G Shock Quotes

Civilised life, you know, is based on a huge number of illusions in which we all collaborate willingly. The trouble is we forget after a while that they are illusions and we are deeply shocked when reality is torn down around us.

In the pain, I imagine bliss. My thoughts are like wind, rushing, curling into the depths of myself, expelling, dispelling darkness. I imagine love, I imagine wind, I imagine gold hair and green eyes and whispers, laughter I imagine Me extraordinary, unbroken the girl who shocked herself by surviving, the girl who loved herself through learning, the girl who respected her skin, understood her worth, found her strength s t r o n g s t r o n g e r strongest Imagine me master of my own universe I am everything I ever dreamed of

Do not be proud of the fact that your grandmother was shocked at something which your are accustomed to seeing or hearing without being shocked. ... It may be that your grandmother was an extremely lively and vital animal and that you are a paralytic.

Success comes to a writer, as a rule, so gradually that it is always something of a shock to him to look back and realize the heights to which he has climbed.

Figures are the most shocking things in the world. The prettiest little squiggles of black looked at in the right light and yet consider the blow they can give you upon the heart.

(Ragnar just came back from the war.) Then Keita the Viper spun around and ran into his arms, hugging him tight. "This is all your fault!" she accused. "What is?" "How much I missed you! And I was shockingly worried about you. I actually cared if you were hurt or had been damaged in some way. She leaned back, squinted up at him. "You weren't, were you? Damaged?" "Not so that I won't heal." "Good." She rested her head on his chest. "Believe it or not, I don't know what I'd have done if something happened to you." Keita abruptly pulled back from him and punched him in the chest. "What have you done to me, foreigner? Well, let me make it plain that you'll not trap me in your evil web of amazing sex and unconditional love! I'm stronger than that!" And Ragnar sighed...loudly.

What’s going on?” “Nothing.” She coughed, and released Talaith’s hand. “Except you have some powerful enemies.” “Tell me what I don’t know, witch.” “Powerful enemies who are gods.” For a moment, Annwyl was shocked beyond all reason…then she shrugged. “Now that I think of it—I don’t know why I would be surprised.

Bream Mortimer was tall and thin. He had small bright eyes and a sharply curving nose. He looked much more like a parrot than most parrots do. It gave strangers a momentary shock of surprise when they saw Bream Mortimer in restaurants, eating roast beef. They had the feeling that he would have preferred sunflower seeds.

Do you believe in bobbed hair?" asked G. Reece in the same undertone. "I think it's unmoral," affirmed Bernice gravely. "But, of course, you've either got to amuse people or feed'em or shock'em.

Art is born when the temporary touches the eternal; the shock of beauty is when the irresistible force hits the immovable post.

Salty tears stream down my face—coating my lips as I mutter senseless apologies for so many things. So many irreversible things. Morpheus peels the vines off and lifts me, cradling me to his chest.

In the darkness, I imagine light. … In the pain, I imagine bliss. … I imagine love, I imagine wind, I imagine gold hair and green eyes and whispers, laughter I imagine Me extraordinary, unbroken the girl who shocked herself by surviving, the girl who loved herself through learning, the girl who respected her skin, understood her worth, found her strength s t r o n g s t r o n g e r strongest Imagine me master of my own universe I am everything I ever dreamed of

We have reached a state of constant reinvention. Revolutions have moved off the battlefield and on to home computers. Nothing shocks one anymore. We are living in a post-fictional era. Fictional governments are accepted without comment, and we can sit in a mosque and have a debate about the fictional pork a fictional character consumes in a video game, with every gravity we would accord something quite real.

If my phrases shock the reader, that only shows it is high time he or she was shocked.

Shocked? I consider Bob one of the constellations of our time — of our country — America — a bright, magnificent constellation. Besides, all the constellations—not alone of this but of any time—shock the average intelligence for a while. In one respect that helps to prove it a constellation. Think of Voltaire, Paine, Hicks, not to say anything of modern men whom we could mention. {Whitman's thoughts on his close friend, the great Robert Ingersoll}

Consciousness naturally resists anything unconscious and unknown. I have already pointed out the existence among primitive peoples of what anthropologists call “misoneism,” a deep and superstitious fear of novelty. The primitives manifest all the reactions of the wild animal against untoward events. But “civilized” man reacts to new ideas in much the same way, erecting psychological barriers to protect himself from the shock of facing something new.

You can see it as you walk through the street: people who have never recovered. You can see it on their face, in their posturing. It needn’t be that way. We really are our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers … we really are obliged to put out our hand to someone who is in that state of shock or trauma because it could be us, just as easily.

Nothing about sex ever shocks women. At least, men’s kind of sex.

Tomorrow will be like today, and the day after tomorrow will be like day before yesterday," said Apollonius. "I see your remaining days each as quiet, tedious collections of hours. You will not travel anywhere. You will think no new thoughts. You will experience no new passions. Older you will become but not wiser. Stiffer but not more dignified. Childless you are, and childless you shall remain. Of that suppleness you once commanded in your youth, of that strange simplicity which once attracted a few men to you, neither endures, nor shall you recapture any of them anymore. People will talk to you and visit with you out of sentiment or pity, not because you have anything to offer them. Have you ever seen an old cornstalk turning brown, dying, but refusing to fall over, upon which stray birds alight now and then, hardly remarking what it is they perch on? That is you. I cannot fathom your place in life's economy. A living thing should either create or destroy according to its capacity and caprice, but you, you do neither. You only live on dreaming of the nice things you would like to have happen to you but which never happen; and you wonder vaguely why the young lives about you which you occasionally chide for a fancied impropriety never listen to you and seem to flee at your approach. When you die you will be buried and forgotten and that is all. The morticians will enclose you in a worm-proof casket, thus sealing even unto eternity the clay of your uselessness. And for all the good or evil, creation or destruction, that your living might have accomplished, you might just as well has never lived at all. I cannot see the purpose in such a life. I can see in it only vulgar, shocking waste.

Then the man smiled, and his smile was a shock, for it was all on one side, going up in the right cheek and down in the left. There was nothing, rationally speaking, to scare anyone about this. Many people have this nervous trick of a crooked smile, and in many it is even attractive. But in all Syme's circumstances, with the dark dawn and the deadly errand and the loneliness on the great dripping stones, there was something unnerving in it. There was the silent river and the silent man, a man of even classic face. And there was the last nightmare touch that his smile suddenly went wrong.

When reading the history of the Jewish people, of their flight from slavery to death, of their exchange of tyrants, I must confess that my sympathies are all aroused in their behalf. They were cheated, deceived and abused. Their god was quick-tempered unreasonable, cruel, revengeful and dishonest. He was always promising but never performed. He wasted time in ceremony and childish detail, and in the exaggeration of what he had done. It is impossible for me to conceive of a character more utterly detestable than that of the Hebrew god. He had solemnly promised the Jews that he would take them from Egypt to a land flowing with milk and honey. He had led them to believe that in a little while their troubles would be over, and that they would soon in the land of Canaan, surrounded by their wives and little ones, forget the stripes and tears of Egypt. After promising the poor wanderers again and again that he would lead them in safety to the promised land of joy and plenty, this God, forgetting every promise, said to the wretches in his power:—'Your carcasses shall fall in this wilderness and your children shall wander until your carcasses be wasted.' This curse was the conclusion of the whole matter. Into this dust of death and night faded all the promises of God. Into this rottenness of wandering despair fell all the dreams of liberty and home. Millions of corpses were left to rot in the desert, and each one certified to the dishonesty of Jehovah. I cannot believe these things. They are so cruel and heartless, that my blood is chilled and my sense of justice shocked. A book that is equally abhorrent to my head and heart, cannot be accepted as a revelation from God. When we think of the poor Jews, destroyed, murdered, bitten by serpents, visited by plagues, decimated by famine, butchered by each, other, swallowed by the earth, frightened, cursed, starved, deceived, robbed and outraged, how thankful we should be that we are not the chosen people of God. No wonder that they longed for the slavery of Egypt, and remembered with sorrow the unhappy day when they exchanged masters. Compared with Jehovah, Pharaoh was a benefactor, and the tyranny of Egypt was freedom to those who suffered the liberty of God. While reading the Pentateuch, I am filled with indignation, pity and horror. Nothing can be sadder than the history of the starved and frightened wretches who wandered over the desolate crags and sands of wilderness and desert, the prey of famine, sword, and plague. Ignorant and superstitious to the last degree, governed by falsehood, plundered by hypocrisy, they were the sport of priests, and the food of fear. God was their greatest enemy, and death their only friend. It is impossible to conceive of a more thoroughly despicable, hateful, and arrogant being, than the Jewish god. He is without a redeeming feature. In the mythology of the world he has no parallel. He, only, is never touched by agony and tears. He delights only in blood and pain. Human affections are naught to him. He cares neither for love nor music, beauty nor joy. A false friend, an unjust judge, a braggart, hypocrite, and tyrant, sincere in hatred, jealous, vain, and revengeful, false in promise, honest in curse, suspicious, ignorant, and changeable, infamous and hideous:—such is the God of the Pentateuch.

If you are ignorant of Lora Delane Porter’s books that is your affair. Perhaps you are more to be pitied than censured. Nature probably gave you the wrong shape of forehead. Mrs. Porter herself would have put it down to some atavistic tendency or pre-natal influence. She put most things down to that. She blamed nearly all the defects of the modern world, from weak intellects to in-growing toe-nails, on long-dead ladies and gentlemen who, safe in the family vault, imagined that they had established their alibi. She subpoenaed grandfathers and even great-grandfathers to give evidence to show that the reason Twentieth-Century Willie squinted or had to spend his winters in Arizona was their own shocking health ‘way back in the days beyond recall.

The president tells one group of citizens: You are the good ones. No one else is equal to you. All the others are not as significant, not as important. They should not have the same rights. They should be treated as less-than. They are alien. They should be stricken. That is the language used by totalitarian regimes and fundamentalist religions to generate shock troops of core believers and sow the seeds of extremism.

I do not think we can ever adequately define or understand love; I do not think we were ever meant to. We are meant to participate in love without really comprehending it. We are meant to give ourselves, live ourselves into love’s mystery. It is the same for all important things in life; there is a mystery within them that our definitions and understandings cannot grasp. Definitions and understandings are images and concepts created by our brains to symbolize what is real. Our thoughts about something are never the thing itself. Further, when we think logically about something, our thoughts come sequentially – one after another. Reality is not confined to such linearity; it keeps happening all at once in each instant. The best our thoughts can do is try to keep a little running commentary in rapid, breathless sequence. . . A certain asceticism of mind, a gentle intellectual restraint, is needed to appreciate the important things in life. To be open to the truth of love, we must relinquish our frozen comprehensions and begin instead to appreciate. To comprehend is to grasp; to appreciate is to value. Appreciation is gentle seeing, soft acknowledgement, reverent perception. Appreciation can be a pleasant valuing: being awed by a night sky, touched by a symphony, or moved by a caress without needing to understand why. It can also be painful: feeling someone’s suffering, being shocked by loss or disaster without comprehending the reason. Appreciation itself is a kind of love; it is our direct human responsiveness, valuing what we cannot grasp. Love, the life of our heart, is not what we think. It is always ready to surprise us, to take us beyond our understandings into a reality that is both insecure and wonderful.

I remember when I was a kid at school having to learn a poem of sorts about a fellow named Pig-something—a sculptor he would have been, no doubt—who made a statue of a girl, and what should happen one morning but that the bally thing suddenly came to life. A pretty nasty shock for the chap, of course, but the point I'm working round to is that there were a couple of lines that went, if I remember correctly: She starts. She moves. She seems to feel The stir of life along her keel. And what I'm driving at is that you couldn't get a better description of what happened to Gussie as I spoke these heartening words. His brow cleared, his eyes brightened, he lost that fishy look, and he gazed at the slug, which was still on the long, long trail with something approaching bonhomie. A marked improvement.

His principle can be quite simply stated: he refuses to die while he is still alive. He seeks to remind himself, by every electric shock to the intellect, that he is still a man alive, walking on two legs about the world. For this reason he fires bullets at his best friends; for this reason he arranges ladders and collapsible chimneys to steal his own property; for this reason he goes plodding around a whole planet to get back to his own home; and for this reason he has been in the habit of taking the woman whom he loved with a permanent loyalty, and leaving her about (so to speak) at schools, boarding-houses, and places of business, so that he might recover her again and again with a raid and a romantic elopement. He seriously sought by a perpetual recapture of his bride to keep alive the sense of her perpetual value, and the perils that should be run for her sake.

...he had the telltale signs...G-shock watch, tribal tats, and the whole I’m-so-amazing-just-ask-me vibe. Typical SEAL.

Catch-22 has much passion, comic and fervent, but it gasps for want of craft and sensibility… Its author, Joseph Heller, is like a brilliant painter who decides to throw all the ideas in his sketchbooks onto one canvas, relying on their charm and shock to compensate for the lack of design… The book is an emotional hodgepodge; no mood is sustained long enough to register for more than a chapter.

Most Christians believe that Jesus IS God, that Jesus is the same jealous and angry God that abhorred homosexuals and condemned them as "an abomination." He is the same deity that gave instructions on how to beat slaves and the same divine Creator that suggested the stoning of non-believers and disobedient children. You have to accept the good along with the bad... after all, he came not to abolish the Hebrew laws, but to fulfill them (Matthew 5:17).

Love is not only the cardinal fact in the individual life, but the most important concern of the community; after all, the way in which the young people of this generation pair off determines the fate of the nation; all the other affairs of the state are subsidiary to that. And we leave it to flushed and blundering youth to stumble on its own significance, with nothing to guide it but shocked looks and sentimental twaddle and base whisperings and cant-smeared examples.

Civilised life, you know, is based on a huge number of illusions in which we all collaborate willingly. The trouble is we forget after a while that they are illusions and we are deeply shocked when reality is torn down around us. —J. G. BALLARD

Izzy immediately pulled out the sword Zachariah had given her and turned, barely blocking the weapon aimed right for her. Izzy shoved the weapon—another sword—away and spun to give herself momentum, slashing at the attacker. But her opponent blocked the move, their weapons locking. Izzy, fed up, stepped close to see who the hell would attack her here, so near her home. Shocked, Izzy roared, “Éibhear! What the bloody hells are you doing?” “I’ve come to Claim you as my own, Iseabail, Daughter of Talaith and Briec.” “Oh.” Izzy lowered her weapon at his dramatic announcement. “Why didn’t you say so?” She stepped back. “I’ll go home and get naked.” She turned to head to her house. “That’s it?” Éibhear asked, sounding disappointed.

{Letter from Debbs to Eva Ingersoll, husband of Robert Ingersoll, just after the news of Robert's death} We were inexpressibly shocked to hear of the sudden death of your dear husband and our best loved friend. Most tenderly do we sympathize with you, and all of yours in your great bereavement... Gifted with the rarest genius, in beautiful alliance with his heroism, his kindness and boundless love, he made the name of Ingersoll immortal. To me, he was an older brother and as I loved him living, so will I cherish his sweet memory forever.

Triforce?” “Seriously?” “What?” “From Zelda,” David said. “You know, Link collects the Triforce to rescue Princess Zelda and save Hyrule.” “I never saw it.” “It’s uh… a video game, not a movie.” How can she not know this? That was more shocking to David than Martin’s code.

The modern mind is merely a blank about the philosophy of toleration; and the average agnostic of recent times has really had no notion of what he meant by religious liberty and equality. He took his own ethics as self-evident and enforced them; such as decency or the error of the Adamite heresy. Then he was horribly shocked if he heard of anybody else, Moslem or Christian, taking his ethics as self-evident and enforcing them; such as reverence or the error of the Atheist heresy. And then he wound up by taking all this lop-sided illogical deadlock, of the unconscious meeting the unfamiliar, and called it the liberality of his own mind. Medieval men thought that if a social system was founded on a certain idea it must fight for that idea, whether it was as simple as Islam or as carefully balanced as Catholicism. Modern men really think the same thing, as is clear when communists attack their ideas of property. Only they do not think it so clearly, because they have not really thought out their idea of property.

It is possible, too, that, being there, you decided that you might as well go the whole hog and be manicured at the same time. It is not unlikely, moreover, that when you had got over the first shock of finding your hands so unexpectedly large and red, you felt disposed to chat with the young lady who looked after that branch of the business.

But I’m not just shocked. I’m also disappointed in May for allowing Z.G. to talk her into this. I’m angry at him for preying on her vulnerability. And I’m heartsick that May and I have to take it. This is how women end up on the street selling their bodies. But then this is how it is for women everywhere. You experience one lapse in conscience, in how low you think you’ll go, in what you’ll accept, and pretty soon you’re at the bottom. You’ve become a girl with three holes, the lowest form of prostitute, living on one of the floating brothels in Soochow Creek, catering to Chinese so poor they don’t mind catching a loathsome disease in exchange for a few humping moments of the husband-wife thing.

I know what I am to him. A butterfly he has always wanted to catch. I remember (the very first time I met him) G.P. saying that collectors were the worst animals of all. He meant art collectors, of course. I didn't really understand, I thought he was just trying to shock Caroline - and me. But of course, he is right. They're anti-life, anti-art, anti-everything.

I know what I am to him. A butterfly he has always wanted to catch. I remember (the very fisrt time i met him) G.P. saying that collectors were the worst animals of all. He meant art collectors, of course. I didn't really understand, I thought he was just trying to shock Caroline - and me. But of course, he is right. They're anti-life, anti-art, anti-everything.

To sum up: the inequality r > g has clearly been true throughout most of human history, right up to the eve of World War I, and it will probably be true again in the twenty-first century. Its truth depends, however, on the shocks to which capital is subject, as well as on what public policies and institutions are put in place to regulate the relationship between capital and labor.

In dreams a mirror can symbolize the power of the unconscious to “mirror” the individual objectively—giving him a view of himself that he may never have had before. Only through the unconscious can such a view (which often shocks and upsets the conscious mind) be obtained—just as in Greek myth the Gorgon Medusa, whose look turned men to stone, could be gazed upon only in a mirror.

Hands deep in her pockets, she gazed up at the window, shrewdly weighing my future in her steady eyes. She had released her hair from its tight bun, and this captive fleece now played freely around her shoulders, testing the river air like the eager birds I had seen in my dream. What beautiful and barbarous creature would she have become, some chimeric being to shock the morning air?

At the same time he realized with a shock how much his own faith in the Church’s authority, or in the Christian view of the world in which he had hitherto lived his life, had diminished since he had last inspected them. From the farmyard in which his certitudes perched like fat chickens, every night of the siege, one or two were carried off in the jaws of rationalism and despair. Another

I imagine love, I imagine wind, I imagine gold hair and green eyes and whispers, laughter I imagine Me extraordinary, unbroken the girl who shocked herself by surviving, the girl who loved herself through learning, the girl who respected her skin, understood her worth, found her strength s t r o n g s t r o n g e r strongest Imagine me master of my own universe I am everything I ever dreamed of

Wells recognized that these crude novels correctly foresaw modern warfare as aiming at the massive destruction of the physical structures of an enemy civilization and the terrorizing if not annihilating of its noncombatant population. His Martians anticipate with uncomfortable accuracy, for example, American bombings of Dresden and Tokyo, followed by Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and boastful proclamations of “shock and awe” tactics against Iraq.

The bodhi tree has been converted into a marriage tree. The belief is that young women who die before marriage should have a husband in the next world. Their relatives bring a wedding dress and monks to this tree and perform a wedding ceremony. The spirit of the dead woman is married to a famous singer, poet or magician who died many years ago. Their families believe that he’ll be a good husband will look after each wife as if she were the only one.

It is from a Mr. Percy Gorringe, sir. Omitting extraneous matter and concentrating on essentials, Mr. Gorringe wishes to borrow a thousand pounds from you.' I started sharply, causing the soap to shoot from my hand and fall with a dull thud on the fourth mat. With no preliminary warning to soften the shock, his words had momentarily unmanned me. It is not often that one is confronted with ear-biting on so majestic a scale, a fiver till next Wednesday being the normal tariff.

That was some shady shit out there, Rome,” Braeden said once the total chaos of winning the game had gone down to a considerable roar. We were finally in the locker room, and I was stripping off my sweat and grass-stained gear. “Total douche move.” I agreed. It wasn’t the first time a team had tried to take me out of a game. It was pretty much common practice, especially when something like a title and championship was at stake. Still, I’d never quite had anyone come at me like that before. The play was already in progress. Sacking me wouldn’t have changed the touchdown I’d just thrown. Except of course to keep me from throwing another one. That guy deliberately came in like a freight train and plowed me down. I lay there stunned for long moments, waiting for the air to come back in my lungs and for my body to process the shock of the hit. Thankfully, he wasn’t that good at tackling and it did nothing more than stun me. And it got him thrown out of the game. It really hadn’t been a big deal. Like I said, it happened a lot. But it was the first time it happened in front of Rimmel. I couldn’t help but notice how the large screen on the field had zeroed in on the girl in number twenty-four’s hoodie, who was climbing over the railing and preparing to leap down onto the field. The security guard was yelling at her, but she barely noticed him. Her eyes were trained out on the field, where I was. It was almost laughable that her tiny ass was going to rush out onto a field full of men more than double her size to make sure I was okay. G**damn. I loved her even more just then. When the guard put his hand on her ankle, trying to stop her from going back to her seat, something happened. Something that never had in my entire life of playing football. The game faded away. For once, I was out on the field and unable to focus on only the game. It took a backseat to the girl teetering on the edge of the railing.

MICHAEL (standing up and stretching) Gosh, Steve. I don't know how to thank you. STEVE (also standing) Hey, don't thank me. It means you haven't got any excuse now not to get back to work. They are facing each other. STEVE is looking into MICHAEL's eyes. MICHAEL (embarrassed) So... STEVE (also slightly awkward) Right. Well, I guess I'd better be... MICHAEL, surprising himself, silently pulls STEVE towards him. He puts a hand on his cheek. STEVE stares at MICHAEL, unable to move. The feeling of MICHAEL's hand on his cheek is like an electric shock. MICHAEL (whispering, hardly audible) I mean it, really... thanks. He leans forward and kisses STEVE on the lips. STEVE puts his arms round MICHAEL's neck and holds him tightly. MICHAEL suddenly ends the kiss and pulls away. He goes to the door, opens it and says, in a clear voice. MICHAEL Goodnight, then, Steve. STEVE (disappointed, hurt) Right... sure. G'night. MICHAEL immediately closes the door loudly, before STEVE has had a chance to leave. MICHAEL puts a finger to his lips. STEVE suddenly understands. He smiles in radiant relief, pure love and joy in his eyes. They embrace.

It's me I'm losing control of. Hundreds of sketches, and still can't get enough of your face." He traces the dimple in my chin with his thumb. "Your neck." His palm moves along my throat. "Your..." both hands find my waist and drag me off the table so we're standing toe tote. "I'm not wasting another second drawing you," he whispers against my lips, "when I can touch you instead." He presses his mouth to mine. A spark, hot and electric, jumps between us. Shock and sensation shimmer through me, aglow with his heat ad flavor. Six year of secret desire. Six years of denying that he's the orbit of my world. To think, he's been running from me, too.

Pretty soft!' he cried. 'To have to come and live in New York! To have to leave my little cottage and take a stuffy, smelly, over-heated hole of an apartment in this Heaven-forsaken, festering Gehenna. To have to mix night after night with a mob who think that life is a sort of St Vitus's dance, and imagine that they're having a good time because they're making enough noise for six and drinking too much for ten. I loathe New York, Bertie. I wouldn't come near the place if I hadn't got to see editors occasionally. There's a blight on it. It's got moral delirium tremens. It's the limit. The very thought of staying more than a day in it makes me sick. And you call this thing pretty soft for me!' I felt rather like Lot's friends must have done when they dropped in for a quiet chat and their genial host began to criticise the Cities of the Plain. I had no idea old Rocky could be so eloquent. 'It would kill me to have to live in New York,' he went on. 'To have to share the air with six million people! TO have to wear stiff collars and decent clothes all the time! To - ' He started. 'Good Lord! I suppose I should have to dress for dinner in the evenings. What a ghastly notion!' I was shocked, absolutely shocked. 'My dear chap!' I said, reproachfully. 'Do you dress for dinner every night, Bertie?' 'Jeeves,' I said coldly. 'How many suits of evening clothes have we?' 'We have three suits full of evening dress, sir; two dinner jackets- ' 'Three.' 'For practical purposes, two only, sir. If you remember, we cannot wear the third. We have also seven white waistcoats.' 'And shirts?' 'Four dozen, sir.' 'And white ties?' 'The first two shallow shelves in the chest of drawers are completely filled with our white ties, sir.' I turned to Rocky. 'You see?' The chappie writhed like an electric fan. 'I won't do it! I can't do it! I'll be hanged if I'll do it! How on earth can I dress up like that? Do you realise that most days I don't get out of my pyjamas till five in the afternoon and then I just put on an old sweater?' I saw Jeeves wince, poor chap. This sort of revelation shocked his finest feelings.

The residence of Mr. Peter Pett, the well-known financier, on Riverside Drive is one of the leading eyesores of that breezy and expensive boulevard. As you pass by in your limousine, or while enjoying ten cents worth of fresh air on top of a green omnibus, it jumps out and bites at you. Architects, confronted with it, reel and throw up their hands defensively, and even the lay observer has a sense of shock. The place resembles in almost equal proportions a cathedral, a suburban villa, a hotel and a Chinese pagoda. Many of its windows are of stained glass, and above the porch stand two terra-cotta lions, considerably more repulsive even than the complacent animals which guard New York's Public Library.

Of real sensational journalism, as it exists in France, in Ireland, and in America, we have no trace in this country. When a journalist in Ireland wishes to create a thrill, he creates a thrill worth talking about. He denounces a leading Irish member for corruption, or he charges the whole police system with a wicked and definite conspiracy. When a French journalist desires a frisson there is a frisson; he discovers, let us say, that the President of the Republic has murdered three wives. Our yellow journalists invent quite as unscrupulously as this; their moral condition is, as regards careful veracity, about the same. But it is their mental calibre which happens to be such that they can only invent calm and even reassuring things. The fictitious version of the massacre of the envoys of Pekin was mendacious, but it was not interesting, except to those who had private reasons for terror or sorrow. It was not connected with any bold and suggestive view of the Chinese situation. It revealed only a vague idea that nothing could be impressive except a great deal of blood. Real sensationalism, of which I happen to be very fond, may be either moral or immoral. But even when it is most immoral, it requires moral courage. For it is one of the most dangerous things on earth genuinely to surprise anybody. If you make any sentient creature jump, you render it by no means improbable that it will jump on you. But the leaders of this movement have no moral courage or immoral courage; their whole method consists in saying, with large and elaborate emphasis, the things which everybody else says casually, and without remembering what they have said. When they brace themselves up to attack anything, they never reach the point of attacking anything which is large and real, and would resound with the shock. They do not attack the army as men do in France, or the judges as men do in Ireland, or the democracy itself as men did in England a hundred years ago. They attack something like the War Office--something, that is, which everybody attacks and nobody bothers to defend, something which is an old joke in fourth-rate comic papers

I took a voyage once--it is many years ago, now--to Amsterdam, and the owner, not my good cousin here, but another, took a fancy to go with me; and his wife must needs accompany him, and verily, before that voyage was over, I wished I was dead. "I was no longer captain of the ship. My owner was my captain, and his wife was his. We were forever putting into port for fresh bread and meat, milk and eggs, for she could eat none other. If the wind got up but ever so little, we had to run into shelter and anchor until the sea was smooth. The manners of the sailors shocked her. She would scream at night when a rat ran across her, and would lose her appetite if a living creature, of which, as usual, the ship was full, fell from a beam onto her platter. I was tempted, more than once, to run the ship on to a rock and make an end of us all.

During the latter three centuries the process itself of their existence has become such that in the presences of most of them during their daily existence those 'being-confrontative-associations' almost no longer arise, which usually proceed in three-brained beings thanks to every kind of new perception, and from which alone can data be crystallized in the common presences of three-brained beings for their own individuality. Well then, when your favorites, existing in such a manner in their 'daily life,' go to these contemporary theaters and follow the senseless manipulations of these contemporary actors, and receive 'shocks' one after the other from every kind of reminiscence, already previously perceived, of not less senseless and absurd notions, then during this waking state of theirs, they willy-nilly obtain more or less tolerable being-associations, so that when they go home and go to bed they sleep much better than usual.

Incidentally, those who were shocked by Bush the Younger’s shout that we are now “at war” with Osama should have quickly put on their collective thinking caps. Since a nation can only be at war with another nation-state, why did our smoldering if not yet burning bush come up with such a war cry? Think hard. This will count against your final grade. Give up? Well, most insurance companies have a rider that they need not pay for damage done by “an act of war.” Although the men and women around Bush know nothing of war and less of our Constitution, they understand fund-raising. For this wartime exclusion, Hartford Life would soon be breaking open its piggy bank to finance Republicans for years to come. But the mean-spirited Washington Post pointed out that under U.S. case law, only a sovereign nation, not a bunch of radicals, can commit an “act of war.” Good try, G.W. This now means that we the people, with our tax money, will be allowed to bail out the insurance companies, a rare privilege not afforded to just any old generation.

There is no doubt that the shock of an... emotional experience is often needed to make people wake up and pay attention to what they are doing. There's a famous case of the 13th century Spanish Hidalgo, Raimon Lull, who finally (after a long chase) succeeded in meeting the lady he admired at a secret rendezvous. She silently opened her dress and showed him her breast, rotten with cancer. The shock changed Lull's life; he eventually became an eminent Theologian and one of the Church's greatest missionaries. In the case of such a sudden change one can often prove that an archetype has been at work for a long time in the unconscious, skillfully arranging circumstances that will lead to the crisis... such experiences seem to show that archetypal forms are not just static patterns. They are Dynamic factors that manifest themselves in impulses, just as spontaneously as the instincts. Certain dreams, visions, or thoughts can suddenly appear; and however carefully one investigates, one cannot find out what causes them. This does not mean that they have no cause; they certainly have. But it is so remote or obscure that one cannot see what it is.

I felt the sense of time and self drop away from me. No now, no to-morrow, no yesterday, no I! Only eternity, one vast whole—sun-shot, star-sprent, love-filled, changeless. And in it all, one spot of consciousness more acute than other spots; and that was the something that had eaten hugely, and that now felt the inward-flung glory of it all; the swooning, half-voluptuous sense of awe and wonder, the rippling, shimmering, universal joy. And then suddenly and without shock—like the shifting of the wood smoke—the mood veered, and there was nothing but I. Space and eternity were I—vast projections of myself, tingling with my consciousness to the remotest fringe of the outward swinging atom-drift; through immeasurable night, pierced capriciously with shafts of paradoxic day; through and beyond the awful circle of yearless duration, my ego lived and knew itself and thrilled with the glory of being. The slowly revolving Milky Way was only a glory within me; the great woman-star jeweling the summit of a cliff, was only an ecstasy within me; the murmuring of the river out in the dark was only the singing of my heart; and the deep, deep blue of the heavens was only the splendid color of my soul.

She broke off abruptly as she heard her name being called, and glanced over her shoulder, fearing that St. Vincent had discovered her escape. Her entire body stiffened in battle readiness. But there was no sign of St. Vincent, no betraying gleam of golden-amber hair. She heard the voice again, a deep sound that penetrated to her soul. “Lillian.” Her legs quivered beneath her as she saw a lean, dark-haired man coming from the front entryway. It can’t be, she thought, blinking hard to clear her vision, which must surely have been playing tricks on her. She stumbled a little as she turned to face him. “Westcliff,” she whispered, and took a few hesitant steps forward. The rest of the room seemed to vanish. Marcus’s face was pale beneath its tan, and he stared at her with searing intensity, as if he feared she might disappear. His stride quickened, and as he reached her, she was seized and caught in a biting grip. He wrapped his arms around her, pulling her hard against him. “My God,” he muttered, and buried his face in her hair. “You came,” Lillian gasped, trembling all over. “You found me.” She couldn’t conceive how it was possible. He smelled of horses and sweat, and his clothes were chilled from the outside air. Feeling her shiver, Marcus drew her tightly inside his coat, murmuring endearments against her hair. “Marcus,” Lillian said thickly. “Have I gone mad? Oh, please be real. Please don’t go away—” “I’m here.” His voice was low and shaken. “I’m here, and I’m not going anywhere.” He drew back slightly, his midnight gaze scouring her from head to toe, his hands searching urgently over her body. “My love, my own… have you been hurt?” As his fingers slid along her arm, he encountered the locked manacle. Lifting her wrist, he stared at the handcuffs blankly. He inhaled sharply, and his body began to shake with primitive fury. “G**damn it, I’ll send him to hell—” “I’m fine,” Lillian said hastily. “I haven’t been hurt.” Bringing her hand to his mouth, Marcus kissed it roughly, and kept her fingers against his cheek while his breath struck her wrist in swift repetitions. “Lillian, did he…” Reading the question in his haunted gaze, the words he couldn’t yet bring himself to voice, Lillian whispered scratchily, “No, nothing happened. There wasn’t time.” “I’m still going to kill him.” There was a deadly note in his voice that made the back of her neck crawl. Seeing the open bodice of her gown, Marcus released her long enough to pull off his coat and place it over her shoulders. He suddenly went still. “That smell… what is it?” Realizing that her skin and clothes still retained the noxious scent, Lillian hesitated before replying. “Ether,” she finally said, trying to form her trembling lips into a reassuring smile as she saw his eyes dilate into pools of black. “It wasn’t bad, actually. I’ve slept through most of the day. Other than a touch of queasiness, I’m—” An animal growl came from his throat, and he pulled her against him once more. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Lillian, my sweet love… you’re safe now. I’ll never let anything happen to you again. I swear it on my life. You’re safe.” He took her head in his hands, and his mouth slid over hers in a kiss that was brief, soft, and yet so shockingly intense that she swayed dizzily. Closing her eyes, she let herself rest against him, still fearing that none of this was real, that she would awaken to find herself with St. Vincent once more. Marcus whispered comforting words against her parted lips and cheeks, and held her with a grip that seemed gentle but could not have been broken by the combined efforts of ten men.

(a) A writer always wears glasses and never combs his hair. Half the time he feels angry about everything and the other half depressed. He spends most of his life in bars, arguing with other dishevelled, bespectacled writers. He says very ‘deep’ things. He always has amazing ideas for the plot of his next novel, and hates the one he has just published. (b) A writer has a duty and an obligation never to be understood by his own generation; convinced, as he is, that he has been born into an age of mediocrity, he believes that being understood would mean losing his chance of ever being considered a genius. A writer revises and rewrites each sentence many times. The vocabulary of the average man is made up of 3,000 words; a real writer never uses any of these, because there are another 189,000 in the dictionary, and he is not the average man. (c) Only other writers can understand what a writer is trying to say. Even so, he secretly hates all other writers, because they are always jockeying for the same vacancies left by the history of literature over the centuries. And so the writer and his peers compete for the prize of ‘most complicated book’: the one who wins will be the one who has succeeded in being the most difficult to read. (d) A writer understands about things with alarming names, like semiotics, epistemology, neoconcretism. When he wants to shock someone, he says things like: ‘Einstein is a fool’, or ‘Tolstoy was the clown of the bourgeoisie.’ Everyone is scandalized, but they nevertheless go and tell other people that the theory of relativity is bunk, and that Tolstoy was a defender of the Russian aristocracy. (e) When trying to seduce a woman, a writer says: ‘I’m a writer’, and scribbles a poem on a napkin. It always works. (f) Given his vast culture, a writer can always get work as a literary critic. In that role, he can show his generosity by writing about his friends’ books. Half of any such reviews are made up of quotations from foreign authors and the other half of analyses of sentences, always using expressions such as ‘the epistemological cut’, or ‘an integrated bi-dimensional vision of life’. Anyone reading the review will say: ‘What a cultivated person’, but he won’t buy the book because he’ll be afraid he might not know how to continue reading when the epistemological cut appears. (g) When invited to say what he is reading at the moment, a writer always mentions a book no one has ever heard of. (h) There is only one book that arouses the unanimous admiration of the writer and his peers: Ulysses by James Joyce. No writer will ever speak ill of this book, but when someone asks him what it’s about, he can’t quite explain, making one doubt that he has actually read it.

During the latter three centuries the process itself of their existence has become such that in the presences of most of them during their daily existence those 'being-confrontative-associations' almost no longer arise, which usually proceed in three-brained beings thanks to every kind of new perception, and from which alone can data be crystallized in the common presences of three-brained beings for their own individuality. Well then, when your favorites, existing in such a manner in their 'daily life,' go to these contemporary theaters and follow the senseless manipulations of these contemporary actors, and receive 'shocks' one after the other from every kind of reminiscence, already previously perceived, of not less senseless and absurd notions, then during this waking state of theirs, they willy-nilly obtain more or less tolerable being-associations, so that when they go home and go to bed they sleep much better than usual. Although indeed these contemporary theaters with all that proceeds in them happen to be in this way--but of course only 'for today'--an excellent means for better sleep, nevertheless the objectively evil consequences of these theaters for beings, and particularly for the rising generation, are incalculable. The chief harm for them from these theaters is that they are an additional factor for the complete destruction in them of all possibilities of ever possessing the need, proper to three-brained beings, called the 'need-for-real-perceptions.

and at one point they had heard what had sounded mighty like a musket shot which, although not very near, might or might not have been fired in their direction but, they decided, probably had been. Harry clung to this adventure, such as it was, all the more tenaciously when he found that because of his sprained wrist he had missed an adventure at Captainganj. Those of his peers who had escaped with life and limb from the Captainganj parade ground did not seem to be thinking of it as an adventure, those who had managed to escape unhurt were now looking tired and shocked. And they seemed to be having trouble telling Harry what it had been like. Each of them simply had two or three terrible scenes printed on his mind: an Englishwoman trying to say something to him with her throat cut, or a comrade spinning down into a whirl-pool of hacking sepoys, something of that sort. To make things worse, one kept finding oneself about to say something to a friend who was not there to hear it any more. It was hard to make any sense out of what had happened, and after a while they gave up trying. Of the score of subalterns who had managed to escape, the majority had never seen a dead person before . . . a dead English person, anyway . . . one occasionally bumped into a dead native here and there but that was not quite the same. Strangely enough, they listened quite enviously to Harry talking about the musket shot which had “almost definitely” been fired at himself and Fleury. They wished they had had an adventure too, instead of their involuntary glimpse of the abattoir. It

If you leave off looking at books about beasts and men, if you begin to look at beasts and men then (if you have any humour or imagination, any sense of the frantic or the farcical) you will observe that the startling thing is not how like man is to the brutes, but how unlike he is. It is the monstrous scale of his divergence that requires an explanation. That man and brute are like is, in a sense, a truism; but that being so like they should then be so insanely unlike, that is the shock and the enigma. That an ape has hands is far less interesting to the philosopher than the fact that having hands he does next to nothing with them; does not play knuckle-bones or the violin; does not carve marble or carve mutton. People talk of barbaric architecture and debased art. But elephants do not build colossal temples of ivory even in a roccoco style; camels do not paint even bad pictures, though equipped with the material of many camel's-hair brushes. Certain modern dreamers say that ants and bees have a society superior to ours. They have, indeed, a civilization; but that very truth only reminds us that it is an inferior civilization. Who ever found an ant-hill decorated with the statues of celebrated ants? Who has seen a bee-hive carved with the images of gorgeous queens of old? No; the chasm between man and other creatures may have a natural explanation, but it is a chasm. We talk of wild animals; but man is the only wild animal. It is man that has broken out. All other animals are tame animals; following the rugged respectability of the tribe or type. All other animals are domestic animals; man alone is ever undomestic, either as a profligate or a monk. So that this first superficial reason for materialism is, if anything, a reason for its opposite; it is exactly where biology leaves off that all religion begins.

You’re mine,” he said when he drew back, gazing down at her with a hunger that should have made her run. “No one else’s.” He gripped her hips and set her on the edge of his desk. Before she could figure out what he was doing, he brushed her dress up, spread her thighs, and ripped her thong. “Gavin, what—?” His tongue slipped into her vagina, and her mind went blank with shock. He dragged her to the edge of the desk and ate her as if his life depended on it. One hand pinned her thigh open while the other cupped her ass, drawing her tight to his intimate kiss. She couldn’t think as pleasure ricocheted through her. His talented mouth suckled her clit. Before she could counteract the pleasure or get a hold on it, her climax, violent and unstoppable, blasted through her. She wrapped her legs around his head, body bowing as he slammed his fingers into her, eliciting mind-numbing pleasure so great, her mind shut down and her body took over. When it became too much, she yanked on his hair, trying to get his mouth away from her. He moaned but didn’t budge. She could hear him swallow as he lapped up her juices. “G-Gavin, please stop,” she said hoarsely, shuddering. Without moving his head, he pushed her, so she sprawled on her back in a boneless heap on the slick surface of his desk. He used his fingers this time, curling and stroking. The heat began to build again. She tried to kick him, but his hands pinned her wide, and she had no defense as he teased oversensitive nerves. “I-I can’t,” she panted even as another climax punched through her. She erupted, body jerking as he pulled the strings like the master he was. When rational thought returned, she found him standing over her, fingers still buried between her legs. His eyes were ablaze with lust. “I didn’t ask the first time. You say I raped you. Will you let me have you?” It would feel damn good, but... “No.

Chris- the one who wrote the halfway creepy thing about missing me so much when I didn't post and thinking I was dead- found it mind-boggling that before the Julie/Julia Project began, I had never eaten an egg. She asked, "How can you have gotten through life without eating a single egg? How is that POSSIBLE???!!!!!" Of course, it wasn't exactly true that I hadn't eaten an egg. I had eaten them in cakes. I had even eaten them scrambled once or twice, albeit in the Texas fashion, with jalapeños and a pound of cheese. But the goal of my egg-eating had always been to make sure the egg did not look, smell, or taste anything like one, and as a result my history in this department was, I suppose, unusual. Chris wasn't the only person shocked. People I'd never heard of chimed in with their awe and dismay. I didn't really get it. Surely this is not such a bizarre hang-up as hating, say, croutons, like certain spouses I could name. Luckily, eggs made the Julia Child way often taste like cream sauce. Take Oeufs en Cocotte, for example. These are eggs baked with some butter and cream in ramekins set in a shallow pan of water. They are tremendous. In fact the only thing better than Oeufs en Cocotte is Ouefs en Cocotte with Sauce au Cari on top when you've woken up with a killer hangover, after one of those nights when somebody decided at midnight to buy a pack of cigarettes after all, and the girls wind up smoking and drinking and dancing around the living room to the music the boy is downloading from iTunes onto his new, ludicrously hip and stylish G3 Powerbook until three in the morning. On mornings like this, Oeufs en Cocotte with Sauce au Cari, a cup of coffee, and an enormous glass of water is like a meal fed to you by the veiled daughters of a wandering Bedouin tribe after one of their number comes upon you splayed out in the sands of the endless deserts of Araby, moments from death- it's that good.

I remember the case of a man who was inextricably involved in a number of shady affairs. He developed an almost morbid passion for dangerous mountain climbing, as a sort of compensation. he was seeking "to get above himself." In a dream one night, he saw himself stepping off the summit of a high mountain into empty space. When he told me his dream, I instantly saw his danger and tried to emphasize the warning and persuade him to restrain himself. I even told him that the dream foreshadowed his death in a mountain accident. It was in vain. Six months later he "stepped off into space." A mountain guide watched him and a friend letting themselves down a rope in a difficult place. The friend had found a temporary foothold on a ledge, and the dreamer was following him down. Suddenly he let go of the rope, according to the guide, "as if he were jumping into the air." He fell upon his friend, and both went down and were killed. Another typical case was that of a lady who was living above herself. She was high and mighty in her daily life, but she had shocking dreams, reminding her of all sorts of unsavory things. When I uncovered them, she indignantly refused to acknowledge them. The dreams then became menacing, and full of references to the walks she used to take by herself in the woods, where she indulged in soulful fantasies. I saw her danger, but she would not listen to my many warnings. Soon afterwards, she was savagely attacked in the woods by a sexual pervert; but for the intervention of some people who heard her screams, she would have been killed. There was no magic in this. What her dreams had told me was that this woman had a secret longing for such an adventure-just as the mountain climber unconsciously sought the satisfaction of finding a definite way out of this difficulties. Obviously, neither of them expected the stiff price involved: She had several bones broken, and he paid with his life.

We have learned in the course of this investigation that the libido which builds up religious structures regresses in the last analysis to the mother, and thus represents the real bond through which we are connected with our origins. When the Church Fathers derive the word religio from religare (to reconnect, link back), they could at least have appealed to this psychological fact in support of their view.71 As we have seen, this regressive libido conceals itself in countless symbols of the most heterogeneous nature, some masculine and some feminine—differences of sex are at bottom secondary and not nearly so important psychologically as would appear at first sight. The essence and motive force of the sacrificial drama consist in an unconscious transformation of energy, of which the ego becomes aware in much the same way as sailors are made aware of a volcanic upheaval under the sea. Of course, when we consider the beauty and sublimity of the whole conception of sacrifice and its solemn ritual, it must be admitted that a psychological formulation has a shockingly sobering effect. The dramatic concreteness of the sacrificial act is reduced to a barren abstraction, and the flourishing life of the figures is flattened into two-dimensionality. Scientific understanding is bound, unfortunately, to have regrettable effects—on one side; on the other side abstraction makes for a deepened understanding of the phenomena in question. Thus we come to realize that the figures in the mythical drama possess qualities that are interchangeable, because they do not have the same “existential” meaning as the concrete figures of the physical world. The latter suffer tragedy, perhaps, in the real sense, whereas the others merely enact it against the subjective backcloth of introspective consciousness. The boldest speculations of the human mind concerning the nature of the phenomenal world, namely that the wheeling stars and the whole course of human history are but the phantasmagoria of a divine dream, become, when applied to the inner drama, a scientific probability. The essential thing in the mythical drama is not the concreteness of the figures, nor is it important what sort of an animal is sacrificed or what sort of god it represents; what alone is important is that an act of sacrifice takes place, that a process of transformation is going on in the unconscious whose dynamism, whose contents and whose subject are themselves unknown but become visible indirectly to the conscious mind by stimulating the imaginative material at its disposal, clothing themselves in it like the dancers who clothe themselves in the skins of animals or the priests in the skins of their human victims.

This symbolism may well have been based, originally, on some visionary experience, such as happens not uncommonly today during psychological treatment. For the medical psychologist there is nothing very lurid about it. The context itself points the way to the right interpretation. The image expresses a psychologem that can hardly be formulated in rational terms and has, therefore, to make use of a concrete symbol, just as a dream must when a more or less “abstract” thought comes up during the abaissement du niveau mental that occurs in sleep. These “shocking” surprises, of which there is certainly no lack in dreams, should always be taken “as-if,” even though they clothe themselves in sensual imagery that stops at no scurrility and no obscenity. They are unconcerned with offensiveness, because they do not really mean it. It is as if they were stammering in their efforts to express the elusive meaning that grips the dreamer’s attention.62 [316]       The context of the vision (John 3 : 12) makes it clear that the image should be taken not concretistically but symbolically; for Christ speaks not of earthly things but of a heavenly or spiritual mystery—a “mystery” not because he is hiding something or making a secret of it (indeed, nothing could be more blatant than the naked obscenity of the vision!) but because its meaning is still hidden from consciousness. The modern method of dream-analysis and interpretation follows this heuristic rule.63 If we apply it to the vision, we arrive at the following result: [317]       1. The MOUNTAIN means ascent, particularly the mystical, spiritual ascent to the heights, to the place of revelation where the spirit is present. This motif is so well known that there is no need to document it.64 [318]       2. The central significance of the CHRIST-FIGURE for that epoch has been abundantly proved. In Christian Gnosticism it was a visualization of God as the Archanthropos (Original Man = Adam), and therefore the epitome of man as such: “Man and the Son of Man.” Christ is the inner man who is reached by the path of self-knowledge, “the kingdom of heaven within you.” As the Anthropos he corresponds to what is empirically the most important archetype and, as judge of the living and the dead and king of glory, to the real organizing principle of the unconscious, the quaternity, or squared circle of the self.65 In saying this I have not done violence to anything; my views are based on the experience that mandala structures have the meaning and function of a centre of the unconscious personality.66 The quaternity of Christ, which must be borne in mind in this vision, is exemplified by the cross symbol, the rex gloriae, and Christ as the year.

Scientists have found that there are two important genes, the CREB activator (which stimulates the formation of new connections between neurons) and the CREB repressor (which suppresses the formation of new memories). Dr. Jerry Yin and Timothy Tully of Cold Spring Harbor have been doing interesting experiments with fruit flies. Normally it takes ten trials for them to learn a certain task (e.g., detecting an odor, avoiding a shock). Fruit flies with an extra CREB repressor gene could not form lasting memories at all, but the real surprise came when they tested fruit flies with an extra CREB activator gene. They learned the task in just one session. “This implies these flies have a photographic memory,” says Dr. Tully. He said they are just like students “who could read a chapter of a book once, see it in their mind, and tell you that the answer is in paragraph three of page two seventy-four.” This effect is not just restricted to fruit flies. Dr. Alcino Silva, also at Cold Spring Harbor, has been experimenting with mice. He found that mice with a defect in their CREB activator gene were virtually incapable of forming long-term memories. They were amnesiac mice. But even these forgetful mice could learn a bit if they had short lessons with rest in between. Scientists theorize that we have a fixed amount of CREB activator in the brain that can limit the amount we can learn in any specific time. If we try to cram before a test, it means that we quickly exhaust the amount of CREB activators, and hence we cannot learn any more—at least until we take a break to replenish the CREB activators. “We can now give you a biological reason why cramming doesn’t work,” says Dr. Tully. The best way to prepare for a final exam is to mentally review the material periodically during the day, until the material becomes part of your long-term memory. This may also explain why emotionally charged memories are so vivid and can last for decades. The CREB repressor gene is like a filter, cleaning out useless information. But if a memory is associated with a strong emotion, it can either remove the CREB repressor gene or increase levels of the CREB activator gene. In the future, we can expect more breakthroughs in understanding the genetic basis of memory. Not just one but a sophisticated combination of genes is probably required to shape the enormous capabilities of the brain. These genes, in turn, have counterparts in the human genome, so it is a distinct possibility that we can also enhance our memory and mental skills genetically. However, don’t think that you will be able to get a brain boost anytime soon. Many hurdles still remain. First, it is not clear if these results apply to humans.

Thus polyvictimization or complex trauma are "developmentally adverse interpersonal traumas" (Ford, 2005) because they place the victim at risk not only for recurrent stress and psychophysiological arousal (e.g., PTSD, other anxiety disorders, depression) but also for interruptions and breakdowns in healthy psychobiological, psychological, and social development. Complex trauma not only involves shock, fear, terror, or powerlessness (either short or long term) but also, more fundamentally, constitutes a violation of the immature self and the challenge to the development of a positive and secure self, as major psychic energy is directed toward survival and defense rather than toward learning and personal development (Ford, 2009b, 2009c). Moreover, it may influence the brain's very development, structure, and functioning in both the short and long term (Lanius et al., 2010; Schore, 2009). Complex trauma often forces the child victim to substitute automatic survival tactics for adaptive self-regulation, starting at the most basic level of physical reactions (e.g., intense states of hyperarousal/agitation or hypoarousal/immobility) and behavioral (e.g., aggressive or passive/avoidant responses) that can become so automatic and habitual that the child's emotional and cognitive development are derailed or distorted. What is more, self-integrity is profoundly shaken, as the child victim incorporates the "lessons of abuse" into a view of him or herself as bad, inadequate, disgusting, contaminated and deserving of mistreatment and neglect. Such misattributions and related schema about self and others are some of the most common and robust cognitive and assumptive consequences of chronic childhood abuse (as well as other forms of interpersonal trauma) and are especially debilitating to healthy development and relationships (Cole & Putnam, 1992; McCann & Pearlman, 1992). Because the violation occurs in an interpersonal context that carries profound significance for personal development, relationships become suspect and a source of threat and fear rather than of safety and nurturance. In vulnerable children, complex trauma causes compromised attachment security, self-integrity and ultimately self-regulation. Thus it constitutes a threat not only to physical but also to psychological survival - to the development of the self and the capacity to regulate emotions (Arnold & Fisch, 2011). For example, emotional abuse by an adult caregiver that involves systematic disparagement, blame and shame of a child ("You worthless piece of s-t"; "You shouldn't have been born"; "You are the source of all of my problems"; "I should have aborted you"; "If you don't like what I tell you, you can go hang yourself") but does not involve sexual or physical violation or life threat is nevertheless psychologically damaging. Such bullying and antipathy on the part of a primary caregiver or other family members, in addition to maltreatment and role reversals that are found in many dysfunctional families, lead to severe psychobiological dysregulation and reactivity (Teicher, Samson, Polcari, & McGreenery, 2006).

In 1985, Dr. Darlene Powell Hopson and Dr. Derek S. Hopson, two married psychologists, duplicated Drs. Kenneth and Mamie Clark's experiments using dolls to explore black children's self-esteem. Their results were shocking: they suggested that in the forty years since the Clarks did their research—despite landmark legal decisions, acts of Congress, and the civil rights movement—little had changed. Sixty-five percent of the black children they interviewed preferred white dolls, and 76 percent said the black dolls "looked bad" to them.

Ethan slumped on the bench in the change room, ignoring the ribald behavior around him after yet another foregone win. A hard slap on the rear of his head roused him and he whirled, his lip curled back as he growled menacingly. “Don’t you dare show me your teeth,” Javier warned with a dark look. He ran his hand through hair, already tousled and sweaty from the match. “What the fuck happened out there? I passed you the perfect shot, and instead of grabbing it and scoring, you crashed into the g**damn arena glass. What are you, a rookie? Been watching too many Bugs Bunny cartoons?” Heat burned Ethan’s cheeks in remembrance of his mishap before dejection— along with a large dose of disbelief— quickly set back in. “I missed. It happens and besides, it’s not like we needed the point to win.” “Of course we didn’t,” Javier replied with a scoffing snort. “But it’s the point of it. What the hell distracted you so much? And, why do you look like your best friend died, which, I might add, is an impossibility given I’m standing right beside you.” Javier grinned. “I think I found my mate,” Ethan muttered. A true beauty with light skin, a perfect oval face framed by long, brown hair and the most perfect set of rosebud lips. Javier’s face expressed shock, then glee. “Congrats, dude.” Javier slapped him hard on the back, and while the blow might have killed a human or a smaller species, it didn’t even budge Ethan. “I know you’ve been pining to settle down with someone of the fairer sex. You must be ecstatic.” “Not really.” Although he should have been. Finding one’s mate was a one in a zillion chance given how shifters were scattered across the globe. Most never even came close to finding the one fate deemed their perfect match. His friend’s jovial grin subsided. “What’s wrong? Was she, like, butt ugly? Humongous? Old? Surely she can’t be that bad?” “No, she appears perfect. Or did.” Ethan groaned as banged his head off the locker door. “I am so screwed.” A frown creased Javier’s face. “I don’t get it. I thought you wanted to find the one, you sick bastard. Settle down and pop out cubs.” Ethan looked up in time to see Javier’s mock shudder. “Me, I prefer to share my love among as many women as possible.” Javier mimed slapping an ass then humping it with a leering grin. Ethan didn’t smile at Javier’s attempt at humor even if it happened to be the truth. Javier certainly enjoyed variety where the other sex was concerned. Heck, on many an occasion he’d shared with Ethan. Tag team sessions where they both scored. Best friends who did just about everything together. Blowing out a long sigh, Ethan answered him. “I do want to find my mate, actually, I’m pretty sure I already have, but I don’t think I made a great impression. She’s the one they took out on the stretcher after the ball I missed hit her in the face.” Javier winced. “Ouch. Sucks to be you, my friend. Don’t worry, though. I’m sure she’ll forgive you in, like, fifty years.” Ethan groaned and dropped his head back into his hands. Now that I’ve found her, how do I discover who she is so I can beg her forgiveness? And even worse, how the hell do I act the part of suitor? Raised in the Alaskan wilds by a father who wasn’t all there after the death of Ethan’s mother, his education in social niceties was sadly lacking. He tended to speak with his fists more often than not. Lucky for him, when it came to women, he didn’t usually have to do a thing. Females tended to approach him for sex so they could brag afterward that they’d ridden the Kodiak and survived. Not that Ethan would ever hurt a female, even if his idea of flirty conversation usually consisted of “Suck me harder” and “Bend over.” If I add “darling” on the end, will she count it as sweet talk?

On this piano, ‘vibrations of extraneous origin’ arise from different ‘shocks,’ ‘noises,’ ‘rustlings,’ and for the most part from what are called ‘aerial momentum vibrations,’ which are generally formed in atmospheric space from the natural vibrations already present there.

A G-SHOCK WATCH. THE BLACK WATCH and its rubber wristband

Barbie, too, has changed her look more than once through the years, though her body has remained essentially unaltered. From an art history standpoint—and Barbie, significantly, has been copyrighted as a work of art—her most radical change came in 1971, and was a direct reflection of the sexual revolution. Until then, Barbie's eyes had been cast down and to one side—the averted, submissive gaze that characterized female nudes, particularly those of a pornographic nature, from the Renaissance until the nineteenth century. What had been so shocking about Manet's Olympia (1865) was that the model was both naked and unabashedly staring at the viewer. By 1971, however, when America had begun to accept the idea that a woman could be both sexual and unashamed, Barbie, in her "Malibu" incarnation, was allowed to have that body and look straight ahead.

Once he accidentally singed his pubic hair while prancing about in a gold lamé g-string during a fire ritual. 

What is the differential diagnosis of septic shock? Non-infective disorders, such as acute myocardial infarction, pulmonary embolism or drug reactions, must be excluded. Toxic shock (e.g. toxic shock syndrome) can also present in a similar manner. What would be your

From this general memory about memory I draw a certain inference. What was wonderful about childhood is that anything in it was a wonder. It was not merely a world full of miracles; it was a miraculous world. What gives me this shock is almost anything I really recall; not the things I should think most worth recalling.

It’s a shock, I know, but the Bible turns that whole concept on its head,” Eckhardt replied. “The person who obeys, who does God’s works, will come to understand that the doctrine is true. In the Bible, obedience precedes understanding, comes before knowledge. God promises understanding to those who do His will first. Seventh chapter of John, verse seventeen.

The troops were cracking because they could not absorb what was happening to them, because they knew themselves to be utterly powerless (bravery had little survival value when one was on the receiving end of a bombardment), and because they had no confidence that the generals who had put them in danger knew what they were doing. Men whose courage was beyond challenge could and did break down if subjected to enough strain of this kind.

The benefits of feelings of control also appear in animal research. In research done before today’s greater concern for animal welfare, dogs confined in a cage and taught that they could not escape shocks learned a sense of helplessness. Later, these dogs cowered passively in other situations when they could escape punishment. Dogs that learned personal control (by successfully escaping their first shocks) adapted easily to a new situation. Researcher Martin Seligman (1975, 1991) noted similarities to this learned helplessness in human situations. Depressed or oppressed people, for example, become passive because they believe their efforts have no effect. Helpless dogs and depressed people both suffer paralysis of the will, passive resignation, and even motionless apathy.

Ninian stared in shock as the stranger met his gaze, noticing the way the color danced like the glow of embers over a coal. It was darkly brilliant around the edges, licking crimson in toward the center, and around the pupil glimmered a fine circle of bright copper flecks. It was stunning.

The real life of the ordinary man is his everyday life, his little circle of affections, fears, hungers, lusts, and imaginative impulses. It is only when his attention is directed to political affairs as something vitally affecting this personal circle, that he brings his reluctant mind to bear upon them. It is scarcely too much to say that the ordinary man thinks as little about political matters as he can, and stops thinking about them as soon as possible. It is still only very curious and exceptional minds, or minds that have by example or good education acquired the scientific habit of wanting to know why, or minds shocked and distressed by some public catastrophe and roused to wide apprehensions of danger, that will not accept governments and institutions, however preposterous, that do not directly annoy them, as satisfactory. The ordinary human being, until he is so aroused, will acquiesce in any collective activities that are going on in this world in which he finds himself, and any phrasing or symbolization that meets his vague need for something greater to which his personal affairs, his individual circle, can be anchored.

got to hang out with Shock G and Tupac backstage.

Adults with ADHD as a group have often experienced more than their fair share of disappointments and frustrations associated with the symptoms of ADHD, in many cases not realizing the impact of ADHD has had on them. When you reflect on a history of low grades, forgetting or not keeping promises made to others, repeated exhortations from others about your unfulfilled potential and the need to work harder, you may be left with a self-view that “I’m not good enough,” “I’m lazy,” or “I cannot expect much from myself and neither can anyone else.” The end result of these repeated frustrations can be the erosion of your sense of self, what is often called low self-esteem. These deep-seated, enduring self-views, or “core beliefs” about who you are can be thought of as a lens through which you see yourself, the world, and your place in the world. Adverse developmental experiences associated with ADHD may unfairly color your lens and result in a skewed pessimistic view of yourself, at least in some situations. When facing situations in the here-and-now that activate these negative beliefs, you experience strong emotions, negative thoughts, and a propensity to fall into self-defeating behaviors, most often resignation and escape. These core beliefs might only be activated in limited, specific situations for some people with ADHD; in other cases, these beliefs color one’s perception in most situations. It should be noted that many adults with ADHD, despite feeling flummoxed by their symptoms in many situations, possess a healthy self-view, though there may be many situations that briefly shake their confidence. These core beliefs or “schema” develop over the course of time from childhood through adulthood and reflect our efforts to figure out the “rules for life” (Beck, 1976; Young & Klosko, 1994). They can be thought of as mental categories that let us impose order on the world and make sense of it. Thus, as we grow up and face different situations, people, and challenges, we make sense of our situations and relationships and learn the rubrics for how the world works. The capacity to form schemas and to organize experience in this way is very adaptive. For the most part, these processes help us figure out, adapt to, and navigate through different situations encountered in life. In some cases, people develop beliefs and strategies that help them get through unusually difficult life circumstances, what are sometimes called survival strategies. These old strategies may be left behind as people settle into new, healthier settings and adopt and rely on “healthy rules.” In other cases, however, maladaptive beliefs persist, are not adjusted by later experiences (or difficult circumstances persist), and these schema interfere with efforts to thrive in adulthood. In our work with ADHD adults, particularly for those who were undiagnosed in childhood, we have heard accounts of negative labels or hurtful attributions affixed to past problems that become internalized, toughened, and have had a lasting impact. In many cases, however, many ADHD adults report that they arrived at negative conclusions about themselves based on their experiences (e.g., “None of my friends had to go to summer school.”). Negative schema may lay dormant, akin to a hibernating bear, but are easily reactivated in adulthood when facing similar gaffes or difficulties, including when there is even a hint of possible disappointment or failure. The function of these beliefs is self-protective—shock me once, shame on you; shock me twice, shame on me. However, these maladaptive beliefs insidiously trigger self-defeating behaviors that represent an attempt to cope with situations, but that end up worsening the problem and thereby strengthening the negative belief in a vicious, self-fulfilling cycle. Returning to the invisible fences metaphor, these beliefs keep you stuck in a yard that is too confining in order to avoid possible “shocks.

...And a tree stump became a very large, very pink, very perplexed looking g bird, who sat sprawled on the ground, wings akimbo, as if shocked by its own existence. Which, Xan reasoned, the poor thing probably was

In the pain, I imagine bliss. My thoughts are like wind, rushing, curling into the depths of myself, expelling, dispelling darkness. I imagine love, I imagine wind, I imagine gold hair and green eyes and whispers, laughter I imagine Me extraordinary, unbroken the girl who shocked herself by surviving, the girl who loved herself through learning, the girl who respected her skin, understood her worth, found her strength s t r o n g s t r o n g e r strongest Imagine me master of my own universe I am everything I ever dreamed of

Of course, it’s a bit of a shock that Loki’s real,

Yet this ichor had allowed the tusk to pierce her plate and wound her as never before. This alone shocked her far more than any amount of blood lost.

Omega-3 fatty acids are essential. Insufficient levels of two of the most important omega-3s—eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA)—have been linked to depression and bipolar disorder, suicidal behavior, inflammation, heart disease, ADD/ADHD, cognitive impairment and dementia, and obesity.[1] Ninety-five percent of Americans do not get enough dietary omega-3 fatty acids.[2] The human body doesn’t produce omega-3s on its own, so you have to get it from outside sources, such as fatty fish. If you aren’t getting enough of this essential nutrient from your diet, it’s bad news for your brain. That’s because omega-3s contribute to about 8 percent of your brain’s weight. At Amen Clinics, we tested omega-3 levels of 50 consecutive patients who were not taking fish oil supplements. A shocking 49 out of 50—that’s 98 percent!—had suboptimal levels. In a subsequent study, we analyzed the scans of 130 patients with their omega-3 levels. Patients with the lowest levels had lower blood flow in the areas of the brain associated with depression and dementia.

The average agnostic of recent times has really had no notion of what he meant by religious liberty and equality. He took his own ethics as self-evident and enforced them [...]. Then he was horribly shocked if he heard of anybody else, Moslem or Christian, taking his ethics as self-evident and enforcing them

And then the shock she helped give the world: Absolom. It wasn’t the announcement of Absolom that changed the world. It was when they saw its power. That day was a Saturday in November. Adeline thought the government had selected a weekend for the first departure for several reasons. The most important was so that the world could watch. They told the press it was so the victims’ families could be present to witness the sentence carried out. That morning, those families stood in the viewing booth, mothers and fathers and their children—at least, the children the man in the Absolom chamber hadn’t taken from them. He stared at his victims’ families with hate-filled eyes. That fire vanished as the machine began to vibrate. Fear took its place. He opened his mouth and screamed, but no one could hear it. A flash filled the chamber, and he was gone. So was the world before. Overnight, crime rates plummeted. Adeline had always heard the saying that the devil you know is better than the one you don’t. That’s what Absolom was to the world: a new devil. Prison was a known. So was the death penalty. They were the devils the world knew. Conceptually, the world knew what Absolom was: a box that sent a person to the past, in an alternate universe. What they didn’t know was what truly happened there. Exile was certain. A lonely death was certain. But how? An exotic disease? Starvation? Being torn apart by an animal? In the absence of certainty, a mind tends to imagine the worst. That’s what Absolom became to the world. The phrase “A fate worse than Absolom” quickly supplanted its predecessor: “A fate worse than death.” Before the first departure, the Absolom machine had been an idea. In those small moments as it hummed to life, the world saw something else: a person who was pure evil, with hate in his heart, instantly hollowed out, gutted, cowering with fear, and then, gone. In an instant, they saw evil wiped from existence.

I am afraid my fury and your insult are too shocking to be wiped out even with an apology,” said Gregory very calmly. “No duel could wipe it out. If I struck you dead I could not wipe it out. There is only one way by which that insult can be erased, and that way I choose. I am going, at the possible sacrifice of my life and honour, to prove to you that you were wrong in what you said.” “In what I said?” “You said I was not serious about being an anarchist.” “There are degrees of seriousness,” replied Syme. “I have never doubted that you were perfectly sincere in this sense, that you thought what you said well worth saying, that you thought a paradox might wake men up to a neglected truth.” Gregory stared at him steadily and painfully. “And in no other sense,” he asked, “you think me serious? You think me a flâneur who lets fall occasional truths. You do not think that in a deeper, a more deadly sense, I am serious.” Syme struck his stick violently on the stones of the road. “Serious!” he cried. “Good Lord! is this street serious? Are these damned Chinese lanterns serious? Is the whole caboodle serious? One comes here and talks a pack of bosh, and perhaps some sense as well, but I should think very little of a man who didn’t keep something in the background of his life that was more serious than all this talking—something more serious, whether it was religion or only drink.

Do not be proud of the fact that your grandmother was shocked at something which you are accustomed to seeing or hearing without being shocked. There are two meanings of the word "nervous," and it is not even a physical superiority to be actually without nerves. It may mean that your grandmother was an extremely lively and vital animal, and that you are a paralytic.

That beautiful faith in human nature and in freedom which had made delicate the dry air of John Stuart Mill; that robust, romantic sense of justice which had redeemed even the injustices of Macaulay—all that seemed slowly and sadly to be drying up. Under the shock of Darwinism all that was good in the Victorian rationalism shook and dissolved like dust. All that was bad in it abode and clung like clay. The magnificent emancipation evaporated; the mean calculation remained. One could still calculate in clear statistical tables, how many men lived, how many men died. One must not ask how they lived; for that is politics. One must not ask how they died; for that is religion. And religion and politics were ruled out of all the Later Victorian debating clubs; even including the debating club at Westminster. What third thing they were discussing, which was neither religion nor politics, I do not know. I have tried the experiment of reading solidly through a vast number of their records and reviews and discussions; and still I do not know. The only third thing I can think of to balance religion and politics is art; and no one well acquainted with the debates at St. Stephen's will imagine that the art of extreme eloquence was the cause of the confusion. None will maintain that our political masters are removed from us by an infinite artistic superiority in the choice of words. The politicians know nothing of politics, which is their own affair: they know nothing of religion, which is certainly not their affair: it may legitimately be said that they have to do with nothing; they have reached that low and last level where a man knows as little about his own claim, as he does about his enemies'. In any case there can be no doubt about the effect of this particular situation on the problem of ethics and science. The duty of dragging truth out by the tail or the hind leg or any other corner one can possibly get hold of, a perfectly sound duty in itself, had somehow come into collision with the older and larger duty of knowing something about the organism and ends of a creature; or, in the everyday phrase, being able to make head or tail of it. This paradox pursued and tormented the Victorians. They could not or would not see that humanity repels or welcomes the railway-train, simply according to what people come by it. They could not see that one welcomes or smashes the telephone, according to what words one hears in it. They really seem to have felt that the train could be a substitute for its own passengers; or the telephone a substitute for its own voice.

Young rarely showed outward grief and discouraged public displays of mourning. He had kept his tears to himself after Joseph Smith’s death, and he did not participate in deathbed vigils for his first wife Miriam or his father. When his daughter Mary Eliza Croxall (by Clarissa Ross) died in 1871, a “shocked” and sickened Young cancelled all business and simply remained inside for a day. As the summer of 1875 drew to a close, though, Young’s emotions were unusually ragged. One month after Joseph Angell’s death, George A. Smith died. For four decades, Smith and Young had been at the center of the church’s history: the 1834 Zion’s Camp march, the 1840–1841 mission to England, the tumultuous events of Nauvoo, and the exodus. At his friend’s funeral, Young uncharacteristically wept.2

Most of Jesus’ parables are story parables, a distinctively Jewish form. Fables (cf. the plant fable in Jdg 9:8–15) existed in a range of cultures, including Greek culture, but most of Jesus’ parables are closer to the human story parables that appear in rabbinic sources, sources that sometimes reflect earlier traditions. In earlier sources, both prophets (2Sa 12:1–7; Isa 5:1–7) and Jewish apocalyptic writers (e.g., 1 Enoch 1:2–3; 37–71) used some parables. Although later rabbinic parables are more stereotypical, they share with Jesus’ parables even some standard figures (e.g., a king representing God, sometimes throwing a banquet for his son, and the like). Because most of Jesus’ hearers were rural Galileans, Jesus’ stories tend to be more agrarian and less addressed to the elite than were later rabbinic parables. Jesus’ parables, unlike those of the rabbis, also tend to subvert traditional values, sometimes in shocking ways. Like later rabbis, Jesus apparently sometimes recycled or reapplied more traditional story lines, as Jesus’ parables sometimes resemble other ancient Jewish stories.

Rehja had ignored those and chosen a rather large kitchen knife from a block on the work counter. He turned to face me. The shock and fear had gone, replaced by the feral grin and the confidence of a man holding a knife. "And here was me thinking you were dead," he said. "My apologies, but living is something I've become strangely attached to," I responded, dropping the broom handle and selecting a heavy frying pan for my right hand and a smaller saucepan for my left.

Once there was a little old lady who lived next-door. I was eleven when I decided to kill her. But I didn’t. As an eleven-year-old I was shocked, upset and angry enough to take the life of the frail-looking, white-haired woman, but I lacked the ingenuity and resolve to put a plan into action. It’s easy to want to kill someone but hard to actually do it. Especially when you’re a kid. That’s why I waited until I was eighteen.

If you want to avoid hurting somebody, convince them that fighting you is a Bad Idea. This is hard to do in the heat of the moment, especially if you look like a perky high school cheerleader, so it's best to make the threat credible beforehand through your reputation. Failing that, go for Shock and Awe. If it works, great, if it doesn't you're halfway done anyway.