with someone you don’t love. V) Shower. Scrub. Clean the toxins off your body. W) Read a chapter in a biography about someone who is an inspiration to you. X) Make plans to spend time with a friend. Y) If you think, “Everything would be better off if I were dead,” then think, “That’s really cool. Now I can do anything I want and I can postpone this thought for a while, maybe even a few months.” Because what does it matter now? The planet might not even be around in a few months. Who knows what could happen with all these solar flares. You know the ones I’m talking about. Z) Deep breathing. When the vagus nerve is inflamed, your breathing becomes shallower. Your breath becomes quick. It’s fight-or-flight time! You are panicking. Stop it! Breathe deep. Let me tell you something: most people think “yoga” is all those exercises where people are standing upside down and doing weird things. In the Yoga Sutras, written in 300 B.C., there are 196 lines divided into four chapters. In all those lines, ONLY THREE OF THEM refer to physical exercise. It basically reads, “Be able to sit up straight.” That’s it. That’s the only reference in the Yoga Sutras to physical exercise. Claudia always tells me that yogis measure their lives in breaths, not years. Deep breathing is what keeps those breaths going.

Many of our friends who grew up here now live in Brooklyn, where they are at work on “book-length narratives.” Another contingent has moved to the Bay Area and made a fortune there. Every year or so, these west-coasters travel back to Michigan and call us up for dinner or drinks, occasions they use to educate us on the inner workings of the tech industry. They refer to the companies they work for in the first person plural, a habit I have yet to acculturate to. Occasionally they lapse into the utopian, speaking of robotics ordinances and brain-computer interfaces and the mystical, labyrinthine channels of capital, conveying it all with the fervency of pioneers on a civilizing mission. Being lectured quickly becomes dull, and so my husband and I, to amuse ourselves, will sometimes play the rube. “So what, exactly, is a venture capitalist?” we’ll say. Or: “Gosh, it sounds like science fiction.” I suppose we could tell them the truth—that nothing they’re proclaiming is news; that the boom and bustle of the coastal cities, like the smoke from those California wildfires, liberally wafts over the rest of the country. But that seems a bit rude. We are, after all, Midwesterners. Here, work is work and money is money, and nobody speaks of these things as though they were spiritual movements or expressions of one’s identity.

I do not recall that I felt any tenderness of conscience in reference to Mrs. Joe, when the fear of being found out was lifted off me. But I loved Joe,—perhaps for no better reason in those early days than because the dear fellow let me love him,—and, as to him, my inner self was not so easily composed. It was much upon my mind (particularly when I first saw him looking about for his file) that I ought to tell Joe the whole truth. Yet I did not, and for the reason that I mistrusted that if I did, he would think me worse than I was. The fear of losing Joe’s confidence, and of thenceforth sitting in the chimney corner at night staring drearily at my forever lost companion and friend, tied up my tongue. I morbidly represented to myself that if Joe knew it, I never afterwards could see him at the fireside feeling his fair whisker, without thinking that he was meditating on it. That, if Joe knew it, I never afterwards could see him glance, however casually, at yesterday’s meat or pudding when it came on to-day’s table, without thinking that he was debating whether I had been in the pantry. That, if Joe knew it, and at any subsequent period of our joint domestic life remarked that his beer was flat or thick, the conviction that he suspected Tar in it, would bring a rush of blood to my face. In a word, I was too cowardly to do what I knew to be right, as I had been too cowardly to avoid doing what I knew to be wrong. I had had no intercourse with the world at that time, and I imitated none of its many inhabitants who act in this manner. Quite an untaught genius, I made the discovery of the line of action for myself.

Let us suppose you give your three-year-old daughter a coloring book and a box of crayons for her birthday. The following day, with the proud smile only a little once can muster, she presents her first pictures for inspection. She has colored the sun black, the grass purple, and the sky green. In the lower right-hand corner, she has added woozy wonders of floating slabs and hovering rings; on the left, a panoply of colorful, carefree squiggles. You marvel at her bold strokes and intuit that her psyche is railing against its own cosmic puniness in the face of a big, ugly world. Later at the office, you share with your staff your daughter's first artistic effort and you make veiled references to the early work of van Gogh. A little child can not do a bad coloring; nor can a child of God do bad prayer. "A father is delighted when his little one, leaving off her toys and friends, runs to him and climbs into his arms. As he holds hi little one close to him, he cared little whether the child is looking around, her attention flittering from one thing to another or just settling down to sleep. Essentially the child is choosing to be with the father, confident of the love, the care, the security that is hers in those arms. Our prayer is much like that. We settle down in our Father's arms, in his loving hands. Our minds, our thoughts, our imagination may flit about here and there; we might even fall asleep; but essentially we are choosing for this time to remain intimately with our Father, giving ourselves to him, receiving his love and care, letting him enjoy us as he will. It is very simple prayer. It is very childlike prayer. It is prayer that opens us out to all the delights of the kingdom.

I refer to the Gospel account in which Christ weeps at the grave of his friend Lazarus. We need to pause and consider the meaning of these tears, for in this very moment there occurs a unique transformation within religion in relation to the long-standing religious approach to death. Up to this moment the purpose of religion, as well as the purpose of philosophy, consisted in enabling man to come to terms with death, and if possible even to make death desirable: death as the liberation from suffering; death as freedom from this changing, busy, evil world; death as the beginning of eternity. Here, in fact, is the sum total of religious and philosophical teaching before Christ and outside of Christianity - in primitive religions, in Greek philosophy, in Buddhism, and so forth. But Christ *weeps* at the grave of his friend, and in so doing his own struggle with death, his refusal to acknowledge it and to come to terms with it. Suddenly, death ceases to be a normal and natural fact, it appears as something foreign, as unnatural, as fearsome and perverted, and it is acknowledged as an enemy: 'The last enemy to be destroyed is death.

Let’s say you manage to claw your way into the friend zone, and then by some fucking miracle you get yourself beyond that and into the spider lady’s good graces without losing an eye, how would you like me to refer to her?” “I don’t know, asshole. How about Queen. Or, Your Highness. Fuck off.

I wish I’d told them how much I love them. Sometimes people were referring to parents or spouses, other times it was friends. In almost every case, it was because they’d been so busy in their lives that they took their loved ones for granted. Or they just never knew how to find the right words.

There is a story that Simonides was dining at the house of a wealthy nobleman named Scopas at Crannon in Thessaly, and chanted a lyric poem which he had composed in honor of his host, in which he followed the custom of the poets by including for decorative purposes a long passage referring to Castor and Pollux; whereupon Scopas with excessive meanness told him he would pay him half the fee agreed on for the poem, and if he liked he might apply for the balance to his sons of Tyndaraus, as they had gone halves in the panegyric. The story runs that a little later a message was brought to Simonides to go outside, as two young men were standing at the door who earnestly requested him to come out; so he rose from his seat and went out, and could not see anybody; but in the interval of his absence the roof of the hall where Scopas was giving the banquet fell in, crushing Scopas himself and his relations underneath the ruins and killing them; and when their friends wanted to bury them but were altogether unable to know them apart as they had been completely crushed, the story goes that Simonides was enabled by his recollection of the place in which each of them had been reclining at table to identify them for separate interment; and that this circumstance suggested to him the discovery of the truth that the best aid to clearness of memory consists in orderly arrangement. He inferred that persons desiring to train this faculty must select localities and form mental images of the facts they wish to remember and store those images in the localities, with the result that the arrangement of the localities will preserve the order of the facts, and the images of the facts will designate the facts themselves, and we shall employ the localities and images respectively as a wax writing tablet and the letters written on it.

Here is an example I’m sure you can relate to on some level. Say you really liked someone who doesn’t like you back. Maybe you were in a relationship with this person and maybe not. The focus of your whole being might be on their unwillingness to give you love. If their love is the only source of love you see, you won’t see the love that might be coming to you from family, friends, colleagues, and even potential love interests. Because you’re not looking for that love. You’re not seeing it as a source of love. So, indirectly, you are blinding yourself to the love around you. You might believe you’re not worthy of love, and you’ve supported that belief with evidence from your past, plus evidence from your current situation. If that’s the case, your mind is going to search for every piece of evidence that further proves the story you believe about yourself, or what you make something that happened mean about you. You might see that story referred to as the “ego,” which is simply the Latin word for “I.” From the moment you wake up to the moment you fall asleep, your ego is looking for proof that reinforces what you believe about yourself. You walk around constantly trying to make everything mean something about you.

It is understandable if you are struggling to reconcile images of a smooth moving Justin Timberlake singing, “I’m bringing sexy back…” with the experience of working in aged care! Sexy is often everything that aged care is not. But by using the word “sexy” I am not referring to the high octane experience of being intimate with someone. Who knows though, your older adult clients may well want to talk about such things! How senior friendly to encourage this? What I am referring to is bringing the spice or pizzazz associated with respect back to our Western society that appears to have lost its way in valuing seniors.

Pardon This word is the most notorious pet hate of the upper and upper-middle classes. Jilly Cooper recalls overhearing her son telling a friend ‘Mummy says that “pardon” is a much worse word than “fuck”.’ He was quite right: to the uppers and upper-middles, using such an unmistakably lower-class term is worse than swearing. Some even refer to lower-middle-class suburbs as ‘Pardonia’. Here is a good class-test you can try: when talking to an English person, deliberately say something too quietly for them to hear you properly. A lower-middle or middle-middle person will say, ‘Pardon?’; an upper-middle will say ‘Sorry?’ (or perhaps ‘Sorry – what?’ or ‘What – sorry?’); but an upper-class and a working-class person will both just say, ‘What?’ The working-class person may drop the t – ‘Wha’?’ – but this will be the only difference. Some upper-working-class people with middle-class aspirations might say ‘pardon’, in a misguided attempt to sound ‘posh’.

I don’t know what you want to call it, what we are to each other now,” I said. “But I wanted you to know that your friendship has...quite literally altered me.” For a few long seconds, he just stared at me. There were new things to discover in his face still, even after so long spent in close company. Faint shadows under his cheekbones. The scar that ran through his eyebrow. “You don’t know what to call it?” he said, when he finally spoke again. His armor hit the ground with a clatter, and he reached for me. Wrapped an arm around my waist. Pulled me against him. Whispered against my mouth: “Sivbarat. Zethetet.” One Shotet word, one Thuvhesit. Sivbarat referred to a person’s dearest friend, someone so close that to lose them would be like losing a limb. And the Thuvhesit word, I had never heard before. We didn’t quite know how to fit together, lips too wet, teeth where they didn’t belong. But that was all right; we tried again, and this time it was like the spark that came from friction, a jolt of energy through my body. He clutched at my sides, pulled my shirt into his fists. His hands were deft from handling carving knives and powders, and he smelled like it, too, like herbs and potions and vapor. I pressed into him, feeling the rough stairwell wall against my hands, and his quick, hot breaths against my neck. I had wondered, I had wondered what it was like to go through life without feeling pain, but this was not the absence of pain I had always craved, it was the opposite, it was pure sensation. Soft, warm, aching, heavy, everything, everything. I heard, echoing through the safe house, a kind of commotion. But before I let myself pull away so we could see what it was, I asked him quietly, “What does it mean, ‘zethetet’?” He looked away, like he was embarrassed. I caught sight of that creeping blush around the collar of his shirt. “Beloved,” he said softly. He kissed me again, then picked up his armor and led the way toward the renegades. I couldn’t stop smiling.

When asked about her involvements, Joni most often refers to her work at JAF Ministries, including Wheels for the World—a program through which used wheelchairs are collected, refurbished, and hand-delivered, along with Bibles, to needy disabled people in developing nations. Chuck Colson has stated, “My friend Joni Eareckson Tada is one of God’s choice servants of today.” Philip Yancey has added, “Through her public example, Joni has done more to straighten out warped views of suffering than all the theologians put together. Her life is a triumph of healing—a healing of the spirit, the most difficult kind.” You can read more about this remarkable woman in the twentieth-anniversary edition of her autobiography, titled Joni, published by Zondervan.

regrets, Palazzo,” Luca said wryly. “Now that you’re here, you know Shane won’t let you leave until everyone’s smashed.” Rafe grimaced. “True.” Luca raised his glass. “To your fortune, amico.” Knowing that his friend was not referring to his material possessions, Rafe raised his glass in return, murmuring quietly, “I wish you the same luck, amico.” After downing his third shot,

You know I’m married,’ he said. ‘You read my cuttings.’ I’ve googled every last reference to you, she told him silently. ‘I’ve never been . . . unfaithful before. I still can’t quite articulate what happened.’ ‘I blame the quiche,’ she quipped, wincing. ‘You do something to me, Ellie Haworth. I haven’t written a word in forty-eight hours.’ He paused. ‘You make me forget what I want to say.’ Then I’m doomed, she thought, because as soon as she had felt his weight against her, his mouth on hers, she had known – despite everything she had ever said to her friends about married men, everything she had ever believed – that she required only the faintest acknowledgement from him of what had happened for her to be lost. A year on, she still hadn’t begun to look for a way out.

Exactly who Merowdis was referring to when she said ‘just us’ wasn’t clear. The dogs and Apple assumed she meant them. The trees were quite sure she was addressing them. A spider making a web in a patch of bramble thought she must be addressing him and that this was, in some sense, an overture of friendship. In reply he left off the first web and began another, the second web being a well-argued treatise on the importance of friendship and what friends owed each other. That Merowdis could not read what he had written, indeed was not capable of distinguishing it from any other spider web in the woods, did not occur to him. (If you ever get a chance to learn what is written in spider webs, take it. Spiders have been writing since the world began and know many interesting things.)

Parnet: I want you to talk about desire. What is desire, exactly? Let's consider the question as simply as possible. When Anti-Oedipus... Deleuze: It's not what they thought it was, in any case, not what they thought it was, even back then. Even, I mean, the most charming people who were... It was a big ambiguity, it was a big misunderstanding, or rather a little one, a little misunderstanding. I believe that we wanted to say something very simple. In fact, we had an enormous ambition, notably when one writes a book, we thought that we would say something new, specifically that one way or another, people who wrote before us didn't understand what desire meant. That is, in undertaking our task as philosophers, we were hoping to propose a new concept of desire. But, regarding concepts, people who don't do philosophy mustn't think that they are so abstract... On the contrary, they refer to things that are extremely simple, extremely concrete, we'll see this later... There are no philosophical concepts that do not refer to non-philosophical coordinates. It's very simple, very concrete. What we wanted to express was the simplest thing in the world. We wanted to say: up until now, you speak abstractly about desire because you extract an object that's presumed to be the object of your desire. So, one could say, I desire a woman, I desire to leave on a trip, I desire this, that. And we were saying something really very simple, simple, simple: You never desire someone or something, you always desire an aggregate. It's not complicated. Our question was: what is the nature of relations between elements in order for there to be desire, for these elements to become desirable? I mean, I don't desire a woman - I'm ashamed to say things like that since Proust already said it, and it's beautiful in Proust: I don't desire a woman, I also desire a landscape that is enveloped in this woman, a landscape that, if needs be - I don't know - but that I can feel. As long as I haven't yet unfolded the landscape that envelops her, I will not be happy, that is, my desire will not have been attained, my desire will remain unsatisfied. I believe in an aggregate with two terms: woman/landscape, and it's something completely different. If a woman says, "I desire a dress," or "I desire (some) thing" or "(some) blouse," it's obvious that she does not desire this dress or that blouse in the abstract. She desires it in an entire context, a context of her own life that she is going to organize, the desire in relation not only with a landscape, but with people who are her friends, with people who are not her friends, with her profession, etc. I never desire some thing all by itself, I don't desire an aggregate either, I desire from within an aggregate.

The name Gilberte passed close by me, evoking all the more forcibly her whom it labelled in that it did not merely refer to her, as one speaks of a man in his absence, but was directly addressed to her; it passed thus close by me, in action, so to speak, with a force that increased with the curve of its trajectory and as it drew near to its target;—carrying in its wake, I could feel, the knowledge, the impression of her to whom it was addressed that belonged not to me but to the friend who called to her, everything that, while she uttered the words, she more or less vividly reviewed, possessed in her memory, of their daily intimacy, of the visits that they paid to each other, of that unknown existence which was all the more inaccessible, all the more painful to me from being, conversely, so familiar, so tractable to this happy girl who let her message brush past me without my being able to penetrate its surface, who flung it on the air with a light-hearted cry: letting float in the atmosphere the delicious attar which that message had distilled, by touching them with precision, from certain invisible points in Mlle. Swann's life, from the evening to come, as it would be, after dinner, at her home,—forming, on its celestial passage through the midst of the children and their nursemaids, a little cloud, exquisitely coloured, like the cloud that, curling over one of Poussin's gardens, reflects minutely, like a cloud in the opera, teeming with chariots and horses, some apparition of the life of the gods; casting, finally, on that ragged grass, at the spot on which she stood [....]

JAPANESE PSYCHOLOGY AND SOCIAL BEHAVIOR are often explained in terms of tatemae and honne. Tatemae, meaning “front” or “facade,” refers to the face one shows the world, the opinions one expresses in public, or the role one is obligated to play based on one’s rank or position. Honne describes “the truth” or “honest feelings,” shared only within a trusted circle of family and friends. To let slip the mask, revealing honne to another, is a signal of intimacy or trust; it is tantamount to an offer of friendship. These ideas are hardly unique to Japan, and versions of tatemae and honne are alive and well in the West. But in the Japanese way of thinking, it is perfectly natural that tatemae and honne should be at odds, and no one need agonize over the discrepancy, or go out of his way to put them to rights.

In Paris, Simon Thibault had loved his wife, though not always faithfully or with a great deal of attention. They had been married for twenty-five years. There had been two children, a summer month spent every year at the sea with friends, various jobs, various family dogs, large family Christmases that included many elderly relatives. Edith Thibault was an elegant woman in a city of so many thousands of elegant women that often over the course of years he forgot about her. Entire days would pass when she never once crossed his mind. He did not stop to think what she might be doing or wonder if she was happy, at least not Edith by herself, Edith as his wife. Then, in a wave of government promises made and retracted, they were sent to this country, which, between the two of them was always referred to as ce pays maudit, “this godforsaken country.” Both of them faced the appointment with dread and stoic practicality, but within a matter of days after their arrival a most remarkable thing happened: he found her again, like something he never knew was missing, like a song he had memorized in his youth and had then forgotten. Suddenly, clearly, he could see her, the way he had been able to see her at twenty, not her physical self at twenty, because in every sense she was more beautiful to him now, but he felt that old sensation, the leaping of his heart, the reckless flush of desire. He would find her in the house, cutting fresh paper to line the shelves or lying across their bed on her stomach writing letters to their daughters who were attending university in Paris, and he was breathless. Had she always been like this, had he never known? Had he known and then somehow, carelessly, forgotten? In this country with its dirt roads and yellow rice he discovered he loved her, he was her. Perhaps this would not have been true if he had been the ambassador to Spain. Without these particular circumstances, this specific and horrible place, he might never have realized that the only true love of his life was his wife.

Left with her in the woods, I was overwhelmed by her time and attention, a devotion that I learned could both be an auspicious privilege and have smothering consequences. My mother was a homemaker. Making a home had been her livelihood since I was born, and while she was vigilant and protective, she wasn’t what you would call coddling. She was not what I’d refer to as a “Mommy-Mom,” which was what I envied most of my friends for having. A Mommy-Mom is someone who takes an interest in everything her child has to say even when there is no actual way she gives a shit, who whisks you away to the doctor when you complain of the slightest ailment, who tells you “they’re just jealous” if someone makes fun of you, or “you always look beautiful to me” even if you don’t, or “I love this!” when you give them a piece of crap for Christmas.

In the eyes of his contemporaries, Caesar was cast in the mold of a Catilina: bright, radical and scandalous. He had already acquired an exotic reputation. His adventures during his teens when he had been on the run from Sulla had been only the start. In his twenties, like many young upper-class Romans, he had gone soldiering in Asia and won the Civic Crown—an award analogous to the Medal of Honor—for conspicuous gallantry in action. He may also have had a brief love affair with the King of Bithynia, but it did not inhibit his vigorous sex life among the wives of his contemporaries back in Rome. A Senator once referred to him in a speech as “every woman’s man and every man’s woman” and for the rest of Caesar’s career he had to endure much heavy-handed jocularity about the incident. A few years later Caesar was captured by pirates, who were endemic in the Mediterranean; while waiting for his ransom to arrive he got onto friendly terms with his captors, but warned them that he would return and have them crucified. They thought he was joking. They were not the last to underestimate Caesar’s determination and regret it. AS soon as he was free, he raised a squadron on his own initiative, tracked down the pirates and executed them, just as he had promised.

As seminary students Jim and friends examined the Bible to find every reference to the poor — and they found more than two thousand. In fact, they concluded one of every sixteen verses was about the poor. Then a zealous friend decided to cut out every Bible verse about the poor to see what the Bible would look like. As he tells the story, “that old Bible literally was in shreds. It wouldn’t hold together. It was a Bible full of holes.

Why, all our art treasures of to-day are only the dug-up commonplaces of three or four hundred years ago. I wonder if there is real intrinsic beauty in the old soup-plates, beer-mugs, and candle-snuffers that we prize so now, or if it is only the halo of age glowing around them that gives them their charms in our eyes. The “old blue” that we hang about our walls as ornaments were the common every-day household utensils of a few centuries ago; and the pink shepherds and the yellow shepherdesses that we hand round now for all our friends to gush over, and pretend they understand, were the unvalued mantel-ornaments that the mother of the eighteenth century would have given the baby to suck when he cried. Will it be the same in the future? Will the prized treasures of to-day always be the cheap trifles of the day before? Will rows of our willow-pattern dinner-plates be ranged above the chimneypieces of the great in the years 2000 and odd? Will the white cups with the gold rim and the beautiful gold flower inside (species unknown), that our Sarah Janes now break in sheer light-heartedness of spirit, be carefully mended, and stood upon a bracket, and dusted only by the lady of the house? That china dog that ornaments the bedroom of my furnished lodgings. It is a white dog. Its eyes blue. Its nose is a delicate red, with spots. Its head is painfully erect, its expression is amiability carried to verge of imbecility. I do not admire it myself. Considered as a work of art, I may say it irritates me. Thoughtless friends jeer at it, and even my landlady herself has no admiration for it, and excuses its presence by the circumstance that her aunt gave it to her. But in 200 years’ time it is more than probable that that dog will be dug up from somewhere or other, minus its legs, and with its tail broken, and will be sold for old china, and put in a glass cabinet. And people will pass it round, and admire it. They will be struck by the wonderful depth of the colour on the nose, and speculate as to how beautiful the bit of the tail that is lost no doubt was. We, in this age, do not see the beauty of that dog. We are too familiar with it. It is like the sunset and the stars: we are not awed by their loveliness because they are common to our eyes. So it is with that china dog. In 2288 people will gush over it. The making of such dogs will have become a lost art. Our descendants will wonder how we did it, and say how clever we were. We shall be referred to lovingly as “those grand old artists that flourished in the nineteenth century, and produced those china dogs.” The “sampler” that the eldest daughter did at school will be spoken of as “tapestry of the Victorian era,” and be almost priceless. The blue-and-white mugs of the present-day roadside inn will be hunted up, all cracked and chipped, and sold for their weight in gold, and rich people will use them for claret cups; and travellers from Japan will buy up all the “Presents from Ramsgate,” and “Souvenirs of Margate,” that may have escaped destruction, and take them back to Jedo as ancient English curios.

In modern street-English, we use “hell” as a catchall term to describe the bad place (usually red hot) where sinful people are condemned to punishment and torment after they die. This simplistic, selective, and horrifying perception of hell is due in large part to nearly 400 years of the King James Version’s monopoly in English-speaking congregations (not to mention centuries of imaginative religious art). Rather than acknowledge the variety of terms, images, and concepts that the Bible uses for divine judgment, the KJV translators opted to combine them all under the single term “hell.” In truth, the array of biblical pictures and meanings that this one word is expected to convey is so vast that they appear contradictory. For example, is hell a lake of fire or a place of utter darkness? Is it a purifying forge or a torture chamber? Is it exclusion from God’s presence or the consuming fire of God’s glory? While modern scholarship acknowledges the mis- or over-translation of Sheol, Hades, and Gehenna as “hell” - especially if by “hell” we refer automatically to the eternal punishment of the wicked in conscious torment in a lake of fire - the thoroughly discussed limitations of hell language and imagery have been slow to permeate the theology of pulpits and pews in much of the church. Why the reluctance? Do we resist out of ignorance? Or are we afraid that abandoning infernalism implies abandoning faithfulness to Scripture and sound doctrine? After all, for so long we were taught that to be a Christian - especially an evangelical - is to be an infernalist. And yet, not a few of my friends have confessed that they have given up on being “good Christians” because they can no longer assent to the kind of God that creates and sends people to hell as they imagine it.

The phrases, “on the level” and, “third degree” are familiar to us all, but few of us have stopped to think of their origins. They are, in fact, overt references to the Craft of Freemasonry. In fact, every time a judge or chairperson pounds his or her gavel; every time an unworthy job applicant is blackballed; every time we refer to a faithful friend as being true blue—even when we shake hands to seal a deal—we are echoing Masonic traditions. The

The fear Jackson refers to is not fear of lesbianism—or, at least, not only fear of lesbianism. It is the fear of what lesbianism represented to her, something that on one level she fervently desired even as she feared it: a life undefined by marriage, on her own terms. Constance and Merricat are indeed “two halves of the same person,” together forming one identity, just as a man and a woman are traditionally supposed to do in marriage. Not finding that wholeness in marriage, Jackson sought it elsewhere: first with Jeanne Beatty, and later with her friend Barbara Karmiller, also younger, who came back into her life shortly after she finished Castle. Indeed, the novel, in its final version, is not about “two women murdering a man.” It is about two women who metaphorically murder male society and its expectations for them by insisting on living separate from it, governed only by themselves.

Growing up in the projects, it was common for us to refer to where we lived as our "house." My friends would always ask if they could come over to my house, and vice versa; we never said , "Can I come over to your unit?" But after visiting Mary in a real house, I felt how marginal we were in the projects. Things they took for granted, like space, were new to me. Mary's windows opened up to the view of the garden in the back, birds, and blue sky, without bars.

1)    The woman has intuitive feelings that she is at risk. 2)    At the inception of the relationship, the man accelerated the pace, prematurely placing on the agenda such things as commitment, living together, and marriage. 3)    He resolves conflict with intimidation, bullying, and violence. 4)    He is verbally abusive. 5)    He uses threats and intimidation as instruments of control or abuse. This includes threats to harm physically, to defame, to embarrass, to restrict freedom, to disclose secrets, to cut off support, to abandon, and to commit suicide. 6)    He breaks or strikes things in anger. He uses symbolic violence (tearing a wedding photo, marring a face in a photo, etc.). 7)    He has battered in prior relationships. 8)    He uses alcohol or drugs with adverse affects (memory loss, hostility, cruelty). 9)    He cites alcohol or drugs as an excuse or explanation for hostile or violent conduct (“That was the booze talking, not me; I got so drunk I was crazy”). 10)   His history includes police encounters for behavioral offenses (threats, stalking, assault, battery). 11)   There has been more than one incident of violent behavior (including vandalism, breaking things, throwing things). 12)   He uses money to control the activities, purchase, and behavior of his wife/partner. 13)   He becomes jealous of anyone or anything that takes her time away from the relationship; he keeps her on a “tight leash,” requires her to account for her time. 14)   He refuses to accept rejection. 15)   He expects the relationship to go on forever, perhaps using phrases like “together for life;” “always;” “no matter what.” 16)   He projects extreme emotions onto others (hate, love, jealousy, commitment) even when there is no evidence that would lead a reasonable person to perceive them. 17)   He minimizes incidents of abuse. 18)   He spends a disproportionate amount of time talking about his wife/partner and derives much of his identity from being her husband, lover, etc. 19)   He tries to enlist his wife’s friends or relatives in a campaign to keep or recover the relationship. 20)   He has inappropriately surveilled or followed his wife/partner. 21)   He believes others are out to get him. He believes that those around his wife/partner dislike him and encourage her to leave. 22)   He resists change and is described as inflexible, unwilling to compromise. 23)   He identifies with or compares himself to violent people in films, news stories, fiction, or history. He characterizes the violence of others as justified. 24)   He suffers mood swings or is sullen, angry, or depressed. 25)   He consistently blames others for problems of his own making; he refuses to take responsibility for the results of his actions. 26)   He refers to weapons as instruments of power, control, or revenge. 27)   Weapons are a substantial part of his persona; he has a gun or he talks about, jokes about, reads about, or collects weapons. 28)   He uses “male privilege” as a justification for his conduct (treats her like a servant, makes all the big decisions, acts like the “master of the house”). 29)   He experienced or witnessed violence as a child. 30)   His wife/partner fears he will injure or kill her. She has discussed this with others or has made plans to be carried out in the event of her death (e.g., designating someone to care for children).

Lord Langford," she acknowledged, looking right down her nose at the man. "Penelope," the older man said, unable to keep the surprise from his gaze. "It's Lady Bourne to you." The words were cool and cutting, and Michael was sure she'd never been more beautiful. "Come to think of it, it was always lady to you. And you never referred to me as such." The older man's gaze narrowed in irritation, and Michael had an intense urge to put a fist into the viscount's face for the look. It was not necessary. His wife was more than able to care for herself. "You don't like that, I see. Well, let me tell what I don't like. I don't like insolence. And I don't like cruelty. And I most definitely don't like you. It is time you and I have it out, Langford, because while you might have stolen my husband's lands and funds and reputation, and you might have been a truly horrendous father to my friend, I absolutely refuse to have you take another thing from me, you despicable old man.

The first tip I would offer to those wishing to give Stoicism a try is to practice what I have referred to as stealth Stoicism: You would do well, I think, to keep it a secret that you are a practicing Stoic. (This would have been my own strategy, had I not taken it upon myself to become a teacher of Stoicism.) By practicing Stoicism stealthily, you can gain its benefits while avoiding one significant cost: the teasing and outright mockery of your friends, relatives, neighbors, and coworkers.

Are you two dating now?” “Yup,” I say with finality. “We’re a couple, so I’m sorry to inform you but your title of cutest couple is about to be stolen.” “You think we’re cuter than Milly and Carson?” Emory asks. “Of course. No competition. Milly is gorgeous but Carson is bringing down the team. I surpass them without even having a girlfriend, hell, if I were coupled up with my nightstand, I’d be a better couple.” “I’ll be sure to spread the news on to Carson.” Knox laughs to himself. “Not the best idea, you know how sensitive he is.” “I think you’re referring to yourself,” Knox points out. I chuckle. “True, I’m very sensitive and if he finds out and comes after my ass, I won’t recover easily, which means I’ll be over here at your place, begging you to nurse me back to health so my lady friend doesn’t have to see me in such a weak state.” Knox scratches the side of his jaw and says, “Have I ever told you how much I really don’t like you?” “Almost every day.” I wink at him.

She was not what I’d refer to as a “Mommy-Mom,” which was what I envied most of my friends for having. A Mommy-Mom is someone who takes an interest in everything her child has to say even when there is no actual way she gives a shit, who whisks you away to the doctor when you complain of the slightest ailment, who tells you “they’re just jealous” if someone makes fun of you, or “you always look beautiful to me” even if you don’t, or “I love this!” when you give them a piece of crap for Christmas.

William’s weekend with his friends, Geoffrey and Maggie, was turning out to be neither restful nor enjoyable. Things could have been worse, of course: there must be weekends during which the hosts’ house burns to the ground, one of the guests murders another, the hostess is arrested in extradition proceedings or the guests are all poisoned by the inclusion of death’s cap mushrooms in the stew. Such weekends must be very difficult indeed, not least because of the wording of the thank-you letters that one would have to write. The disaster, whatever it was, could hardly be ignored, but must be referred to tactfully in the letter, and always set in proper perspective. Thus, in the case of the mushroom poisoning, one would comment on how the other courses of the meal were delicious; in the case of the hostess’s arrest, one would say something comforting about the ability of defence lawyers in the jurisdiction to which she was being extradited—and so on, mutatis mutandis, trying at all times to be as positive as possible.

Unhappiness and dissatisfaction with life are common themes in the American culture today. Folks sometimes mistake my meaning when I say, “You have the freedom of choice and the ability to create your best life”, because they all too often rush to drop everything that is weighing them down. They quit the job, ditch the unhappy marriage, cut out negative friends and family, get out of Dodge, etc. I do not advocate such hastiness; in fact, I believe that rash decision-making leads to more problems further down the road. Another unsatisfying job manifests; another unhappy relationship results. These people want a new environment, yet the same negative energy always seems to occupy it. This is because transformation is all about the internal shift, not the external. Any blame placed on outside sources for our unhappiness will forever perpetuate that unhappiness. Pointing the finger is giving away your power of choice and the ability to create our best life. We choose: “That person is making me unhappy” vs. “I make myself happy.” When you are in unhappy times of lack and feelings of separation – great! Sit there and be with it. Find ways to be content with little. Find ways to be happy with your Self. As we reflect on the lives of mystics past and present, it is not the things they possess or the relationships they share that bring them enlightenment – their light is within. The same light can bring us unwavering happiness (joy). Love, Peace, Joy – these three things all come from within and have an unwavering flame – life source – that is not dependent on the conditions of the outside world. This knowing is the power and wisdom that the mystics teach us that we are all capable of achieving. When I say, “You have the freedom of choice and the ability to create your best life”, I am not referring to external conditions; I am referring to the choice you have to look inward and discover the ability to transform the lead of the soul into gold. Transformation is an inner journey of the soul. Why? Because, as we mentioned above, wherever we go, ourselves go with us. Thus, quitting the job, dumping relationships, etc. will not make us happy because we have forgotten the key factor that makes or breaks our happiness: ourselves. When we find, create, and maintain peace, joy, and love within ourselves, we then gain the ability to embrace the external world with the same emotions, perspective, and vibration. This ability is a form of enlightenment. It is the modern man’s enlightenment that transforms an unsatisfying life into one of fulfillment.

Other individuals find it difficult to be authentically themselves even in the presence of their spouses, lovers, or closest friends and relatives. Such individuals, whilst not going so far as to construct a false self which entirely replaces the true self at a conscious level, have an especial need to be alone which goes beyond the occasional demand for solitude referred to above. One possibility, plausible but as yet unproven, is that this especial need to be alone in adult life is derived from, or has been enhanced by, some degree of insecure attachment in early childhood. The child who has not, in infancy, formed secure bonds of trust with attachment figures, may react to parents, and later to other people, in a variety of ways; but I suggest that these variants are founded upon two basic themes. The first is placation; the second, avoidance. I shall try to show that placation is associated with the development of a depressive personality, whilst avoidance is associated with the development of a schizoid personality.

I often tell people that I’m the biggest self-aware misogynist I know. I was writing a scene last night between a woman general and the man she helped put on the throne. I started writing in some romantic tension, and realized how lazy that was. There are other kinds of tension. I made a passing reference to sexual slavery, which I had to cut. I nearly had him use a gendered slur against her. I growled at the screen. He wanted to help save her child… no. Her brother? Ok. She was going to betray him. OK. He had some wives who died… ug. No. Close advisors? Friends? Maybe somebody just… left him? Even writing about societies where there is very little sexual violence, or no sexual violence against women, I find myself writing in the same tired tropes and motivations. “Well, this is a bad guy, and I need something traumatic to happen to this heroine, so I’ll have him rape her.” That was an actual thing I did in the first draft of my first book, which features a violent society where women outnumber men 25-1. Because, of course, it’s What You Do.

What are you thinking about?” Jay asked as he plopped down next to her. She blinked, wondering if she was wearing her frustration on her face. “Nothing,” she lied, pushing her salad around her plate. She wasn’t sure why she didn’t just tell him. “Doesn’t look like nothing,” Jules interrupted from across the table. Violet cast a quick glare at her friend for inconveniently pointing out the obvious. “What?” Jay asked, nudging Violet with his shoulder. “Tell me.” Violet hesitated, suddenly embarrassed over her new insecurity. Yet, inside her head, she bitterly referred to Mike as “Jay’s boyfriend.” Ironically, though, it was Mike who saved Violet from having to confess those very thoughts, when he slid into an open space on the other side of the table. “What’d I miss?” His lazy smile reached all the way into his tawny-colored eyes, and even the dimples on his cheek made a fleeting appearance. Violet could see the draw for Chelsea; he was sort of stunning to look at. So then what was Jay’s excuse? She jokingly hoped it wasn’t the adorable dimple too.

Easter was late in April that year; my first three tours of trenches occupied me during the last thirty days of Lent. This essential season in the Church calendar was not, as far as I remember, remarked upon by anyone in my company, although the name of Christ was often on our lips, and Mansfield (when a canister made a mess of the trench not many yards away from him) was even heard to refer to our Saviour as ‘murry old Jesus!’ These innocuous blasphemings of the holy name were a peculiar feature of the War, in which the principles of Christianity were either obliterated or falsified for the convenience of all who were engaged in it. Up in the trenches every man bore his own burden; the Sabbath was not made for man; and if a man laid down his life for his friends it was no part of his military duties. To kill an enemy was an effective action; to bring in one of our own wounded was praiseworthy, but unrelated to our war-aims. The Brigade chaplain did not exhort us to love our enemies. He was content to lead off with the hymn ‘How sweet the name of Jesus sounds’!

The duties, which a man performs as a friend or parent, do not seem merely owing to his benefactor or children; nor can he be wanting to these duties, without breaking through all the ties of nature and morality. A strong inclination may prompt him to the performance: A sentiment of order and moral obligation joins its force to these natural ties: And the whole man, if truly virtuous, is drawn to his duty, without any effort or endeavour. Even with regard to the virtues, which are more austere, and more founded on reflection, such as public spirit, filial duty, temperance, or integrity; the moral obligation, in our apprehension, removes all pretension to religious merit; and the virtuous conduct is deemed no more than what we owe to society and to ourselves. In all this, a superstitious man finds nothing, which he has properly performed for the sake of his deity, or which can peculiarly recommend him to the divine favor and protection. He considers not, that the most genuine method of serving the divinity is by promoting the happiness of his creatures. He still looks out for some immediate service of the supreme Being, in order to allay those terrors, with which he is haunted. And any practice, recommended to him, which either serves to no purpose in life, or offers the strongest violence to his natural inclinations; that practice he will the more readily embrace, on account of those very circumstances, which should make him absolutely reject it. It seems the more purely religious, because it proceeds from no mixture of any other motive or consideration. And if, for its sake, he sacrifices much of his ease and quiet, his claim of merit appears still to rise upon him, in proportion to the zeal and devotion, which he discovers. In restoring a loan, or paying a debt, his divinity is nowise beholden to him; because these acts of justice are what he was bound to perform, and what many would have performed, were there no god in the universe. But if he fast a day, or give himself a sound whipping; this has a direct reference, in his opinion, to the service of God. No other motive could engage him to such austerities. By these distinguished marks of devotion, he has now acquired the divine favor; and may expect, in recompense, protection, and safety in this world, and eternal happiness in the next.

The conversation swings from the brothers Bush to the war in Iraq to the emerging rights of Muslim women to postfeminism to current cinema—Mexican, American, European (Giorgio goes spasmodically mad over Bu-ñuel), and back to Mexican again—to the relative superiority of shrimp over any other kind of taco to the excellence of Ana’s paella, to Ana’s childhood, then to Jimena’s, to the changing role of motherhood in a postindustrial world, to sculpture, then painting, then poetry, then baseball, then Jimena’s inexplicable (to Pablo) fondness for American football (she’s a Dallas Cowboys fan) over real (to Pablo) fútbol, to his admittedly adolescent passion for the game, to the trials of adolescence itself and revelations over the loss of virginity and why we refer to it as a loss and now Óscar and Tomás, arms over each other’s shoulders, are chanting poetry and then Giorgio picks up a guitar and starts to play and this is the Juárez that Pablo loves, this is the city of his soul—the poetry, the passionate discussions (Ana makes her counterpoints jabbing her cigarette like a foil; Jimena’s words flow like a gentle wave across beach sand, washing away the words before; Giorgio trills a jazz saxophone while Pablo plays bass—they are a jazz combo of argument), the ideas flowing with the wine and beer, the lilting music in a black night, this is the gentle heartbeat of the Mexico that he adores, the laughter, the subtle perfume of desert flowers that grow in alleys alongside garbage, and now everyone is singing— México, está muy contento, Dando gracias a millares… —and this is his life—this is his city, these are his friends, his beloved friends, these people, and if this is all that there is or will be, it is enough for him, his world, his life, his city, his people, his sad beautiful Juárez… —empezaré de Durango, Torreón y Ciudad de

I find, since reading over the foregoing Narrative that I have, in several instances, spoken in such a tone and manner, respecting religion, as may possibly lead those unacquainted with my religious views to suppose me an opponent of all religion. To remove the liability of such misapprehension, I deem it proper to append the following brief explanation. What I have said respecting and against religion, I mean strictly to apply to the slaveholding religion of this land, and with no possible reference to Christianity proper; for, between the Christianity of this land, and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference—so wide, that to receive the one as good, pure, and holy, is of necessity to reject the other as bad, corrupt, and wicked. To be the friend of the one, is of necessity to be the enemy of the other. I love the pure, peaceable, and impartial Christianity of Christ: I therefore hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. Indeed, I can see no reason, but the most deceitful one, for calling the religion of this land Christianity. I look upon it as the climax of all misnomers, the boldest of all frauds, and the grossest of all libels.

First of all,” I bite out, clenching my fists to keep from grabbing her, “you should be fucking proud of yourself. You are strong and you are capable, and you’ve done nothing but prove that to yourself and everyone around you for the past several weeks.” She starts, eyes widening as her hands fall limp at her sides. “Second of all, I’m buying you a phone because not knowing where you were made me fucking sick.” A flush streaks up her cheeks, and I see the apology in her eyes. “And third of all, the only foolish thing you’ve done is continue to refer to us as friends.” I spit the word. “That word makes me want to break something.

The general, whom the boys knew as the commander of their division, looked at the other officer and spoke coolly, as if he were criticising his clothes. "Th' enemy's formin' over there for another charge," he said. "It'll be directed against Whiterside, an' I fear they'll break through there unless we work like thunder t' stop them." The other swore at his restive horse, and then cleared his throat. He made a gesture toward his cap. "It'll be hell t' pay stoppin' them," he said shortly. "I presume so," remarked the general. Then he began to talk rapidly and in a lower tone. He frequently illustrated his words with a pointing finger. The two infantrymen could hear nothing until finally he asked: "What troops can you spare?" The officer who rode like a cowboy reflected for an instant. "Well," he said, "I had to order in th' 12th to help th' 76th, an' I haven't really got any. But there's th' 304th. They fight like a lot 'a mule drivers. I can spare them best of any." The youth and his friend exchanged glances of astonishment. The general spoke sharply. "Get 'em ready, then. I'll watch developments from here, an' send you word when t' start them. It'll happen in five minutes." As the other officer tossed his fingers toward his cap and wheeling his horse, started away, the general called out to him in a sober voice: "I don't believe many of your mule drivers will get back." The other shouted something in reply. He smiled. With scared faces, the youth and his companion hurried back to the line. These happenings had occupied an incredibly short time, yet the youth felt that in them he had been made aged. New eyes were given to him. And the most startling thing was to learn suddenly that he was very insignificant. The officer spoke of the regiment as if he referred to a broom. Some part of the woods needed sweeping, perhaps, and he merely indicated a broom in a tone properly indifferent to its fate. It was war, no doubt, but it appeared strange.

I Won’t Write Your Obituary You asked if you could call to say goodbye if you were ever really gonna kill yourself. Sure, but I won’t write your obituary. I’ll commission it from some dead-end journalist who will say things like: “At peace… Better place… Fought the good fight…” Maybe reference the loving embrace of Capital-G-God at least 4 times. Maybe quote Charles fucking Bukowski. And I won’t stop them because I won’t write your obituary. But if you call me, I will write you a new sky, one you can taste. I will write you a D-I-Y cloud maker so on days when you can’t do anything you can still make clouds in whatever shape you want them. I will write you letters, messages in bottles, in cages, in orange peels, in the distance between here and the moon, in forests and rivers and bird songs. I will write you songs. I can’t write music, but I’ll find Rihanna, and I’ll get her to write you music if it will make you want to dance a little longer. I will write you a body whose veins are electricity because outlets are easier to find than good shrinks, but we will find you a good shrink. I will write you 1-800-273-8255, that’s the suicide hotline; we can call it together. And yeah, you can call me, but I won’t tell you it’s okay, that I forgive you. I won’t say “goodbye” or “I love you” one last time. You won’t leave on good terms with me, Because I will not forgive you. I won’t read you your last rights, absolve you of sin, watch you sail away on a flaming viking ship, my hand glued to my forehead. I will not hold your hand steady around a gun. And after, I won’t come by to pick up the package of body parts you will have left specifically for me. I’ll get a call like “Ma’am, what would you have us do with them?” And I’ll say, “Burn them. Feed them to stray cats. Throw them at school children. Hurl them at the sea. I don’t care. I don’t want them.” I don’t want your heart. It’s not yours anymore, it’s just a heart now and I already have one. I don’t want your lungs, just deflated birthday party balloons that can’t breathe anymore. I don’t want a jar of your teeth as a memento. I don’t want your ripped off skin, a blanket to wrap myself in when I need to feel like your still here. You won’t be there. There’s no blood there, there’s no life there, there’s no you there. I want you. And I will write you so many fucking dead friend poems, that people will confuse my tongue with your tombstone and try to plant daisies in my throat before I ever write you an obituary while you’re still fucking here. So the answer to your question is “yes”. If you’re ever really gonna kill yourself, yes, please, call me.

To narrow natural rights to such neat slogans as "liberty, equality, fraternity" or "life, liberty, property," . . . was to ignore the complexity of public affairs and to leave out of consideration most moral relationships. . . . Burke appealed back beyond Locke to an idea of community far warmer and richer than Locke's or Hobbes's aggregation of individuals. The true compact of society, Burke told his countrymen, is eternal: it joins the dead, the living, and the unborn. We all participate in this spiritual and social partnership, because it is ordained of God. In defense of social harmony, Burke appealed to what Locke had ignored: the love of neighbor and the sense of duty. By the time of the French Revolution, Locke's argument in the Second Treatise already had become insufficient to sustain a social order. . . . The Constitution is not a theoretical document at all, and the influence of Locke upon it is negligible, although Locke's phrases, at least, crept into the Declaration of Independence, despite Jefferson's awkwardness about confessing the source of "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." If we turn to the books read and quoted by American leaders near the end of the eighteenth century, we discover that Locke was but one philosopher and political advocate among the many writers whose influence they acknowledged. . . . Even Jefferson, though he had read Locke, cites in his Commonplace Book such juridical authorities as Coke and Kames much more frequently. As Gilbert Chinard puts it, "The Jeffersonian philosophy was born under the sign of Hengist and Horsa, not of the Goddess Reason"--that is, Jefferson was more strongly influenced by his understanding of British history, the Anglo-Saxon age particularly, than by the eighteenth-century rationalism of which Locke was a principal forerunner. . . . Adams treats Locke merely as one of several commendable English friends to liberty. . . . At bottom, the thinking Americans of the last quarter of the eighteenth century found their principles of order in no single political philosopher, but rather in their religion. When schooled Americans of that era approved a writer, commonly it was because his books confirmed their American experience and justified convictions they held already. So far as Locke served their needs, they employed Locke. But other men of ideas served them more immediately. At the Constitutional Convention, no man was quoted more frequently than Montesquieu. Montesquieu rejects Hobbes's compact formed out of fear; but also, if less explicitly, he rejects Locke's version of the social contract. . . . It is Montesquieu's conviction that . . . laws grow slowly out of people's experiences with one another, out of social customs and habits. "When a people have pure and regular manners, their laws become simple and natural," Montesquieu says. It was from Montesquieu, rather than from Locke, that the Framers obtained a theory of checks and balances and of the division of powers. . . . What Madison and other Americans found convincing in Hume was his freedom from mystification, vulgar error, and fanatic conviction: Hume's powerful practical intellect, which settled for politics as the art of the possible. . . . [I]n the Federalist, there occurs no mention of the name of John Locke. In Madison's Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention there is to be found but one reference to Locke, and that incidental. Do not these omissions seem significant to zealots for a "Lockean interpretation" of the Constitution? . . . John Locke did not make the Glorious Revolution of 1688 or foreordain the Constitution of the United States. . . . And the Constitution of the United States would have been framed by the same sort of men with the same sort of result, and defended by Hamilton, Madison, and Jay, had Locke in 1689 lost the manuscripts of his Two Treatises of Civil Government while crossing the narrow seas with the Princess Mary.

I'm going to throw some suggestions at you now in rapid succession, assuming you are a father of one or more boys. Here we go: If you speak disparagingly of the opposite sex, or if you refer to females as sex objects, those attitudes will translate directly into dating and marital relationships later on. Remember that your goal is to prepare a boy to lead a family when he's grown and to show him how to earn the respect of those he serves. Tell him it is great to laugh and have fun with his friends, but advise him not to be "goofy." Guys who are goofy are not respected, and people, especially girls and women, do not follow boys and men whom they disrespect. Also, tell your son that he is never to hit a girl under any circumstances. Remind him that she is not as strong as he is and that she is deserving of his respect. Not only should he not hurt her, but he should protect her if she is threatened. When he is strolling along with a girl on the street, he should walk on the outside, nearer the cars. That is symbolic of his responsibility to take care of her. When he is on a date, he should pay for her food and entertainment. Also (and this is simply my opinion), girls should not call boys on the telephone-at least not until a committed relationship has developed. Guys must be the initiators, planning the dates and asking for the girl's company. Teach your son to open doors for girls and to help them with their coats or their chairs in a restaurant. When a guy goes to her house to pick up his date, tell him to get out of the car and knock on the door. Never honk. Teach him to stand, in formal situations, when a woman leaves the room or a table or when she returns. This is a way of showing respect for her. If he treats her like a lady, she will treat him like a man. It's a great plan. Make a concerted effort to teach sexual abstinence to your teenagers, just as you teach them to abstain from drug and alcohol usage and other harmful behavior. Of course you can do it! Young people are fully capable of understanding that irresponsible sex is not in their best interest and that it leads to disease, unwanted pregnancy, rejection, etc. In many cases today, no one is sharing this truth with teenagers. Parents are embarrassed to talk about sex, and, it disturbs me to say, churches are often unwilling to address the issue. That creates a vacuum into which liberal sex counselors have intruded to say, "We know you're going to have sex anyway, so why not do it right?" What a damning message that is. It is why herpes and other sexually transmitted diseases are spreading exponentially through the population and why unwanted pregnancies stalk school campuses. Despite these terrible social consequences, very little support is provided even for young people who are desperately looking for a valid reason to say no. They're told that "safe sex" is fine if they just use the right equipment. You as a father must counterbalance those messages at home. Tell your sons that there is no safety-no place to hide-when one lives in contradiction to the laws of God! Remind them repeatedly and emphatically of the biblical teaching about sexual immorality-and why someone who violates those laws not only hurts himself, but also wounds the girl and cheats the man she will eventually marry. Tell them not to take anything that doesn't belong to them-especially the moral purity of a woman.

Perhaps Bufalino’s closest friend was Philadelphia crime boss Angelo Bruno. Law enforcement referred to Bufalino as “the quiet Don Rosario”; Bruno was known as the “Docile Don” for his similar low-key approach to heading a major crime family. Like Bufalino’s family, the Bruno crime family was not permitted to deal in drugs. Because of his perceived old-fashioned ways Bruno was killed by greedy underlings in 1980. Bruno’s demise would lead to everlasting anarchy in his family. His successor, Philip “Chicken Man” Testa, was literally blown up a year after taking over. Testa’s successor, Nicodemus “Little Nicky” Scarfo, is now serving multiple life sentences for murder, having been betrayed by his own underboss and nephew. Little Nicky’s successor, John Stanfa, is serving five consecutive life sentences for murder. Frank Sheeran got a Christmas card every year from John Stanfa in his Leavenworth cell. John Stanfa’s successor, Ralph Natale, is the first boss to turn government informant and testify against his own men. Frank Sheeran calls Philadelphia “the city of rats.” On the other hand, Russell Bufalino lived a long life. He died of old age in a nursing home in 1994 at the age of ninety. He controlled his “family” until the day he died, and unlike Angelo Bruno’s Philadelphia family, not a sign of discord has been reported in the Bufalino family since his death. Frank

When we ask someone "How old are you?" we are really asking them "What time are you?" We're trying to slap a frame of reference on the person by bringing the past into play. When I find out how old you are, I know what memories you are likely to have. Depending on your age, you may know all about the Marshall Plan, Jackie O., the first moon walk, dial phones, disco, or DOS. I can call this information up in a friendly way, singing old Beatles songs with you. I can bring it back in a hostile way, thinking that you're a fool to have gotten caught up in "flower power." In either case, I'm not seeing you exactly as you are now. I'm judging by what I see as the sum of your past experiences.

The U.S. Census Bureau considers mothers the "designated parent," even when both parents are present in the home. When mothers care for their children, it's "parenting," but when fathers care for their children, the government deems it a "child care arrangement." I have even heard a few men say that they are heading home to "babysit" for their children. I have never heard a woman refer to taking care of her own children as "babysitting." A friend of mine ran a team-building exercise during a company retreat where people were asked to fill in their hobbies. Half of the men in the group listed "their children" as hobbies. A hobby? For most mothers, kids are not a hobby. Showering is a hobby.

She could not resist, so she asked, "Why do men refer to vehicles in the feminine form?"... Amelia groaned. "You're going to say it's because they're temperamental like women, aren't you?" "Of course not," defended Rick. "Far from it. Men have a great deal of respect for their cars and their women. I was talking to a friend about this the other day and we both agreed that we see a vehicle as a piece of artwork." "What do you mean?" asked Amelia as she leaned against the door and faced him. "The body of a car, especially a classic, has pleasing curves to the male eye. Just like women. It tends to work better with tender loving care. Just like women. Not only that, cars get us men excited and so do women.

When Libya fought against the Italian occupation, all the Arabs supported the Libyan mujahideen. We Arabs never occupied any country. Well, we occupied Andalusia unjustly, and they drove us out, but since then, we Arabs have not occupied any country. It is our countries that are occupied. Palestine is occupied, Iraq is occupied, and as for the UAE islands... It is not in the best interest of the Arabs for hostility to develop between them and Iran, Turkey, or any of these nations. By no means is it in our interest to turn Iran against us. If there really is a problem, we should decide here to refer this issue to the international court of Justice. This is the proper venue for the resolution of such problems. We should decide to refer the issue of the disputed UAE islands to the International Court of Justice, and we should accept whatever it rules. One time you say this is occupied Arab land, and then you say... This is not clear, and it causes confusion. 80% of the people of the Gulf are Iranians. The ruling families are Arab, but the rest are Iranian. The entire people is Iranian. This is a mess. Iran cannot be avoided. Iran is a Muslim neighbour, and it is not in our interes to become enemies. What is the reason for the invasion and destruction of Iraq, and for killing of one million Iraqis? Let our American friends answer this question: Why Iraq? What is the reason? Is Bin Laden an Iraqi? No he is not. Were those who attacked New York Iraqis? No, they were not. were those who attacked the Pentagon Iraqis? No, they were not. Were there WMDs in Iraq? No, there were not. Even if iraq did have WMDs - Pakistan and India have nuclear bombs, and so do China, Russia, Britain, France and America. Should all these countries be destroyed? Fine, let's destroy all the countries that have WMDs. Along comes a foreign power, occupies an Arab country, and hangs its president, and we all sit on the sidelines, laughing. Why didn't they investigate the hanging of Saddam Hussein? How can a POW be hanged - a president of an Arab country and a member of the Arab League no less! I'm not talking about the policies of Saddam Hussein, or the disagreements we had with him. We all had poitlical disagreements with him and we have such disagreements among ourselves here. We share nothing, beyond this hall. Why won't there be an investigation into the killing of Saddam Hussein? An entire Arab leadership was executed by hanging, yet we sit on the sidelines. Why? Any one of you might be next. Yes. America fought alongside Saddam Hussein against Khomeini. He was their friend. Cheney was a friend of Saddam Hussein. Rumsfeld, the US Defense Secretary at the time Iraq was destroyed, was a close friend of Saddam Hussein. Ultimately, they sold him out and hanged him. You are friends of America - let's say that ''we'' are, not ''you'' - but one of these days, America may hang us. Brother 'Amr Musa has an idea which he is enthusiastic. He mentioned it in his report. He says that the Arabs have the right to use nuclear power for peaceful purposes, and that there should be an Arab nuclear program. The Arabs have this right. They even have the right to have the right to have a nuclear program for other... But Allah prevails... But who are those Arabs whom you say should have united nuclear program? We are the enemies of one another, I'm sad to say. We all hate one another, we deceive one another, we gloat at the misfortune of one another, and we conspire against one another. Our intelligence agencies conspire against one another, instead of defending us against the enemy. We are the enemies of one another, and an Arab's enemy is another Arab's friend.

Richard found his quarry in the library. ‘Selwick!’ The Honourable Miles Dorrington flung aside the news sheet he had been reading, leapt up from his chair and pounded his friend on the back. He then hastily reseated himself, looking slightly abashed at his unseemly display of affection. In a fit of temper, Richard’s sister Henrietta had once referred irritably to Miles as ‘that overeager sheepdog,’ and there was something to be said for the description. With his sandy blond hair flopping into his face, and his brown eyes alight with good fellowship, Miles did bear a striking resemblance to the more amiable varieties of man’s best friend. He was, in fact, Richard’s best friend. They had been fast friends since their first days at Eton.

So determined was Roosevelt that his children grow up to be strong, fearless adults that he had said that he would “rather one of them should die than have them grow up weaklings.” To ensure that none of them would ever be the kind of weakling he himself had been before he had resolved to “make” his body, Roosevelt had put his children through frequent and, for some of them, terrifying tests of physical endurance and courage. Most of these tests took place during what came to be known in the Roosevelt household as scrambles, long point-to-point walks led by Roosevelt himself. The only rule during these walks was that the participants could go through, over, or under an obstacle, but never around it. Roosevelt and his children, as well as a revolving crowd of cousins and friends, would not turn aside “for anything,” Ted Jr. would later write. “If a haystack was in the way we either climbed over it or burrowed through it. If we came to a pond we swam across.” Roosevelt used these scrambles, as well as other, separate excursions, to attack his children’s wilderness fears, which he referred to as buck fever—“a state of intense nervous excitement which may be entirely divorced from timidity.” Even the most courageous man, he believed, when confronted by real danger in the wilderness—whether it be an angry lion or a roaring river—could suffer from buck fever. “What such a man needs is not courage but nerve control, cool-headedness,” he explained. “This he can get only by actual practice.

Why in the world a book on Christ for Unitarian Universalists (UUs)? Less than 20 percent of us identify as Christians.1 But more than 70 percent of Americans identify as Christian, and we UUs are only 0.3 percent of America at best.2 So, primarily, this is a book to help us talk intelligently about Christ with our Christian friends. We Unitarian Universalists actually have had a lot to say about Christ over the years as well (that is, centuries, and perhaps even millennia), and we have generally done that in dialogue with mainstream Christians. But not much anymore. This book is meant to encourage us to do so again, not just by referencing our history, but also by speaking freshly as Unitarian Universalists in the twenty-first century. Why in the world a book on Christ for Unitarian Universalists, when we virtually never use that title for the historical figure of Jesus of Nazareth? Again, primarily because that’s how the rest of the world speaks. They refer to themselves and others who stand in the tradition of Jesus as Christ-ians, not Jesus-ians. Why? Because they tend to be less interested in the Jesus of history than in the Christ of their present faith. Jesus lives with them in their daily lives now as the Christ. Christ is an honorific title that technically means “the anointed one” of God. For most Christians, Jesus is the post-Easter Christ, the resurrected Christ, who is actually with them now in real time—who companions them and comforts them and challenges them in their daily lives—not just a prophet and teacher of first-century Israel.

Freud eventually developed his theory of transference, one that would play a key role in his method of treating emotional disorders and that still today gives us some insight into how we choose both our friends and the person we marry. Feelings in relationships as we now understand them run on a double track. We react and relate to another person not only on the basis of how we consciously experience that person, but also on the basis of our unconscious experience in reference to our past relationships with significant people in infancy and childhood—particularly parents and other family members. We tend to displace our feelings and attitudes from these past figures onto people in the present, especially if someone has features similar to a person in the past. An individual may, therefore, evoke intense feelings in us—strong attraction or strong aversion—totally inappropriate to our knowledge of or experience with that person. This process may, to varying degrees, influence our choice of a friend, roommate, spouse, or employer. We all have the experience of seeing someone we have never met who evokes in us strong feelings. According to the theory of transference, this occurs because something about that person—the gait, the tilt of the head, a laugh, or some other feature—recalls a significant figure in our early childhood. Sometimes a spouse or a superior we work under will provoke in us a reaction far more intense than the circumstances warrant. A gesture or tone of voice may reactivate early negative feelings we experienced toward an important childhood figure. *

I’m not really in the mood.” “Can we call Ben then?” “No. Ben’s an asshole.” Radar looked at me sideways. “Of course he is. You know your problem, Quentin? You keep expecting people not to be themselves. I mean, I could hate you for being massively unpunctual and for never being interested in anything other than Margo Roth Spiegelman, and for, like, never asking me about how it’s going with my girlfriend—but I don’t give a shit, man, because you’re you. My parents have a shit ton of black Santas, but that’s okay. They’re them. I’m too obsessed with a reference Web site to answer my phone sometimes when my friends call, or my girlfriend. That’s okay, too. That’s me. You like me anyway. And I like you. You’re funny, and you’re smart, and you may show up late, but you always show up eventually.

You find yourself alarmingly invested in the lives of fictional characters. You refer to fictional favorites in conversation as though they’re your friends, and your real friends don’t know who you’re talking about. Your explanation puzzles your friends. You know you refer to a favorite book irritatingly often, but you can’t stop. Someone asks you to name your three favorite books, and you can narrow your list to only five. Or seven. Or seventeen. You can’t put the book you just finished behind you because you still want to live it. You have a terrible book hangover, and it lasts three days. Ibuprofen does nothing for it. You’re sad because whatever you read next can’t possibly be as good as the book you just finished. You despair because nothing you read can possibly be as good, ever again.

Jefferson then distilled and enunciated these “essentials” in several personal works he shared with friends, his “Syllabus,” and two extracts from the Bible: “The Philosophy of Jesus of Nazareth,” and “The Life and Morals of Jesus,” sometimes called the “Jefferson Bible.” In these works Jefferson disputed core Christian doctrines while he omitted references to miracles and Jesus’ resurrection. Although his own spirituality apparently grew later in life, he remained a religious skeptic and on the fringes of unitarianism in his beliefs. Throughout his life he opposed religious orthodoxy and intolerance, and the government’s subversion of religion for political gain. “To the corruptions of Christianity I am, indeed, opposed,” Jefferson wrote Benjamin Rush, “but not to the genuine precepts of Jesus himself.”90

1. Close Friend, someone who got yo back, yo "main nigga." 2. Rooted in blackness and the Black experience. From a middle-aged social worker: "That Brotha ain like dem ol e-lights, he real, he a shonuff nigga" 3. Generic, neutral refrence to African Americans. From a 30 something college educated Sista: "The party was live, it was wall to wall niggaz there" 4. A sista's man/lover/partner. from the beauty shop. "Guess we ain gon be seein too much of girlfriend no mo since she got herself a new nigga" From Hip Hop artist Foxy brown, "Ain no nigga like the on I got." 5. Rebellious, fearless unconventional, in-yo-face Black man. From former NBA superstar Charles Barkley, "Nineties niggas... The DailyNews, The Inquirer has been on my back... They want their Black Athletes to be Uncle Tom. I told you white boys you've never heard of a 90s nigga. We do what we want to do" quoted in The Source, December 1992). 6. Vulgar, disrespectful Black Person, antisocial, conforming to negative sterotype of African Americans. From former Hip Hop group Arrested Development, in their best-selling song, "People Everyday" 1992: A black man actin like a nigga... got stomped by an African" 7. A cool, down person, rooted in Hip Hop and black culture, regardless of race, used today by non-blacks to refer to other non-Blacks. 8. Anyone engaged in inappropriate, negative behavior; in this sense, Blacks may even apply the term to White folk. According to African American scholar Clarence Major's From Juba to Jive, Queen Latifah was quoted in Newsweek as criticizing the US government with these words. "Those niggers don't know what the fuck they doing

So often have I studied the views of Florence, that I was familiar with the city before I ever set foot within its walls; I found that I could thread my way through the streets without a guide. Turning to the left I passed before a bookseller's shop, where I bought a couple of descriptive surveys of the city (guide). Twice only was I forced to inquire my way of passers by, who answered me with politeness which was wholly French and with a most singular accent; and at last I found myself before the facade of Santa Croce. Within, upon the right of the doorway, rises the tomb of Michelangelo; lo! There stands Canova's effigy of Alfieri; I needed no cicerone to recognise the features of the great Italian writer. Further still, I discovered the tomb of Machiavelli; while facing Michelangelo lies Galileo. What a race of men! And to these already named, Tuscany might further add Dante, Boccaccio and Petrarch. What a fantastic gathering! The tide of emotion which overwhelmed me flowed so deep that it scarce was to be distinguished from religious awe. The mystic dimness which filled the church, its plain, timbered roof, its unfinished facade – all these things spoke volumes to my soul. Ah! Could I but forget...! A Friar moved silently towards me; and I, in the place of that sense of revulsion all but bordering on physical horror which usually possesses me in such circumstances, discovered in my heart a feeling which was almost friendship. Was not he likewise a Friar, Fra Bartolomeo di San Marco, that great painter who invented the art of chiaroscuro, and showed it to Raphael, and was the forefather of Correggio? I spoke to my tonsured acquaintance, and found in him an exquisite degree of politeness. Indeed, he was delighted to meet a Frenchman. I begged him to unlock for me the chapel in the north-east corner of the church, where are preserved the frescoes of Volterrano. He introduced me to the place, then left me to my own devices. There, seated upon the step of a folds tool, with my head thrown back to rest upon the desk, so that I might let my gaze dwell on the ceiling, I underwent, through the medium of Volterrano's Sybills, the profoundest experience of ecstasy that, as far as I am aware, I ever encountered through the painter's art. My soul, affected by the very notion of being in Florence, and by proximity of those great men whose tombs I had just beheld, was already in a state of trance. Absorbed in the contemplation of sublime beauty, I could perceive its very essence close at hand; I could, as it were, feel the stuff of it beneath my fingertips. I had attained to that supreme degree of sensibility where the divine intimations of art merge with the impassioned sensuality of emotion. As I emerged from the porch of Santa Croce, I was seized with a fierce palpitations of the heart (that same symptom which, in Berlin, is referred to as an attack of nerves); the well-spring of life was dried up within me, and I walked in constant fear of falling to the ground. I sat down on one of the benches which line the piazza di Santa Croce; in my wallet, I discovered the following lines by Ugo Foscolo, which I re-read now with a great surge of pleasure; I could find no fault with such poetry; I desperately needed to hear the voice of a friend who shared my own emotion (…)

The supreme magistrate was not distinguished from the rest by superior habitation or revenue. On the other hand, the duties awarded to him were marvellously light and easy, requiring no preponderant degree of energy or intelligence. There being no apprehensions of war, there were no armies to maintain; there being no government of force, there was no police to appoint and direct. What we call crime was utterly unknown to the Vril-ya; and there were no courts of criminal justice. The rare instances of civil disputes were referred for arbitration to friends chosen by either party, or decided by the Council of Sages, which will be described later. There were no professional lawyers; and indeed their laws were but amicable conventions, for there was no power to enforce laws against an offender who carried in his staff the power to destroy his judges.

When Camilla and her husband joined Prince Charles on a holiday in Turkey shortly before his polo accident, she didn’t complain just as she bore, through gritted teeth, Camilla’s regular invitations to Balmoral and Sandringham. When Charles flew to Italy last year on a sketching holiday, Diana’s friends noted that Camilla was staying at another villa a short drive away. On her return Mrs Parker-Bowles made it quite clear that any suggestion of impropriety was absurd. Her protestations of innocence brought a tight smile from the Princess. That changed to scarcely controlled anger during their summer holiday on board a Greek tycoon’s yacht. She quietly simmered as she heard her husband holding forth to dinner-party guests about the virtues of mistresses. Her mood was scarcely helped when, later that evening, she heard him chatting on the telephone to Camilla. They meet socially on occasion but, there is no love lost between these two women locked into an eternal triangle of rivalry. Diana calls her rival “the rotweiller” while Camilla refers to the Princess as that “ridiculous creature”. At social engagements they are at pains to avoid each other. Diana has developed a technique in public of locating Camilla as quickly as possible and then, depending on her mood, she watches Charles when he looks in her direction or simply evades her gaze. “It is a morbid game,” says a friend. Days before the Salisbury Cathedral spire appeal concert Diana knew that Camilla was going. She vented her frustration in conversations with friends so that on the day of the event the Princess was able to watch the eye contact between her husband and Camilla with quiet amusement. Last December all those years of pent-up emotion came flooding out at a memorial service for Leonora Knatchbull, the six-year-old daughter of Lord and Lady Romsey, who tragically died of cancer. As Diana left the service, held at St James’s Palace, she was photographed in tears. She was weeping in sorrow but also in anger. Diana was upset that Camilla Parker Bowles who had only known the Romseys for a short time was also present at such an intimate family service. It was a point she made vigorously to her husband as they travelled back to Kensington Palace in their chauffeur-driven limousine. When they arrived at Kensington Palace the Princess felt so distressed that she ignored the staff Christmas party, which was then in full swing, and went to her sitting-room to recover her composure. Diplomatically, Peter Westmacott, the Wales’s deputy private secretary, sent her avuncular detective Ken Wharfe to help calm her.

So what's going on with you and your boyfriend?" Eli asked me right before he shoved a forkful of eggs into his mouth during breakfast the next morning. I made a face in the direction of my plate before shooting a glance upward to find Gordo’s eyes on me, a smirk on his face. "Mason?" I asked, going back to my food. Eli made a gagging noise, elbowing me hard in the ribs. "I'm not gonna go into details on how disturbing it is that I say ‘your boyfriend’ and you automatically think of fucking Mase." "He's always calling me his wife, or telling people I don't know that we're getting married," I replied, elbowing him back as hard as he got me. It was partially the truth… but mostly, I didn’t want to talk about the man who had been kissing my shoulder hours ago. "I love Mase, but it'll be a sunny day in my asshole before you and him get together," he mumbled. I snorted, biting into my biscuit. "Who the heck else would you be talking about?" I asked, but I knew. Oh, I knew damn well he was referring to Sacha. Freaking Gordo snickered from across the table before putting his hands up in surrender when I glared at him. "I didn’t say anything." "Sacha, Flabby. Sacha. Your boyfriend. Your snuggle bug." Eliza finally answered. Suddenly the half-eaten biscuit on my plate needed to be eaten immediately. I shoved the entire piece into my mouth to avoid the conversation my brother was trying to edge into. I'd had talks about boys with Eli in the past, and they never ended—or started—well. "There's nothing going on between us. We're just friends." Because we were. Eli made a noise that sounded like “hmmph” deep in his throat. It was incredulous and disbelieving. Then he asked the question to prove it, his attention back on his band mate. "Gordo, do you think I'm blind?" Gordo shook his head. "Gaby, do you think I'm blind?" he asked. "Not blind, just dumb.” I smiled. He shot me a frown. A moment later, he threw his arm over my shoulders and started shoving his plate away with his free hand. "Flabby Gaby, that kid is in love with you." In love. With me? I leaned forward and tried to sniff his breath. “Are you still drunk?” But my brother kept talking before I could keep going. "Anyone with eyes and ears knows that guy thinks you shit out Lucky Charms." Gordo and I burst out laughing. "Is that a good thing?" I asked him. Eliza shoved my face away with his palm, ignoring my commentary again. "And I think that you love him, too." The noise that came out of my mouth sounded like a hybrid “moo” and squawk at the same time. "I—,” I slammed my mouth shut before opening it again with a sputter. “What?

We hear a great deal about the rudeness of the rising generation. I am an oldster myself and might be expected to take the oldsters’ side, but in fact I have been far more impressed by the bad manners of parents to children than by those of children to parents. Who has not been the embarrassed guest at family meals where the father or mother treated their grown-up offspring with an incivility which, offered to any other young people, would simply have terminated the acquaintance? Dogmatic assertions on matters which the children understand and their elders don’t, ruthless interruptions, flat contradictions, ridicule of things the young take seriously—sometimes of their religion—insulting references to their friends, all provide an easy answer to the question ‘Why are they always out? Why do they like every house better than their home?’ Who does not prefer civility to barbarism?

Thus we are counseled at length to be careful about the company we keep, recognizing the simple fact that an unexamined lifestyle, in which we are immersed in the materialistic values and behavior of worldly friends, will get us nowhere. Only frustration and inanity will be the result. Shāntideva advises us to fight shy of those whose values are contrary to the Dharma—people he habitually refers to as “those who are like children” (in other words, in terms designed to stimulate feelings of concern rather than resentment). Thus Shāntideva prescribes solitude, a flight from the world—not of course in a puritanical, world-denying sense, but in a spirit of inner freedom. Tranquillity of mind, he says significantly, is “found by people who are happy to be free from worldly ties,” and who for that reason, “never turns . . . a backward glance” (8.4, 8.26). And he is lyrical in his celebration of retreat in the wilderness.

Such is the lot of the knight that even though my patrimony were ample and adequate for my support, nevertheless here are the disturbances which give me no quiet. We live in fields, forests, and fortresses. Those by whose labors we exist are poverty-stricken peasants, to whom we lease our fields, vineyards, pastures, and woods. The return is exceedingly sparse in proportion to the labor expended. Nevertheless the utmost effort is put forth that it may be bountiful and plentiful, for we must be diligent stewards. I must attach myself to some prince in the hope of protection. Otherwise every one will look upon me as fair plunder. But even if I do make such an attachment hope is beclouded by danger and daily anxiety. If I go away from home I am in peril lest I fall in with those who are at war or feud with my overlord, no matter who he is, and for that reason fall upon me and carry me away. If fortune is adverse, the half of my estates will be forfeit as ransom. Where I looked for protection I was ensnared. We cannot go unarmed beyond to yokes of land. On that account, we must have a large equipage of horses, arms, and followers, and all at great expense. We cannot visit a neighboring village or go hunting or fishing save in iron. Then there are frequently quarrels between our retainers and others, and scarcely a day passes but some squabble is referred to us which we must compose as discreetly as possible, for if I push my claim to uncompromisingly war arises, but if I am too yielding I am immediately the subject of extortion. One concession unlooses a clamor of demands. And among whom does all this take place? Not among strangers, my friend, but among neighbors, relatives, and those of the same household, even brothers. These are our rural delights, our peace and tranquility. The castle, whether on plain or mountain, must be not fair but firm, surrounded by moat and wall, narrow within, crowded with stalls for the cattle, and arsenals for guns, pitch, and powder. Then there are dogs and their dung, a sweet savor I assure you. The horsemen come and go, among them robbers, thieves, and bandits. Our doors are open to practically all comers, either because we do not know who they are or do not make too diligent inquiry. One hears the bleating of sheep, the lowing of cattle, the barking of dogs, the shouts of men working in the fields, the squeaks or barrows and wagons, yes, and even the howling of wolves from nearby woods. The day is full of thought for the morrow, constant disturbance, continual storms. The fields must be ploughed and spaded, the vines tended, trees planted, meadows irrigated. There is harrowing, sowing, fertilizing, reaping, threshing: harvest and vintage. If the harvest fails in any year, then follow dire poverty, unrest, and turbulence.

QUOTES & SAYINGS OF RYAN MORAN- THE WORLD'S MOST POWERFUL MAN Favorite Sayings of Ryan Moran: The World's Most Powerful Man “Sometimes the withholding of a small part of the truth is not only wise, but prudent.” “There is one principle that bars all other principles, and that is contempt prior to investigation.” (Ryan was fond of paraphrasing Herbert Spencer) “What do you mean?”, “How do you know?”, “So what?” “I don’t need much, just one meal a day, a pack of cigarettes and a roof over my head.” “Well…, we must have different data bases, mustn’t we?” “This guy is more squirrely than a shithouse rat” The CIA—you know, the ‘Catholic Irish Alcoholics’ “That dumb fuck.” “Oye! A Jew and an Irishman—what a team!” “Okay, everybody, up and to the right ten thousand feet,” ( If things in general were not going well. Refers to his jet flying days) “Is that what you want to do?.....Are you sure?" “Curiosity is self serving,” “If you don’t know where you’re going, you will end up somewhere else.” “So…, what are you thinking?” “I can do anything that I want, as long as I have the desire and I am willing to pay the price.” (His working definition of honesty) “Well, what did you learn tonight?” “Don’t let your emotions get the best of you, and don’t get too far out into your future.” “If you meet someone in the middle of the desert and he asks you where the next water hole is, you had better tell him the truth. If you don’t, then the next time you meet, he will kill you.” “Damn it!” “And remember to watch your mirrors!” (Refers to the fact someone may be following us in the car) “A person either gets humble or gets humiliated.” “That’s right.” “Oye, Sheldon, a Jew and an Irishman—talk about guilt and suffering!” “Pigs grow fat, but hogs get slaughtered.” “A friend is someone who is coming in, when everyone else is going out.

Q. Positive means not negative? A. Yes, and much more besides. An emotion that cannot become negative gives enormous understanding, has an enormous cognitive value. It connects things that cannot be connected in an ordinary state. To have positive emotions is advised and recommended in religions, but they do not say how to get them. They say, ‘Have faith, have love’. How? Christ says, ‘Love your enemies’. It is not for us; we cannot even love our friends. It is the same as saying to a blind man, ‘You must see!’ A blind man cannot see, otherwise he would not be a blind man. That is what positive emotion means. Q. How can we learn to love our enemies? A. Learn to love yourself first—you do not love yourself enough; you love your false personality, not yourself. It is difficult to understand the New Testament or Buddhist writings, for they are notes taken in school. One line of these writings refers to one level and another to another level.

We're all equal before a wave. —Laird Hamilton, professional surfer In 2005, I was working as an equity analyst at Merrill Lynch. When one afternoon I told a close friend that I was going to leave Wall Street, she was dumbfounded. "Are you sure you know what you're doing?" she asked me. This was her polite, euphemistic way of wondering if I'd lost my mind. My job was to issue buy or sell recommendations on corporate stocks—and I was at the top of my game. I had just returned from Mexico City for an investor day at America Movíl, now the fourth largest wireless operator in the world. As I sat in the audience with hundreds of others, Carlos Slim, the controlling shareholder and one of the world's richest men, quoted my research, referring to me as "La Whitney." I had large financial institutions like Fidelity Investments asking for my financial models, and when I upgraded or downgraded a stock, the stock price would frequently move several percentage points.

Mr. Duffy Napp has just transmitted a nine-word e-mail asking that I immediately send a letter of reference to your firm on his behalf; his request has summoned from the basement of my heart a star-spangled constellation of joy, so eager am I to see Mr. Napp well established at Maladin IT. As for the basis of our acquaintanceship: I am a professor in an English department whose members consult Tech Help—aka Mr. Napp—only in moments of desperation. For example, let us imagine that a computer screen, on the penultimate page of a lengthy document, winks coyly, twice, and before the “save” button can be deployed, adopts a Stygian façade. In such a circumstance one’s only recourse—unpalatable though it may be—is to plead for assistance from a yawning adolescent who will roll his eyes at the prospect of one’s limited capabilities and helpless despair. I often imagine that in olden days people like myself would crawl to the doorway of Tech Help on our knees, bearing baskets of food, offerings of the harvest, the inner organs of neighbors and friends— all in exchange for a tenuous promise from these careless and inattentive gods that the thoughts we entrusted to our computers will be restored unharmed. Colleagues have warned me that the departure of Mr. Napp, our only remaining Tech Help employee, will leave us in darkness. I am ready. I have girded my loins and dispatched a secular prayer in the hope that, given the abysmal job market, a former mason or carpenter or salesman—someone over the age of twenty-five—is at this very moment being retrained in the subtle art of the computer and will, upon taking over from Mr. Napp, refrain (at least in the presence of anxious faculty seeking his or her help) from sending text messages or videos of costumed dogs to both colleagues and friends. I can almost imagine it: a person who would speak in full sentences—perhaps a person raised by a Hutterite grandparent on a working farm.

Great artistic works are often based on solving several psychological problems simultaneously. In literature this is often accomplished by splitting apart the conflict and assigning each aspect to a different character. Marjie Rynearson, for instance, wrote an award-winning play, Jenny, about the meeting and reconciliation of two women: the mother of a murder victim and the mother of the murderer. Within the dialogue between the two characters she sought to resolve two sets of problems: the rage and grief of the victim's mother, and the horror, guilt, and grief of the murderer's mother. She worked on the play for several years, and only when it was finished did she realize that through it she was struggling to resolve her feelings about the suicide of her best friend. Rynearson had simultaneously been, in effect, both the friend of the victim and the friend of the perpetrator of the killing. The power of the work lay in its simultaneous resolution of conflicting problems.

He expected her to feel what she did not know how to feel. There were things that existed for him that she could not penetrate. With his close friends, she often felt vaguely lost. They were youngish and well-dressed and righteous, their sentences filled with “sort of,” and “the ways in which”; they gathered at a bar every Thursday, and sometimes one of them had a dinner party, where Ifemelu mostly listened, saying little, looking at them in wonder: were they serious, these people who were so enraged about imported vegetables that ripened in trucks? They wanted to stop child labor in Africa. They would not buy clothes made by underpaid workers in Asia. They looked at the world with an impractical, luminous earnestness that moved her, but never convinced her. Surrounded by them, Blaine hummed with references unfamiliar to her, and he would seem far away, as though he belonged to them, and when he finally looked at her, his eyes warm and loving, she felt something like relief.

You know what I realized? I’ve just never met someone like you.” I’ve just never met someone like you, as if I were a stranger from another town or an eccentric guest accompanying a mutual friend to a dinner party. It was a strange thought to hear from the mouth of the woman who had birthed and raised me, with whom I shared a home for eighteen years, someone who was half me. My mother had struggled to understand me just as I struggled to understand her. Thrown as we were on opposite sides of a fault line—generational, cultural, linguistic—we wandered lost without a reference point, each of us unintelligible to the other’s expectations, until these past few years when we had just begun to unlock the mystery, carve the psychic space to accommodate each other, appreciate the differences between us, linger in our refracted commonalities. Then, what would have been the most fruitful years of understanding were cut violently short, and I was left alone to decipher the secrets of inheritance without its key.

I found that those of my friends who were admirers of Marx, Freud, and Adler, were impressed by a number of points common to these theories, and especially by their apparent explanatory power. These theories appeared to be able to explain practically everything that happened within the fields to which they referred. The study of any of them seemed to have the effect of an intellectual conversion or revelation, opening your eyes to a new truth hidden from those not yet initiated. Once your eyes were thus opened you saw confirming instances everywhere: the world was full of verifications of the theory. Whatever happened always confirmed it. Thus its truth appeared manifest; and unbelievers were clearly people who did not want to see the manifest truth; who refused to see it, either because it was against their class interest, or because of their repressions which were still 'un-analysed' and crying aloud for treatment. The most characteristic element in this situation seemed to me the incessant stream of confirmations, of observations which 'verified' the theories in question; and this point was constantly emphasized by their adherents. A Marxist could not open a newspaper without finding on every page confirming evidence for his interpretation of history; not only in the news, but also in its presentation--which revealed the class bias of the paper--and especially of course in what the paper did not say. The Freudian analysts emphasized that their theories were constantly verified by their 'clinical observations'. As for Adler, I was much impressed by a personal experience. Once, in 1919, I reported to him a case which to me did not seem particularly Adlerian, but which he found no difficulty in analysing in terms of his theory of inferiority feelings, although he had not even seen the child. Slightly shocked, I asked him how he could be so sure. 'Because of my thousandfold experience,' he replied; whereupon I could not help saying: 'And with this new case, I suppose, your experience has become thousand-and-one-fold.

What led you to write a graduate thesis on the subject of the imagination? SARTRE: I suppose that at that period of my life I had some ideas about the image I refer to the time when I was at L'Ecole normale—and later I had the feeling that that was the first thing I ought to do. The idea that sensation was not identical to the image, that the image was not sensation renewed. That was something I felt in myself. It is bound up with the freedom of consciousness since, when the conscious mind imagines, it disengages itself from what is real in order to look for something that isn't there or that doesn't exist. And it was this passage into the imaginary that helped me understand what freedom is. For instance, if one person asks another: "Where is your friend Pierre?" and it turns out that he's in Berlin, for example, that person will picture where his friend Pierre is. There is a disconnection of thought that cannot be explained by determinism. Determinism cannot move to the plane of the imaginary. If it's a fact, it will create a fact.

How to Create Coping Statements Coping statements should be brief and simple so you can easily remember them when you feel anxious. They should apply directly to the situation you fear--if you are worried about your hand shaking while you eat, a statement about public speaking won’t help. They should also be realistic. You might try to counter anxious feelings with a statement like, “I won’t be nervous.” That statement is too unrealistic to help; everyone feels nervous at times. Your statements should help you cope with the nervousness. Some examples of effective coping statements include: -Relax. I’m in control. -My friends will still accept me if I say something silly. -It’s not that bad. I can do it. You may want to write your coping statement on a piece of paper to carry with you. You can also write other helpful comments on it. Then, when you become anxious, you can read the coping card and can remind yourself that you can change the way you think. Often, simply having the card with you is calming whether you refer to it or not.

in modern terminology the major divide is between ‘deontologists’ (such as Kant) and ‘consequentialists’ (including ‘utilitarians’ such as Jeremy Bentham, 1748–1832). Deontology is a fancy name for the belief that morality consists in the obeying of rules. It is literally the science of duty, from the Greek for ‘that which is binding’. Deontology is not quite the same thing as moral absolutism, but for most purposes in a book about religion there is no need to dwell on the distinction. Absolutists believe there are absolutes of right and wrong, imperatives whose rightness makes no reference to their consequences. Consequentialists more pragmatically hold that the morality of an action should be judged by its consequences. One version of consequentialism is utilitarianism, the philosophy associated with Bentham, his friend James Mill (1773–1836) and Mill’s son John Stuart Mill (1806–73). Utilitarianism is often summed up in Bentham’s unfortunately imprecise catchphrase: ‘the greatest happiness of the greatest number is the foundation of morals and legislation’.

She opened her eyes just as her pillow heaved out a sigh. “My goodness.” Vim Charpentier slept beside her, his arm around her where she was plastered to his side. Light came through a crack in the window curtains, and a quiet snuffling sounded from the cradle near the hearth. “He’s awake.” Vim’s voice was resigned. “I’ll get him. It’s my turn.” “He’s not fussing yet. You have a few minutes.” Vim sighed gustily, and his hand settled on Sophie’s shoulder. “I do apologize for appropriating half your bed. Just a few more days rest, and I’ll be happy to vacate it.” There was weary humor in his tone and something else… affection? “Vim?” He shifted a little, so Sophie might have met his gaze if she’d had sufficient courage. “I’ve never awoken with a man in my bed before. It’s cozy.” “And I’ve never been referred to as cozy before, but the Infant Terrible has reduced me to viewing that state as worthy in the extreme. You’re cozy too.” He kissed her temple, and a sweetness bloomed in Sophie’s middle. Affection. It was different from passion and different with a man than with, say, a sibling or friend. It was wonderful. “Sophie?

They may talk rapidly and say things that will rip your heart right out of your chest. They can be very invalidating. Their conscience is diminished during the mania, so they may do or say things that seem unconscionable. In their normal state of mind, they may be quite personable and conscientious. If you have friends or relatives who have this imbalance, you really need to not take what they say personally when they are manic. Most of us think things we would never actually say, but mania can be a direct thought-to-mouth process. During the mania, the prefrontal lobe of the brain is diminished, so their judgment is poor, even though they may think brilliantly. They are not in tune to the bigger picture of things or the consequences of what they do. They may intellectually know what they are doing, but they are not engaged in the bigger picture. They feel good, and they may have what I call the trilogy operating: ego, arrogance, and entitlement. I know you might think that people can always help what they say, but if you do think that, refer to the section above on narcissism. Sometimes they really can’t help it. I am not trying to make excuses for them. I am merely trying to point out that it is not personal. What

We'll have something private and very quiet, and above all, small,” she said. “It's the only choice, really.” “I agree,” he said readily. “On second thought, we don't need to invite more than three hundred guests.” Holly gave him an incredulous glance. “When I said ‘small,’ I had a different number in mind. Perhaps half a dozen.” His jaw set obstinately. “I want all of London to know that I've won you.” “They'll know,” she said dryly. “I'm sure the ton will talk of little else… and it's a certainty that none of my scandal-avoiding former friends would attend the wedding, extravagant or otherwise.” “Nearly all of mine would,” he said cheerfully. “Undoubtedly,” she agreed, knowing that he was referring to the crowd of ruffians, dandies and social climbers who ran the gamut from being bad ton to complete wastrels. “Nevertheless, the wedding will be as discreet as possible. You can save the doves and trumpeters and such for Elizabeth's wedding.” “I suppose it would be faster that way,” he said grudgingly. Holly stopped on the graveled path and smiled up at him. “We'll keep our wedding small, then, and get on with it.” She slid her arms around his lean waist. “I don't want to wait a day longer than necessary to belong to you.

In any case, we should expect that in due time we will be moved into our eternal destiny of creative activity with Jesus and his friends and associates in the “many mansions” of “his Father’s house.” Thus, we should not think of ourselves as destined to be celestial bureaucrats, involved eternally in celestial “administrivia.” That would be only slightly better than being caught in an everlasting church service. No, we should think of our destiny as being absorbed in a tremendously creative team effort, with unimaginably splendid leadership, on an inconceivably vast plane of activity, with ever more comprehensive cycles of productivity and enjoyment. This is the “eye hath not seen, neither ear heard” that lies before us in the prophetic vision (Isa. 64:4). This Is Shalom When Saint Augustine comes to the very end of his book The City of God, he attempts to address the question of “how the saints shall be employed when they are clothed in immortal and spiritual bodies.”15 At first he confesses that he is “at a loss to understand the nature of that employment.” But then he settles upon the word peace to describe it, and develops the idea of peace by reference to the vision of God—utilizing, as we too have done, the rich passage from 1 Corinthians 13. Thus he speaks of our “employment” then as being “the beatific vision.” The eternal blessedness of the city of God is presented as a “perpetual Sabbath.” In words so beautiful that everyone should know them by heart, he says, “There we shall rest and see, see and love, love and praise. This is what shall be in the end without end. For what other end do we propose to ourselves than to attain to the kingdom of which there is no end?” And yet, for all their beauty and goodness, these words do not seem to me to capture the blessed condition of the restoration of all things—of the kingdom come in its utter fullness. Repose, yes. But not as quiescence, passivity, eternal fixity. It is, instead, peace as wholeness, as fullness of function, as the restful but unending creativity involved in a cosmoswide, cooperative pursuit of a created order that continuously approaches but never reaches the limitless goodness and greatness of the triune personality of God, its source. This, surely, is the word of Jesus when he says, “Those who overcome will be welcomed to sit with me on my throne, as I too overcame and sat down with my Father on his throne. Those capable of hearing should listen to what the Spirit is saying to my people” (Rev. 3:21

What advice would you give to a smart, driven college student about to enter the “real world”? What advice should they ignore? I thought about this a lot when I gave the commencement address at MIT back in 2013. I said that if I had a cheat sheet I could give myself at 22, it would have three things on it: a tennis ball, a circle, and the number 30,000. The tennis ball is about finding something that you can become obsessed with, like my childhood dog who would go crazy whenever anyone threw a ball for her. The most successful people I know are all obsessed with solving a problem that really matters to them. The circle refers to the idea that you’re the average of your five closest friends. Make sure to put yourself in an environment that pulls the best out of you. And the last is the number 30,000. When I was 24, I came across a website that says most people live for about 30,000 days—and I was shocked to find that I was already 8,000 days down. So you have to make every day count. I’d give the same advice today, but I would clarify that it’s not just about passion or following your dreams. Make sure the problem you become obsessed with is one that needs solving and is one where your contribution can make a difference. As Y Combinator says, “Make something people want.

Trust me, Mr. Maxwell.” No more Christian name familiarity for him! “Greyden Kane has never had to ‘overwhelm’ anyone.” He was overwhelming enough on his own. It was too dark to tell for certain, but she thought Kellan might have flushed. “Since we are speaking plainly, I must express my surprise that you would fall so readily into the clutches of such a man.” Rose’s eyes narrowed and she took a step toward him as flames of anger leaped to life within her breast. “By ‘such a man; you refer, of course, to the duke. The very same man who came to my father’s aid when his so-called friends abandoned him. The same man who took my mother and I in after my father’s death and kept us from a life of poverty and no prospects. The very man who was a friend when others-including you-turned their back.” Rage tightened her jaw and clenched her fingers into fists. “I would rather fall into his ‘clutches,’ Kellan, than depend on your friendship, which was proven itself far less palatable than this swill Lady Frederick calls punch. Excuse me.” She shoved the glass into his hand, not caring that some of the sugary liquid splashed over his fingers. And then she whirled on her heel and left him standing alone, and went back inside to face the stares with as much dignity as her anger would give her.

It may be said very abstractly that in personality all persons are equal. But this is an empty tautological proposition, in logic identified with the law of mere identity or A = A. This is so because a person abstractly considered is not as yet separate from others, and has no distinguishing attribute. Equality is the abstract identity set up by the mere understanding. Upon this principle, mere impoverished reflecting thought, or, in other words, spirit in its middle ranges, is apt to fall, when before it there arises the relation of identity to difference. This equalit would be only the identity of abstract persons as such, and would exclude all reference to posession, which is the basis of inequality. Sometimes the demand is made for equality in the division of the soil of the earth, and even other kinds of wealth. The theory of a pious, friendly brotherhood of men who are to possess all goods in common, and to banish the principle of private ownership, easily presents itself to one who fails to understand the nature of freedom of spirit and nature of right, through mistaking their definite phases. Claims of a demand for equality in divisions of wealth are superficial, because the differences of wealth are due not only to the accidents of external nature but also to the infinite variety and difference of mental ability and character.

If there are so many references in the Mass to poverty, sadness, failure and loss, it is because the Church views the ill, the frail of mind, the desperate and the elderly as representing aspects of humanity and (even more meaningfully) of ourselves which we are tempted to deny, but which bring us, when we can acknowledge them, closer to our need for one another. In our more arrogant moments, the sin of pride – or superbia, in Augustine’s Latin formulation – takes over our personalities and shuts us off from those around us. We become dull to others when all we seek to do is assert how well things are going for us, just as friendship has a chance to grow only when we dare to share what we are afraid of and regret. The rest is merely showmanship. The Mass encourages this sloughing off of pride. The flaws whose exposure we so dread, the indiscretions we know we would be mocked for, the secrets that keep our conversations with our so-called friends superficial and inert – all of these emerge as simply part of the human condition. We have no reason left to dissemble or lie in a building dedicated to honouring the terror and weakness of a man who was nothing like the usual heroes of antiquity, nothing like the fierce soldiers of Rome’s army or the plutocrats of its Senate, and yet who was nevertheless worthy of being crowned the highest of men, the king of kings.

a like position, can understand my feelings at this hour, nor the oppressive sadness I feel at this parting. For more than a quarter of a century I have lived among you, and during all that time I have received nothing but kindness at your hands. Here I have lived from my youth until now I am an old man. Here the most sacred ties of earth were assumed; here all my children were born; and here one of them lies buried.” Lincoln would turn fifty-two the next day. The death he referred to was that of his second son, Edward, who had died in 1850 just shy of his fourth birthday, the cause thought to have been tuberculosis. “To you, dear friends, I owe all that I have, all that I am. All the strange, checkered past seems to crowd now upon my mind. To-day I leave you; I go to assume a task more difficult than that which devolved upon General Washington.” Only with God’s guidance and support, the same that “directed and protected” George Washington, would he succeed, he said. “Let us all pray that the God of our fathers may not forsake us now. To him I commend you all—permit me to ask that with equal security and faith you all will invoke His wisdom and guidance for me.” By this point, witnesses agree, as rain fell and Lincoln visibly struggled with powerful emotions, a veil of eye-glistening sorrow descended over the crowd. “With these few words,” he said, “I must leave you—for how long I know not. Friends, one and all, I must now bid you an affectionate farewell.

He, in truth, bears witness to himself that he is faithful and loyal towards God; and to the tempter, that he in vain envied him who is faithful through love; and to the Lord, of the inspired persuasion in reference to His doctrine, from which he will not depart through fear of death; further, he confirms also the truth of preaching by his deed, showing that God to whom he hastes is powerful. You will wonder at his love, which he conspicuously shows with thankfulness, in being united to what is allied to him, and besides by his precious blood, shaming the unbelievers. He then avoids denying Christ through fear by reason of the command; nor does he sell his faith in the hope of the gifts prepared, but in love to the Lord he will most gladly depart from this life; perhaps giving thanks both to him who afforded the cause of his departure hence, and to him who laid the plot against him, for receiving an honourable reason which he himself furnished not, for showing what he is, to him by his patience, and to the Lord in love, by which even before his birth he was manifested to the Lord, who knew the martyr's choice. With good courage, then, he goes to the Lord, his friend, for whom he voluntarily gave his body, and, as his judges hoped, his soul, hearing from our Saviour the words of poetry, "Dear brother," by reason of the similarity of his life. We call martyrdom perfection, not because the man comes to the end of his life as others, but because he has exhibited the perfect work of love.

It is in this context, clearly dominated by a classist propaganda, chauvinist and persecutory, that the accusation of anti-Semitism and hidden negationism – despite being completely unfounded – tetanizes the majority of its victims. How should we explain this strange phenomenon? A first reason lies in the brutality of the accusation, very unusual in a society bathed in a polite consensus – at least among well-behaved people. Suddenly, in a procedure reminiscent of the logic of fascism in which insult overshadows argument, we are dealing with a genuine provocation: an accusation so serious and so incongruous that we can well imagine it leaves some people speechless. And then, it’s very difficult to defend yourself against such an accusation: ‘No, I’m not anti-Semitic’ being a double negation (‘I’m not one of those people who don’t like Jews’) with the fragility this implies. How, indeed, can one prove that one is not something? Say that one has Jewish friends? That’s the worst of all. (‘Ah! He’s got his good Jews.’) Remind people, in certain cases, that one is Jewish oneself? We have seen how that is an aggravating factor. Launch a legal action? Lost in advance, as the accusers are clever enough to use terms that shelter them from prosecution for defamation, which has its precise rules. They will never say that you’re anti-Semitic; they’ll even say that ‘of course, you’re not’, letting their argument, their tone, their comparisons and their historic references do the slandering work while they remain protected.

Oh,Ella. I wish you'd had a better time at the ball." "Fuhgeddaboudit," I muttered. Greaseball. Freddy. Freak. "It's not like she and I were ever going to be BFFs." "I wasn't just referring to Amanda." Of course he wasn't. "I'll try," I moaned into the crook of my elbow. "Oh, Lord.I'll try to carry on." "That sounds rather dramatic, even for you." "It's Styx," I told him. "After your time, before mine. I don't know all the words,but those work for the moment. And for the record, I'm being ironic, not dramatic." "If you say so." I ignored him. "I have had my last flutter over Alex Bainbridge. I mean it. Frankie was right.How many signs do I need that we are never, ever going to have...anything...before I get it? Obviously, it doesn't matter that we realte to the same schizo seventies songs. Or that we can discuss antique Japanese woodblock prints. Or that when he sits next to me, he kinda takes my breath away. You would think that would count for a lot,wouldn't you?" Edward gets the concept of rhetorical questions, so I went on. "I wouldn't even want to hazard a guess about what makes Amanda's pulse go all skittery, but I would bet anything it's not Alex. And he's still with her. He doesn't belong with her, but apparently he feels he belongs to her. Explain that,please." "Oh,Ella.We men are not always the best at looking beyond the...er..." "Boobs,Edward. You can say it. Amanda Alstead has boobs and blonda hair. Beyond that, I can't see a single thing that's special about her." "Because there isn't a single thing. Beyond the...er, obvious. You,on the other hand,are a creature of infinite charms. Shall I list them alphabetically or from the top down?" I scowled up at him. "Y'know, you are beginning to sound a little too much like Frankie and Sadie,my deluded Greek chorus." "yes,well,I rather thought that's what friends are for." "You're not supposed to be my friend," I muttered. "You're supposed to be my Prince Charming." "Ahem." Edward's sculpted lips compressed into a grim line. "Have you looked at me lately? I am supposed to be startling and even a bit scary." "Nope.Neither." I rested my chin on my forearm. "To me,you are perfect. You are loyal and reliable and completely lacking in surprises." "That is a good thing?" "Absolutely," I said. "It's an excellent thing.I don't want any more surprises, over." "Hardly an admirable goal,that." "Maybe not," I agreed, "but pleasant. Among all the other bizarreness tonight, I found something new to be afraid of. Evil girlfriends." "Now,Ella. You can't go on being afraid forever." "Oh,yes,I can. As far as Amanda Alstead is concerned, I can." Edward tilted his head and studied me for a moment. He looked annoyed. "Why do you insist on having these conversations with me when you ignore everything I have to say?" It was a pretty good question. "Fine." I sat up straight and folded my hands in my lap. Home Truth time. "Go ahead. On this night when we celebrate the mysteries of life and death..Say something profound, something startling." There was a long silence. Then, "Boo," Edward said. "Thank you,Mr. Willing." "Don't mention it, Miss Marino. I am yours to command.

I’m very glad,” Jones continued fervently, sounding like a card-carrying Colin Firth impersonator. “So very glad. You can’t know how glad . . .” He cleared his throat. “I hate to be the bearer of more bad tidings, but your . . . friend was something of a criminal, the way I heard it. He had a price on his head—millions—from some druglord who wanted him dead. Chased him mercilessly, for years. I guess this Jones fellow used to work for him—it’s all very sordid, I’m afraid. And dangerous. He had to be on the move constantly. It was risky just to have a drink with Jones—you might’ve gotten killed in the crossfire. Of course, the big irony here is that the druglord died two weeks before Jones. He never knew it, but he was finally free.” As he looked at her with those eyes that she’d dreamed about for so many months, Molly understood. Jones was here, now, only because the druglord known as Chai, a dangerous and sadistic bastard who’d spent years hunting him, was finally dead. “It’s entirely possible that whoever’s taken over business for this druglord,” he continued, “would’ve gone after this Jones, too. Of course, he probably wouldn’t have searched to the ends of the earth for him . . . Although, when dealing with such dangerous types, it pays to be cautious, I suppose.” Message received. “Not that that’s anything Jones needs to worry about,” he added. “Considering he’s left his earthly cares behind. Still, I suspect it’s rather hot where he’s gone.” Yes, it certainly was hot in Kenya right now. Molly covered her mouth, pretending to sob instead of laugh. “Shhh,” Helen admonished him, thinking, of course, that he was referring to an unearthly heat. “Don’t say such a thing. She loved him.” She turned back to Molly. “This Jones is the man that you spoke of so many times?” Molly could see from the expression on Jones’s face that Helen had given her away. She might as well go big with the truth. She wipes her eyes with a handkerchief that Helen had at the ready, then met his gaze. “I loved him very much. I’ll always love him,” she told this man who’d traveled halfway around the world for her, who apparently had waited years for it to be safe enough for him to join her, who had actually thought that, once he arrived, she might send him away. If you don’t want me here—and I don’t blame you if you don’t—just say the word . . . “He was a good man,” Molly said, “with a good heart.” Her voice shook, because, dear Lord, there were now tears in his eyes, too. “He deserved forgiveness—I’m positive he’s in heaven.” “I don’t think it’s going to be that easy for him,” he whispered. “It shouldn’t be . . .” He cleared his throat, put his glasses back on. “I’m so sorry to have distressed you, Miss Anderson. And I haven’t even properly introduced myself. Where are my manners?” He held out his hand to her. “Leslie Pollard.” Even with his glasses on, she could see quite clearly that he’d far rather be kissing her. But that would have to wait for later, when he came to her tent . . . No, wait, Gina would be there. Molly would have to go to his. Later, she told him with her eyes, as she reached out and, for the first time in years, touched the hand of the man that she loved.

Is It True? English is a really a form of Plattdeutsch or Lowland German, the way it was spoken during the 5th century. It all happened when Germanic invaders crossed the English Channel and the North Sea from northwest Germany, Denmark and Scandinavia to what is now Scotland or Anglo Saxon better identified as Anglo-Celtic. English was also influenced by the conquering Normans who came from what is now France and whose language was Old Norman, which became Anglo-Norman. Christianity solidified the English language, when the King James Version of the Bible was repetitively transcribed by diligent Catholic monks. Old English was very complex, where nouns had three genders with der, die and das denoting the male, female and neuter genders. Oh yes, it also had strong and weak verbs, little understood and most often ignored by the masses. In Germany these grammatical rules survive to this day, whereas in Britain the rules became simplified and der, die and das became da, later refined to the article the! It is interesting where our words came from, many of which can be traced to their early roots. “History” started out as his story and when a “Brontosaurus Steak” was offered to a cave man, he uttered me eat! Which has now become meat and of course, when our cave man ventured to the beach and asked his friend if he saw any food, the friend replied “me see food,” referring to the multitude of fish or seafood! Most English swear words, which Goodreads will definitely not allow me to write, are also of early Anglo-Saxon origin. Either way they obeyed their king to multiply and had a fling, with the result being that we now have 7.6 Billion people on Earth.

That such a surprisingly powerful philosophical method was taken seriously can be only partially explained by the backwardness of German natural science in those days. For the truth is, I think, that it was not at first taken really seriously by serious men (such as Schopenhauer, or J. F. Fries), not at any rate by those scientists who, like Democritus2, ‘would rather find a single causal law than be the king of Persia’. Hegel’s fame was made by those who prefer a quick initiation into the deeper secrets of this world to the laborious technicalities of a science which, after all, may only disappoint them by its lack of power to unveil all mysteries. For they soon found out that nothing could be applied with such ease to any problem whatsoever, and at the same time with such impressive (though only apparent) difficulty, and with such quick and sure but imposing success, nothing could be used as cheaply and with so little scientific training and knowledge, and nothing would give such a spectacular scientific air, as did Hegelian dialectics, the mystery method that replaced ‘barren formal logic’. Hegel’s success was the beginning of the ‘age of dishonesty’ (as Schopenhauer3 described the period of German Idealism) and of the ‘age of irresponsibility’ (as K. Heiden characterizes the age of modern totalitarianism); first of intellectual, and later, as one of its consequences, of moral irresponsibility; of a new age controlled by the magic of high-sounding words, and by the power of jargon. In order to discourage the reader beforehand from taking Hegel’s bombastic and mystifying cant too seriously, I shall quote some of the amazing details which he discovered about sound, and especially about the relations between sound and heat. I have tried hard to translate this gibberish from Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature4 as faithfully as possible; he writes: ‘§302. Sound is the change in the specific condition of segregation of the material parts, and in the negation of this condition;—merely an abstract or an ideal ideality, as it were, of that specification. But this change, accordingly, is itself immediately the negation of the material specific subsistence; which is, therefore, real ideality of specific gravity and cohesion, i.e.—heat. The heating up of sounding bodies, just as of beaten or rubbed ones, is the appearance of heat, originating conceptually together with sound.’ There are some who still believe in Hegel’s sincerity, or who still doubt whether his secret might not be profundity, fullness of thought, rather than emptiness. I should like them to read carefully the last sentence—the only intelligible one—of this quotation, because in this sentence, Hegel gives himself away. For clearly it means nothing but: ‘The heating up of sounding bodies … is heat … together with sound.’ The question arises whether Hegel deceived himself, hypnotized by his own inspiring jargon, or whether he boldly set out to deceive and bewitch others. I am satisfied that the latter was the case, especially in view of what Hegel wrote in one of his letters. In this letter, dated a few years before the publication of his Philosophy of Nature, Hegel referred to another Philosophy of Nature, written by his former friend Schelling: ‘I have had too much to do … with mathematics … differential calculus, chemistry’, Hegel boasts in this letter (but this is just bluff), ‘to let myself be taken in by the humbug of the Philosophy of Nature, by this philosophizing without knowledge of fact … and by the treatment of mere fancies, even imbecile fancies, as ideas.’ This is a very fair characterization of Schelling’s method, that is to say, of that audacious way of bluffing which Hegel himself copied, or rather aggravated, as soon as he realized that, if it reached its proper audience, it meant success.

Questioner: In the tradition, we were always taught to be reverential towards God or the highest aspect. So how to reconcile this with Mirabai or Akka Mahadevi who took God as their lover? Sadhguru: Where there is no love, how can reverence come? When love reaches its peak, it naturally becomes reverence. People who are talking about reverence without love know neither this nor that. All they know is fear. So probably you are referring to God-fearing people. These sages and saints, especially the seers like Akka Mahadevi, Mirabai or Anusuya and so many of them in the past, have taken to this form of worship because it was more suitable for them – they could emote much more easily than they could intellectualize things. They just used their emotions to reach their Ultimate nature. Using emotion and reaching the Ultimate nature is what is called bhakti yoga. In every culture, there are different forms of worship. Some people worship God as the master and themselves as the slaves. Sometimes they even take God as their servant or as a partner in everything that they do. Yet others worship him as a friend, as a lover, or as their own child like Balakrishna. Generally, you become the feminine and you hold him as the ultimate purusha – masculine. How you worship is not at all the point; the whole point is just how deeply you relate. These are the different attitudes, but whatever the attitude, the love affair is such that you are not expecting anything from the other side. Not even a response. You crave for it. But if there is no response, you are not going to be angry, you are not going to be disappointed – nothing. Your life is just to crave and make something else tremendously more important than yourself. That is the fundamental thing. In the whole path of bhakti, the important thing is just this, that something else is far more important than you. So Akka, Mirabai and others like them, their bhakti was in that form and they took this mode of worship where they worshipped God – whether Shiva or Krishna – as their husband. In India, when a woman comes to a certain age, marriage is almost like a must, and it anyway happens. They wanted to eliminate that dimension of being married once again to another man, so they chose the Lord himself as their husband so that they don’t need any other relationship in their lives. How a devotee relates to his object of devotion does not really matter because the purpose of the path of devotion is just dissolution. The only objective of a devotee is to dissolve into his object of devotion. Whichever way they could relate best, that is how they would do it. The reason why you asked this question in terms of reverence juxtaposed with being a lover or a husband is because the word “love” or “being a lover” is always understood as a physical aspect. That is why this question has come. How can you be physical with somebody and still be reverential? This has been the tragedy of humanity that lovers have not known how to be reverential to each other. In fact the very objective of love is to dissolve into someone else. If you look at love as an emotion, you can see that love is a vehicle to bring oneness. It is the longing to become one with the other which we are referring to as love. When it is taken to its peak, it is very natural to become reverential towards what you consider worthwhile being “one” with. For whatever sake, you are willing to dissolve yourself. It is natural to be reverential towards that. Otherwise how would you feel that it is worthwhile to dissolve into? If you think it is something you can use or something you can just relate to and be benefited by, there can be no love. Always, the object of love is to dissolve. So, whatever you consider is worthwhile to dissolve your own self into, you are bound to be reverential towards that; there is no other way to be.

It is, in short, the growing conviction that the Negroes cannot win—a conviction with much grounding in experience—which accounts for the new popularity of black power. So far as the ghetto Negro is concerned, this conviction expresses itself in hostility, first toward the people closest to him who have held out the most promise and failed to deliver (Martin Luther King, Roy Wilkins, etc.), then toward those who have proclaimed themselves his friends (the liberals and the labor movement), and finally toward the only oppressors he can see (the local storekeeper and the policeman on the corner). On the leadership level, the conviction that the Negroes cannot win takes other forms, principally the adoption of what I have called a "no-win" policy. Why bother with programs when their enactment results only in sham? Why concern ourselves with the image of the movement when nothing significant has been gained for all the sacrifices made by SNCC and CORE? Why compromise with reluctant white allies when nothing of consequence can be achieved anyway? Why indeed have anything to do with whites at all? On this last point, it is extremely important for white liberals to understand what, one gathers from their references to "racism in reverse," the President and the Vice-President of the United States do not: that there is all the difference in the world between saying, "If you don't want me, I don't want you" (which is what some proponents of black power have in effect been saying), and the statement, "Whatever you do, I don't want you" (which is what racism declares). It is, in other words, both absurd and immoral to equate the despairing response of the victim with the contemptuous assertion of the oppressor. It would, moreover, be tragic if white liberals allowed verbal hostility on the part of Negroes to drive them out of the movement or to curtail their support for civil rights. The issue was injustice before black power became popular, and the issue is still injustice.

You might consider a full shave," he suggested. "You certainly have the chin for it." Keir shook his head. "I must keep the beard." Looking sympathetic, the barber asked, "Pockmarks? Scars?" "No' exactly." Since the man seemed to explain an explanation, Keir continued uncomfortably, "It's... well... my friends and I, we're a rough lot, you ken. 'Tis our way to chaff and trade insults. Whenever I shave off the beard, they start mocking and jeering. Blowing kisses, calling me a fancy lad, and all that. They never tire of it. And the village lasses start flirting and mooning about my distillery, and interfering with work. 'Tis a vexation." The barber stared at him in bemusement. "So the flaw you're trying to hide is... you're too handsome?" A balding middle-aged man seated in the waiting area reacted with a derisive snort. "Balderdash," he exclaimed. "Enjoy it while you can, is my advice. A handsome shoe will someday be an ugly slipper." "What did he say, nephew?" asked the elderly man beside him, lifting a metal horn to his ear. The middle-aged man spoke into the horn. "Young fellow says he's too handsome." "Too handsome?" the old codger repeated, adjusting his spectacles and squinting at Keir. "Who does the cheeky bugger think he is, the Duke of Kingston?" Amused, the barber proceeded to explain the reference to Keir. "His Grace the Duke of Kingston is generally considered one of the finest-looking men who's ever lived." "I know-" Keir began. "He caused many a scandal in his day," the barber continued. "They still make jokes about it in Punch. Cartoons with fainting women, and so forth." "Handsome as Othello, they say," said a man who was sweeping up hair clippings. "Apollo," the barber corrected dryly. He used a dry brush to whisk away the hair from Keir's neck. "I suspect by now Kingston's probably lost most of those famed golden locks." Keir was tempted to contradict him, since he'd met the duke earlier that very day and seen for himself the man still had a full head of hair. However, he thought better of it and held his tongue.

Sidney, is that what you girls go for these days?” Kathleen asked, pointing toward her oldest son. “All this scruffy whatnot?” Well, nothing like putting her on the spot here. Personally, Sidney thought that the dark hint of scruff along Vaughn’s angular jaw looked fine. Better than fine, actually. She would, however, rather be trapped for the next thirty-six hours in a car with the crazy pregnant lady before admitting that in front of him. “I generally prefer clean-shaven men.” She shrugged—sorry—when Vaughn gave her the side-eye as he began setting the table. “See? If you don’t believe me, at least listen to her,” Kathleen said, while peeling a carrot over a bowl at the island. “If you want to find a woman of quality, you can’t be running around looking like you just rolled out of bed.” “I’ll keep that in mind. But for now, the ‘scruffy whatnot’ stays. I need it for an undercover role,” Vaughn said. Surprised to hear that, Sidney looked over as she dumped the tomatoes into a large salad bowl filled with lettuce. “You’re working undercover now?” “Well, I’m not in the other identity right this second,” Vaughn said. “I’m kind of guessing my mother would be able to ID me.” Thank you, yes, she got that. “I meant, how does that work?” Sidney asked him. “You just walk around like normal, being yourself, when you’re not . . . the other you?” “That’s exactly how it works. At least, when we’re talking about a case that involves only part-time undercover work.” “But what if I were to run into the other you somewhere? Say . . . at a coffee shop.” A little inside reference there. “If I called you ‘Vaughn’ without realizing that you were working, wouldn’t that blow your cover?” “First of all, like all agents who regularly do undercover work, I tell my friends and family not to approach me if they happen to run into me somewhere—for that very reason. Second of all, in this case, the ‘other me’ doesn’t hang out at coffee shops.” “Where does the other you hang out?” Sidney asked. Not to contribute to his already healthy ego, but this was pretty interesting stuff. “In dark, sketchy alleys doing dark, sketchy things,” Vaughn said as he set the table with salad bowls. “So the other you is a bad guy, then.” Sidney paused, realizing something. “Is what you’re doing dangerous?” “The joke around my office is that the agents on the white-collar crime squad never do anything dangerous.” Sidney noticed that wasn’t an actual answer to her question

He surprised her by reaching out for her, his arms closing around her. She stiffened but allowed him to draw her near. “Poor sweet,” he murmured. “You have so many burdens to carry.” There had been a time when Amelia had passionately longed for a moment such as this. Being held by Christopher, soothed by him. Once this would have been heaven. But it didn’t feel quite the same as before. “Christoph—” she began, moving away from him, but his mouth caught hers, and she froze in astonishment as he kissed her. This, too, was different … and yet for a moment, she remembered what it had been like, how happy she had once been with him. It seemed so long ago, that time before the scarlet fever, when she had been innocent and hopeful and the future had seemed full of promise. She turned her face from his. “No, Christopher.” “Of course.” He pressed his lips to her hair. “Now isn’t the proper time for this. I’m sorry.” “I’m so concerned about my brother, and Merripen, I can’t think of anything else—” “I know, sweet.” He turned her face back to his. “I’m going to help you and your family. There’s nothing I want more than your safety and happiness. And you need my protection. With your family in turmoil, you could easily be taken advantage of.” She frowned. “No one is taking advantage of me.” “What about the Gypsy?” “You’re referring to Mr. Rohan?” Christopher nodded. “I chanced to meet him on his way to London, and he spoke of you in a way that … well, suffice it to say, he’s no gentleman. I was offended for your sake.” “What did he say?” “He went so far as to claim that you and he were going to marry.” A scornful laugh escaped him. “As if you would ever lower yourself to that. A half-bred Gypsy with no manners or education.” Amelia felt a rush of defensive anger. She looked into the face of the man she had once loved so desperately. He was the embodiment of everything a young woman should want to marry. Not all that long ago, she might have compared him to Cam Rohan and found Christopher superior. But she was no longer the woman she had been … and Christopher wasn’t the knight in shining armor she had believed him to be. “I wouldn’t consider it lowering myself,” she said. “Mr. Rohan is a gentleman, and highly esteemed by his friends.” “They all find him entertaining enough for social occasions, but he will never be their equal. And never a gentleman. That’s understood by everyone, my dear, even Rohan himself.” “It’s neither understood nor accepted by me,” she said. “There is more to being a gentleman than fine manners.

[...]Many of those friends were self-declared socialists - Wester socialists, that is. They spoke about Rosa Luxemburg, Leon Trotsky, Salvador Allende or Ernesto 'Che' Guevara as secular saints. It occurred to me that they were like my father in this aspect: the only revolutionaries they considered worthy of admiration had been murdered.[...]ut they did not think that my stories from the eighties were in any way significant to their political beliefs. Sometimes, my appropriating the label of socialist to describe both my experiences and their commitments was considered a dangerous provocation. [...] 'What you had was not really socialism.' they would say, barely concealing their irritation. My stories about socialism in Albania and references to all the other socialist countries against which our socialism had measured itself were, at best, tolerated as the embarrassing remarks of a foreigner still learning to integrate. The Soviet Union, China, the German Democratic Republic, Yugoslavia, Vietnam, Cuba; there was nothing socialist about them either. They were seen as the deserving losers of a historical battle that the real, authentic bearers of that title had yet to join. My friends' socialism was clear, bright and in the future. Mine was messy, bloody and of the past. And yet, the future that they sought, and that which socialist states had once embodied, found inspiration in the same books, the same critiques of society, the same historical characters. But to my surprise, they treated this as an unfortunate coincidence. Everything that went wrong on my side of the world could be explained by the cruelty of our leaders, or the uniquely backward nature of our institutions. They believed there was little for them to learn. There was no risk of repeating the same mistakes, no reason to ponder what had been achieved, and why it had been destroyed. Their socialism was characterized by the triumph of freedom and justice; mine by their failure. Their socialism would be brought about by the right people, with the right motives, under the right circumstances, with the right combination of theory and practice. There was only one thing to do about mine: forget it. [...]But if there was one lesson to take away from he history of my family, and of my country, it was that people never make history under circumstances they choose. It is easy to say, 'What you had was not the real thing', applying that to socialism or liberalism, to any complex hybrid of ideas and reality. It releases us from the burden of responsability. We are no longer complicit in moral tragedies create din the name of great ideas, and we don't have to reflect, apologize and learn.

Not long after I learned about Frozen, I went to see a friend of mine who works in the music industry. We sat in his living room on the Upper East Side, facing each other in easy chairs, as he worked his way through a mountain of CDs. He played “Angel,” by the reggae singer Shaggy, and then “The Joker,” by the Steve Miller Band, and told me to listen very carefully to the similarity in bass lines. He played Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love” and then Muddy Waters’s “You Need Love,” to show the extent to which Led Zeppelin had mined the blues for inspiration. He played “Twice My Age,” by Shabba Ranks and Krystal, and then the saccharine ’70s pop standard “Seasons in the Sun,” until I could hear the echoes of the second song in the first. He played “Last Christmas,” by Wham! followed by Barry Manilow’s “Can’t Smile Without You” to explain why Manilow might have been startled when he first heard that song, and then “Joanna,” by Kool and the Gang, because, in a different way, “Last Christmas” was an homage to Kool and the Gang as well. “That sound you hear in Nirvana,” my friend said at one point, “that soft and then loud kind of exploding thing, a lot of that was inspired by the Pixies. Yet Kurt Cobain” — Nirvana’s lead singer and songwriter — “was such a genius that he managed to make it his own. And ‘Smells Like Teen Spirit’?” — here he was referring to perhaps the best-known Nirvana song. “That’s Boston’s ‘More Than a Feeling.’ ” He began to hum the riff of the Boston hit, and said, “The first time I heard ‘Teen Spirit,’ I said, ‘That guitar lick is from “More Than a Feeling.” ’ But it was different — it was urgent and brilliant and new.” He played another CD. It was Rod Stewart’s “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy,” a huge hit from the 1970s. The chorus has a distinctive, catchy hook — the kind of tune that millions of Americans probably hummed in the shower the year it came out. Then he put on “Taj Mahal,” by the Brazilian artist Jorge Ben Jor, which was recorded several years before the Rod Stewart song. In his twenties, my friend was a DJ at various downtown clubs, and at some point he’d become interested in world music. “I caught it back then,” he said. A small, sly smile spread across his face. The opening bars of “Taj Mahal” were very South American, a world away from what we had just listened to. And then I heard it. It was so obvious and unambiguous that I laughed out loud; virtually note for note, it was the hook from “Do Ya Think I’m Sexy.” It was possible that Rod Stewart had independently come up with that riff, because resemblance is not proof of influence. It was also possible that he’d been in Brazil, listened to some local music, and liked what he heard.

I have a friend—she is the kind of friend that all of us have—who is a true believer in astrology and psychic phenomenon, a devotee of reiki, a collector of crystals, a woman who occasionally sends me emails with cryptic titles and a single line of text asking, for example, the time of day that I was born or whether I have any mental associations with moths. None that come immediately to mind, I write back. But then of course moths are suddenly everywhere: on watercolor prints in the windows of art shops, in Virginia Woolf’s diaries, on the pages of the illustrated children’s book I read to my nieces. This woman, whom I have known since I was very young, also experiences strange echoes and patterns, but for her they are not the result of confirmation bias or the brain’s inclination toward narrative. She believes that the patterns are part of the very fabric of reality, that they refer to universal archetypes that express themselves in our individual minds. Transcendent truths, she has told me many times, cannot be articulated intellectually because higher thought is limited by the confines of language. These larger messages from the universe speak through our intuitions, and we modern people have become so completely dominated by reason that we have lost this connection to instinct. She claims to receive many of these messages through images and dreams. In a few cases she has predicted major global events simply by heeding some inchoate sensation—an aching knee, the throbbing of an old wound, a general feeling of unease. This woman is a poet, and I tend to grant her theories some measure of poetic license. It seems to me that beneath all the New Agey jargon, she is speaking of the power of the unconscious mind, a realm that is no doubt elusive enough to be considered a mystical force in its own right. I have felt its power most often in my writing, where I’ve learned that intuition can solve problems more efficiently than logical inference. This was especially true when I wrote fiction. I would often put an image in a story purely by instinct, not knowing why it was there, and then the image would turn out to be the perfect metaphor for some conflict that emerged between the characters—again, something that was not planned deliberately—as though my subconscious were making the connections a step or two ahead of my rational mind. But these experiences always took place within the context of language, and I couldn’t understand what it would mean to perceive knowledge outside that context. I’ve said to my friend many times that I believe in the connection between language and reason, that I don’t believe thought is possible without it. But like many faith systems, her beliefs are completely self-contained and defensible by their own logic. Once, when I made this point, she smiled and said, “Of course, you’re an Aquarius.

Parental efforts to gain leverage generally take two forms: bribery or coercion. If a simple direction such as “I'd like you to set the table” doesn't do, we may add an incentive, for example, “If you set the table for me, I'll let you have your favorite dessert.” Or if it isn't enough to remind the child that it is time to do homework, we may threaten to withdraw some privilege. Or we may add a coercive tone to our voice or assume a more authoritarian demeanor. The search for leverage is never-ending: sanctions, rewards, abrogation of privileges; the forbidding of computer time, toys, or allowance; separation from the parent or separation from friends; the limitation or abolition of television time, car privileges, and so on and so on. It is not uncommon to hear someone complain about having run out of ideas for what still might remain to be taken away from the child. As our power to parent decreases, our preoccupation with leverage increases. Euphemisms abound: bribes are called variously rewards, incentives, and positive reinforcement; threats and punishments are rechristened warnings, natural consequences, and negative reinforcements; applying psychological force is often referred to as modifying behavior or teaching a lesson. These euphemisms camouflage attempts to motivate the child by external pressure because his intrinsic motivation is deemed inadequate. Attachment is natural and arises from within; leverage is contrived and imposed from without. In any other realm, we would see the use of leverage as manipulation. In parenting, such means of getting a child to follow our will have become embraced by many as normal and appropriate. All attempts to use leverage to motivate a child involve the use of psychological force, whether we employ “positive” force as in rewards or “negative” force as in punishments. We apply force whenever we trade on a child's likes or when we exploit a child's dislikes and insecurities in order to get her to do our will. We resort to leverage when we have nothing else to work with — no intrinsic motivation to tap, no attachment for us to lean on. Such tactics, if they are ever to be employed, should be a last resort, not our first response and certainly not our modus operandi. Unfortunately, when children become peer-oriented, we as parents are driven to leverage-seeking in desperation. Manipulation, whether in the form of rewards or punishments, may succeed in getting the child to comply temporarily, but we cannot by this method make the desired behavior become part of anyone's intrinsic personality. Whether it is to say thank-you or sorry, to share with another, to create a gift or card, to clean up a room, to be appreciative, to do homework, or to practice piano, the more the behavior has been coerced, the less likely it is to occur voluntarily. And the less the behavior occurs spontaneously, the more inclined parents and teachers are to contrive some leverage. Thus begins a spiraling cycle of force and counterwill that necessitates the use of more and more leverage. The true power base for parenting is eroded.

In the entire endless evening his serenity received a jolt only a few times. The first was when someone who didn’t know who he was confided that only two months ago Lady Elizabeth’s uncle had sent out invitations to all her former suitors offering her hand in marriage. Suppressing his shock and loathing for her uncle, Ian had pinned an amused smile on his face and confided, “I’m acquainted with the lady’s uncle, and I regret to say he’s a little mad. As you know, that sort of thing runs,” Ian had finished smoothly, “in our finest families.” The reference to England’s hopeless King George was unmistakable, and the man had laughed uproariously at the joke. “True,” he agreed. “Lamentably true.” Then he went off to spread the word that Elizabeth’s uncle was a confirmed loose screw. Ian’s method of dealing with Sir Francis Belhaven-who, his grandfather had discovered, was boasting that Elizabeth had spent several days with him-was less subtle and even more effective. “Belhaven,” Ian said after spending a half hour searching for the repulsive knight. The stout man had whirled around in surprise, leaving his acquaintances straining to hear Ian’s low conversation with him. “I find your presence repugnant,” Ian had said in a dangerously quiet voice. “I dislike your coat, I dislike your shirt, and I dislike the knot in your neckcloth. In fact, I dislike you. Have I offended you enough yet, or shall I continue?” Belhaven’s mouth dropped open, his pasty face turning a deathly gray. “Are-are you trying to force a-duel?” “Normally one doesn’t bother shooting a repulsive toad, but in this instance I’m prepared to make an exception, since this toad doesn’t know how to keep his mouth shut!” “A duel, with you?” he gasped. “Why, it would be no contest-none at all. Everyone knows what sort of marksman you are. It would be murder.” Ian leaned close, speaking between his clenched teeth. “It’s going to be murder, you miserable little opium-eater, unless you suddenly remember very vocally that you’ve been joking about Elizabeth Cameron’s visit.” At the mention of opium the glass slid from his fingers and crashed to the floor. “I have just realized I was joking.” “Good,” Ian said, restraining the urge to strangle him. “Now start remembering it all over this ballroom!” “Now that, Thornton,” said an amused voice from Ian’s shoulder as Belhaven scurried off to begin doing as bidden, “makes me hesitate to say that he is not lying.” Still angry with Belhaven, Ian turned in surprise to see John Marchman standing there. “She was with me as well,” Marchman sad. “All aboveboard, for God’s sake, so don’t look at me like I’m Belhaven. Her aunt Berta was there every moment.” “Her what?” Ian said, caught between fury and amusement. “Her Aunt Berta. Stout little woman who doesn’t say much.” “See that you follow her example,” Ian warned darkly. John Marchman, who had been privileged to fish at Ian’s marvelous stream in Scotland, gave his friend an offended look. “I daresay you’ve no business challenging my honor. I was considering marrying Elizabeth to keep her out of Belhaven’s clutches; you were only going to shoot him. It seems to me that my sacrifice was-“ “You were what?” Ian said, feeling as if he’d walked in on a play in the middle of the second act and couldn’t seem to hold onto the thread of the plot or the identity of the players. “Her uncle turned me down. Got a better offer.” “Your life will be more peaceful, believe me,” Ian said dryly, and he left to find a footman with a tray of drinks.