Girls Aspects Quotes

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Well, at heart I knew she'd never be a normal woman. And I didn't want her to be one, because what I loved in her were the indomitable and unpredictable aspects of her personality
Mario Vargas Llosa (Travesuras de la niña mala)
He was a Frenchman, a melancholy-looking man. His aspect was that of one who has been looking for the leak in a gas pipe with a lighted candle.
P.G. Wodehouse (The Girl in Blue)
There is thought, and then there is thinking about thoughts, and they don’t feel the same. They must reflect quite different aspects of brain function. The point is, the brain talks to itself, and by talking to itself changes its perceptions.
Susanna Kaysen (Girl, Interrupted)
The most terrifying aspect of human health is our refusal to take steps to help ourselves and the fact that we are so often responsible for our own demise through lack of positive action. It makes me want to take a nap.
Lena Dunham (Not That Kind of Girl: A young woman tells you what she's "learned")
I wanted to get rid of a certain aspect of my character. I was performing a kind of self-abortion with those aspirin. It worked for a while. Then it stopped; but I had no heart to try again.
Susanna Kaysen (Girl, Interrupted)
I don't want to know what's going to happen. As frightening as that is in real life, it's a crucial aspect in creativity. Being predictable is boring, and it's also disheartening and usinspiring.
Carrie Brownstein (Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl)
The man raised his glass, 'To you!' Can't you think of a wittier toast?' Something was beginning to irritate him about the girl's game. Now sitting face to face with her, he realized it wasn't just the words which were turning her into a stranger, but that her whole persona had changed, the movements of her body and her facial expression, and that she unpalatably and faithfully resembled that type of woman whom he knew so well and for whom he felt some aversion. And so (holding his glass in his raised hand), he corrected his toast: 'O.K., then I won't drink to you, but to your kind, in which are combined so successfully the better qualities of the animal and the worse aspects of the human being.
Milan Kundera (Laughable Loves)
One of the paradoxical and transformative aspects of implicit traumatic memory is that once it is accessed in a resourced way (through the felt sense), it, by its very nature, changes. Out of the shattered fragments of her deeply injured psyche, Jody discovered and nurtured a nascent, emergent self. From the ashes of the frantically activated, hypervigilant, frozen, traumatized girl of twenty-five years ago, Jody began to reorient to a new, less threatening world. Gradually she shaped into a more fluid, resilient, woman, coming to terms with the felt capacity to fiercely defend herself when necessary, and to surrender in quiet ecstasy.
Peter A. Levine
Who are we to say getting incested or abused or violated or any of those things can’t have their positive aspects in the long run? … You have to be careful of taking a knee-jerk attitude. Having a knee-jerk attitude to anything is a mistake, especially in the case of women, where it adds up to this very limited and condescending thing of saying they’re fragile, breakable things that can be destroyed easily. Everybody gets hurt and violated and broken sometimes. Why are women so special? Not that anybody ought to be raped or abused, nobody’s saying that, but that’s what is going on. What about afterwards? All I’m saying is there are certain cases where it can enlarge you or make you more of a complete human being, like Viktor Frankl. Think about the Holocaust. Was the Holocaust a good thing? No way. Does anybody think it was good that it happened? No, of course not. But did you read Viktor Frankl? Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning? It’s a great, great book, but it comes out of his experience. It’s about his experience in the human dark side. Now think about it, if there was no Holocaust, there’d be no Man’s Search for Meaning… . Think about it. Think about being degraded and brought within an inch of your life, for example. No one’s gonna say the sick bastards who did it shouldn’t be put in jail, but let’s put two things into perspective here. One is, afterwards she knows something about herself that she never knew before. What she knows is that the most totally terrible terrifying thing that she could ever have imagined happening to her has now happened, and she survived. She’s still here, and now she knows something. I mean she really, really knows. Look, totally terrible things happen… . Existence in life breaks people in all kinds of awful fucking ways all the time, trust me I know. I’ve been there. And this is the big difference, you and me here, cause this isn’t about politics or feminism or whatever, for you this is just ideas, you’ve never been there. I’m not saying nothing bad has ever happened to you, you’re not bad looking, I’m sure there’s been some sort of degradation or whatever come your way in life, but I’m talking Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning type violation and terror and suffering here. The real dark side. I can tell from just looking at you, you never. You wouldn’t even wear what you’re wearing, trust me. What if I told you it was my own sister that was raped? What if I told you a little story about a sixteen-year-old girl who went to the wrong party with the wrong guy and four of his buddies that ended up doing to her just about everything four guys could do to you in terms of violation? But if you could ask her if she could go into her head and forget it or like erase the tape of it happening in her memory, what do you think she’d say? Are you so sure what she’d say? What if she said that even after that totally negative as what happened was, at least now she understood it was possible. People can. Can see you as a thing. That people can see you as a thing, do you know what that means? Because if you really can see someone as a thing you can do anything to him. What would it be like to be able to be like that? You see, you think you can imagine it but you can’t. But she can. And now she knows something. I mean she really, really knows. This is what you wanted to hear, you wanted to hear about four drunk guys who knee-jerk you in the balls and make you bend over that you didn’t even know, that you never saw before, that you never did anything to, that don’t even know your name, they don’t even know your name to find out you have to choose to have a fucking name, you have no fucking idea, and what if I said that happened to ME? Would that make a difference?
David Foster Wallace (Brief Interviews with Hideous Men)
Well, everyone has a friend who holds a very special place in his life. Talking about men…a friend whom you love unconditionally and selflessly.....a friend who knows every secret of your life and who is always the first person whom you want to call when you are in some mess…a friend who tells you exactly what you want to hear. Ena was such a friend to me. My best friend – if that defines the zenith of good friendship. I would rather say, there is no definition of friendship that we shared with each other, the more I explain it, the more complicated it becomes to recite the aspects of our relationship. She was that closer a friend to me, who knew all the nitty-gritties of my life…from every girl who ever came into my life, to passwords of my email accounts or public profiles. Absolutely everything! She was the only girl on earth I trusted blindly and cared for, truly and unconditionally. She was the only girl who could actually make me dance to her beats. We shared that deeper relationship with each other.
Shivam Singh (Best Friends)
The most terrifying aspect of human health is our refusal to take steps to help ourselves and the fact that we are so often responsible for our own demise through lack of positive action.
Lena Dunham (Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She's "Learned")
My god, I hope you find love. And I don’t just mean that in regards to someone you wrap your tired bones around at night. I mean that I hope you find love in every aspect of your life. I hope you find it tucked into early morning sunrises and the smell of your favorite places. I hope you find it strung between the laughter you share with friends I hope it bounces off of you when you hug the people you care for I hope it swells within your rib cage whenever you hear your favorite song or discover something that moves you. I hope you fall in love with growth, and change, and the messiness, and the beauty of fucking up, and making mistakes, and becoming exactly who you want to be. I hope you find love in places that were once devoid of it, in places within yourself that you could have been softer to, kinder to, in the past. Because if there is one thing I have learned, it is that love is so much more than a boy or a girl who holds your heart. Love is everything around you. It is everything.
Bianca Sparacino (The Strength In Our Scars)
If sexual physiology provides the pattern for our experience of the world, what is woman's basic metaphor? It is mystery, the hidden. Karen Horney speaks of a girl's inability to see her genitals and a boy's ability to see his as the source of "the greater subjectivity of women as compared with the greater objectivity of men." To rephrase this with my different emphasis: men's delusional certitude that objectivity is possible is based on the visibility of their genitals. Second, this certitude is a defensive swerve from the anxiety-inducing invisibility of the womb. Women tend to be more realistic and less obsessional because of their toleration for ambiguity which they learn from their inability to learn about their own bodies. Women accept limited knowledge as their natural condition, a great human truth that a man may take a lifetime to reach. The female body’s unbearable hiddenness applies to all aspects men’s dealings with women. What does it look like in there? Did she have an orgasm? Is it really my child? Who was my real father? Mystery surrounds women’s sexuality. This mystery is the main reason for the imprisonment man has imposed on women. Only by confining his wife in a locked harem guarded by eunuchs could he be certain that her son was also his.
Camille Paglia (Sexual Personae: Art and Decadence from Nefertiti to Emily Dickinson (Yale Nota Bene))
During one of my biggest struggles, the ripple effect was at its worst. I felt as though the ripple was going to turn into a whirlpool – to the point where I thought I was going to drown. My head was under the water and my hands were reaching for something to hold on to. Sadly, there wasn’t anyone or anything I could take hold of. However, when I trusted the waves, they carried me to a peaceful place in my mind, to the hidden aspects of my true self where I could explore my options. I had to find comfort in what was given and make the best of it.
Charlena E. Jackson (A Woman's Love Is Never Good Enough)
You can’t tell half a tale, Poison. You can’t write half a book. Whatever you choose to do next will completely change the aspect of what has gone before. if you decided to suddenly kill your friends as they slept –“ Why would I do that?” Poison interjected. Bear with me,” Fleet said patiently. “If you did, then the tale would take on a whole new light. Instead of being the journey of Poison from Gull to save her sister, it would be the terrible story of how a young girl became a cold-blooded killer. They way it would be written would be different. Do you see? Or you might die right now, and it would turn out that it wasn’t your tale all along it was Bram’s or Peppercorn’s, and you were just one of the sideline characters. The whole story has to be known before it can be recorded; otherwise it might suddenly change. That’s the beauty, Poison. You never know what’s going to happen next. When the tale is ended, then the writing will be visible to your eyes; until then it is unwritten.
Chris Wooding (Poison)
It doesn't take two minutes on an examining table for a girl to know that abortion is painful and destructive and it'll have far-reaching effects on her life. Besides the emotional trauma of going through something so violent, there are the physical aspects, the aftereffects. Unfortunately, by the time she's gone that far, it's too late to change her mind.
Francine Rivers (The Atonement Child)
It should have dawned on me that many aspects of the religion were based on revoking the rights of women. If a girl speaks her mind, get her married. Once she’s married, get her pregnant. Once she has children, she’s in for
Elissa Wall (Stolen Innocence: My Story of Growing Up in a Polygamous Sect, Becoming a Teenage Bride, and Breaking Free of Warren Jeffs)
However, in ordinary life, one cannot live by such principles. Imagine the time it would take if every aspect of experience had to be scrutinized afresh every minute of every day. No; in order to free ourselves from the mundane it is essential that we delegate much of our interpretation of the world to that lower area of the mind that deals with the presumed, the assumed, the probable. Even though it sometimes leads us astray and causes us to misinterpret a flash of sunlight as a girl in a white dress, when these two things are as unlike as two things can be.
Diane Setterfield (The Thirteenth Tale)
As Harry Potter was the only other thing I was passionate about, the doctors gave consent for me to leave the hospital and collect the fifth Harry Potter book, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, from the local book shop. I was so ecstatic to have the book and excited to begin reading it, but there was never any hint of your imminent arrival and the way you would change my life so drastically. Luna, you instantly captivated me. I didn’t know why but there was something about you with your upside-down magazine, straggly blonde hair, and the honest, abashed way you stared at people without blinking that fascinated and perplexed me at once. You laughed hysterically at one of Ron’s quips and didn’t stop to excuse yourself and feel ashamed when it became clear that everyone found you strange. Throughout the book, I found myself waiting for your brief appearances and wanting to know more about you and why you were the way you were. You baffled me, not because you were odd (though indeed you were), but because you were… perfect. But it was a different kind of perfect to the perfectly thin, smiling magazine girls I simultaneously idolised and reviled. It was the way you carried your oddness like it was the most natural thing in the world. You didn’t market your oddness as your defining feature the way some insecure teenagers do, in guise of confidence and security. And nor were you oblivious to the awkward and uncomfortable feelings your oddness provoked in others. When, unable to comprehend how you wore your oddness so honestly and unashamedly, your peers reverted to mockery and bullying, you recognized this as a reflection of their own deep-seated insecurity and calmly let them carry on, quite above your head. You weren’t trying hard to present a certain aspect of yourself that would boldly identify you in the world. And that’s when it occurred to me how bizarre and positively ridiculous it was to apply the word “weird” to describe you, when you represented the most natural and unpretentious state possible to be; you were yourself.
Evanna Lynch
Every aspect of her body and personality was up for inspection: too big, too small, too available, too hidden, too much, not enough
Danielle Pender (Watching Women & Girls)
Religion has always been an irrelevant aspect if my life. The people here are either pissed of atheists, or religious freaks waiting for God to save them.
Alina Baker
a song of heartbreak. Of a girl who walked the earth by starlight. Whose aspect was mortal but with beauty divine. Her cruelty had pierced his heart.
Holly Black (The Lost Sisters (The Folk of the Air, #1.5))
34. Sexual contact between a boy and a girl is a progressive thing. In other words, the amount of touching and caressing and kissing that occurs in the early days tends to increase as they become more familiar and at ease with one another. Likewise, the amount of contact necessary to excite one another increases day by day, leading in many cases to an ultimate act of sin and its inevitable consequence. This progression must be consciously resisted by Christian young people who want to serve God and live by His standards. They can resist this trend by placing deliberate controls on the physical aspect of their relationship, right from the first date.
James C. Dobson (Life on the Edge: The Next Generation's Guide to a Meaningful Future)
In general, though, women aren’t really allowed to be kick-ass. It’s like the famous distinction between art and craft: Art, and wildness, and pushing against the edges, is a male thing. Craft, and control, and polish, is for women. Culturally we don’t allow women to be as free as they would like, because that is frightening. We either shun those women or deem them crazy. Female singers who push too much, and too hard, don’t tend to last very long. They’re jags, bolts, comets: Janis Joplin, Billie Holiday. But being that woman who pushes the boundaries means you also bring in less desirable aspects of yourself. At the end of the day, women are expected to hold up the world, not annihilate it. That’s why Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill is so great. The term girl power was coined by the Riot Grrl movement that Kathleen spearheaded in the 1990s. Girl power: a phrase that would later be co-opted by the Spice Girls, a group put together by men, each Spice Girl branded with a different personality, polished and stylized to be made marketable as a faux female type. Coco was one of the few girls on the playground who had never heard of them, and that’s its own form of girl power, saying no to female marketing!
Kim Gordon
We’re not citizens of Israel; nor do we have a say or any political rights in the state that controls every aspect of our lives. We’re stuck with the inability to plan for our futures, to travel freely, or even to move about our territories from city to city without having to cross military checkpoints. We need permission to build our homes, to travel, to work—all the basic rights and freedoms you might take for granted living in a civil society simply don’t exist when you’re living under military occupation. It’s not an easy life, and yet, it’s the only one I’ve ever known.
Ahed Tamimi (They Called Me a Lioness: A Palestinian Girl's Fight for Freedom)
She discovered that underneath the aspect of the Rumpled Porcupine, a tortured Marxist was at war with an impossible, incurable Romantic - who forgot the candles, who broke the wine glasses, who forgot the ring. Who made love to her with a passion that took her breath away. She had always thought of herself as a somewhat uninteresting, thick-waisted, thick ankled girl. Not bad-looking. Not special. But when she was with Chacko, old limits were pushed back. Horizons expanded. She had never before met a man who spoke of the workd - of what it was, and how it came to be, or what he thought would become of it - in the way in which other men she knew discussed their jobs, their friends or their weekends at the beach. Being with Chacko made Margaret Kochamma feel as though her soul had escaped from the narrow confines of her island country, into the vast extravagant spaces of his. He made her feel as though the world belonged to them - as though it lay before thm like an opened frog on a dissecting table, begging to be examined.
Arundhati Roy (The God of Small Things)
I know we live in a very sexist world, and a lot of boys do nothing except get in trouble, until one day they grow up and dominate every aspect of society,” Ash said. “But girls, at least while they’re still girls and perform well, seem to do everything better for a while.
Meg Wolitzer (The Interestings)
Good-girl-gone-queer Lindsay Lohan, divorced single mother Britney Spears, Caitlyn Jenner with her sultry poses, Kim Kardashian having the gall to show up on the cover of Vogue with her black husband: All of them are tied to the tracks and gleefully run over, less for what they've done than for the threat they pose to the idea that female sexuality fits within a familiar and safe pattern. If control over women's bodies were the sole point of the trainwreck, that would be terrifying enough. But it's only the beginning: Shame and fear are used to police pretty much every aspect of being female. After you've told someone what to do with her body, you need to tell her what to do with her mind.
Jude Ellison S. Doyle (Trainwreck: The Women We Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear... and Why)
Driven by that extraordinary oppression which falls on every human being when, childhood over, he begins to divine that he is fated to go on in isolation and unaided towards his own death; driven by this extraordinary oppression, which may with justice be called a fear of God, man looks round him for a companion hand in hand with whom he may tread the road to the dark portal, and if he has learned by experience how pleasurable it undoubtedly is to lie with another fellow-creature in bed, then he is ready to believe that this extremely intimate association of two bodies may last until these bodies are coffined: and even if at the same time it has its disgusting aspects, because it takes place under coarse and badly aired sheets, or because he is convinced that all a girl cares for is to get a husband who will support her in later life, yet it must not be forgotten that every fellow-creature, even if she has a sallow complexion, sharp, thin features and an obviously missing tooth in her left upper jaw, yearns, in spite of her missing tooth, for that love which she thinks will for ever shield her from death, from that fear of death which sinks with the falling of every night upon the human being who sleeps alone, a fear that already licks her as with a tongue of flame when she begins to take off her clothes, as Fraulein Erna was doing now; she laid aside her faded red-velvet blouse and took off her dark-green shirt and her petticoat.
Hermann Broch (The Sleepwalkers (The Sleepwalkers, #1-3))
Communication is a vital component of a healthy partnership. It is a necessary foundational aspect of a romantic relationship, as well as a therapeutic one. Yet self-preservation must trump the blind trust of one’s spouse. Particularly when one’s spouse has proved untrustworthy in the past.
Greer Hendricks (An Anonymous Girl)
These students of mine, like the rest of their generation, were different from mine in one fundamental aspect. My generation complained of a loss, the void in our lives that was created when our past was stolen from us, making us exile in our own country. Yet we had a past to compare with the present; we had memories and images of what had been taken away. But my girls spoke constantly of stolen kisses, films they had never seen and the wind they had never felt on their skin. This generation had no past. Their memory was of a half-articulated desire, something they had never had. It was this lack, their sense of longing for the ordinary, taken-for-granted aspects of life, that gave their words a certain luminous quality akin to poetry.
Azar Nafisi (Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books)
There was a case in which a youth named Haragobinda, scion of the wealthy Basak family of Calcutta, was sentenced to life imprisonment for torturing and raping a minor girl called Kshetramoni. That a boy whose father owned lakhs worth of property could be serving a sentence for raping a poor village girl was unheard of! Girls like Kshetramoni had been bought and sold for twenty or thirty tankas only a few years ago. Natives respected this aspect of British rule
Sunil Gangopadhyay (Those Days)
You’re a badass, hot-as-hell, fucking brilliant doctor, not some insecure high school girl. Man up!” “Do you know how rife with toxic masculinity the phrase man up is?” I challenged, mirroring her pose. “It implies that to be courageous is to be a man.” “Do you know how annoying it is when you change the subject?” Her tone was smug. “I’m just saying, we don’t need to insert men into every aspect of our language.” “Okay, ovary up. Fallopian forward. Vulva with a vengeance.
Denise Williams (How To Fail at Flirting)
The encounter put me in the mood to shop...Babette and the kids followed me into the elevator, into the shops set along the tiers, through the emporiums and the department stores, puzzled but excited by my desire to buy. When I could not decide between two shirts, they encouraged me to buy both. When I said I was hungry they fed me pretzels, beer, souvlaki. The two girls scouted ahead, spotting things they thought I might want or need, running back to get me, to clutch my arms, to plead with me to follow. The...y were my guides to endless well-being...My family gloried in the event. I was one of them, shopping, at last. They gave me advice, badgered clerks on my behalf...We moved from store to store, rejecting not only items in certain departments, not only entire departments but whole stores, mammoth corporations that did not strike our fancy for one reason or another. There was always another store, three floors, eight floors...I shopped with reckless abandon. I shopped for immediate needs and distant contingencies. I shopped for its own sake, looking and touching, inspecting merchandise I had no intention of buying, then buying it...I began to grow in value and self-regard. I filled myself out, found new aspects of myself, located a person I'd forgotten existed. Brightness settled around me. I traded money for goods. The more money I spent, the less important it seemed. I was bigger than these sums. These sums poured off my skin like so much rain
Don DeLillo (White Noise)
Besides, those whose suffering is due to love are, as we say of certain invalids, their own physicians. As consolation can come to them only from the person who is the cause of their grief, and as their grief is an emanation from that person, it is there, in their grief itself, that they must in the end find a remedy: which it will disclose to them at a given moment, for as long as they turn it over in their minds this grief will continue to show them fresh aspects of the loved, the regretted creature, at one moment so intensely hateful that one has no longer the slightest desire to see her, since before finding enjoyment in her company one would have first to make her suffer, at another so pleasant that the pleasantness in which one has invested her one adds to her own stock of good qualities and finds in it a fresh reason for hope.
Marcel Proust (In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower)
There was I, then, mounted aloft; I, who had said I could not bear the shame of standing on my natural feet in the middle of the room, was now exposed to general view on a pedestal of infamy. What my sensations were no language can describe; but just as they all rose, stifling my breath and constricting my throat, a girl came up and passed me: in passing, she lifted her eyes. What a strange light inspired them! What an extraordinary sensation that ray sent through me! How the new feeling bore me up! It was as if a martyr, a hero, had passed a slave or victim, and imparted strength in the transit. I mastered the rising hysteria, lifted up my head, and took a firm stand on the stool. Helen Burns asked some slight question about her work of Miss Smith, was chidden for the triviality of the inquiry, returned to her place, and smiled at me as she again went by. What a smile! I remember it now, and I know that it was the effluence of fine intellect, of true courage; it lit up her marked lineaments, her thin face, her sunken grey eye, like a reflection from the aspect of an angel. Yet at that moment Helen Burns wore on her arm “the untidy badge;” scarcely an hour ago I had heard her condemned by Miss Scatcherd to a dinner of bread and water on the morrow because she had blotted an exercise in copying it out. Such is the imperfect nature of man! such spots are there on the disc of the clearest planet; and eyes like Miss Scatcherd’s can only see those minute defects, and are blind to the full brightness of the orb.
Charlotte Brontë (Jane Eyre)
And here I thought you were a good girl, like your mother. Taking after her in all aspects.”  “Rage is the one thing I got from my father,
Anna Widzisz (Innocent (Omertà, #1))
The rebel may shrug off attempts to please Mom since she deems it impossible anyway and cast herself as “the bad child.” She escapes the pressure of being good and looks outwardly independent—but beneath the outward facing, tough chick act is a little girl who wonders if she is loveable. As a result, she has trouble letting anyone get close—better to keep people at arm’s length. The rebel has trouble trusting, while the Good Daughter naively seems to trust everyone. They are mirror images of each other, each a distorted reflection of their mother’s unintegrated aspects of herself.
Katherine Fabrizio (The Good Daughter Syndrome: Help For Empathic Daughters of Narcissistic, Borderline, or Difficult Mothers Trapped in the Role of the Good Daughter)
Polarization is just one of many ways group membership can change an individual. Perhaps the most striking effect of group membership is that it can modify individuals’ perceptions of themselves. Unable to separate their personal introspection from the ways they believe other people perceive them, teenagers may have what psychologists call an “imaginary audience,” meaning they believe that other people are just as attuned to their appearance and behavior as they are (cue any pimple cream commercial). These perceptions can affect various aspects of their lives. For example, psychologists found that when Asian girls were subtly reminded about their Asian identity, they performed better on math tests. When they were subtly reminded about their gender, however, they performed worse.
Alexandra Robbins (The Geeks Shall Inherit the Earth: Popularity, Quirk Theory and Why Outsiders Thrive After High School)
We hear every day of murders committed in the country. Brutal and treacherous murders; slow, protracted agonies from poisons administered by some kindred hand; sudden and violent deaths by cruel blows, inflicted with a stake cut from some spreading oak, whose every shadow promised—peace. In the county of which I write, I have been shown a meadow in which, on a quiet summer Sunday evening, a young farmer murdered the girl who had loved and trusted him; and yet, even now, with the stain of that foul deed upon it, the aspect of the spot is—peace. No species of crime has ever been committed in the worst rookeries about Seven Dials that has not been also done in the face of that rustic calm which still, in spite of all, we look on with a tender, half-mournful yearning, and associate with—peace.
Mary Elizabeth Braddon (Lady Audley's Secret)
[Fantasy] is a constructive aspect of the child's experimental exploration of reality, or his progressive relating of himself to reality, of his trial-and-error attempts to solve his reality problems.
Lauretta Bender
The first school shooting that attracted the attention of a horrified nation occurred on March 24, 1998, in Jonesboro, Arkansas. Two boys opened fire on a schoolyard full of girls, killing four and one female teacher. In the wake of what came to be called the Jonesboro massacre, violence experts in media and academia sought to explain what others called “inexplicable.” For example, in a front-page Boston Globe story three days after the tragedy, David Kennedy from Harvard University was quoted as saying that these were “peculiar, horrible acts that can’t easily be explained.” Perhaps not. But there is a framework of explanation that goes much further than most of those routinely offered. It does not involve some incomprehensible, mysterious force. It is so straightforward that some might (incorrectly) dismiss it as unworthy of mention. Even after a string of school shootings by (mostly white) boys over the past decade, few Americans seem willing to face the fact that interpersonal violence—whether the victims are female or male—is a deeply gendered phenomenon. Obviously both sexes are victimized. But one sex is the perpetrator in the overwhelming majority of cases. So while the mainstream media provided us with tortured explanations for the Jonesboro tragedy that ranged from supernatural “evil” to the presence of guns in the southern tradition, arguably the most important story was overlooked. The Jonesboro massacre was in fact a gender crime. The shooters were boys, the victims girls. With the exception of a handful of op-ed pieces and a smattering of quotes from feminist academics in mainstream publications, most of the coverage of Jonesboro omitted in-depth discussion of one of the crucial facts of the tragedy. The older of the two boys reportedly acknowledged that the killings were an act of revenge he had dreamed up after having been rejected by a girl. This is the prototypical reason why adult men murder their wives. If a woman is going to be murdered by her male partner, the time she is most vulnerable is after she leaves him. Why wasn’t all of this widely discussed on television and in print in the days and weeks after the horrific shooting? The gender crime aspect of the Jonesboro tragedy was discussed in feminist publications and on the Internet, but was largely absent from mainstream media conversation. If it had been part of the discussion, average Americans might have been forced to acknowledge what people in the battered women’s movement have known for years—that our high rates of domestic and sexual violence are caused not by something in the water (or the gene pool), but by some of the contradictory and dysfunctional ways our culture defines “manhood.” For decades, battered women’s advocates and people who work with men who batter have warned us about the alarming number of boys who continue to use controlling and abusive behaviors in their relations with girls and women. Jonesboro was not so much a radical deviation from the norm—although the shooters were very young—as it was melodramatic evidence of the depth of the problem. It was not something about being kids in today’s society that caused a couple of young teenagers to put on camouflage outfits, go into the woods with loaded .22 rifles, pull a fire alarm, and then open fire on a crowd of helpless girls (and a few boys) who came running out into the playground. This was an act of premeditated mass murder. Kids didn’t do it. Boys did.
Jackson Katz (The Macho Paradox: Why Some Men Hurt Women and How All Men Can Help (How to End Domestic Violence, Mental and Emotional Abuse, and Sexual Harassment))
To carry the remark still further, if fear in girls, instead of being cherished, perhaps, created, were treated in the same manner as cowardice in boys, we should quickly see women with more dignified aspects. It is true, they could not then with equal propriety be termed the sweet flowers that smile in the walk of man; but they would be more respectable members of society, and discharge the important duties of life by the light of their own reason.
Mary Wollstonecraft (A Vindication of the Rights of Woman)
He wanted Jo for his heroine, and called upon his memory to supply him with tender recollections and romantic visions of his love. But memory turned traitor, and as if possessed by the perverse spirit of the girl, would only recall Jo's oddities, faults, and freaks, would only show her in the most unsentimental aspects – beating mats with her head tied up in a bandana, barricading herself with the sofa pillow, or throwing cold water over his passion a la Gummidge – and an irresistable laugh spoiled the pensive picture he was endeavoring to paint. Jo wouldn't be put into the opera at any price, and he had to give her up with a 'Bless that girl, what a torment she is!' (...)
Louisa May Alcott (Little Women (Little Women, #1))
I think maybe at some level it would be good if feminism was about raising up women but also femininity, no matter where it is. Sometimes it’s the delicate and the weak and the yielding aspects of life that are the most important.
Rachel Gold (Just Girls)
Stable biological facts have contingent social effects in a given society in conjunction with other social aspects. A society can always choose to mitigate those effects by instigating different social arrangements and structures.
Kathleen Stock (Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism)
Cunning, ferocity, and drunkenness in all its stages, were there, in their strongest aspects; and women: some with the last lingering tinge of their early freshness, almost fading as you looked: others with every mark and stamp of their sex utterly beaten out, and presenting but one loathsome blank of profligacy and crime: some mere girls, others but young women, and none past the prime of life: formed the darkest and saddest portion of this dreary picture.
Charles Dickens (Oliver Twist)
We do not meet one another as persons in the several aspects of our total life, but know one another only fractionally, as the man who fixes the car, or as that girl who serves our lunch. The humanistic reality of others does not, cannot, come through.
C. Wright Mills
Coming face-to-face with an individual who has crossed class barriers of gender or attractiveness can help us recognize the extent to which our own biases, assumptions, and stereotypes create those class systems in the first place. But rather than question our own value judgments or notice the ways that we treat people differently based on their size, beauty, or gender, most of us reflexively react to these situations in a way that reinforces class boundaries: We focus on the presumed “artificiality” of the transformation the subject has undergone. Playing up the “artificial” aspects of the transformation process gives one the impression that the class barrier itself is “natural,” one that could not have been crossed if it were not for modern medical technology.
Julia Serano (Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity)
Men are taught to view women as “less than.” Far too many aspects of manhood and masculinity are defined by devaluing women. Men are taught to have higher expectations of our sons and lower expectations of our daughters. That’s because the men before us taught us to minimize and trivialize the experience of women and girls—even the women and girls in our own lives. We pass that teaching on to our sons and other boys. I’m not saying this is true for every man, but I am saying that it happens far too often, with far too many of us.
Maria Shriver (The Shriver Report: A Woman’s Nation Pushes Back from the Brink)
The misogyny that shapes every aspect of our civilization is the institutionalized form of male fear and hatred of what they have denied and therefore cannot know, cannot share: the wild country, the being of women. All we can do is try to speak it, try to say it, try to save it. Look, we say, this is the land where your mother lived and where your daughter will live. This is your sister's country. You lived there as a child, boy or girl, you lived there - have you forgotten? All children are wild. You lived in the wild country. Why are you afraid of it?
Ursula K. Le Guin (Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places)
I know we live in a very sexist world, and a lot of boys do nothing except get in trouble, until one day they grow up and dominate every aspect of society. But girls, at least while they’re still girls and perform well, seem to do everything better for a while. Seem to get the attention.
Meg Wolitzer (The Interestings)
She could look back to it from her present standing-place, and contemplate, almost as another being, the young unmarried girl absorbed in her love, having no eyes but for one special object, receiving parental affection if not ungratefully, at least indifferently, and as it were her due-her whole heart and thoughts bent on the accomplishment of one desire. The review of those days, so lately gone yet so far away, touched her with shame; and the aspect of the kind parents filled her with tender remorse. Was the prize gained-the heaven of life-and the winner still doubtful and unsatisfied? As his hero and heroine pass the matrimonial barrier, the novelist generally drops the curtain, as if the drama were over then: the doubts and struggles of life ended: as if, once landed in the marriage country, all were green and pleasant there: and wife and husband had nothing to do but to link each other's arms together, and wander gently downwards towards old age in happy and perfect fruition. But our little Amelia was just on the bank of her new country, and was already looking anxiously back towards the sad friendly figures waving farewell to her across the stream, from the other distant shore.
William Makepeace Thackeray (Vanity Fair)
Ms. Doman had this whole thing about how we have to tell stories about whatever happens to us, and then we can use those stories to decide whether out lives are happy or not, whether events have redeeming aspects or are totally hopeless, that it's really all about how we choose to shape and name things.
Rachel DeWoskin (Big Girl Small)
Here, there was something almost intimate about kneeling. Spirits gathered in warm places. Or rather, warmth was a sign they were near. They were unseen as of yet. You had to draw them forth—but they wouldn’t come to the beck of just anyone. You needed someone like Yumi. You needed a girl who could call to the spirits. There were many viable methods, but they shared a common theme: creativity. Most self-aware Invested beings—be they called fay, seon, or spirit—respond to this fundamental aspect of human nature in one way or another. Something from nothing. Creation. Beauty from raw materials. Art. Order from chaos. Organization.
Brandon Sanderson (Yumi and the Nightmare Painter)
Yet as a storyteller and a non-academic, I was struck by the fact that the books focused on the legal and scientific aspects of the women’s story, and not on the compelling lives of the girls themselves. In fact, I soon discovered that no book existed that put the radium girls center stage and told the story from their perspective. The individual women who had fought and died for justice had been eclipsed by their historic achievements; they were now known only by the anonymous moniker of “the Radium Girls.” Their unique experiences—their losses and their loves; their triumphs and their terrors—had been forgotten, if ever charted in the first place.
Kate Moore (The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America's Shining Women)
Act normal, the Russo girl had said. And so Eli tried again. Started fresh. It wasn’t a perfect imitation, not by far. But it was an improvement. The children at this new house still called him names, but the names had changed. Timid, quiet, weirdo had been replaced by strange, curious, intense. Soon came another family, and another chance. Another opportunity to reinvent, to modify, to adjust aspects of that act. Eli tested his theater on the families as if they were an audience, and used their feedback, the immediate, constant feedback, to tweak his performance. Slowly strange, curious, intense had been refined, honed into charming, focused, clever.
Victoria Schwab (Vengeful (Villains, #2))
For a young woman today, developing femininity successfully requires meeting three basic demands. The first of these is that she must defer to others, the second that she must anticipate and meet the needs of others, and the third, that she must seek self-definition through connection with another. The consequences of these requirements frequently mean that in denying themselves, women are unable to develop an authentic sense of their needs or a feeling of entitlement for their desires. Preoccupied with others' experience and unfamiliar with their own needs, women come to depend on the approval of those to whom they give. The imperative of affiliation, the culture demand that a woman must define herself through association with another, means that many aspects of self are under-developed, producing insecurity and a shaky sense of self. Under the competent carer who gives to the world lives a hungry, deprived and needy little girl who is unsure and ashamed of her desires and wants.
Susie Orbach (Hunger Strike: Starving Amidst Plenty)
I can feel every bit of his naked skin, from his hard, hairy thighs to the hair covering his muscular abdomen. He's nothing like I daydreamed a husband would be. When I was a young girl, I imagined a sweet-faced knight with pale hair and pretty eyes, who would delicately hold my hand and read me poems. The reality is so much better.
Ruby Dixon (The Half-Orc's Maiden Bride (Aspect and Anchor, #3.5))
In order to have more control in my life, in order to have the freedom to live in alignment with my goals and values, and in order to be able to walk away from situations that did not serve me, I needed to be financially free. I realised it wasn't wrong to care about or be ‘focused on’ money. Money affects every aspect of our lives. It affects our life expectancy, our health outcomes, our access to better resources. It affects our stress and mental health, our relationships with our families, partners and children. It affects our ability to enjoy our day-to-day activities, but, more importantly, it affects our freedom, our choices and what control we have over our lives.
Simran Kaur​ (Girls That Invest: Your Guide to Financial Independence through Shares and Stocks)
This is the ultimate narcissistic white-girl game. I would picture how I would handle the attack differently. Or the same. Inevitably, I'd think about my own death, which next to staring at your face in a magnifying mirror is probably the worst thing you can do for yourself. The ambulance-chasing aspect combined with the Monday-morning quarterbacking of it all is the luxury afforded to those of us left untouched by trauma. Sometimes I would use these tragedy-porn shows to unlock deep feelings or cut through the numbness. I would read terrible stories to punish myself for my lucky life. Some real deep Irish Catholic shit. Either way, it was all gross and all bad for my health.
Amy Poehler (Yes Please)
Ivy had learned to find Alexia’s bluntness entertaining, and Alexia had learned one did not always have to look at one’s friend’s hats. Thus, each having discovered a means to overlook the most tiresome aspects of the other’s personality early on in their relationship, the two girls developed a fixed friendship to the mutual benefit of both.
Gail Carriger (Soulless (Parasol Protectorate, #1))
If Titus raped a little girl who happened to be a Red, how would you feel?” She doesn’t know how to answer. The Law does. Nothing would happen. It isn’t rape unless she wears the sigil of an elder House like Augustus. Even then, the crime is against her master. “Now look around,” I say quietly. “There are no Golds here. I’m a Red. You’re a Red. We are all Reds till one of us gets enough power. Then we get rights. Then we make our own law.” I lean back and raise my voice. “That is the point of all this. To make you terrified of a world where you do not rule. Security and justice aren’t given. They are made by the strong.” “You should hope that is not true,” Mustang says quietly to me. “Why?” “Because there is a boy here like you.” Her face takes on a gloomy aspect, as though she regrets what she must say. “My Proctor calls him the Jackal. He is smarter and crueler and stronger than you, and he will win this game and make us his slaves if the rest of us go about acting like animals.” Her eyes implore me. “So please, hurry up and evolve.
Pierce Brown (Red Rising (Red Rising Saga, #1))
If we offer what we’ve experienced to Him, in all its horror and ugliness, and receive His offer to redeem all that occurred, He will bring fruit from it. This has been the single most healing aspect of my recovery from childhood victimization. This is my prayer for that precious little girl. And my prayer for you, too, if you’ve experienced something similar.
Beth Moore (Chasing Vines: Finding Your Way to an Immensely Fruitful Life)
It is little surprise, then, that after ten-plus years of watching movies with stars who are digitally altered, an international study shows that, as of 2014, “90% of all women want to change at least one aspect of [their] physical appearance. . . . [And] 81% of 10-year-old girls are afraid of being fat. Only 2% of [women] actually think [they] are beautiful.
Naomi McDougall Jones (The Wrong Kind of Women: Inside Our Revolution to Dismantle the Gods of Hollywood)
Have you found it different having girls in the house?” He cleared his throat. “Oh, yeah.” “Would you care to elaborate?” “Nope.” I looked up from my writing. “If you don’t elaborate, it’s going to be a very short article.” “Look, I’ve already gotten into it once tonight--” “Are you implying I’m hard to live with? Is that why you won’t comment further? Because you think I’ll be offended? I won’t be.” “No further comment.” I sighed, tempted to toss the recorder at him. “Okay, then, we’ll move on. What’s been the most difficult aspect of living with us?” There was silence, but it was the kind where you can sense someone wants to speak but doesn’t. Jason was so incredibly still, as though he was weighing consequences. “Not kissing you,” he finally said, quietly.
Rachel Hawthorne (The Boyfriend League)
I guess a god doesn't like to be told to put pants on. Its kind of funny, in a surreal sort of way. Of course, knowing that makes me want to peek at his junk. The way he is seated, I can't see anything, but how often does a girl get to see god-dick? If he really is a god. I figure I can't be blamed for being curious, but I don't get up from my spot on the floor to peer. Even I'm not that dumb.
Ruby Dixon (Bound to the Battle God (Aspect and Anchor, #1))
Liberation of the Spirit As a girl, touched by the mystical dimensions of Christian faith, I felt the presence of the Beloved in my heart: the oneness of our life. At that time, when I had not yet learned the right language, I knew only that despite the troubles of my world, the suffering I witnessed around and within me, there was always available a spiritual force that could lift me higher, that could give me moments of transcendent bliss wherein I could surrender all thought of the world and know profound peace. Early on, my heart had been touched by its delight. I knew its rapture. Early on, I made a commitment to be a seeker on the path: a seeker after truth. I was determined to live a life in the spirit. The black theologian James Cone says that our survival and liberation depend upon our recognition of the truth when it is spoken and lived: 'If we cannot recognize the truth, then it cannot liberate us from untruth. To know the truth is to prepare for it; for it is not mainly reflection and theory. Truth is divine action entering our lives and creating the human action of liberation.' In reflecting on my youth, I emphasize the mystical dimension of the Christian faith because it was that aspect of religious experience that I found to be truly liberatory. The more fundamental religious beliefs that were taught to me urging blind obedience to authority and acceptance of oppressive hierarchies-- this didn't move me. no, it was those mystical experiences that enabled me to understand and recognize the realm of being in a spiritual experience that transcends both authority and law.
bell hooks (Teaching Community)
Each one, in my impassioned interior conversations, granted me some aspect of my most dearly held, most fiercely hidden heart’s desires. Life, art, motherhood. Love and the great seductive promise that I wasn’t nothing. That I could be seen for my unvarnished self, and that this hidden self, this precious girl without a mask, unseen for decades, could, that indeed she must, leave a trace upon the world.
Claire Messud (The Woman Upstairs)
But I- unbeknownst to me- had been swayed by this same leaven. If only I could just be straight, and lay aside my homosexuality, God would accept me and call me His own, I used to think. This delusion was the belief that only one aspect of my life was worthy of judgment, while the rest deserved heaven. That my other voices were “not as bad.” They were just struggles that I had to work on instead of repenting. There is a possibility that this kind of self-righteous thinking is why salvation has eluded many same-sex-attracted men and women… Because God did not take hold of their gay desires and replace them with straight desires, they have no other choice but to follow where their affections may lead. The error is this: they have come to God believing that only a fraction of themselves needs saving. They have therefore neglected to acknowledge the rest of them also needs to be made right.
Jackie Hill Perry (Gay Girl, Good God: The Story of Who I Was and Who God Has Always Been)
The stack of her medical files that confronted me at the nurses’ station was about four feet high, taller than the shrunken little girl herself. Laura’s story, like that of the children of Waco, helped us learn more about how children respond to early experience. It illustrates how the mind and body cannot be treated separately, reveals what infants and young children need for healthy brain development and demonstrates how neglecting those needs can have a profound impact on every aspect of a child’s growth.
Bruce D. Perry (The Boy Who Was Raised As a Dog: And Other Stories from a Child Psychiatrist's Notebook)
Astrid turned, slowly and deliberately, toward Reyna. She looked her up and down, and then frowned, as if she couldn't quite place her. "Reyna? I didn't recognize you without the emo girl costume. Still not quite the goddess of light and beauty, are you? Big heels to fill. It'll take a while to grow into them." She looked Reyna over again. "Maybe a long while." "Oh, I fit my shoes just fine. Today, they're a sweet pair of combat boots, because today, I'm playing a different aspect of Freya. Goddess of kick-your-butt-if-you-mess-with-me. Or mess with anyone else.
K.L. Armstrong (Thor's Serpents (The Blackwell Pages #3))
I've been studying every aspect of every dish on sauté for the past two months. How the orzo-filled roasted onions accompany the red snapper in a tart broth dotted with hot chili and cilantro oil. How the pheasant, seared skin-side down and flipped, then finished off in the oven, is served with pumpkin risotto, cranberry coulis, and a side of garlic greens. How the grouper, sautéed in olive oil, then butter, and finished in the oven, lies on a mountain of mashed potatoes surrounded by baby turnips and roasted bits of corn, lightly drizzled with a balsamic reduction.
Hannah Mccouch (Girl Cook: A Novel)
We may assume that the socialising aspect of play settings is beneficial to the child. This is an almost universally held belief, particularly in the case of girls. The child with ASD may disagree. It may be that for some children with ASD there really is no point or functional benefit in them attending a group play setting and that the distress caused outweighs any possible benefit gained. This notion is difficult for many parents to acknowledge as they believe that being alone cannot be good for the child; but for many children and adults with ASD, being alone is the best thing of all.
Sarah Hendrickx (Women and Girls with Autism Spectrum Disorder: Understanding Life Experiences from Early Childhood to Old Age)
Little girls ought to be taught and brought up with boys, so that they might be always together. A woman ought to be trained so that she may be able, like a man, to recognise when she's wrong, or she always thinks she's in the right. Instil into a little girl from her cradle that a man is not first of all a cavalier or a possible lover, but her neighbour, her equal in everything. Train her to think logically, to generalise, and do not assure her that her brain weighs less than a man's and that therefore she can be indifferent to the sciences, to the arts, to the tasks of culture in general. The apprentice to the shoemaker or the house painter has a brain of smaller size than the grown-up man too, yet he works, suffers, takes his part in the general struggle for existence. We must give up our attitude to the physiological aspect, too -- to pregnancy and childbirth, seeing that in the first place women don't have babies every month; secondly, not all women have babies; and, thirdly, a normal countrywoman works in the fields up to the day of her confinement and it does her no harm. Then there ought to be absolute equality in everyday life. If a man gives a lady his chair or picks up the handkerchief she has dropped, let her repay him in the same way. I have no objection if a girl of good family helps me to put on my coat or hands me a glass of water --
Anton Chekhov
Please remember that your divine right to exist in a constant state of pleasure does not mean that you do not or should not feel the entire range of emotions. One of the most magical parts of womanhood is the way we can move about the emotional spectrum at a moment’s notice. People out of tune with our true nature will call us “erratic” or “crazy” when really, we’re just a natural as the wind, the water, and the earth. All of nature’s elements present aspects of beauty, elegance, purity, and peace. Nature’s elements also present aspects of chaos, fury, barrenness, coldness, and destruction. We are made of the same atoms that make up earth and stars, and therefore are capable of all of their attributes.
Black Girl Bliss (Pussy Prayers: Sacred and Sensual Rituals for Wild Women of Color)
When what stays in our mind is the vivid flash of a bold glance, inevitably what will take us by surprise in our next glimpse, almost solely strike us, that is, will be a look close to languid, a gentle and pensive expression, overlooked in the former memory. It is this which, in our comparison of memory with the new reality, will color our disappointment or our surprise; and by its notifying us that our memory had been defective, it will seem to be reality itself that was in need of refocusing. Then the aspect of the face that was recently overlooked, having now become for that reason the most unforgettable, the most real, the most accurately corrective, will itself become an object for us to dream about and recall.
Marcel Proust (In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower)
Funny thing, falling in love. You can't quite explain the difference between this--kissing the girl you love, having sex with the girl you love--and all the kissing and all the sex that came before. You can't describe the difference between her flesh and that flesh, her hips and their hips, her gasp and those gasps. You can't parse the qualitative and quantitative aspects of the experience, the units that make up the whole, any more than you, the untrained viewer, can explain why the Mona Lisa is the Mona fucking Lisa. You just stand back and take it in and say, Wow, so this is art. You lie back in your bed, you hold her next to your chest, her ribs next to your ribs, her breath and your breath, and you say, So this is love.
Beatriz Williams (Tiny Little Thing (Schuyler Sisters, #2))
What will Helene’s fate be? My own, beyond doubt. How can a mother ensure that the man to whom she gives her daughter will be the husband of her heart? You pour scorn on the miserable creatures who sell themselves for a few coins to any passer-by, though want and hunger absolve the brief union; while another union, horrible for quite other reasons, is tolerated, nay encouraged, by society, and a young and innocent girl is married to a man whom she has only met occasionally during the previous three months. She is sold for her whole lifetime. It is true that the price is high! If you allow her no compensation for her sorrows, you might at least respect her; but no, the most virtuous of women cannot escape calumny. This is our fate in its double aspect. Open prostitution and shame; secret prostitution and unhappiness.
Honoré de Balzac (Works of Honore de Balzac)
It truly is a team sport, and we have the best team in town. But it’s my relationship with Ilana that I cherish most. We have such a strong partnership and have learned how we work most efficiently: I need coffee, she needs tea. When we’re stressed, I pace around and use a weird neck massager I bought online that everyone makes fun of me for, and she knits. When we’re writing together she types, because she’s faster and better at grammar. We actually FaceTime when we’re not in the same city and are constantly texting each other ideas for jokes or observations to potentially use (I recently texted her from Asheville: girl with flip-flops tucked into one strap of tank top). Looking back now at over ten years of doing comedy and running a business with her I can see how our collaboration has expanded and contracted. But it’s the problem-solving aspect of this industry, the producing, the strategy, the realizing that we could put our heads together and figure out the best solution, that has made our relationship and friendship what it is. Because that spills into everything. We both have individual careers now, but those other projects have only been motivating and inspiring to each other and the show. We bring back what we’ve learned on the other sets, in the other negotiations, in the other writers’ rooms or press situations. I’m very lucky to have jumped into this with Ilana Rose Glazer, the ballsy, curly-haired, openhearted, nineteen-year-old girl that cracked me up that night at the corner of the bar at McManus. So many wonderful things have happened since we began working together, but there are a lot of confusing, life-altering things in there too, and it’s such a relief to have someone who completely understands the good and the bad.
Abbi Jacobson (I Might Regret This: Essays, Drawings, Vulnerabilities, and Other Stuff)
The Qur’ān began by criticizing two closely related aspects of that society: the polytheism or multiplicity of gods which was symptomatic of the segmentation of society, and the gross socioeconomic disparities that equally rested on and perpetuated a pernicious divisiveness of mankind. The two are obverse and converse of the same coin: only God can ensure the essential unity of the human race as His creation, His subjects, and those responsible finally to Him alone. The economic disparities were most persistently criticized, because they were the most difficult to remedy and were at the hear of social discord—although tribal rivalries, with their multiple entanglements of alliance, enmity, and vengeance, were no less serious, and the welding of these tribes into a political unity was an imperative need. Certain abuses of girls, orphans, and women, and the institution of slavery demanded desperate reform.
Fazlur Rahman (Major Themes of the Qur'an)
know of nothing that is able, to the same degree as a kiss, to conjure up from what we believed to be something with one definite aspect, the hundred other things it may equally well be, since each is related to a no less valid perspective. In short, just as in Balbec Albertine had often seemed different to me, now—as if, by magically accelerating the speed of the changes of perspective and coloring a person offers us in the course of our various encounters, I had tried to contain them all within the space of a few seconds in order to re-create experimentally the phenomenon that diversifies a person’s individuality and to draw out separately, as from a slipcase, all the possibilities it contains—now what I saw, in the brief trajectory of my lips toward her cheek, was ten Albertines; because this one girl was like a many-headed goddess, the head I had seen last, when I tried to draw near, gave way to another.
Marcel Proust (The Guermantes Way (In Search of Lost Time, #3))
Have you found it different having girls in the house?” He cleared his throat. “Oh, yeah.” “Would you care to elaborate?” “Nope.” I looked up from my writing. “If you don’t elaborate, it’s going to be a very short article.” “Look, I’ve already gotten into it once tonight--” “Are you implying I’m hard to live with? Is that why you won’t comment further? Because you think I’ll be offended? I won’t be.” “No further comment.” I sighed, tempted to toss the recorder at him. “Okay, then, we’ll move on. What’s been the most difficult aspect of living with us?” There was silence, but it was the kind where you can sense someone wants to speak but doesn’t. Jason was so incredibly still, as though he was weighing consequences. “Not kissing you,” he finally said, quietly. My heart did this little stutter. I just stared at him as the recorder continued to run, searching for sound. My hand was shaking when I reached over and turned it off. “But you did kiss me, and you said it was a mistake.” “Because getting involved with you is a bad idea, on so many levels.” “Care to share one of those levels?” “I’m living in your house. Your parents are giving me a roof over my head. Your mom brings home extra takeout. I’m here only for the summer. Then I’m back at school.” He reached up, removed the ice pack from around his shoulder, and set it on the table. “And Mac? After we went to Dave and Bubba’s, he comes out to the mound and tells me he thinks you’re hot. And I know you like him, so I was willing to bunt.” “Bunt?” “Willing to sacrifice my happiness.” “You thought you’d be happy being with me?” “Are you kidding? You’re cute, easy to talk to. You love baseball. You make me smile, make me laugh. And we won’t even mention how much I liked kissing you.” Only he had mentioned it. And now I was thinking about it when I really shouldn’t be.
Rachel Hawthorne (The Boyfriend League)
Inarguably, a successful restaurant demands that you live on the premises for the first few years, working seventeen-hour days, with total involvement in every aspect of a complicated, cruel and very fickle trade. You must be fluent in not only Spanish but the Kabbala-like intricacies of health codes, tax law, fire department regulations, environmental protection laws, building code, occupational safety and health regs, fair hiring practices, zoning, insurance, the vagaries and back-alley back-scratching of liquor licenses, the netherworld of trash removal, linen, grease disposal. And with every dime you've got tied up in your new place, suddenly the drains in your prep kitchen are backing up with raw sewage, pushing hundreds of gallons of impacted crap into your dining room; your coke-addled chef just called that Asian waitress who's working her way through law school a chink, which ensures your presence in court for the next six months; your bartender is giving away the bar to under-age girls from Wantagh, any one of whom could then crash Daddy's Buick into a busload of divinity students, putting your liquor license in peril, to say the least; the Ansel System could go off, shutting down your kitchen in the middle of a ten-thousand-dollar night; there's the ongoing struggle with rodents and cockroaches, any one of which could crawl across the Tina Brown four-top in the middle of the dessert course; you just bought 10,000 dollars-worth of shrimp when the market was low, but the walk-in freezer just went on the fritz and naturally it's a holiday weekend, so good luck getting a service call in time; the dishwasher just walked out after arguing with the busboy, and they need glasses now on table seven; immigration is at the door for a surprise inspection of your kitchen's Green Cards; the produce guy wants a certified check or he's taking back the delivery; you didn't order enough napkins for the weekend — and is that the New York Times reviewer waiting for your hostess to stop flirting and notice her?
Anthony Bourdain (Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly)
I have one priority in life and it’s not making millions as it once was. I have all the money I could ever want, too much, India claims. I’m business driven but it’s my girl who is the most important part of my life. My whole life. It’s that very reason I’m reluctant to bring any shift in our happy bubble. We both work hard. We play hard together. That woman is my equal in every aspect of life. She thrills me, and intrigues me. I’ve loved peeling back India’s layers. She’s vulnerable is my mean girl and I love the place we’ve gotten to where she trusts me with all her sad, unsure moments. She will grieve for her brother for the rest of her life. She’ll always worry about her mom becoming manic depressive again. She’ll forever be a woman who puts everyone else before her own needs. But what’s different in India’s life is she now has me who makes sure she’s first. In everything. It’s going to kill me to see the happiness drop from her eyes. She’ll go into fix it mode and when she can’t, she’ll get angry and stressed.
V. Theia (Manhattan Heart (From Manhattan #5))
Saddle horses lined the hitching-rails as far as Brite could see. Canvas-covered wagons, chuck-wagons, buckboards, vehicles of all Western types, stood outside the saddle horses. And up one side and down the other a procession ambled in the dust. On the wide sidewalk a throng of booted, belted, spurred men wended their way up or down. The saloons roared. Black-sombreroed, pale-faced, tight-lipped men stood beside the wide portals of the gaming-dens. Beautiful wrecks of womanhood, girls with havoc in their faces and the look of birds of prey in their eyes, waited in bare-armed splendor to be accosted. Laughter without mirth ran down the walk. The stores were full. Cowboys in twos and threes and sixes trooped by, young, lithe, keen of eye, bold of aspect, gay and reckless. Hundreds of cowboys passed Brite in that long block from the hotel to the intersecting street. And every boy gave him a pang. These were the toll of the trail and of Dodge. It might have been the march of empire, the tragedy of progress, but it was heinous to Brite. He would never send another boy to his death.
Zane Grey (The Trail Driver: A Western Story)
Maggie felt an unexpected pang. She had thought beforehand chiefly at her own deliverance from her teasing hair and teasing remarks about it, and something also of the triumph she should have over her mother and her aunts by this very decided course of action; she didn't want her hair to look pretty,–that was out of the question,–she only wanted people to think her a clever little girl, and not to find fault with her. But now, when Tom began to laugh at her, and say she was like an idiot, the affair had quite a new aspect. She looked in the glass, and still Tom laughed and clapped his hands, and Maggie's cheeks began to pale, and her lips to tremble a little. "Oh, Maggie, you'll have to go down to dinner directly," said Tom. "Oh, my!" ...But Maggie, as she stood crying before the glass, felt it impossible that she should go down to dinner and endure the severe eyes and severe words of her aunts, while Tom and Lucy, and Martha, who waited at table, and perhaps her father and her uncles, would laugh at her; for if Tom had laughed at her, of course every one else would; and if she had only let her hair alone, she could have sat with Tom and Lucy, and had the apricot pudding and the custard! What could she do but sob? She sat as helpless and despairing among her black locks as Ajax among the slaughtered sheep. Very trivial, perhaps, this anguish seems to weather-worn mortals who have to think of Christmas bills, dead loves, and broken friendships; but it was not less bitter to Maggie–perhaps it was even more bitter–than what we are fond of calling antithetically the real troubles of mature life. "Ah, my child, you will have real troubles to fret about by and by," is the consolation we have almost all of us had administered to us in our childhood, and have repeated to other children since we have been grown up. We have all of us sobbed so piteously, standing with tiny bare legs above our little socks, when we lost sight of our mother or nurse in some strange place; but we can no longer recall the poignancy of that moment and weep over it, as we do over the remembered sufferings of five or ten years ago. Every one of those keen moments has left its trace, and lives in us still, but such traces have blent themselves irrecoverably with the firmer texture of our youth and manhood; and so it comes that we can look on at the troubles of our children with a smiling disbelief in the reality of their pain. Is there any one who can recover the experience of his childhood, not merely with a memory of what he did and what happened to him, of what he liked and disliked when he was in frock and trousers, but with an intimate penetration, a revived consciousness of what he felt then, when it was so long from one Midsummer to another; what he felt when his school fellows shut him out of their game because he would pitch the ball wrong out of mere wilfulness; or on a rainy day in the holidays, when he didn't know how to amuse himself, and fell from idleness into mischief, from mischief into defiance, and from defiance into sulkiness; or when his mother absolutely refused to let him have a tailed coat that "half," although every other boy of his age had gone into tails already? Surely if we could recall that early bitterness, and the dim guesses, the strangely perspectiveless conception of life, that gave the bitterness its intensity, we should not pooh-pooh the griefs of our children.
George Eliot (The Mill on the Floss)
I have always, deeply, violently, detested those who look for a position (political, philosophical, religious, whatever) in a work of art rather than searching it for an effort to know, to understand, to grasp this or that aspect of reality. Until Stravinsky, music was never able to give barbaric rites a grand form. We could not imagine them musically. Which means: we could not imagine the beauty of the barbaric. Without its beauty, the barbaric would remain incomprehensible. (I stress this: to know any phenomenon deeply requires understanding its beauty, actual or potential.) Saying that a bloody rite does possess some beauty—there's the scandal, unbearable, unacceptable. And yet, unless we understand this scandal, unless we get to the very bottom of it, we cannot understand much about man. Stravinsky gives the barbaric rite a musical form that is powerful and convincing but does not lie: listen to the last section of the Sacre, the "Danse sacrale" ("Sacrificial Dance"): it does not dodge the horror. It is there. Merely shown? Not denounced? But if it were denounced—stripped of its beauty, shown in its hideousness—it would be a cheat, a simplification, a piece of "propaganda." It is because it is beautiful that the girl's murder is so horrible.
Milan Kundera (Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts)
Though each of them was of a type quite different from the others, all of them were beautiful; but I had been looking at them for so few moments, and was so far from daring to stare at them, that I had not yet been able to individualize any of them. With the exception of one, whose straight nose and darker complexion marked her out among the rest, as a king of Arabian looks may stand out in a Renaissance painting of the Magi, they were knowable only as a pair of hard, stubborn, laughing eyes in one of the faces; as two cheeks of that pink touched by coppery tones suggesting geraniums in another; and none of even these features had I yet inseparably attached to any particular girl rather than to some other; and when (given the order in which I saw their complex whole unfold before me, wonderful because the most dissimilar aspects were mixed into it and all shades of colour were juxtaposed, but also as confused as a piece of music in which one cannot isolate and identify the phrases as they form, which once heard are as soon forgotten) I noticed the emergence of a pale oval, of two green eyes, or black ones, I had no idea whether they were those whose charm had struck me a moment before, in my inability to single out and recognize one or other of these girls and allot them to her.
Marcel Proust (In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower)
Echad is first mentioned in the garden. It says a man and a woman, when they join together, become echad, or “one.” But that word echad is more explosive with meaning than just one flesh. It can literally mean to fuse together at the deepest part of our beings. Two becoming one, completely glued together, completely meshing. I still remember one of the hardest conversations I have had with Alyssa. We were just starting to date again, and were sitting in the car after a wonderful date night. We knew marriage was a possibility on the horizon, and I felt like I finally had to share things in my past that would affect her if we got married. I was incredibly nervous, as well as terrified of rejection or hurt, but I realized that if intimacy were to grow, I had to get vulnerable. For marriage to be what it truly is—two people becoming one in mind, body, soul, and spirit—I had to be honest. I remember sharing with her many things, but specifically some details of my sexual past. My teenage years were littered with me almost worshiping sexual fulfillment in pornography, partying, and girls. And I say worship, because that was where I got my worth, value, and purpose as well as what I most lived for (which is what the definition of worship is). I had to apologize and ask forgiveness from Alyssa for things I had done before I even knew her because of echad—one form of complete and utter intimacy. Because of that beauty, mystery, and power, God created it to function best in a man and a woman coming together for life and constantly echading or fusing together. I needed forgiveness because I had betrayed echad. I had betrayed oneness. I had betrayed intimacy. And if I wasn’t honest about it, it’d be a little part of my life or heart that Alyssa didn’t know—thus blocking echad. But something really peculiar happened in that moment. With the grace and forgiveness of Jesus, Alyssa forgave me. She heard all that I was and am, and still wanted to walk this journey with me. I still remember the tenderness in her voice as she spoke truth and forgiveness over me. In that moment I was exposed and known, and yet because of Alyssa’s grace, I was at the same time loved. And that is where intimacy is found—to be fully loved and to be fully known. To be fully loved, but not fully known will always allow us to buy the lie that “if they only knew the real me, they wouldn’t want me anymore.” And to be fully known but not fully loved feels sharp, painful, at a level of rejection that hurts so bad. But to be fully known and at the same time fully loved, now that is intimacy. I don’t want to give the wrong impression. Intimacy is certainly romantic in some aspects, but at its deepest level, it’s much more than that. It can be experienced with friends and family, not just spouses and loved ones.
Jefferson Bethke (It's Not What You Think: Why Christianity Is About So Much More Than Going to Heaven When You Die)
Though each of them was of a type quite different from the others, all of them were beautiful; but I had been looking at them for so few moments, and was so far from daring to stare at them, that I had not yet been able to individualize any of them. With the exception of one, whose straight nose and darker complexion marked her out among the rest, as a king of Arabian looks may stand out in a Renaissance painting of the Magi, they were knowable only as a pair of hard, stubborn, laughing eyes in one of the faces; as two cheeks of that pink touched by coppery tones suggesting geraniums in another; and none of even these features had I yet inseparably attached to any particular girl rather than to some other; and when (given the order in which I saw their complex whole unfold before me, wonderful because the most dissimilar aspects were mixed into it and all shades of colour were juxtaposed, but also as confused as a piece of music in which one cannot isolate and identify the phrases as they form, which once heard are as soon forgotten) I noticed the emergence of a pale oval, of two green eyes, or black ones, I had no idea whether they were those whose charm had struck me a moment before, in my inability to single out and recognize one or other of these girls and allot them to her. The fact that my view of them was devoid of demarcations, which I was soon to draw among them, sent a ripple of harmonious imprecision through their group, the uninterrupted flow of a shared, unstable and elusive beauty.
Marcel Proust (In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower)
HEART ACTION Do you practice what you preach? Become aware of the times when you are not living out the principles and kindnesses that you hold dear. Find fresh ways to show God's love and express your gifts and your compassion. Cambric tea was hot water and milk, with only a taste of tea in it, but little girls felt grown-up when their mothers let them drink cambric tea. LAURA INGALLS WILDER We are no longer to be children, tossed here and there by waves and carried about by every wind of doctrine, by the trickery of men, by craftiness in deceitful scheming; but speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in all aspects into Him. -EPHESIANS 4:14-15 God does not want us to remain spiritually immature. Many of the 30-to-40-year-old women I meet seem to dwell on how old they are. There doesn't seem to be much hope or time for them to make an impact in life. I always reassure them how beautiful the older decades are. Each season of life has so much to offer. Life becomes richer the more mature we become. Benjamin Jowett once wrote, Though I am growing old, I maintain that the best part is yet to come-the time when one may see things more dispassionately and know oneself and others more truly, and perhaps be able to do more, and in religion rest centered in a few simple truths. I do not want to ignore the other side, that one will not be able to see so well or walk so far or read so much. But there may be more peace within, more communications with God, more real light instead of distraction about many things, better relations with others, and fewer
Emilie Barnes (The Tea Lover's Devotional)
The questing, anxious, exacting way that we have of looking at the person we love, our eagerness for the word which shall give us or take from us the hope of an appointment for the morrow, and, until that word is uttered, our alternative if not simultaneous imaginings of joy and of despair, all these make our observation, in the beloved object’s presence, too tremulous to be able to carry away a clear impression of her. Perhaps, also, that activity of all the senses at once which endeavours to learn from the visible aspect alone what lies behind it is over-indulgent to the thousand forms, to the changing fragrance, to the movements of the living person whom as a rule, when we are not in love, we regard as fixed in one permanent position. Whereas the beloved model does not stay still; and our mental photographs of her are always blurred. I did not rightly know how Gilberte’s features were composed, save in the heavenly moments when she disclosed them to me; I could remember nothing but her smile. And not being able to see again that beloved face, despite every effort that I might make to recapture it, I would be disgusted to find, outlined in my memory with a maddening precision of detail, the meaningless, emphatic faces of the man with the wooden horses and of the barley-sugar woman; just as those who have lost a dear friend whom they never see even while they are asleep, are exasperated at meeting incessantly in their dreams any number of insupportable creatures whom it is quite enough to have known in the waking world. In their inability to form any image of the object of their grief they are almost led to assert that they feel no grief.
Marcel Proust (In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower)
The old chap goes on equably trusting Providence and the established order of the universe, but alive to its small dangers and its small mercies. One can almost see him, grey-haired and serene in the inviolable shelter of his book-lined, faded, and comfortable study, where for forty years he had conscientiously gone over and over again the round of his little thoughts about faith and virtue, about the conduct of life and the only proper manner of dying; where he had written so many sermons, where he sits talking to his boy, over there, on the other side of the earth. But what of the distance? Virtue is one all over the world, and there is only one faith, one conceivable conduct of life, one manner of dying. He hopes his “dear James” will never forget that “who once gives way to temptation, in the very instant hazards his total depravity and everlasting ruin. Therefore resolve fixedly never, through any possible motives, to do anything which you believe to be wrong.” There is also some news of a favourite dog; and a pony, “which all you boys used to ride,” had gone blind from old age and had to be shot. The old chap invokes Heaven’s blessing; the mother and all the girls then at home send their love. . . . No, there is nothing much in that yellow frayed letter fluttering out of his cherishing grasp after so many years. It was never answered, but who can say what converse he may have held with all these placid, colourless forms of men and women peopling that quiet corner of the world as free of danger or strife as a tomb, and breathing equably the air of undisturbed rectitude. It seems amazing that he should belong to it, he to whom so many things “had come.” Nothing ever came to them; they would never be taken unawares, and never be called upon to grapple with fate. Here they all are, evoked by the mild gossip of the father, all these brothers and sisters, bone of his bone and flesh of his flesh, gazing with clear unconscious eyes, while I seem to see him, returned at last, no longer a mere white speck at the heart of an immense mystery, but of full stature, standing disregarded amongst their untroubled shapes, with a stern and romantic aspect, but always mute, dark — under a cloud.
Joseph Conrad (Delphi Complete Works of Joseph Conrad)
If we consider the possibility that all women–from the infant suckling her mother’s breast, to the grown woman experiencing orgasmic sensations while suckling her own child, perhaps recalling her mother’s milk-smell in her own; to two women, like Virginia Woolf’s Chloe and Olivia, who share a laboratory; to the woman dying at ninety, touched and handled by women–exist on a lesbian continuum, we can see ourselves as moving in and out of this continuum, whether we identify ourselves as lesbian or not. It allows us to connect aspects of woman-identification as diverse as the impudent, intimate girl-friendships of eight- or nine-year-olds and the banding together of those women of the twelfth and fifteenth centuries known as Beguines who “shared houses, rented to one another, bequeathed houses to their room-mates … in cheap subdivided houses in the artisans’ area of town,” who “practiced Christian virtue on their own, dressing and living simply and not associating with men,” who earned their livings as spinners, bakers, nurses, or ran schools for young girls, and who managed–until the Church forced them to disperse–to live independent both of marriage and of conventual restrictions. It allows us to connect these women with the more celebrated “Lesbians” of the women’s school around Sappho of the seventh century B.C.; with the secret sororities and economic networks reported among African women; and with the Chinese marriage resistance sisterhoods–communities of women who refused marriage, or who if married often refused to consummate their marriages and soon left their husbands–the only women in China who were not footbound and who, Agnes Smedley tells us, welcomed the births of daughters and organized successful women’s strikes in the silk mills. It allows us to connect and compare disparate individual instances of marriage resistance: for example, the type of autonomy claimed by Emily Dickinson, a nineteenth-century white woman genius, with the strategies available to Zora Neale Hurston, a twentieth-century black woman genius. Dickinson never married, had tenuous intellectual friendships with men, lived self-convented in her genteel father’s house, and wrote a lifetime of passionate letters to her sister-in-law Sue Gilbert and a smaller group of such letters to her friend Kate Scott Anthon. Hurston married twice but soon left each husband, scrambled her way from Florida to Harlem to Columbia University to Haiti and finally back to Florida, moved in and out of white patronage and poverty, professional success and failure; her survival relationships were all with women, beginning with her mother. Both of these women in their vastly different circumstances were marriage resisters, committed to their own work and selfhood, and were later characterized as “apolitical ”. Both were drawn to men of intellectual quality; for both of them women provided the ongoing fascination and sustenance of life.
Adrienne Rich (Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence)
One could spend a lifetime mastering the technical aspects of the piano and never achieve a state of musical expression - that alchemy by which the performer not only comprehends the sentiments of the composer, but somehow communicates them to her audience through the manner of her play. Whatever personal sense of heartache Chopin had hoped to express through this little composition - whether it had been prompted by a loss of love, or simply sweet anguish one feels when witnessing a mist on a meadow in the morning - it was right there, ready to be experienced to its fullest, in the ballroom of the Hotel Metropol one hundred years after the composer's death. But how, the question remained, could a seventeen-year-old girl achieve this feat of expression, if not by channeling a sense of loss and longing of her own?
Amor Towles (A Gentleman in Moscow)
A date was set for the girls to undergo their rite of passage into the Sisterhood of the Dragon. It would take place on the autumnal equinox, known under the Madragorian beliefs as the Feast of Corg, after one of Madragore’s sons, who was associated with harvest and death. Everna told Pharinet she should now look at Foymeriel. Under dragon lore, this was a female day, when the mute priestesses of Foy, the Dragon Queen, came to reap the land of ripe souls, and take their Bone Lady a youth of fair aspect as a sacrificial husband.
Storm Constantine (Sea Dragon Heir (The Chronicles of Magravandias, #1))
Even in a single story, the narrator will often change his or her tone or pitch to emphasise certain aspects-such as laughter or shouting. When this happens, I have to turn the volume down. But when they whisper, I need to turn it up. It is very annoying and time-consuming.
Alis Rowe (The Girl with the Curly Hair - Asperger's and Me)
Many casualties?’ ‘Thirty or more. Mostly young girls from the typing pool and half of them were Catholic, there’s the irony. The Provisionals have already claimed credit, if that’s the right word. A nasty business.’ ‘Binnie Gallagher would be the first to agree with you.’ Which seemed to have little or no effect on him, for he sat staring down at the desk, whistling softly to himself while he traced complicated patterns on a memo pad with a pencil. I said, ‘Look, I’m not too happy about what you might call the security aspects
Jack Higgins (The Savage Day (Simon Vaughn, #2))
Jenna, you are halfway to freedom from Wayne. A few more months and you can hand him back to us, and not have to deal with him anymore. If you launch this business with him, you are locked in, day in and day out, for a minimum of four or five years. And really, can you imagine him really helping at these events? I just see him knocking over ice sculptures, and tipping over cakes, and generally being a bull in the china shop everywhere he goes. A bull on steroids. With an inner ear imbalance. On roller skates." "Enough, lawdouche, she gets it." "I know. But again, Wayne is pretty clear that his area here would be identifying and helping land clients, and consulting on thematic details and event brainstorming, and keeping up with all industry aspects of the target market." "You mean going to movies, reading comics, and playing video games." "Yep, something like that." "You can't really be thinking you are going to do this." "I can be thinking that. And I'm pretty sure that the only opinion I asked you for on this was legal ramifications and financial obligations. I don't really care about your personal opinions." "Well, that hurts my feelings, because I still care about you on a personal level, and I think this is a huge mistake for you personally." I wait for my heart to race, for the sweats to start, for my colon to twist itself into a pretzel. And when none of that happens, I look at Brian. "I think, that being the case, that perhaps you ought to speak to your partners about who might be the best attorney to work with me moving forward." "You're firing me? Because I care about you?" "I'm firing you because I need an attorney who is less personally interested in the decisions I make. I'm a big girl, and I have a dad. And clearly, this is no longer a good fit. I'll appreciate a call from the other partners by the end of the week with a plan that I can review." "Seriously, I feel like you've completely lost your mind!" "Careful, Brian. At the moment, I'm asking you be removed from my account. However uncomfortable that may be for you with your partners, I assume you would rather that, than having to explain why I'm leaving the firm entirely. And I will be advising Wayne to shift to the same person I am with, obviously, for convenience." His chiseled jaw snaps shut, and while I can see a dozen retorts on the tip of his tongue, he doesn't speak. "Thank you. I'll review this further, and will discuss my decision with my new attorney. You'll get formal word from Wayne on his choice soon, I'm sure.
Stacey Ballis (Out to Lunch)
I have to hand it to you, little Annamuk, this is not what I would have expected." "Why is that?" "It's so, um, romantic." "And you don't think I'm romantic?" "I think you're refreshingly unsentimental. It's what makes you a great builder." "I don't think I follow." He pauses for a moment. "I think that your eye always goes to what will make a home function smoothly, what will make the people who live there comfortable. That is different than the romantic aspect. Romantic people get focused on things like brand names and labels that evoke a certain feel for them, or focused on elements that may or may not work well for their space. Old-world crown molding in a modern loft space, commercial kitchen appliances for a family that doesn't cook, the kinds of touches that actually make a space feel awkward or just off. Your places are always fully kitted out, with amazing attention to detail, and always designed with the actual usage and client in mind." "So why is this different?" "I don't know. Don't get me wrong, it's amazing, and still super-functional, but the chandelier? The painted floor? Very girly." "And I'm not a girl?" Liam looks me dead in my eyes. "No, my darling. You are not now and never have been a girl. You are a woman. Every inch.
Stacey Ballis (Recipe for Disaster)
Having fun is an important key in relationships. Love is the most important aspect of course, but if you can’t have fun and laugh and play together one of you is bound to get bored and move on. That’s why I like to have fun too. I want my girl to be satisfied in every possible way.
Victoria Ashley
Like shit. Like losing. Like lacking in every aspect of everything. It has felt like breathing with one lung in a room steamed with chlorine and acid, like walking on broken ankles and sleeping on spikes. That’s what I’ve felt like,” I tell him. “That’s what missing you feels like.
Meagan Brandy (Tempting Little Thief (Girls of Greyson, #1))
Related: I am scared about what my cell phone is doing to my brain. And yet I have never used an earbud for more than half a day. The most terrifying aspect of human health is our refusal to take steps to help ourselves and the fact that we are so often responsible for our own demise through lack of positive action. It makes me want to take a nap.
Lena Dunham (Not That Kind of Girl: A young woman tells you what she's "learned")
Holy Goddess,” I whispered into Jai’s hair, which smelled like soap and sun-bleached linen. “Maiden, Mother, and Crone, I pray to all your aspects. Relieve this girl’s burden.
Maria Turtschaninoff
Serious topics were never discussed. I learned to avoid them in the way children acquire a sense for the dangers of the road. This was for my own protection, and we were no different from other families in that respect. Since there was no aspect of life, public or private, that fell outside the authority of the Party, almost every topic of conversation was potentially political, and potentially dangerous. My parents would not risk an incautious remark that might be repeated innocently by me, or misunderstood.
Hyeonseo Lee (The Girl with Seven Names: Escape from North Korea)
A perfection of the goddess Astarte, for no man could look at her provocative form without seeing in her the sublime representation of fertility. She was a girl whose purpose was to be loved, to be taken away and made fertile so that she could reproduce her grandeur and bless the earth. As ancient civilizations such as Urbaal's were destroyed, their clay images buried under ruins for eons, so were the gods and goddesses who protected and insured their growth. No longer did the sacred prostitute, the human woman who embodied the goddess, dance in the temple to excite the communication of body and soul. The temple of the goddess of love, no longer vital, went underground. Who was "the sacred prostitute"? And what happened to the developing consciousness of humankind when people no longer venerated the goddess of love, passion and sex?
Nancy Qualls-Corbett (The Sacred Prostitute: Eternal Aspect of the Feminine (Studies in Jungian Psychology by Jungian Analysts, 32))
Love's Legacy focuses on aspects of Chateaubriand's life, character, and literary intelligence in the context of the times and customs in which he and his contemporaries lived -- it leads to an adventure as I sought to resolve a genealogical mystery related to my own ancestors.
Daniel Fallon (Love’s Legacy Viscount Chateaubriand and the Irish Girl)
Lenora was a Fosse girl. She had learned from the mater, the actual master himself. Fosse was a galvanizing choreographer, who fascinated and spoke directly to me for a range of reasons. The first was the fact that the most iconic aspects of his work were inspired by his imperfections. Because he was losing his hair, hats became an integral part of his pageantry. His shoulders were rounded, giving rise to his signature slouch. He didn't like his hands, so gloves made their way into his numbers. He was pigeon-toed and couldn't achieve the kind of turnout expected in ballet, so he developed a style in which the legs are turned in and the feet point at each other. I was intoxicated by the way he had spun his ‘flaws’ into stylistic gold. It felt like a message for me that my own ‘flaws’ and vulnerabilities might actually be arrows pointing straight to the heart of my power as a performer, and – dare I say – my artistry.
Billy Porter (Unprotected: A Memoir)
Lenora was a Fosse girl. She had learned from the master, the actual master himself. Fosse was a galvanizing choreographer, who fascinated and spoke directly to me for a range of reasons. The first was the fact that the most iconic aspects of his work were inspired by his imperfections. Because he was losing his hair, hats became an integral part of his pageantry. His shoulders were rounded, giving rise to his signature slouch. He didn't like his hands, so gloves made their way into his numbers. He was pigeon-toed and couldn't achieve the kind of turnout expected in ballet, so he developed a style in which the legs are turned in and the feet point at each other. I was intoxicated by the way he had spun his ‘flaws’ into stylistic gold. It felt like a message for me that my own ‘flaws’ and vulnerabilities might actually be arrows pointing straight to the heart of my power as a performer, and – dare I say – my artistry.
Billy Porter (Unprotected: A Memoir)
She wrote about the apartheid wall, which, in a nonbinding decision, the International Court of Justice had declared illegal in 2004. We all knew firsthand that the wall cut right through Palestinian towns and villages, dividing communities and separating many farmers from their land. Israel contends that the wall is needed for security, to prevent attacks, but it didn’t construct the wall along the pre-1967 Green Line, which is recognized as the boundary between Israel and the West Bank. Rather, the wall was built deep within the West Bank, enabling Israel to annex even more Palestinian land. The same classmate also wrote about how Israel’s many permanent and temporary checkpoints prevent Palestinians from moving around freely and add painful delays to what should be short, direct journeys. She interviewed some of us about our own experiences with checkpoints. I told her about the spontaneous checkpoints the military regularly erect at the entrance to our village and how we’d sometimes sit in the car for hours trying to go to school or work or whatever appointment we had. Another aspect of her research project looked at the identification cards we are forced to carry at all times and present at the checkpoints. She interviewed some of our classmates from the West Bank about how they aren’t allowed to go to Jerusalem or any city inside ’48 without a permit from Israel, which isn’t easy to obtain.
Ahed Tamimi (They Called Me a Lioness: A Palestinian Girl's Fight for Freedom)
Although all this abnormal order of things is not of recent date, the characteristic fact of the bourgeois period is that it assumed the principal, dissociated, and autonomous characteristics of a "social morality"—precisely with the "virtuism" of which Pareto accuses it, which to a certain extent was no longer subject to religious morality. Now, it is exactly this morality with a sexual basis that is the principal object of the processes of dissolution in recent times. We hear of a "sexual revolution" supposed to remove both inner inhibitions and repressive social taboos. In fact, in today’s world "sexual freedom" is being affirmed ever more, as a current practice. But we have to consider this in more detail. I must emphasize above all that the direction of the processes at work is toward a freeing of sex, but in no way a freeing from sex. Sex and women are instead becoming dominant forces in present society, an evident fact that is also part of the general phenomenology of every terminal phase of a civilization’s cycle. One might speak of a chronic sexual intoxication that is profusely manifested in public life, conduct, and art. Its counterpart is a gynocratic tendency, a sexually oriented preeminence of the woman that relates to the materialistic and practical involvement of the masculine sex: a phenomenon that is clearest in those countries, like the United States, where that involvement is more excessive. [...] The aspects of the crisis of female modesty are another part of this. Beside the cases in which almost full female nudity feeds the atmosphere of abstract, collective sexuality, we should consider those cases in which nudity has lost every serious "functional" character—cases which by their habitual, public character almost engender an involuntarily chaste glance that is capable of considering a fully undressed girl with the same aesthetic disinterest as observing a fish or a cat. Furthermore, by adding the products of commercialized mass pornography, the polarity between the sexes is diluted, as seen in the conduct of "modern" life where the youth of both sexes are everywhere intermingled, promiscuously and "unaffectedly," with almost no tension, as if they were turnips and cabbages in a vegetable garden. We can see how this particular result of the processes of dissolution relates to what I have said of the "animal ideal," as well as the correspondence between the East and the West. The primitive, erotic life so typical among American youth is not at all far from the promiscuity of male and female "comrades" in the communist realm, free from the "individualistic accidents of bourgeois decadence," who in the end reflect little on sexual matters, their prevalent interests being channeled elsewhere into collective life and class. We can consider separately the cases in which the climate of diffuse and constant eroticism leads one to seek in pure sexuality, more or less along the same lines as drugs, frantic sensations that mask the emptiness of modern existence. The testimonies of certain beatniks and similar groups reveal that their pursuit of the sexual orgasm causes an anguish aroused by the idea that they and their partner might not reach it, even to the point of exhaustion.
Julius Evola (Ride the Tiger: A Survival Manual for the Aristocrats of the Soul)
In any event, it was not many months later that my wife conceived, unexpectedly. After careful discussion we decided it was not something that should continue. I’m in my fifties. I didn’t want to go through any more child-raising experiences. I’d seen enough. So we came to our conclusion and made the necessary medical appointment. "Then something very strange happened. I’ll never forget it. As we went over the whole decision in detail one last time, there was a kind of dissociation, as though my wife started to recede while we sat there talking. We were looking at each other, talking normally, but it was like those photographs of a rocket just after launching where you see two stages start to separate from each other in space. You think you’re together and then suddenly you see that you’re not together anymore. "I said, 'Wait. Stop. Something’s wrong.' What it was, was unknown, but it was intense and I didn’t want it to continue. It was a really frightening thing, which has since become clearer. It was the larger pattern of Chris, making itself known at last. We reversed our decision, and now realize what a catastrophe it would have been for us if we hadn’t. "So I guess you could say, in this primitive way of looking at things, that Chris got his airplane ticket after all. This time he’s little girl named Nell and our life is back in perspective again. The hole in the pattern is being mended. A thousand memories of Chris will always be at hand, of course, but not a destructive clinging to some material entity that can never be here again. We’re in Sweden now, the home of my mother’s ancestors, and I’m working on a second book which is a sequel to this one. "Nell teaches aspects of parenthood never understood before. If she cries or makes a mess or decides to be contrary (and these are relatively rare), it doesn’t bother. There is always Chris’s silence to compare it to. What is seen now so much more clearly is that although the names keep changing and the bodies keep changing, the larger pattern that holds us all together goes on and on. In terms of this larger pattern the lines at the end of this book still stand. We have won it. Things are better now. You can sort of tell these things. "ooolo99ikl;i.,pyknulmmmmmmmmmm 111 "(This last line is by Nell. She reached around the corner of the machine and banged on the keys and then watched with the same gleam Chris used to have. If the editors preserve it, it will be her first published work.) " ...Robert M. Pirsig Gothenburg, Sweden 1984
Robert Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
don’t pay attention to the frightening aspects of the future. Worrying about them isn’t going to make them any smaller, or prepare you anymore. God isn’t going to fling you into your future without preparing you. So trust Him.
Hannah Duggan (Just Us Girls: A Bible Study on Being God's Girl in Middle School)
Girls were responding to these films’ darker aspects, analysts said. “Today’s teen girls want to see movies that speak to them more on their level, rather than giving them a sanitized view of teen life,” Paul Dergarabedian, president of Exhibitor Relations, a box office tracking firm, told USA Today. “The paradigm is shifting toward going after the teen audience in a more realistic way with edgier portrayals, things that today’s teens can relate to.
Jennifer Keishin Armstrong (So Fetch: The Making of Mean Girls (And Why We're Still So Obsessed With It) – The First Authoritative Book on the Teen Comedy That Defined a Generation)
There are essentially no files in the brain of a child where the whole of their abusive experience can be put and understood. Think about it—you are a five-year-old girl and you live in a house where you are chronically neglected, beaten, and raped. To absorb the memory—the sensations (voice, smells, pain), the visual, the cognitive twisting, and the emotional aspects—of all that at once would likely lead to insanity. If you cannot escape physically, then one possible coping mechanism is to divide the parts of the experience and store them separately in your mind, even to the point of rendering them inaccessible—hence amnesia. So the abuse from certain ages, the abuse in certain places, the emotional responses, etc. are all filed separately in the computer of the brain.
Diane Langberg (Suffering and the Heart of God: How Trauma Destroys and Christ Restores)
Those stories seemed like foolish risk-taking scenarios I could successfully avoid by never going outside. No, I would watch the horrible pieces on women who had been assaulted and left for dead. First-person accounts of people being attacked by strangers or stabbed by boy-friends. This is the ultimate narcissistic white-girl game. I would picture how I would handle the attack differently. Or the same. Inev-itably, I'd think about my own death, which next to staring at your face in a magnifying mirror is probably the worst thing you can do for yourself. The ambulance-chasing aspect combined with the Monday-morning quarterbacking of it all is the luxury afforded to those of us left untouched by trauma. Sometimes I would use these tragedy-porn shows to unlock deep feelings or cut through the numbness. I would read terrible stories to punish myself for my lucky life. Some real deep Irish Catholic shit. Either way, it was all gross and all bad for my health.
Amy Poehler ([Yes Please] [By: Poehler, Amy] [October, 2014])
all spiralled because Andrea wanted Toyah to do well. She didn’t want her confidence battered due to not competing on the same level as the other girls. Luckily, we could afford it, but it was no cheap hobby. ‘What started as fun dress up with a bit of make-up and a sparkly dress turned into emails to organisers about rules and age ranges, arguments with dress designers who didn’t deliver. Over time, the fun aspect was replaced with rivalry and the desire to win. It took up more and more time.’ He paused. ‘Other things suffered.
Angela Marsons (Guilty Mothers (DI Kim Stone, #20))
I’m devoted to you in all aspects of the word. You’re my goddess, and I’m your humble worshiper. Whatever you want, whatever you need, no matter the consequences, I’ll attain it for you. Ask me to shower you with riches, and I’ll blow every single dollar in each of my bank accounts. Ask me to defend you, and I’ll lay my body out like a human shield. Ask me to kill for you, and I’ll lay their lifeless body at your feet.” I frowned. “The adoration I feel for you is lethal, Kiara. It’ll burn us both to the ground if we let it consume us.” I looked away from her widening gaze. “Now, be a good girl and take your ass to sleep.
Asia Monét (Heir of Flames: Book 1 of the Cartel Elements Series)
Going to Moscow was a dream for us,' Ilich said years later. He and his younger brother started the course within weeks of Soviet tanks rolling into Czechoslovakia to crush the heady 'Prague Spring'. But they soon found that discipline at the cosmopolitan university, whose 6000 students were all selected through the Communist Party of their country of origin, was as stifling as its modernist architecture. Drab grey concrete blocks squatted around a charmless artificial pond. The only dash of colour was a map of the world painted on to the façade of one block in a valiant attempt to symbolise the ideals of the university: from an open book, symbol of learning, a torch emerges, issuing multicoloured flames that spread like waves across the planisphere. Perhaps Ilich drew some comfort from glancing up at the mural as, huddled against the rigours of the Russian winter and wearing a black beret in tribute to Che Guevara who had died riddled by bullets in October of the previous year, he trudged across the bleak square on his way to lectures. Coincidentally, the base of the flame is very close to Venezuela. Rules and regulations governed virtually every aspect of Ilich's life from the moment he started the first year's induction course, which was designed to flesh out his knowledge of the Russian language and introduce him to the delights of Marxist society before he launched into his chosen subjects, languages and chemistry. Like father, like son. Ilich rebelled against the rules, preferring to spend his time chasing girls. He would often crawl back to his room drunk. His professors at the university, some of them children of Spanish Civil War veterans who had sought refuge in Moscow, were unimpressed by his academic performance. 'His name alone, Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, was so strange that people were curious about him,' relates Kirill Privalov, a journalist on the newspaper Druzhba (Friendship) which was printed at the small university press, and an acquaintance of Ilich. The Venezuelan's escapades, wildly excessive by the standards of the university, only fanned people's interest. 'llich was not at all the typical student sent by his country's Communist Party, nothing to do with the good little soldier of Mao who laboured in the fields every summer. He was a handsome young man although his cheeks looked swollen, and he was a great bon viveur. Flush with cash sent by his parents, Ilich could afford to spend lavishly on whisky and champagne in the special stores that only accepted payment in hard currencies and which were off-limits to most people. More Russian than the Russians, the privileged student and his friends would throw over their shoulders not only empty glasses but bottles as well. The university authorities, frustrated in their attempts to impose discipline on Ilich, reasoned that his freedom of action would be drastically limited if the allowance that his father sent him were reduced. But when they asked Ramírez Navas to be less generous, the father, piqued, retorted that his son had never wanted for anything. 'The university had a sort of vice squad, and at night students were supposed either to study or sleep,' recounts Privalov. "One night the patrol entered Ilich's room and saw empty bottles of alcohol and glasses on the table, but he was apparently alone. The squad opened the cupboard door and a girl who was completely drunk fell out. She was naked and was clutching her clothes in her hands. They asked her what she was doing there and she answered: 'I feel pity for the oppressed.' She was obviously a prostitute. Another time, and with another girl, Ilich didn't bother to hide her in the cupboard. He threw her out of the window. This one was fully dressed and landed in two metres of snow a foor or two below. She got up unhurt and shouted abuse at him.
John Follain (Jackal: The Complete Story of the Legendary Terrorist, Carlos the Jackal)
Pilar approached the guest house by the back door. It was a friendly habit. She felt she had become friends with Theo. He was an interesting, and interested, young man once you chipped through the surface. A boy, she thought, who needed the softening influence of a mother. She was touched that he seemed to enjoy rather than resent her company when he came by the villa to use the pool. She'd managed to lure him up to the music room and have him play—or at least play around with—the piano. It had been an easy step from there to open up a dialogue, and a debate, over music. She hoped he was as entertained by them as she was. Maddy was a different matter. The girl was polite but consistently cool. And watched, Pilar thought, everything and everyone. It wasn't resentment so much as a measuring. A measuring, Pilar knew, that was directly connected to her relationship with Maddy's father. That aspect appeared to have gone straight over Theo's head. But Pilar recognized the female-tofemale judgment in Maddy's eyes. So far, she hadn't come up to snuff.
Nora Roberts (The Villa)
Albert, friend to royalty,” Beatrix said later at the Rutledge Hotel, laughing as she sat on the floor of their suite and examined the new collar. “I hope you don’t get above yourself, and put on airs.” “Not around your family, he won’t,” Christopher said, stripping off his coat and waistcoat, and removing his cravat. He lowered himself to the settee, relishing the coolness of the room. Albert went to drink from his bowl of water, lapping noisily. Beatrix went to Christopher, stretched full length atop him, and braced her arms on his chest. “I was so proud of you today,” she said, smiling down at him. “And perhaps a tiny bit smug that with all the women swooning and sighing over you, I’m the one you went home with.” Arching a brow, Christopher asked, “Only a tiny bit smug?” “Oh, very well. Enormously smug.” She began to play with his hair. “Now that all this medal business is done with, I have something to discuss with you.” Closing his eyes, Christopher enjoyed the sensation of her fingers stroking his scalp. “What is it?” “What would you say to adding a new member to the family?” This was not an unusual question. Since they had established a household at Riverton, Beatrix had increased the size of her menagerie, and was constantly occupied with animal-related charities and concerns. She had also compiled a report for the newly established natural history society in London. For some reason it had not been at all difficult to convince the group of elderly entomologists, ornithologists, and other naturalists to include a pretty young woman in their midst. Especially when it became clear that Beatrix could talk for hours about migration patterns, plant cycles, and other matters relating to animal habitats and behavior. There was even discussion of Beatrix’s joining a board to form a new natural history museum, to provide a lady’s perspective on various aspects of the project. Keeping his eyes closed, Christopher smiled lazily. “Fur, feathers, or scales?” he asked in response to her earlier question. “None of those.” “God. Something exotic. Very well, where will this creature come from? Will we have to go to Australia to collect it? Iceland? Brazil?” A tremor of laughter went through her. “It’s already here, actually. But you won’t be able to view it for, say…eight more months.” Christopher’s eyes flew open. Beatrix was smiling down at him, looking shy and eager and more than a little pleased with herself. “Beatrix.” He turned carefully so that she was underneath him. His hand came to cradle the side of her face. “You’re sure?” She nodded. Overwhelmed, Christopher covered her mouth with his, kissing her fiercely. “My love…precious girl…” “It’s what you wanted, then?” she asked between kisses, already knowing the answer. Christopher looked down at her through a bright sheen of joy that made everything blurred and radiant. “More than I ever dreamed. And certainly more than I deserve.” Beatrix’s arms slid around his neck. “I’ll show you what you deserve,” she informed him, and pulled his head down to hers again.
Lisa Kleypas (Love in the Afternoon (The Hathaways, #5))
My father came first," says a Missouri painter who consistently faces a work slump whenever she commits herself to submitting paintings for a show. "My mother was defined by him. If she behaved well he would love her, buy her presents, and take care of her - she was a queen. He did take care of her. She behaved, she ran the house. He bought her presents all the time." "Was she smart?" I asked. "I don't know," the woman replied. "I think she may have been, once. She stopped thinking." One reason Mother remains shadowy is that she was intimidated by the forceful, vivid personality of her husband. The peacemaker, a kind of half-person who chooses to tag along safely behind her husband, Mother is protected from the more abrasive aspects of life in the world. Huge fights, open power struggles - these were not characteristic of the girl's relationship with her elusive mother. (...) Mother was there (...). But she was also not there. (...) Father is active; Mother is passive. Father is able to rely on himself; Mother is helpless and dependent.
Colette Dowling (The Cinderella Complex: Women's Hidden Fear of Independence)
I sobbed out the story of the day thus far, too far gone in my relief to see Drake to care that I was watering his tux again. “Kincsem, I understand that it was difficult to be banished in that way. I do not understand why you believe your hands are possessed, but I am confident you will fill me in on that aspect of your day. We must leave now, however. I cannot protect this house, and I will not have you at further risk.” I sniffled and accepted the tissues that he had recently started carrying. “I know. And I want to go. I’m just so glad you’re here. Sometimes things get so overwhelming, and only when you’re around do I feel better.” Drake tipped my chin up, his eyes sparkling with a brilliant emerald light. “That has to be one of the nicest things you’ve said to me. You have made yourself necessary to me, as well.” I balled up my fingers and punched him in the stomach. He laughed as he rubbed his belly, then pulled me tightly against his chest. “All right, I will say it, but you must make note that this fulfills the requirement for the day.” “Too much talking and not enough kissing,” I said as I grabbed his head and pulled it down to me. His kiss was as hot as his dragon fire, scorching more than just my lips. His tongue danced along mine, driving me into squirming against him, wanting what only he could give me. “Give it,” I whispered into his mouth, and quivered to the tips of my toes when he opened his mouth and let his fire sweep through me. It blazed a trail along my veins, burning my blood, carrying me along in an inferno of desire, love, and need. “I love you more than all the treasures of the world, Aisling. Our love will burn for an eternity until we have taken our last breaths, and even then it will continue to shine as a testament to that which we are together, a beacon of passion for all to see like a glittering star in the darkness of the night sky.” “You sure know how to sweep a girl off her feet,” I said, kissing the corners of his delectable mouth as his dragon fire faded away. I felt empty inside without it, as if a part of me was missing, a sadness so profound it made my soul weep. “I love you, too.” “We must leave. I do not like this place.” “I know the feeling
Katie MacAlister (Holy Smokes (Aisling Grey, #4))
Because her name is not Lolita; her real name is Dolores, which as you know in Latin means `dolor.' So her real name is associated with sorrow and with anguish and with innocence. While Lolita becomes a sort of lightheaded, seductive and airy name, the Lolita of our novel is both of these at the same time. And in our culture here today, we only associate it with one aspect of that little girl, and the crassest interpretation of her.
Azar Nafisi
Well, it's true that the anarchist vision in just about all its varieties has looked forward to dismantling state power―and personally I share that vision. But right now it runs directly counter to my goals: my immediate goals have been, and now very much are, to defend and even strengthen certain elements of state authority that are now under severe attack. And I don't think there's any contradiction there―none at all, really. For example, take the so-called "welfare state." What's called the "welfare state" is essentially a recognition that every child has a right to have food, and to have health care and so on―and as I've been saying, those programs were set up in the nation-state system after a century of very hard struggle, by the labor movement, and the socialist movement, and so on. Well, according to the new spirit of the age, in the case of a fourteen-year-old girl who got raped and has a child, her child has to learn "personal responsibility" by not accepting state welfare handouts, meaning, by not having enough to eat. Alright, I don't agree with that at any level. In fact, I think it's grotesque at any level. I think those children should be saved. And in today's world, that's going to have to involve working through the state system; it's not the only case. So despite the anarchist "vision," I think aspects of the state system, like the one that makes sure children eat, have to be defended―in fact, defended very vigorously. And given the accelerating effort that's being made these days to roll back the victories for justice and human rights which have been won through long and often extremely bitter struggles in the West, in my opinion the immediate goal of even committed anarchists should be to defend some state institutions, while helping to pry them open to more meaningful public participation, and ultimately to dismantle them in a much more free society. There are practical problems of tomorrow on which people's lives very much depend, and while defending these kinds of programs is by no means the ultimate end we should be pursuing, in my view we still have to face the problems that are right on the horizon, and which seriously affect human lives. I don't think those things can simply be forgotten because they might not fit within some radical slogan that reflects a deeper vision of a future society. The deeper visions should be maintained, they're important―but dismantling the state system is a goal that's a lot farther away, and you want to deal first with what's at hand and nearby, I think. And in any realistic perspective, the political system, with all its flaws, does have opportunities for participation by the general population which other existing institutions, such as corporations, don't have. In fact, that's exactly why the far right wants to weaken governmental structures―because if you can make sure that all the key decisions are in the hands of Microsoft and General Electric and Raytheon, then you don't have to worry anymore about the threat of popular involvement in policy-making.
Noam Chomsky (Understanding Power: The Indispensable Chomsky)
The most terrifying aspect of human health is our refusal to take steps to help ourselves and the fact that we are so often responsible for our own demise through lack of positive action,
Lena Dunham (Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She's "Learned")
Instantly, I noticed that our conversation was easy, flirtatious and exciting. It didn’t take very long for us to get to know each other. To start with, I was a little taken aback with both of them being so friendly and talkative. As we talked, I really didn’t know what to call Rita and I stammered some as I attempted to navigate around the social aspects of my dilemma. I didn’t know her last name and “Mrs. Whatjamacallit” didn’t seem appropriate, so I continued using her first name. What seemed awkward to me at first, soon became and sounded acceptable. I also noticed that Connie alternated between calling her mother “Mom” and “Rita.” At first this was strange, but soon I kind of understood the unique relationship between them. For me it seemed different, however I tend to adapt easily and now I was becoming acquainted with a girl who called her mother by her first name. The house was without central heating, but it did have a big cast iron Franklin stove in the living room. Rita looked over to me and asked if I would light the fire. “Guess so,” I replied. I soon found out that lighting the fire encompassed getting and splitting the firewood, and then tending to it. Connie showed me to the front porch where there was a big pile of cordwood, just dumped in one heap. I also noticed that the wind was picking up and was blowing the white stuff onto the porch and covering the woodpile. “Might be a good idea to bring in enough wood to last the night,” I thought aloud. This was going to become a full time job! With Connie’s able help I got a roaring fire going. Rita made sandwiches and poured us all some Coca-Cola, which she topped off with some Canadian Whiskey. Turning the damper down on the fire, I thought to myself that the Franklin stove would never heat this size house, besides the wind was coming in through the cracks around the windows and doors. I knew that the house didn’t have much insulation by how cold the walls were. The windows were single pane, which also didn’t help much, but at least it was shelter. When I mentioned this, Rita said, “Never mind, we’ll all be able to stay warm in bed.” By this time, Connie and I were clowning around and Rita reminded us that she was also there. “I may be momma but I’m not about to freeze, while you kids have all the fun! Besides we only have one bed.” Suddenly the whole scene came into focus. The sandwiches on the kitchen table wouldn’t be our only food. The sandwiches we would have that night would just be the beginning of a feast.
Hank Bracker
First and foremost, we are not to be afraid. We are to banish every aspect of fear from our minds and not allow it to muddy our thinking.
Lisa Bevere (Girls with Swords: How to Carry Your Cross Like a Hero)
Part of him wanted to throw her down onto the straw and have done with it. For there was no surer way of losing desire for a woman than to take your fill of her. But he sensed that Eleni might be slow to realise that her duty was to please her sheikh in every aspect that he demanded. His mouth curved into a smile. She would soon learn.
Sharon Kendrick (The Playboy Sheikh's Virgin Stable-Girl (The Royal House of Karedes #2))
Book Descriptions: Amazon Rainforest Magic: The Adventures of Namowë, a Yanomami Boy, Volume 1 The magic of the Amazon rainforest enchanted artist Barbara Crane Navarro as she spent the winter months with the Yanomami communities in Venezuela and Brazil over a period of twelve years and inspired her to write her children's book series. The vividly illustrated stories in this series evoke daily life in the rainforest and the magical quality of the Yanomami's relation to the plants and animals around them. The first book, "Amazon Rainforest Magic: The Adventures of Namowë, a Yanomami Boy", recounts the journey of Namowë, a thirteen year old Yanomami boy living in the rainforest, as he seeks a cure for his baby sister. Amazon Rainforest Magic: The Adventures of Meromi, a Yanomami Girl, Volume 2 The second volume recounts the surprising voyage of Meromi, a 9 year old Yanomami girl who is swept into an unexpected adventure in the rivers and jungles of the Amazon. With the help of improvised allies, she seeks a way to discourage intruders and make them leave the forest. Aspects of traditional Yanomami life in the Rainforest are woven into the fanciful story. The author’s enchanting illustrations transform readers into fellow travelers on Meromi’s magical quest.
Barbara Crane Navarro (Amazon Rainforest Magic: The adventures of Namowë, a Yanomami boy)
I never thought that one day I'd be writing novels, much less novels taking place in Paris. As a girl I dreamed of traveling to the City of Light and when I finally did get to spend significant time there (not by running away from home, as Amy did, but it was still a big adventure), I found that it was just as fabulous as I'd always known it would be. I also found that Paris has some not-so-fabulous aspects, as every city does! It's this balance of "romantic dream versus gritty reality" that I've tried to convey in my books. Most of all, I aim to make my stories fun to read, yet not entirely fluffy, with a little bit of wisdom thrown in.
K.S.R. Burns
I’m going to focus on your hands, Mr. Harrison. Hands can be complicated.” He smiled as if she’d just explained to the Archbishop of Canterbury that Christmas often fell on the twenty-fifth of December. “I like hands,” he said, taking his seat. “They can be windows to the soul too. What shall I do with these hands you intend to immortalize?” She hadn’t thought that far ahead, it being sufficient challenge to choose a single aspect of him to sketch. Fleur and Amanda came skipping back into the room, each clutching a sketch pad. “You will sketch the girls, and I will sketch you, while the girls sketch whomever they please.” The plan was brilliant; everybody had an assigned task. Amanda’s little brows drew down. “I want to watch Mr. Harrison. Fleur can sketch you, Aunt Jen. You have to sit very still, though.” “An unbroken chain of artistic indulgence,” Mr. Harrison said, accepting a sketch pad and pencil from Fleur. “Miss Fleur, please seat yourself on the hearth, though you might want a pillow to make the ordeal more comfortable.” Amanda grabbed two burgundy brocade pillows off the settee, tossed one at Fleur, and dropped the other beside Elijah’s rocker. Jenny took the second rocking chair and flipped open her sketch pad. Her subject sat with the morning sun slanting over his shoulder, one knee crossed over the other, the sketch pad on his lap. Amanda watched from where she knelt at his elbow, and Fleur… Fleur crossed one knee over the other—an unladylike pose, but effective for balancing a sketch pad—and glowered at Jenny as if to will Jenny’s image onto the page by visual imperative. “Your sister has beautiful eyebrows,” Mr. Harrison said to his audience. “They have the most graceful curve. It’s a family trait, I believe.” Amanda crouched closer. “Does that mean I have them too?” He glanced over at her, his expression utterly serious. “You do, though yours are a touch more dramatic. When you make your bows, gentlemen will write sonnets to the Carrington sisters’ eyebrows.” “Papa’s
Grace Burrowes (Lady Jenny's Christmas Portrait (The Duke's Daughters, #5; Windham, #8))
In your care I will be released from my worries” (CIL 11.137). In a few brief sentences, this man’s colorful life, during which he passed from freedom to slavery to freedom and ultimately to prosperity, is memorialized. An aspect of life that these tombstones bring to light is the strong emotions that tied together spouses, family members, and friends. One grave marker records a husband’s grief for his young wife: “To the eternal memory of Blandina Martiola, a most blameless girl, who lived eighteen years, nine months, five days. Pompeius Catussa, a Sequanian citizen and a plasterer, dedicates this monument to his wife, who was incomparable and very kind to him. She lived with him five years, six months, eighteen days without any shadow of a fault. You who read this, go bathe in the baths of Apollo as I used to do with my wife. I wish I still could” (CIL 1.1983). The affection that some parents felt for their children is also reflected in these inscriptions: “Spirits who live in the underworld, lead innocent Magnilla through the groves and the Elysian Fields directly to your places of rest. She was snatched away in her eighth year by cruel fate while she was still enjoying the tender time of childhood. She was beautiful and sensitive, clever, elegant, sweet, and charming beyond her years. This poor child who was deprived of her life so quickly must be mourned with perpetual lament and tears” (CIL 6.21846). Some Romans seemed more concerned with ensuring that their bodies would lie undisturbed after death than with recording their accomplishments while alive. An inscription of this type states: “Gaius Tullius Hesper had this tomb built for himself, as a place where his bones might be laid. If anyone damages them or removes them from here, may he live in great physical pain for a long time, and when he dies, may the gods of the underworld deny entrance to his spirit” (CIL 6.36467). Some tombstones offer comments that perhaps preserve something of their authors’ temperaments. One terse inscription observes: “I was not. I was. I am not. I care not” (CIL 5.2893). Finally, a man who clearly enjoyed life left a tombstone that included the statement: “Baths, wine, and sex ruin our bodies. But what makes life worth living except baths, wine, and sex?” (CIL 6.15258). Perhaps one of the greatest values of these tombstones is the manner in which they record the actual feelings of individuals, and demonstrate the universality across time, cultures, and geography of basic emotions such as love, hate, jealousy, and pride. They also preserve one of the most complicated yet subtle characteristics of human beings—our enjoyment of humor. Many of the messages were plainly drafted to amuse and entertain the reader, and the fact that some of them can still do so after 2,000 years is one of the best testimonials to the humanity shared by the people of the ancient and the modern worlds.
Gregory S. Aldrete (The Long Shadow of Antiquity: What Have the Greeks and Romans Done for Us?)
It was marijuana that drew the line between us and them, that bright generational line between the cool and the uncool. My timidity about pot, as I first encountered it in Hawaii, vanished when, a few months later, during my first year of high school, it hit Woodland Hills. We scored our first joints from a friend of Pete's. The quality of the dope was terrible -- Mexican rag weed, people called it -- but the quality of the high was so wondrous, so nerve-end-opening, so cerebral compared to wine's effects, that I don't think we ever cracked another Purex jug. The laughs were harder and finer. And music that had been merely good, the rock and roll soundtrack of our lives, turned into rapture and prophecy. Jimi Hendrix, Dylan, the Doors, Cream, late Beatles, Janis Joplin, the Stones, Paul Butterfield -- the music they were making, with its impact and beauty amplified a hundredfold by dope, became a sacramental rite, simply inexplicable to noninitiates. And the ceremonial aspects of smoking pot -- scoring from the million-strong network of small-time dealers, cleaning "lids," rolling joints, sneaking off to places (hilltops, beaches, empty fields) where it seemed safe to smoke, in tight little outlaw groups of three or four, and then giggling and grooving together -- all of this took on a strong tribal color. There was the "counterculture" out in the greater world, with all its affinities and inspirations, but there were also, more immediately, the realignments in our personal lives. Kids, including girls, who were "straight" became strangers. What the hell was a debutante, anyway? As for adults -- it became increasingly difficult not to buy that awful Yippie line about not trusting anyone over thirty. How could parents, teachers, coaches, possibly understand the ineluctable weirdness of every moment, fully perceived? None of them had been out on Highway 61.
William Finnegan (Barbarian Days: A Surfing Life)
The reason Dr. Caner’s flameout didn’t make a bigger dent in this school’s spiritual life, I think, is that Liberty students have much more pressing things to do than contemplate the existence of God. There are papers to write, grad school applications to complete, girls to ask out. Even if you were convinced by the Rational Response Squad, entertaining a crisis of faith would mean reevaluating every aspect of your life, from the friends you hang out with to the classes you take to, really, whether you should be at Liberty at all. In a faith system as rigorous and all-encompassing as this, severe doubt is paralyzing. Better just to keep believing, keep living life, and take up the big questions later, when not so much is at stake.
Kevin Roose (The Unlikely Disciple: A Sinner's Semester at America's Holiest University)
Faiza Ghaffar 1 min · Motherly love... is unconditional affirmation of the child's life and his needs... Affirmation of the child's life has two aspects; one is the care and responsibility absolutely necessary for the preservation of the child's life and his growth. The other aspect goes further than mere preservation. It is the attitude which instills in the child a love for living, which gives him the feeling: it is good to be alive, it is good to be a little boy or girl, it is good to be on this earth! ... in... Biblical symbolism.. The promised land (land is always a mother symbol) is described as "flowing with milk and honey." Milk is the symbol of the first aspect of love, that of care and affirmation. Honey symbolizes the sweetness of life, the love for it and the happiness in being alive. Most mothers are capable of giving "milk," but only a minority of giving "honey" too. In order to be able to give honey, a mother must not only be a "good mother," but a happy person—and this aim is not achieved by many. The effect on the child can hardly be exaggerated. Mother's love for life is as infectious as her anxiety is. Both attitudes have a deep effect on the child's whole personality; one can distinguish indeed, among children—and, adults—those who got only "milk" and those who got "milk and honey.
Erich Fromm
The racial separation we see in schools might also be seen as an element of the “hidden curriculum,” an unspoken set of rules that “teaches” certain students what they can and cannot do because of who they are. There are aspects of this hidden curriculum that are not being taught by the adults. It may well be that students are the ones teaching it to each other. No adult goes onto the playground and says, “I don’t want the boys and girls to play together.” The girls and boys do that themselves, and it’s a rare child who crosses over. Why? Because
Pedro A. Noguera (The Trouble With Black Boys: ...And Other Reflections on Race, Equity, and the Future of Public Education)
Modern economics, by which I mean the style of economics taught and practised in today's leading universities, likes to start the enquiries from the ground up: from individuals, through the household, village, district, state, country, to the whole world. In various degrees, the millions of individual decisions shape the eventualities people face; as both theory, common sense, and evidence tell us that there are enormous numbers of consequences of what we all do. Some of these consequences have been intended, but many are unintended. There is, however, a feedback, in that those consequences in turn go to shape what people subsequently can do and choose to do. When Becky's family drive their cars or use electricity, or when Desta's family create compost or burn wood for cooking, they add to global carbon emissions. Their contributions are no doubt negligible, but the millions of such tiny contributions sum to a sizeable amount, having consequences that people everywhere are likely to experience in different ways. It can be that the feedbacks are positive, so that the whole contribution is greater than the sum of the parts. Strikingly, unintended consequences can include emergent features, such as market prices, at which the demand for goods more or less equals their supply. Earlier, I gave a description of Becky's and Desta's lives. Understanding their lives involves a lot more; it requires analysis, which usually calls for further description. To conduct an analysis, we need first of all to identify the material prospects the girls' households face - now and in the future, under uncertain contingencies. Second, we need to uncover the character of their choices and the pathways by which the choices made by millions of households like Becky's and Desta's go to produce the prospects they all face. Third, and relatedly, we need to uncover the pathways by which the families came to inherit their current circumstances. These amount to a tall, even forbidding, order. Moreover, there is a thought that can haunt us: since everything probably affects everything else, how can we ever make sense of the social world? If we are weighed down by that worry, though, we won't ever make progress. Every discipline that I am familiar with draws caricatures of the world in order to make sense of it. The modern economist does this by building models, which are deliberately stripped down representations of the phenomena out there. When I say 'stripped down', I really mean stripped down. It isn't uncommon among us economists to focus on one or two causal factors, exclude everything else, hoping that this will enable us to understand how just those aspects of reality work and interact. The economist John Maynard Keynes described our subject thus: 'Economics is a science of thinking in terms of models joined to the art of choosing models which are relevant to the contemporary world.
Partha Dasgupta (Economics: A Very Short Introduction)
As young girls, my friends and I often played “school” or “house,” cooperative role-playing games in which we acted out scenarios like math class or making dinner. As long as I got to be the teacher or the mother, I loved these games. They played into my need for control and my love of organizing. If I didn’t get to be the teacher or the mother, the game usually ended in a nasty fight between me and the girl who got that role. Other kids’ rules made no sense to me. They felt all wrong. I had to be in charge or I wasn’t playing. Dr. Tony Attwood describes this as “god mode”—the way that autistic kids need to control every aspect of a social situation to make it safe for them to interact. For whatever reason, a few friends tolerated my god mode and hung around, though not all the time. I remember sometimes daily shouting matches that left me without a playmate for the rest of the day. Unlike boys’ games, where there tend to be winners and losers, girls’ games are often based on how well a girl cooperates with the group to create an enjoyable role-playing scenario. Boys
Cynthia Kim (Nerdy, Shy, and Socially Inappropriate: A User Guide to an Asperger Life)
What makes you a more conscious, more caring person than you were yesterday is recognising aspects of yourself in others, being compassionate, realising the profound truth that we each have a path to tread, and that no two paths are the same.
Tara Bliss (High: A Party Girl's Guide To Peace)
And judging by what she’d been saying when he walked in, she was also fond of penises. He really couldn’t overlook such an important aspect of her personality.
Victoria Dahl (Flirting with Disaster (Jackson: Girls' Night Out, #2))
Many years ago I saw a short film sequence of a little girl. She was wearing a pretty dress as she skipped down a narrow cobbled lane. The people around smiled fondly as she passed. The grainy, black-and-white image did nothing to detract from the happy scene, and the light, summery music gave a feeling of well-being. The audience’s attention was focused entirely on the child. Then the identical film was shown again, but this time with sinister music playing. There was a gasp from the audience. For the first time, every person in the room noticed an unsmiling man standing at the mouth of a dark alley, smoking a cigarette and watching the girl. In spite of already knowing the ending, there was a sigh of relief when the child was reunited with her mother. Same film. Different music. For some people, life is like that. They filter out the positive and focus on the negative. They make assumptions about what somebody else is thinking, and believe only in the worst possible outcome. They are listening to a sinister tune. Is this you? If so, change the music, and focus on the positive. Listen to a happy tune, and see if the man skulking in the doorway disappears from view. “Human beings, by changing the inner attitudes of their minds, can change the outer aspects of their lives.” William James
Rachel Abbott (The Back Road (DCI Tom Douglas #2))
Girls excel boys in practically all the aspects of memory. In rote memory, that is, memory for lists of unrelated words, there is not much difference; but the girls are somewhat better. However, in the ability to remember the ideas of a story, girls excel boys at every age. This superiority of girls over boys is not merely a matter of memory. A girl is superior to a boy of the same age in nearly every way. This is merely a fact of development. A girl develops faster than a boy, she reaches maturity more quickly, in mind as well as in body. Although a girl is lighter than a boy at birth, on the average she gains in weight faster and is heavier at twelve than a boy of the same age. She also gains faster in height, and for a few years in early adolescence is taller than a boy of the same age. Of course, boys catch up and finally become much taller and heavier than girls. Similarly, a girl’s mind develops faster than the mind of a boy, as shown in memory and other mental functions.
William Henry Pyle (The Science of Human Nature: A Psychology for Beginners)
I have said earlier that the typical attention span of a child is his age in minutes. If a parent or teacher expects that a ten-year-old should be able to focus uninterrupted for twenty or thirty minutes, those are unrealistic expectations. When the adult gets to the part of the questionnaire that says, “Often has difficulty sustaining attention in tasks or play activities,” she has to check off one of the following modifiers: always, often, sometimes, rarely, or never. Because of her expectation that a ten-year-old boy should be able to focus for twenty or thirty minutes, she is likely to check off always or often. Is this realistic? Will these kinds of answers lead to a diagnosis of ADD in a boy whose behaviour is perfectly normal? Two other statements on the questionnaire are, “Often leaves seat in classroom or in other situations in which remaining seated is expected,” and “Often has difficulty playing or engaging in leisure activities quietly.” Let’s imagine a December-born boy in grade one sitting with a January-born girl on each side of him. How will he appear? Does he have ADD? I have heard it suggested, and I completely agree, that no child should be assessed for ADD before the age of seven, and even that is pretty young. The “clay” is still very soft. In our modern schools, where we are in the business of making kids “normal” and measuring normalcy, our yardsticks may be flawed. Our standards for normal have two aspects: the tools we use for measuring, and the attitudes and expectations we bring to interpreting the results. We should have great humility when it comes to diagnosing kids. Are our tools accurate and our expectations realistic?
Michael Reist (Raising Boys in a New Kind of World)
You have an accent I do not recognize," he was saying. 'Tis certainly not local…." "Really, Lord Gareth — you should rest, not try to talk. Save your strength." "My dear angel, I can assure you I'd much rather talk to you, than lie here in silence and wonder if I shall live to see the next sunrise. I ... do not wish to be alone with my thoughts at the moment. Pray, amuse me, would you?" She sighed. "Very well, then. I'm from Boston." "County of Lincolnshire?" "Colony of Massachusetts." His smile faded. "Ah, yes ... Boston."  The town's name fell wearily from his lips and he let his eyes drift shut, as though that single word had drained him of his remaining strength. "You're a long way from home, aren't you?" "Farther, perhaps, than I should be," she said, cryptically. He seemed not to hear her. "I had a brother who died over there last year, fighting the rebels.... He was a captain in the Fourth. I miss him dreadfully." Juliet leaned the side of her face against the squab and took a deep, bracing breath. If this man died, he would never know just who the little girl playing so contentedly with his cravat was. He would never know that the stranger who was caring for him during his final moments was the woman his brother had loved, would never know just why she — a long way from home, indeed — had come to England. It was now or never. "Yes," she whispered, tracing a thin crack in the squab near her face. "So do I." "Sorry?" "I said, yes. I miss him too." "Forgive me, but I don't quite understand...."  And then he blanched and stiffened as the truth hit him with debilitating force. His eyes widened, their lazy dreaminess fading. His head rose halfway out of her lap. He stared at her and blinked, and in the sudden, charged silence that filled the coach, Juliet heard the pounding tattoo of her own heart, felt his gaze boring into the underside of her chin as his mind, dulled by pain and shock, quickly put the pieces together. Boston. Juliet. I miss him, too. He gave an incredulous little laugh. "No," he said, slowly shaking his head, as though he suspected he was the butt of some horrible joke or worse, knew she was telling the truth and could not find a way to accept it. He scrutinized her features, his gaze moving over every aspect of her face. "We all thought ... I mean, Lucien said he tried to locate you ... No, I am hallucinating, I must be!  You cannot be the same Juliet. Not his Juliet —" "I am," she said quietly. "His Juliet. And now I've come to England to throw myself on the mercy of his family, as he bade me to do should anything happen to him." "But this is just too extraordinary, I cannot believe —" Juliet was gazing out the window into the darkness again. "He told you about me, then?" "Told us? His letters home were filled with nothing but declarations of love for his 'colonial maiden,' his 'fair Juliet' — he said he was going to marry you. I ... you ... dear God, you have shocked my poor brain into speechlessness, Miss Paige. I do not believe you are here, in the flesh!" "Believe it," she said, miserably. "If Charles had lived, you and I would have been brother and sister. Don't die, Lord Gareth. I have no wish to see yet another de Montforte brother into an early grave." He settled back against her arm and flung one bloodstained wrist across his eyes, his body shaking. For a moment she thought the shock of her revelation had killed him. But no. Beneath the lace of his sleeve she could see his gleaming grin, and Juliet realized that he was not dying but convulsing with giddy, helpless mirth. For the life of her, she did not see what was so funny. "Then this baby —" he managed, sliding his wrist up his brow to peer up at her with gleaming eyes — "this baby —" "Is your niece.
Danelle Harmon (The Wild One (The de Montforte Brothers, #1))
Sibil is a remarkable achievement, and this museum is the envy of galleries and spaces around the world because you have made your home here with us. Sincerity speaks steadily, taking a breath at each pause: You are being kind, Fernand. It is a great honor for me to work in this beautiful and prestigious building, which so captured my imagination when I was a little girl even before I saw it in mesh. It gives me deep satisfaction that my project will continue to be hosted by the European Museum, and that the museum will be a guardian of its development. Sibil will be the catalyst for a new era in the study of art. Through Sibil, we will rediscover aspects of our culture, and nature, that progress has made us forget. What better place for her to be than here? More
Katie Ward (Girl Reading)
Maybe the difference between speech and music isn't all that great. We infer a lot from the tone of someone's voice, so imagine that aspect of speech pushed just a little further. The weird cadences of a Valley girl, for instance, might be viewed as a species of singing. The malls of Sherman Oaks are a setting for a kind of massed choir.
David Byrne (How Music Works)
DEFENDING A RAPIST What is the character of a person who becomes a sexual enabler? We get an early glimpse into this question from 1975, when Hillary Clinton defended a man, Thomas Alfred Taylor, who was accused of beating and raping a twelve-year-old girl. A virgin prior to the attack, she spent five days in a coma, several months recovering from her injuries, and years in therapy. Even people who are accused of heinous crimes deserve criminal representation. Hillary’s strategy in defending Taylor, however, was to blame the teenage victim. According to an affidavit filed by Hillary, children who come from “disorganized families such as the complainant” sometimes “exaggerate or romanticize sexual experiences.” Hillary suggested the girl was “emotionally unstable with a tendency to seek out older men and engage in fantasizing.” Here Hillary seems to be echoing what Bernie Sanders wrote in his rape fantasy essay. In this case, however, the girl certainly didn’t dream up the assault and rape. There was physical evidence that showed she had been violated, and she was beaten so badly she was in a coma. Prosecutors had in their possession a bloodied pair of Taylor’s underwear. But fortunately for Hillary and her client, the forensic lab mishandled the way that evidence was preserved. At the time of trial, the state merely had a pair of Taylor’s underwear with a hole cut in it. Hillary plea bargained on behalf of Taylor and got him released without having to do any additional time. A tape unearthed by the Washington Free Beacon has Hillary celebrating the outcome. “Got him off with time served in the county jail,” she says. Did Hillary believe that, in this case, justice was done? Certainly not. On the tape, Hillary admits she never trusted her client. “Course he claimed he didn’t, and all this stuff.” So she decided to verify his story. “I had him take a polygraph, which he passed—which forever destroyed my faith in polygraphs.” Clearly Hillary knows her client is guilty, and this fact doesn’t bother her. The most chilling aspect of Hillary’s voice is her indifference—even bemusement—at getting a man off after he raped a twelve-year-old. The episode is a revealing look into the soul of an enabler. In fact, it reminds me of Alinsky protesting to Frank Nitti about the wasted expense of importing an out-of-town-killer. Hillary, like Alinsky, seems to be a woman without a conscience.9
Dinesh D'Souza (Hillary's America: The Secret History of the Democratic Party)
By this time I had become well acquainted with her, and could judge of the power and character of her mind, and the natural turn of her disposition. She was no ordinary girl. She had an uncommon degree of intellectual power, and especially of keen discrimination. She was a severe reasoner. She grasped the points of an argument with the hand of a giant, after she had discerned them with the eye of an eagle. Often afterwards I had occasion to be humbled before the penetration and strength of her uncommon mind. She was modest and timid to a fault. Mind —reason, was her forte. She had not much poetry about her. Her taste, however, was correct; ,not only, as might be expected, from the severe correctness of her intellect, but it was gentle and refined also, as might be expected from the amiableness of her affectionate disposition. A truer heart never beat or bled. She was all woman, all affection. A stranger might not think so, because she was timid and reserved in her manners, which cast over her an aspect of coldness. She had a fine education, moved in polite society, and was universally esteemed. The more I knew of her mind and heart, the more I esteemed and loved her.
Ichabod Smith Spencer (A Pastor's Sketches: Conversations with anxious inquirers respecting the way of Salvation (The Complete Series))
Had he felt pride in Sofia before? Of course he had. On a daily basis. He was proud of her success in school, of her beauty, of her composure, of the fondness with which she was regarded by all who worked in the hotel. And that is how he could be certain that what he was experiencing at that moment could not be referred to as pride. For there is something knowing in the state of pride. Look, it says, didn’t I tell you how special she is? How bright? How lovely? Well, now you can see it for yourself. But in listening to Sofia play Chopin, the Count had left the realm of knowing and entered the realm of astonishment. On one level he was astonished by the revelation that Sofia could play the piano at all; on another, that she tackled the primary and subordinate melodies with such skill. But what was truly astonishing was the sensitivity of her musical expression. One could spend a lifetime mastering the technical aspects of the piano and never achieve a state of musical expression—that alchemy by which the performer not only comprehends the sentiments of the composer, but somehow communicates them to her audience through the manner of her play. Whatever personal sense of heartache Chopin had hoped to express through this little composition—whether it had been prompted by a loss of love, or simply the sweet anguish one feels when witnessing a mist on a meadow in the morning—it was right there, ready to be experienced to its fullest, in the ballroom of the Hotel Metropol one hundred years after the composer’s death. But how, the question remained, could a seventeen-year-old girl achieve this feat of expression, if not by channeling a sense of loss and longing of her own? As Sofia began the third iteration of the melody, Viktor Stepanovich looked over his shoulder with his eyebrows raised, as if to say: Can you believe it? Have you ever in all your years even imagined? Then he quickly looked back to the piano and dutifully turned the page for Sofia almost in the manner of an apprentice turning the page for his master.
Amor Towles (A Gentleman in Moscow)
Well, there’s two aspects to discernment, of course. There’s perceiving and then there’s knowing the significance of what you see.
Jeffrey McClain Jones (The Girl Who Sees Angels)
Another subculture that freely intermingles past and present: e-girls and e-boys, whose style combines aspects of Japanese kawaii culture, goth, skater, and punk, all remixed in classic bricolage tradition and heavily mediated by internet culture.
Véronique Hyland (Dress Code: Unlocking Fashion from the New Look to Millennial Pink)
Brushing past me on his way out he smelled like musk. Like something Louise called an animalic, the scent from the gland of a male deer. He turned around in the middle of the hallway. "My name's Gabriel, I thought you should know since I've been inside of your grandmother's house." Like the archangel, I thought, the impact of Loretta's Catholicism making a rare appearance in my mind. I made a mental note to look up the angel Gabriel and see what deeds he had done to deserve his angel status. When Gabriel was gone his glandular scent, earthy and sweet, lingered in the room. I remembered Louise telling me that a good scent should not smell like a perfume, but like nature itself, including all aspects of the natural world, dark and animal as well as light and floral. "Love includes the bad as well as the good," she'd said, "the evil as well as the kind, and so should the scent that induces it.
Margot Berwin (Scent of Darkness)
Some AFAB individuals who identify as butch use he/him/his pronouns, while others use she/hers, others use hy/hys/hym, and so on. Countless AFAB individuals who identify as butch encounter many of the same barriers, discrimination, and even violence that transgender people encounter in society. Research has shown that being butch is experienced as an “unmalleable aspect of self, so essential that it even preceded their awareness of that label” (Levitt & Hiestand, 2004). It is something that is deep inside, so deep one may not even have a word for it, but the knowledge of being is just that – it just is. Many describe themselves in childhood as tomboys, and socialized as boys rather than as girls, and even as adults are uncomfortable with feminine clothing or even being perceived as feminine (Levitt & Hiestand, 2004). This is, no doubt, a clear example and definition of what it is to be non-binary (or transgender). Those who are not masculine-appearing can also be non-binary in identity, despite a more feminine appearance.
Michael Eric Brown (Challenging Genders: Non-Binary Experiences of Those Assigned Female at Birth)
Let me say it for you loud and clear – men aren’t the centre of the universe and a relationship is one aspect of your life but not all of it and, even when you do meet someone, they’re not there to fill up your life for you and give it meaning.
Natalie Lue (Mr Unavailable & The Fallback Girl)
The folk-like crafted goods of Sergei Maliutin, the principal artist at Talashkino, were pure invention. Maliutin was the creator of the first matrioshka, or Russian nesting doll, in 1891. At that time he was working at the Moscow zemstvo’s craft workshops at Sergiev Posad which specialized in making Russian toys. Contrary to the popular belief today, the matrioshka has no roots in Russian folk culture at all. It was dreamed up in response to a commission from the Mamontovs to make a Russian version of the Japanese nesting doll. Maliutin created a red-cheeked peasant girl in the shape of a barrel with a chicken underneath her arm. Each smaller doll portrayed a different aspect of peasant life; and at the core was a baby tightly swaddled in the Russian style. The design became immensely popular and by the end of the 1890s several million dolls were being manufactured every year. The myth was then established that the matrioshka was an ancient Russian toy.
Orlando Figes (Natasha's Dance: A Cultural History of Russia)
Sadhguru – WARNING! | Misfortune Will Come Upon You | If You Visit This Temple in South India - Sadhguru Darshan - YouTube channel comment about this video message, Until now, I have many times trolled your videos, but now honestly asking two question about this very video, 1) Tanjore temple will bring misfortune because of incorrect consecration, that is not correct, it was consecrated in right way for the people with bad intention. 2) You can not build a structure without stable foundation - Not agreeing - Because earth itself moving and there is no stable foundation on earth, even Maglev trains are example of structure and dynamics without stable foundation. 3) If you are devotee or if you have sacrificed your soul for the greater good, it is going to benefit much and can be manifested in any manner as we wish, 1000& truth, but for such sacrifice the person needs to completely trust on particular aspect or at least on one particular person with 100% trust - that is the problem, for getting such trust, that persons intention is under question, ok I am sacrificing my soul to someone whether its boy or girl or spiritual people like you or institutions or some other hierarchy , now what is their intentions from me! Until I completely have analyzed their background with their motive and intentions and long term goals, I will not trust even 1%, you are talking about 100% trust
Ganapathy K Siddharth Vijayaraghavan
Our adventure There was nothing in the garden, No trees, no grass, no flowers at all, It was Summer’s eternal burden, To have an existence within this gloomy wall, Where it was now trapped forever, In this world without any beautiful thing, There were no girls, no boys, no lover, The world was a picture of remorse, totally a lifeless thing, Shadows of life crawled on the walls of death, Life had retired into a permanent state of inadventurousness, It was as if life was running short of its own breath, Love, that existed without its loveliness, It was like Alice in a land without the wonder, Beauty with no one to appreciate or admire, It was like lightning but no rumbling of the thunder, A world full of wishes, but devoid of desire, A sad state for the joyless Summer, Where only time had a pulse of life everything else felt like an ominous raven, A bright day that grew dimmer and dimmer, Where reality exited only never to be proven, Until one day the Summer garden vanished suddenly, And the Summer beauty proliferated every virtue except the reality, Then gloom reigned endlessly, The beauty had disavowed the beast, because the prince in the beast had lost the perception of beauty, And at this juncture Earth lost its humans and humanity, For love was forgotten, beauty was forsaken and lovers were forbidden, To kiss and love in reality, And everywhere lay feelings hurt, emotions killed and hearts broken, While I thought of you hoping you too would be thinking of me, And as I stood in this world of hurt feelings and hearts broken, How I wished to be, With you in this world, where everyone feels lost and forsaken! As the world is crumbling under my still steady feet, The covenants of human morality lie desecrated, I still hope that we shall meet, Before Earth’s every aspect of pride and beauty is relegated, To the basest ranks of virtueless vanity, Because when that happens you and I shall dwell in the corner our own, Where beauty, love and humanity are still the only reality, Then no matter how old you might be, thee I shall neither forsake nor disown!
Javid Ahmad Tak (They Loved in 2075!)
There are three key aspects of Bourdieu’s theory that are relevant to white fragility: field, habitus, and capital. Field is the specific social context the person is in—a party, the workplace, or a school. If we take a school as an example, there is the macro field of school as a whole, and within the school are micro fields—the teacher’s lounge, the staff room, the classroom, the playground, the principal’s office, the nurses’ office, the janitor’s supply room, and so on. Capital is the social value people hold in a particular field; how they perceive themselves and are perceived by others in terms of their power or status. For example, compare the capital of a teacher and a student, a teacher and a principal, a middle-class student and a student on free or reduced lunch, an English language learner and a native English speaker, a popular girl and an unpopular one, a custodian and a receptionist, a kindergarten teacher and a sixth-grade teacher, and so on. Capital can shift with the field, for example, when the custodian comes “upstairs” to speak to the receptionist—the custodian in work clothes and the receptionist in business attire—the office worker has more capital than does the maintenance person. But when the receptionist goes “down” to the supply room, which the custodian controls, to request more whiteboard markers, those power lines shift; this is the domain of the custodian, who can fulfill the request quickly or can make the transaction difficult. Notice how race, class, and gender will also be at play in negotiations of power. The custodian is most likely to be male, and the receptionist female; the custodian more likely a person of color and the receptionist more likely white. These complex and intersecting layers of capital are being negotiated automatically.
Robin DiAngelo (White Fragility: Why It's So Hard for White People to Talk About Racism)
I hope you find love. And I don’t just mean that in regards to someone you wrap your tired bones around at night or someone who you lock eyes with unable to look away. I mean that I hope you find love in every aspect of your life. I hope you fall in love with growth, and change, and the messiness, and the beauty of fucking up, and making mistakes, and becoming exactly who you want to be. I hope you find love in places that were once devoid of it, in places within yourself that you could have been softer to, kinder to, in the past. Because if there is one thing I have learned, it is that love is so much more than a boy or a girl who holds your heart. Love is everything around you. It is everything!
Faraaz Kazi (Meant To Be Together)
My personal note about love - There is no true love as far as my knowledge only attachments and vibrations that keep two souls and bodies for sometime and then they sperate. Somehow if they are trapped what is so called as social bondage i e Marriage, then they have responsibilities, children to make and nurture them. But world needs human resources so marriage is needed but here the concept of marriage in south and north. concept of marriage in south india is different than concept of marriage in north india where manu smiriti is written and rajputs (My previous life clans) dominates. Bhramin concept of marriage is totally unique. so when you love someone within your culture it becomes strong family bondage that is hard to break but that affects organization you work, if you inter marry concept of trust may break anytime, that is why north rajputs follow the concept of vibrations in love but that is not suitable in south india. And because of sexual activities it affects the society and ecology. So finally for my personal choice which is true true true love is almost impossible anywhere even within same culture or inter culture because both have their own pros and cons and trust issues, that is why i choose to be single but if I marry then I will keep my marrital relationship out of context or out of my organization or institution where i am going to. Sex is primary desire for men and women and also for theird genders. In western concept sex has gone into multiple varieties even incest nature. It is now difficult to classify which one is right and which one is wrong becaus they context specific and completely personal but problem is where legality is touching. So my personal choice is if getting married whatever community the girl is from I will keep it out of my research institutional context but most probably i will not marry as I am not sure about immorality and where immorality comes into touch and it may get against the meaning of what is ganapathy. Ganapathy should never be immoral nor his wife. so i will most probably be single and friendly to anyone, any sex, any nationality but i will keep recording each every aspect of science and where immorality comes to. And when i choose to die, I will write all about science and immorality and spirtulism and souls desire. Prostituion or porn industry can never be avoided completely nor should be avoided as it researches about human emotions. they are track records of human evolution. But I see these prostitutes and porn industry as a tool for finding where immorality comes forward. And inside research institutions whereever I am going to I will keep observing everything that goes in science. Traditional and modern science both i will keep on observing for sure. So finally if i marry somehow whomever it is, the girl should be out of my research working context or completely same mind set. And My marriage should not ruin the name of Ganapathy so they girl i choose will be very specific that can not ruin my names reputation at any cost. the girl i touch should be fire that fires other guys if they desire for her and she fires other girls that try to reach me
Ganapathy K
At its worst, digital technology undermines a teen’s capacity to cultivate meaningful in-person connections and actually amplifies the negative aspects of their relationships.
Lisa Damour (Untangled: Guiding Teenage Girls Through the Seven Transitions into Adulthood)
According to all known laws of aviation, there is no way a bee should be able to fly. Its wings are too small to get its fat little body off the ground. The bee, of course, flies anyway because bees don't care what humans think is impossible. Yellow, black. Yellow, black. Yellow, black. Yellow, black. Ooh, black and yellow! Let's shake it up a little. Barry! Breakfast is ready! Coming! Hang on a second. Hello? - Barry? - Adam? - Can you believe this is happening? - I can't. I'll pick you up. Looking sharp. Use the stairs. Your father paid good money for those. Sorry. I'm excited. Here's the graduate. We're very proud of you, son. A perfect report card, all B's. Very proud. Ma! I got a thing going here. - You got lint on your fuzz. - Ow! That's me! - Wave to us! We'll be in row 118,000. - Bye! Barry, I told you, stop flying in the house! - Hey, Adam. - Hey, Barry. - Is that fuzz gel? - A little. Special day, graduation. Never thought I'd make it. Three days grade school, three days high school. Those were awkward. Three days college. I'm glad I took a day and hitchhiked around the hive. You did come back different. - Hi, Barry. - Artie, growing a mustache? Looks good. - Hear about Frankie? - Yeah. - You going to the funeral? - No, I'm not going. Everybody knows, sting someone, you die. Don't waste it on a squirrel. Such a hothead. I guess he could have just gotten out of the way. I love this incorporating an amusement park into our day. That's why we don't need vacations. Boy, quite a bit of pomp... under the circumstances. - Well, Adam, today we are men. - We are! - Bee-men. - Amen! Hallelujah! Students, faculty, distinguished bees, please welcome Dean Buzzwell. Welcome, New Hive City graduating class of... ...9:15. That concludes our ceremonies. And begins your career at Honex Industries! Will we pick our job today? I heard it's just orientation. Heads up! Here we go. Keep your hands and antennas inside the tram at all times. - Wonder what it'll be like? - A little scary. Welcome to Honex, a division of Honesco and a part of the Hexagon Group. This is it! Wow. Wow. We know that you, as a bee, have worked your whole life to get to the point where you can work for your whole life. Honey begins when our valiant Pollen Jocks bring the nectar to the hive. Our top-secret formula is automatically color-corrected, scent-adjusted and bubble-contoured into this soothing sweet syrup with its distinctive golden glow you know as... Honey! - That girl was hot. - She's my cousin! - She is? - Yes, we're all cousins. - Right. You're right. - At Honex, we constantly strive to improve every aspect of bee existence. These bees are stress-testing a new helmet technology. - What do you think he makes? - Not enough. Here we have our latest advancement, the Krelman. - What does that do? - Catches that little strand of honey that hangs after you pour it. Saves us millions. Can anyone work on the Krelman? Of course. Most bee jobs are small ones. But bees know that every small job, if it's done well, means a lot. But choose carefully because you'll stay in the job you pick for the rest of your life. The same job the rest of your life? I didn't know that. What's the difference? You'll be happy to know that bees, as a species, haven't had one day off in 27 million years. So you'll just work us to death? We'll sure try. Wow! That blew my mind! "What's the difference?" How can you say that? One job forever? That's an insane choice to have to make. I'm relieved. Now we only have to make one decision in life. But, Adam, how could they never have told us that? Why would you question anything? We're bees. We're the most perfectly functioning society on Earth. You ever think maybe things work a little too well here? Like what? Give me one example. I don't know. But you know what I'm talking about. Please clear the gate. Royal Nectar Force on approach. Wait a second. Check it out. - Hey, those are Pollen Jocks! - Wow. I've never seen them this close. They know
Jerry Seinfeld
It is one of the most painful aspects of assimilation: the loss of our heritage, language, and family.
Julissa Arce (You Sound Like a White Girl)
Examples of pimp references permeate every aspect of popular culture. Some argue that the meaning of the word has changed and now reflects something positive.
Rachel Lloyd (Girls Like Us: Fighting for a World Where Girls are Not for Sale, an Activist Finds Her Calling and Heals Herself)
Gary Ladd’s Pathways Project is a long-term study of the various influences on children’s early and continuing educational progress. This longitudinal study of children from kindergarten through middle school examines aspects of family and school that affect children’s academic success. Results indicate that when children have difficulty with their peer group at school, they perform less well on measures of learning and achievement.9
Michelle Anthony (Little Girls Can Be Mean: Four Steps to Bully-Proof Girls in the Early Grades)
If you enjoy sex or explore aspects of your sexual identity using technology, that experience should belong to you. Only you should get to decide whether it was a good or bad thing to do.
Violet Blue (The Smart Girl's Guide to Privacy: Practical Tips for Staying Safe Online)
Elizabeth succeeded at last with Record of a School because she was performing a literary version of what she was beginning to recognize as her vocation in life: to nurture and promote the men she admired, helping them to achieve a greater range of action than she could ever hope to attain as a woman. Elizabeth didn’t receive the same recognition from Record of a School that she would have if it had been her school, her theory. But the men whose minds she hoped to capture would not have paid attention to a woman’s book about a girls’ school. And she might never have had the self-assurance to write such a book about a school of her own. Playing the role of facilitator—or “Recorder,” as she referred to herself in later editions—freed Elizabeth first to produce and then to promote the book more vigorously than she ever had one of her own, without appearing unfeminine or immodest in character, an aspect of her reputation that she continued to care about even as she habitually disregarded the niceties of dress. To
Megan Marshall (The Peabody Sisters)
In other words, science and religion occupied two separate spheres; in the pope’s view, Darwin might have explained where the human body came from, but that had nothing to do with the spiritual and divine aspects of human existence.
Edward Humes (Monkey Girl: Evolution, Education, Religion, and the Battle for America's Soul – A Dramatic True Story of the Dover Intelligent Design Trial)
The Hotel Maillot, where they resided for four months, had French personnel and Jewish customers: Polish, Hungarian, Romanian refugees. Everybody was waiting for a visa - all displaced persons, everybody clinging to a hope, a piece of paper. In the yard of the hotel, red-cheeked peasant girls from Bretagne washed the hotel laundry. They also cleaned the rooms, scrubbed with rags and brooms. When the cleaning girl would come in and see Father in bed, she would say: "Monsieur shlooft" (Monsieur is sleeping, in Yiddish) and would come later. The only pleasant aspect of that time was the proximity of the Bois de Boulogne, which reminded my parents of home, of the Habsburgshohe. They watched children playing and the boats on the lake and there they spent hours upon hours. They hoped that one of their children would come to rescue them from that exile - Bernie or Pearl.
Pearl Fichman (Before Memories Fade)
Jong-Il’s elite team of bodyguards was one of the most sinister, intriguing aspects of his way of life. He kept 120 of them and preferred them to be orphans; once hired they were not permitted to visit home or to ever leave the Leader’s side. If they wanted to marry, they were only allowed to marry a typist or secretary from a specific unit of the Party, and the matchmaking procedure itself was bizarre. A bodyguard had to apply to his supervisor for marriage, and if the application was approved—likely this decision was Jong-Il’s—the bodyguard would be called to his supervisor’s office on the Third Floor. Twenty photographs were placed on the supervisor’s desk, facedown. Blindly the bodyguard would pick a picture, which the supervisor would then flip over. The woman in the photograph would be the man’s wife. If the bodyguard refused to marry the stranger, he would have to wait another two years before being able to reapply—and this time he would have to marry the girl whose photograph he had blindly drawn, whether he liked the look of her or not, at risk of being dismissed.
Paul Fischer (A Kim Jong-Il Production: The Extraordinary True Story of a Kidnapped Filmmaker, His Star Actress, and a Young Dictator's Rise to Power)
So let it be said again, I love Martial Arts – all of them. They all have beneficial aspects and bring so much happiness to the people that practice them. X art is not better than Y art, (they are just different) and no style is without value. Except Capoeira you big bunch of dancing girls. (Just kidding)
Phil Pierce (Martial Arts Myths: Behind the Myths!)
Every single day we're alive, we're choosing this life and this persona. We choose to be the stay-at-home mom who loves baking and Pilates. We choose to be a hipster who loves coffee shops and artisan goods. We choose to be a lawyer who runs marathons and only eats organic. Every single aspect of our persona, no matter how long we've rocked it, is a choice we make every day.
Rachel Hollis (Girl Wash your Face)
We armed ourselves with pistols, shotguns, and assault rifles. We knew that the government had us impossibly outgunned but nevertheless felt obliged to not only prepare ourselves for the upcoming collapse of society as we had known it, but also to do whatever it took to speed the day when that collapse occurred. The government was illegitimate; a puppet regime manipulated by a shadowy and sinister force that was hellbent on our destruction. The supposed democracy that seated traitorous politicians had been tainted by mass media that poisoned the minds and souls of our people to not only blind them against what was happening, but also to con them into complicity in their own downfall. Our guns served many purposes. In addition to the simple purpose they were designed for-to kill people-our firearms endowed with us a sense of destiny befitting an epic struggle against fearsome odds. The deadly seriousness of the situation was underlined, italicized, and emboldened by the smell of gun oil and the clack of magazines sliding into position as we recruited new soldiers into our movement. According to the founding Fathers, it was not only our right, but our duty to bear arms against the tyrants who had usurped our beloved nation. I spent 7 years immersed in that world. A reality where I was constantly looking over my shoulder to reveal the handiwork of the enemy. Every aspect of our culture faced a relentless assault. Everything that was good about America-Life, Liberty, And The Pursuit of Happiness-had been denigrated and disparaged by those that sought to impose Marxist equality. I hated them for that. I hated them with the passion of a patriot. That hate was fueled by what I truly believed was a love for my race. Oops! Did I say "race?" I meant a love for my country, Or was it a love of Christ? Or Allah? It could have been any of a number of allegiances-any number of ways to identify myself-that I built walls around and bristled at those outside, and it was all in the name of love. Roads to a lot of really bad places are paved with that kind of bizarro love. A vampiric, soul-depleting love-substitute that beckons to those who never know the real thing. I was very lucky to realize the true love of a little girl-my daughter-otherwise I'd likely be dead or in prison like so many of my former comrades. Simply by playing with other children, she taught me that the walls and guns and hate that had seemed to give me purpose were in fact unnecessary constructs that threatened to separate us. The children she shared toys, laughs, and smiles with also shared the same need for love and compassion that we all do-regardless of the color of our skin, our family's choice of spirituality, or the part of the world we come from. I made a decision to cast aside the fear that masqueraded as love, and to live my life in wonderful affection for diversity instead of scorn for it.
Arno Michaelis (My Life After Hate)
The widespread vision of Her as a Triple Goddess also expressed the cycle of birth-death-rebirth. The original God-in-Three-Persons, the Goddess was believed to manifest both successively and simultaneously as Maiden, Mother, and Crone. As Maiden, She guarded and expressed the beginnings of life and its early development; in this aspect She was seen as a young girl or the Kore. Her Mother aspect referred not necessarily to the biological condition of having a child but connoted the fruition of life, its maturity, in this aspect, She was seen as a mature woman. As Crone, She was seen as most powerful of all, for it was the Crone, representing the aging and end of life, who made the link between life and death; in this aspect, She appeared as an old woman or skeletal hag. But the destruction of life brought about by the Crone was also an initiation into Her most profound mystery: that, out of death, She would create new life. Thus were the Crone and the Maiden inextricably linked and the cycle repeated and ongoing. In Her triple form, the Goddess, also bestowed a meaningfulness and even sanctity to each phase of a woman's life. Unlike our culture, which values only a woman's youthfulness, earlier cultures valued the aging woman. In the vision of the Old Religion, it was the Crone who carried the most wisdom and power.
Kathie Carlson (In Her Image: The Unhealed Daughter's Search for Her Mother)
The 68-page first issue of Calling All Girls contained four comic stories—an 8-pager on Queen Elizabeth (the mother of the current queen); a 9-pager on famed author Osa Johnson, “the famed jungle adventuress,” as the story so quaintly dubbed her; a fictional 7-pager on Judy Wing, Air Hostess No. 1 (aviation themes were huge in the early years of comics, just as they were in all of popular culture); and a fictional 8-pager on the teenage adventures of the Yorktown Younger Set, which “lives in a town like yours. The other half of the first issue contained text stories of a wide variety, with an astonishing amount of reading material for the teen girl’s dime. There was a 4-page story devoted to Connie Martin, a Nancy Drew knockoff; a 4-pager devoted to circus girls; a 3-pager on Gloria Jean herself; a 3-pager by publisher George Hecht on “13 ways girls can help in the national defense”; a 2-pager on manners; a 3-pager by best-selling sports novelist John R. Tunis on women in sports; a 2-pager on grooming; a 4-pager on a fictional female boater; a 2-pager on films; a 2-pager on fashion, with delightful drawings; a page on fashion accessories; and a 2-pager on cooking, by the famed food writer Cecily Brownstone. This issue gave girls an awful lot of reading, some of it inspirational and showing they could be more than “just a girl,” as the boys in Tubby’s clubhouse used to call Little Lulu and her friends a decade later in their Dell Comics adventures. The most intriguing aspect of Calling All Girls is that it approached schoolgirls not as boy-crazy or male-dependent, but as interesting individuals in their own right. The ensuing issues of Calling All Girls expanded on this theme. This was definitely a mini “feminist manifesto” for teens!
Michelle Nolan (Love on the Racks: A History of American Romance Comics)
I heard a singer begin a tune i hadn't heard before, a song of heartbreak. Of a girl who walked the earth by starlight. Who's aspect was mortal but with beauty divine. her cruelty had pierced his heart.
Holly Black
It had been often commented upon that Vibe offspring tended to be crazy as bedbugs. ‘Fax’s brother Cragmont had run away with a trapeze girl, then brought her back to New York to get married, the wedding being actually performed on trapezes, groom and best man, dressed in tails and silk opera hats held on with elastic, swinging upside down by their knees in perfect synchrony across the perilous Æther to meet the bride and her father, a carnival “jointee” or concessionaire, in matched excursion from their own side of the ring, bridesmaids observed at every hand up twirling by their chins in billows of spangling, forty feet above the faces of the guests, feathers dyed a deep acid green sweeping and stirring the cigar smoke rising from the crowd. Cragmont Vibe was but thirteen that circus summer he became a husband and began what would become, even for the day, an enormous family. The third brother, Fleetwood, best man at this ceremony, had also got out of the house early, fast-talking his way onto an expedition heading for Africa. He kept as clear of political games as of any real scientific inquiry, preferring to take the title of “Explorer” literally, and do nothing but explore. It did not hurt Fleetwood’s chances that a hefty Vibe trust fund was there to pick up the bills for bespoke pith helmets and meat lozenges and so forth. Kit met him one spring weekend out at the Vibe manor on Long Island. “Say, but you’ve never seen our cottage,” ‘Fax said one day after classes. “What are you doing this weekend? Unless there’s another factory girl or pizza princess or something in the works.” “Do I use that tone of voice about the Seven Sisters material you specialize in?” “I’ve nothing against the newer races,” ‘Fax protested. “But you might like to meet Cousin Dittany anyway.” “The one at Smith.” “Mount Holyoke, actually.” “Can’t wait.” They arrived under a dourly overcast sky. Even in cheerier illumination, the Vibe mansion would have registered as a place best kept clear of—four stories tall, square, unadorned, dark stone facing looking much older than the known date of construction. Despite its aspect of abandonment, an uneasy tenancy was still pursued within, perhaps by some collateral branch of Vibes . . . it was unclear. There was the matter of the second floor. Only the servants were allowed there. It “belonged,” in some way nobody was eager to specify, to previous occupants. “Someone’s living there?” “Someone’s there.” . . . from time to time, a door swinging shut on a glimpse of back stairway, a muffled footfall . . . an ambiguous movement across a distant doorframe . . . a threat of somehow being obliged to perform a daily search through the forbidden level, just at dusk, so detailed that contact with the unseen occupants, in some form, at some unannounced moment, would be inevitable . . . all dustless and tidy, shadows in permanent possession, window-drapes and upholstery in deep hues of green, claret, and indigo, servants who did not speak, who would or could not meet one’s gaze . . . and in the next room, the next instant, waiting . . . “Real nice of you to have me here, folks,” chirped Kit at breakfast. “Fellow sleeps like a top. Well, except . . .” Pause in the orderly gobbling and scarfing. Interest from all around the table. “I mean, who came in the room in the middle of the night like that?” “You’re sure,” said Scarsdale, “it wasn’t just the wind, or the place settling.” “They were walking around, like they were looking for something.” Glances were exchanged, failed to be exchanged, were sent out but not returned. “Kit, you haven’t seen the stables yet,” Cousin Dittany offered at last. “Wouldn’t you like to go riding?
Thomas Pynchon (Against the Day)
That the spectrum is linear couldn’t be further from the truth. To get a more accurate perspective, I met Dr. Judith Gould at the Lorna Wing Centre for Autism. Judith is a chartered consultant clinical psychologist with more than forty years’ experience. She specializes in autism-spectrum disorders and learning disabilities. In the 1970s, with the late Dr. Lorna Wing, Judith came up with the term autism spectrum. Judith believes the key point to understand is that autism is a spectrum not because it is linear but because any factor can be present at any point. She said, “[In our study] we saw the classic autistic aloof person with repetitive rituals and elaborate routines. But we also saw children with aspects of social difficulties, communication difficulties, and imagination difficulties who didn’t fit in with [earlier] precise criteria. “These traits tended to be seen together, but you could have anything on the dimension: anything on the communication dimension, anything on the imagination dimension, and so on. At first we called it the autism continuum. Continuum implied severity from high to low, but that’s not what we meant. The spectrum would look like a rainbow because anything can happen at any point. The colors merge. “In terms of communication, people can come anywhere on the spectrum. There are those who only communicate their needs, and there are those who don’t realize the person they are with may be getting bored when they talk about special interests. Then you’ve got those with a highly intellectual, formal, little-professor communication style.
Laura James (Odd Girl Out: An Autistic Woman in a Neurotypical World)
I was the same way. For my entire young life, I was terrified of anyone not liking me. The mere thought of someone hating me, girl or guy, would literally keep me up at night. As a result, every aspect of my life revolved around people-pleasing, hiding my faults, covering my tracks, and blaming others. And needless to say, I barely had any success with women. And when I did finally get a girlfriend, she left my ass for a man who could actually express himself.
Mark Manson (Models: Attract Women Through Honesty)
Introduction Raised in the cloistered world of Brooklyn’s Satmar sect of Hasidic Judaism, Deborah Feldman struggled as a naturally curious child to make sense of and obey the rigid strictures that governed her daily life. From what she could read to whom she could speak with, virtually every aspect of her identity was tightly controlled. Married at age seventeen to a man she had met for only thirty minutes and denied a traditional education—sexual or otherwise—she was unable to consummate the relationship for an entire year. Her resultant debilitating anxiety went undiagnosed and was exacerbated by the public shame of having failed to serve her husband. In exceptional prose, Feldman recalls how stolen moments reading about the empowered literary characters of Jane Austen and Louisa May Alcott helped her to see an alternative way of life—one she knew she had to seize when, at the age of nineteen, she gave birth to a son and realized that more than just her own future was at stake. Questions and Topics for Discussion 1. The heroines in the books Deborah read as a girl were her first inspirations, the first to make her consider her own potential outside of her community. Which literary characters have inspired you? 2. As a girl, with two absentee parents and an outspoken nature, Deborah was systematically made to feel different or “bad.” How did the structure of Satmar Hasidic culture make her feel such shame, and how did this shame serve to subjugate her? 3. When Deborah learns that King David—a revered historical figure who supposedly did no wrong—is a murderer and a hypocrite, she writes, “I am not aware at this moment that I have lost my innocence. I will realize it many years later.” What is the line between innocence and willful ignorance? How did Deborah’s ability and willingness to question authority and think for herself change the course of her life? 4. The cloistered Satmar community is located on the outskirts of New York City, one of the most racially, spiritually, and culturally diverse places in America. How do aspects of the outside world enter Deborah’s consciousness, and how do you think these glimpses of life outside her insular community affected her development?
Deborah Feldman (Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots)
It was never If we returned to the outside. It was always When. In this there was probably the most important aspect of our survival: hope.
Krystyna Chiger (The Girl in the Green Sweater: A Life in Holocaust's Shadow)
two of the most important aspects our wedding.
Fenella J. Miller (Operation Winter Wedding (Army Girls #4))