Harder Struggle Quotes

It shouldn't be easy to be amazing. Then everything would be. It's the things you fight for and struggle with before earning that have the greatest worth. When something's difficult to come by, you'll do that much more to make sure it's even harder―or impossible―to lose.

The harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly; it is dearness only that gives everything its value. I love the man that can smile in trouble, that can gather strength from distress and grow.

If relationships were hard, mariage was even harder... it seemed like most couples struggled. It went with the territory. What did Nana always say? Stick two different people with two different sets of expectations under one roof and it ain't always going to be shrimp and grits on Easter.

Maybe the truth was, it shouldn't be so easy to be amazing. Then everything would be. It's the things you fight for and struggle with before earning that have the greatest worth. When something's difficult to come by, you'll do that much more to make sure it's even harder--if not impossible--to lose.

Often men who have been emotionally neglected and abused as children by dominating mothers bond with assertive women, only to have their childhood feelings of being engulfed surface. While they could not 'smash their mommy' and still receive love, they find that they can engage in intimate violence with partners who respond to their acting out by trying harder to connect with them emotionally, hoping that the love offered in the present will heal the wounds of the past. If only one party in the relationship is working to create love, to create the space of emotional connection, the dominator model remains in place and the relationship just becomes a site for continuous power struggle.

Where there's life, death is inevitable. Dying's easy; it's living that's hard. The harder it gets, the stronger the will to live. And the greater the fear of death, the greater the struggle to keep on living.

It was so risky and so scary, and yet at the same time, so beautiful. Maybe the truth was, it shouldn't be easy to be amazing. Then everything would be. It's the things you fight for and struggle with before earning that have the greatest worth. When something's difficult to come by, you'll do that much more to make sure it's even harder -if not impossible- to lose.

I have moments that aren't too bad, but there's always something I'm struggling with, or feeling guilty about. I just figured I needed to try harder, but I find it difficult to sustain that motivation.

Things happen or they don't happen, that's all. Nothing is accomplished by sweat and struggle. Nearly everything which we call life is just insomnia, an agony because we've lost the habit of falling asleep. We don't know how to let go. We're like a Jack-in-the-box perched on top of a spring and the more we struggle the harder it is to get back in the box.

I find so many people struggling, often working harder, simply because they cling to old ideas. They want things to be the way they were; they resist change. I know people who are losing their jobs or their houses, and they blame technology or the economy or their boss. Sadly they fail to realize that they might be the problem. Old ideas are their biggest liability. It is a liability simply because they fail to realize that while that idea or way of doing something was an asset yesterday, yesterday is gone.

The Bible isn't a rule book. It's a love letter. I'm not an employee. I'm a child. It's not about my performance. It's about Jesus' performance for me. Grace isn't there for some future me but for the real me. The me who struggled. The me who was messy. ..... He loves me in my mess; he was not waiting until I cleaned myself up.

I picked up the mop and started washing again as Rob struggled to his feet, red faced. John laughed, and Much covered a smile. "You lot think this is funny?" I asked. "I'll unman you too if you wish it." They jumped back, and Rob grunted. "You haven't unmanned me, and I resent the implication of it." "It were a warning blow," I told him, shoving the mop 'cross the floor. "Next time I'll try harder.

When you’re going through a breakdown, a good question to ask is what is actually breaking down. We usually think it’s our self. But what’s typically happening is that our struggle to deny our emotional truth is breaking down. Emotional distress is a signal that it’s getting harder to remain emotionally unconscious. It means we’re about to discover our true selves underneath all that story business.

Kid, when will you learn.” “You’d be amazed the things I know.” “You might be able thrash your way out of a spider-web, but thrashing in quicksand doesn’t work. The harder you fight, the more ground you lose. Struggling merely expedites your inevitable defeat.” “Never been defeated. Never will be.” “Rowena was a spider web.” He touches my cheek with the hand holding the knife. The silver glints an inch from my eye. “Do you know what I am.” “A great big pain in my ass.” “Quicksand. And you’re dancing on it.” “Dude, what’s with the knife?” “I’m not interested in ink anymore. You’re going to sign my contract in blood.” “Thought you said it was an application,” I say pissily. “It is, Dani. To a very exclusive club. What’s Mine.” “Ain’t nobody’s. “ “Sign.” “You can’t—“ “Or Jo dies. Slowly and painfully.” “Dude, why you still talking? Unchain me and give me the fecking contract already.

It's so easy to focus on the anguish and the misery; it's harder, somehow, to acknowledge the positive, maybe for fear of jinxing it, bringing the nightmare back down on our heads.

You need not struggle to define your passion. You just have to be aware of what you truly enjoy doing.

Prayer is awe, intimacy, struggle—yet the way to reality. There is nothing more important, or harder, or richer, or more life-altering. There is absolutely nothing so great as prayer.

It is much harder to struggle against irrelevance than against exploitation.

MirkerLurker: I thought the characters were the reason anyone read Monstrous Sea. rainmaker: You mean like, shipping? MirkerLurker: No, not shipping - shipping's great, and I do it all the time, but I mean... the characters themselves. The struggles they have to go through, and when you really love them, how much they affect you. When the characters are good, they make you care about everything else. That's why I draw them. It probably sounds dumb, but they're like real people to me. And this will probably sound worse, but sometimes I like them better than real people. I can empathize with characters. Real people are harder.

At the core of every addiction is an emptiness based in abject fear. The addict dreads and abhors the present moment; she bends feverishly only toward the next time, the moment when her brain, infused with her drug of choice, will briefly experience itself as liberated from the burden of the past and the fear of the future—the two elements that make the present intolerable. Many of us resemble the drug addict in our ineffectual efforts to fill in the spiritual black hole, the void at the center, where we have lost touch with our souls, our spirit—with those sources of meaning and value that are not contingent or fleeting. Our consumerist, acquisition-, action-, and image-mad culture only serves to deepen the hole, leaving us emptier than before. The constant, intrusive, and meaningless mind-whirl that characterizes the way so many of us experience our silent moments is, itself, a form of addiction—and it serves the same purpose. “One of the main tasks of the mind is to fight or remove the emotional pain, which is one of the reasons for its incessant activity, but all it can ever achieve is to cover it up temporarily. In fact, the harder the mind struggles to get rid of the pain, the greater the pain.”14 So writes Eckhart Tolle. Even our 24/7 self-exposure to noise, e-mails, cell phones, TV, Internet chats, media outlets, music downloads, videogames, and nonstop internal and external chatter cannot succeed in drowning out the fearful voices within.

The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep lowing concern. Beautiful people do not just happen.

You might be able to thrash your way out of a spiderweb, but thrashing in quicksand doesn’t work. The harder you fight, the more ground you lose. Struggling merely expedites your inevitable defeat.

But the truth is it’s hard for me to know what I really think about any of the stuff I’ve written. It’s always tempting to sit back and make finger-steeples and invent impressive sounding theoretical justifications for what one does, but in my case most of it’d be horseshit. As time passes I get less and less nuts about anything I’ve published, and it gets harder to know for sure when its antagonistic elements are in there because they serve a useful purpose and when their just covert manifestations of this "look-at-me-please-love-me-I-hate you" syndrome I still sometimes catch myself falling into. Anyway, but what I think I meant by "antagonize" or "aggravate" has to do with the stuff in the TV essay about the younger writer trying to struggle against the cultural hegemony of TV. One thing TV does is help us deny that we’re lonely. With televised images, we can have the facsimile of a relationship without the work of a real relationship. It’s an anesthesia of "form." The interesting thing is why we’re so desperate for this anesthetic against loneliness. You don’t have to think very hard to realize that our dread of both relationships and loneliness, both of which are like sub-dreads of our dread of being trapped inside a self (a psychic self, not just a physical self), has to do with angst about death, the recognition that I’m going to die, and die very much alone, and the rest of the world is going to go merrily on without me. I’m not sure I could give you a steeple-fingered theoretical justification, but I strongly suspect a big part of real art fiction’s job is to aggravate this sense of entrapment and loneliness and death in people, to move people to countenance it, since any possible human redemption requires us first to face what’s dreadful, what we want to deny.

Everyone is going through tough times. The irony in it is that everyone thinks what they're going through is harder than what you are. Life isn't about surviving these things, it's about understanding this- We are all struggling.

I do not think God makes bad things happen just so that people can grow spiritually. Bad parents do that, my mother said. Bad parents make things hard and painful for their children and then say it was to help them grow. Growing and living are hard enough already; children do not need things to be harder. I think this is true even for normal children. I have watched little children learning to walk; they all struggle and fall down many times. Their faces show that it is not easy. It would be stupid to tie bricks on them to make it harder. If that is true for learning to walk, then I think it is true for other growing and learning as well. God is suppose to be the good parent, the Father. So I think God would not make things harder than they are. I do not think I am autistic because God thought my parents needed a challenge or I needed a challenge. I think it is like if I were a baby and a rock fell on me and broke my leg. Whatever caused it was an accident. God did not prevent the accident, but He did not cause it, either.... I think my autism is an accident, but what I do with it is me.

In fact, the harder the mind struggles to get rid of the pain, the greater the pain. The mind can never find the solution, nor can it afford to allow you to find the solution, because it is itself an intrinsic part of the “problem.” Imagine a chief of police trying to find an arsonist when the arsonist is the chief of police. You will not be free of that pain until you cease to derive your sense of self from identification with the mind, which is to say from ego. The mind is then toppled from its place

Faith is always supposed to make it harder, not easier, to ignore the plight of our sisters and brothers. (p. 165)

prayed for the poor and destitute in great cities, where the struggle for life was harder than it was here with us.

The world has a very serious problem, my friend' Shiva went on. 'Poor children still die by their millions. Westerners and the global rich -- like me -- live in post-scarcity society, while a billion people struggle to get enough to eat. And we're pushing the planet towards a tipping point, where the corals die and the forests burn and life becomes much, much harder. We have the resources to solve those problems, even now, but politics and economics and nationalism all get in the way. If we could access all those minds, though...

You have a wild young heart. Right now, it is like a caged bird that batters itself against the bars. To struggle harder will only hurt you more. Wait, be patient. Your time will come to fly. And when it does, you must be strong, not bloodied and weary.

You can't change a regime on the basis of compassion. There's got to be something harder.

She had not meant to name them, but she could not help herself; and having done so she thought, Let their names be symbols that their lives are worth the keeping. Let them struggle a little the harder, to keep their names.

Ravka was many things to him: a grand lady who required constant courting, a stubborn child unwilling to stand on its own, and most often, a drowning man—the more Nikolai struggled to save it, the harder it fought. But with the help of the scientists and soldiers at the Gilded Bog, he might just drag his country to shore yet.

Mother. Father. I am sorry. I have failed you both. I made a promise to protect our people, Mother. I thought if I could stop the Templars, If I could keep the revolution free from their influence, then those I supported would do what was right. They did, I suppose, do what was right - what was right for them. As for you, Father, I thought I might unite us, that we would forget the past and forge a better future. In time, I believed you could be made to see the world as I do - to understand. But it was just a dream. This, too, I should have known. Were we not meant to live in peace, then? Is that it? Are we born to argue? To fight? So many voices - each demanding something else. "It has been hard at times, but never harder than today. To see all I worked for perverted, discarded, forgotten. You would say I have described the whole of history, Father. Are you smiling, then? Hoping I might speak the words you long to hear? To validate you? To say that all along you were right? I will not. Even now, faced as I am with the truth of your cold words, I refuse. Because I believe things can still change. "I may never succeed. The Assassins may struggle another thousand years in vain. But we will not stop." "Compromise. That's what everyone has insisted on. And so I have learnt it. But differently than most, I think. I realize now that it will take time, that the road ahead is long and shrouded in darkness. It is a road which will not always take me where I wish to go - and I doubt I will live to see it end. But I will travel down it nonetheless." "For at my side walks hope. In the face of all that insists I turn back, I carry on: this, this is my compromise.

With few exceptions, the Negro youth must work harder and must perform his tasks even better than a with youth in order to secure recognition. But out of the hard and unusual struggle through which he is compelled to pass, he gets a strength, a confidence, that one missed whose pathway is comparatively smooth by reason of brith and race.

I tried again, but the door refused to open. It was like everything in life; the more one struggled against it, the harder it became.

So here is the happiness trap in a nutshell: to find happiness, we try to avoid or get rid of bad feelings, but the harder we try, the more bad feelings we create.

It's easy for men to be friends as close as brothers when they're poor and struggling, but much harder when things are going well. Friends are never as close as blood. Remember that, Rat.

As ever, he is surpriz'd by the fierceness of their bodies, their inability to hold back, the purity of the not-yet-dishonest,— 'twould take a harder Case than Mason not to struggle with Tears of Sentiment.

Some flies and gnats were sitting on my paper and this disturbed me; I breathed on them to make them go, then blew harder and harder, but it did no good. The tiny beasts lowered their behinds, made themselves heavy, and struggled against the wind until their thin legs were bent. They were absolutely not going to leave the place. They would always find something to get hold of, bracing their heels against a comma or an unevenness in the paper, and they intended to stay exactly where they were until they themselves decided it was the right time to go.

To succeed in this competition means finding yourself in a place where you call the shots and gets the gain. This is not an easy feat, unless you are born into it. if you are not, you will need to out-smart your equals. You need to be more ambitious than they are. You need to work harder. You need to look better and smarter. You need to justify why it should be you and not them. It’s a competition.

Scott walked away and did not look back. They knew Maggie would try to follow him, and she did. In her world, they were a pack, and the pack stayed together. Maggie whined and barked, and he heard her claws scrape the tarmac like files. Budress had cautioned him not to look back or wave bye-bye or any of the silly things people did. Dogs weren't people. Eye contact would make her struggle harder to reach him. A dog could see your heart in your eyes, Budress told him, and dogs were drawn to our hearts.

Cool morning shadows sadly shift across the floor Each time we say goodbye it’s harder than before Even after all the pain of parting still we find That we must mourn the death of the dreams we leave behind As I turn my back on all that means the most to me The sounds and smells, the light that dances on the sea The greatest gamble is to act on the belief That only the slave who leaves it all is truly free The sacrifice that we both lay before His feet A thousand moments that belonged to us That now will never be By faith we hold a better dream inside our hearts A time when our family will never have to be apart Till then we struggle with just what it really means And we will mourn the death of our beautiful dreams Mourn the death of our beautiful dreams

It is hard to struggle for success but harder for survival.

The struggle to grow makes the vine work harder, extending its roots and absorbing elements that make it produce a more interesting fruit.

Valuing freedom above all else; entrepreneurs work harder to create future freedom, which directly takes away from their freedom in the present.

...there's no satisfaction in watching Jack struggle. Feral dogs bite harder when they're cornered.

The harder thing is You are not just fighting them But also a part of yourself who is still struggling Between the truth and familiarity

The harder the struggle, the bigger the gain. The important thing is to stick with it, repetitively and consistently.

If your son is heterosexual, then he discovers the harder it is to find a job, the harder it is to find a woman.

I feel to that the gap between my new life in New York and the situation at home in Africa is stretching into a gulf, as Zimbabwe spirals downwards into a violent dictatorship. My head bulges with the effort to contain both worlds. When I am back in New York, Africa immediately seems fantastical – a wildly plumaged bird, as exotic as it is unlikely. Most of us struggle in life to maintain the illusion of control, but in Africa that illusion is almost impossible to maintain. I always have the sense there that there is no equilibrium, that everything perpetually teeters on the brink of some dramatic change, that society constantly stands poised for some spasm, some tsunami in which you can do nothing but hope to bob up to the surface and not be sucked out into a dark and hungry sea. The origin of my permanent sense of unease, my general foreboding, is probably the fact that I have lived through just such change, such a sudden and violent upending of value systems. In my part of Africa, death is never far away. With more Zimbabweans dying in their early thirties now, mortality has a seat at every table. The urgent, tugging winds themselves seem to whisper the message, memento mori, you too shall die. In Africa, you do not view death from the auditorium of life, as a spectator, but from the edge of the stage, waiting only for your cue. You feel perishable, temporary, transient. You feel mortal. Maybe that is why you seem to live more vividly in Africa. The drama of life there is amplified by its constant proximity to death. That’s what infuses it with tension. It is the essence of its tragedy too. People love harder there. Love is the way that life forgets that it is terminal. Love is life’s alibi in the face of death. For me, the illusion of control is much easier to maintain in England or America. In this temperate world, I feel more secure, as if change will only happen incrementally, in manageable, finely calibrated, bite-sized portions. There is a sense of continuity threaded through it all: the anchor of history, the tangible presence of antiquity, of buildings, of institutions. You live in the expectation of reaching old age. At least you used to. But on Tuesday, September 11, 2001, those two states of mind converge. Suddenly it feels like I am back in Africa, where things can be taken away from you at random, in a single violent stroke, as quick as the whip of a snake’s head. Where tumult is raised with an abruptness that is as breathtaking as the violence itself.

Take off your damned wrapper! The old buffer ordered, looking intensely at her lower part. Comfort was on her knees, rubbing the old man's dirty feet. All her plea and tears continually worsen the whole matter. I want to do you harder cos you gonna be fucked by other folks who needs a large hole, said the man, moving towards her. Comfort struggled with all her feminine might, but the old masculine but old man ripped her wrapper and slapped her on the face. Lie here, Lie here! I'm gonna do what your old man did to your mama and its gonna sweet you. She screamed as the man's organ prick her glory hole like a sharp needle.

I’m not sure what to say about struggle except that it feels like a long, dark tunnel with no light at the end. You never notice until it’s over the ways it has changed you, and there is no going back. We struggled a lot this year. For everyone who picked a fight with life and got the shit kicked out of them: I’m proud of you for surviving. This year I learned that cities are beautiful from rooftops even when you’re sad and that swimming in rivers while the sun sets in July will make you feel hopeful, no matter what’s going on at home. I found out my best friend is strong enough to swing me over his shoulder like I’m weightless and run down the street while I’m squealing and kicking against his chest. I found out vegan rice milk whipped cream is delicious, especially when it’s licked off the stomach of a boy you love. This year I kissed too many people with broken hearts and hands like mousetraps. If I could go back and unhurt them I would. If I could go back even farther and never meet them I would do that too. I turned 21. There’s no getting around it. I’m an adult now. Navigating the world has proved harder than I expected. There were times I was reckless. In my struggle to survive I hurt others. Apologies do not make good bandages. I’m not sure what to say about change except that it reminds me of the Bible story with the lions’ den. But you are not named Daniel and you have not been praying, so God lets the beasts get a few deep, painful swipes at you before the morning comes and you’re pulled into the light, exhausted and cut to shit. The good news is you survived. The bad news is you’re hurt and no one can heal you but yourself. You just have to find a stiff drink and a clean needle before you bleed out. And then you get up. And start over.

Once, I discovered the skulls of two impala rams, their horns locked into an irreversible figure-of-eight; the two animals had been trapped in combat, latched to each other during the battle of the rut. The harder they had pulled to escape from each other, the more intractably stuck they were, until they had fallen exhausted, to their knees, in an embrace of hatred that had killed them both. When I picked up the skulls to add to my growing collection of what Vanessa called "Bobo's smelly pile," the hooked horns fell away from each other and the story of the impalas' death struggle was undone.

...the characters themselves. The struggles they have to go through, and when you really love them, how much they affect you. When the characters are good, they make you care about everything else. That's why I draw them. It probably sounds dumb, but they're like real people to me. And this will probably sound worse, but sometimes I like them better than real people. I can empathize with characters. Real people are harder.

Generations of sacrifice; hard work and harder living. So much suffered, so much forfeited, so much -- for this opportunity. For my life. And I've tried, tried living up to it. But after years of struggling, fighting against the current, I'm ready to slow my arms. Stop kicking. Breathe the water in. I'm exhausted. Perhaps it’s time to end this story. Ah - here’s Lou.

Another sob came, harder than the first, but she couldn't cover her face and her mastectomy scars at the same time when he raised his head. When she tried, Luke merely caught her wrists and lightly pinned them on either side of her head. "It's all right, Em. Tears are part of this," he whispered, bending to kiss them away. He moved gently within her, another tender caress that soothed as much as it stimulated. It broke the seal on the dam of her tears. They came out in a quiet rush while he stayed above her, eyes on her face as he murmured soothing things she didn't quite catch. And when the tears slowed, she looked up into his handsome face with a sniffle and the smile he gave her filled her heart to overflowing. Dear God she loved him. Had always loved him and would never love another man but him. Her heart had known it all along. And so had her body. Still, she tensed when he released one of her wrists to touch the skin beneath her right collarbone. Luke shook his dark head, those liquid eyes looking right into her soul. "I won't let you hide from me. Or from yourself." Embedded deep inside her, he raised his upper body to gaze at her, and all she could do was close her eyes in resistance. "Look at me." After a long hesitation, she did. He stared down at her with a powerful mixture of tenderness and hunger. "You think a scar's going to change how I see you? Feel about you?" She swallowed and struggled to find her voice. "It's ugly." "You're beautiful to me, Em. Always." She opened her mouth to say something but he leaned down to kiss her again. "Give me your hand," he coaxed, his voice a seductive whisper. She did, tentatively, and his fingers closed around hers in a warm grip. Strong and reassuring. "Accept who you are. Be proud of your body. It's fighting a war for you.

He cupped my chin with his big hand and watched me. He breathed hard through his nose. His shoulders heaved way harder than they should have after a few minutes of kissing. I was about to suggest some additional conditioning exercises before football season started. I opened my mouth to tell him. He kissed me again. His tongue passed my lips and played across my teeth. We’d only been kissing like this for a week, but it seemed very natural when I kissed him back the same way. My body was on autopilot as I reached blindly for his waist and dragged him even closer, his torso skin-to-skin with mine against the tree. Who were we? I was turning into any of the assorted older girls who’d been seen leaving the cab of Sean’s truck at night. I’d always viewed those girls with a mixture of awe and derision. Sexual attraction was funny. Lust was hilarious. Now, not so much. Those girls had my sympathy, because I totally got it. I ran my fingers lightly up Adam’s bare back. He gasped. I opened my eyes to see if I’d done something wrong. He still touched the tree, but his muscles were taut, holding on to it for dear life. His eyes were closed. He rubbed his rough cheek slowly against mine. I had done nothing wrong. He was savoring. I knew how he felt. Tracing my fingernails down his back again, I whispered, “Stubble or what?” Eyes still closed, he chuckled. “I’m not shaving until our parents let us date again.” He kissed my cheek. “What if it takes… a… while?” I asked, struggling to talk.

After Obama’s victory, 395 new voting restrictions were introduced in 49 states from 2011 to 2015. Following the Tea Party’s triumph in the 2010 elections, half the states in the country, nearly all of them under Republican control—from Texas to Wisconsin to Pennsylvania—passed laws making it harder to vote. The sudden escalation of efforts to curb voting rights most closely resembled the Redemption period that ended Reconstruction, when every southern state adopted devices like literacy tests and poll taxes to disenfranchise African-American voters.

Perhaps in the twenty-first century populist revolts will be staged not against an economic elite that exploits people but against an economic elite that does not need them anymore.6 This may well be a losing battle. It is much harder to struggle against irrelevance than against exploitation.

Henceforward our struggle against the things of this world became harder, because it is now no longer in our power to enjoy intelligible realities in a way corresponding to that in which we enjoy sensory realities with the senses, even though we are greatly assisted by baptism, which purifies and exalts us.

It grew darker, and thus harder to read, as the sun peacefully, sank to bestow a new life on other people. Hamza, sinking into the darkness struggled to read the dark lines lying lifelessly before him. It dawned on him earlier that as long as we sought life, we could give it, and there always must be life close to us, closer than we imagine.

I wake with tears in my eyes. I wake to Jeanine’s scream of frustration. “What is it?” She grabs Peter’s gun out of his hand and stalks across the room, pressing the barrel to my forehead. My body stiffens, goes cold. She won’t shoot me. I am a problem she can’t solve. She won’t shoot me. “What is it that clues you in? Tell me. Tell me or I will kill you.” I slowly push myself up from the chair, coming to my feet, pushing my skin harder into the cold barrel. “You think I’m going to tell you?” I say. “You think I believe that you would kill me without figuring out the answer to this question?” “You stupid girl,” she says. “You think this is about you, and your abnormal brain? This is not about you. It is not about me. It is about keeping this city safe from the people who intend to plunge it into hell!” I summon the last of my strength and launch myself at her, clawing at whatever skin my fingernails find, digging in as hard as I can. She screams at the top of her lungs, a sound that turns my blood into fire. I punch her hard in the face. A pair of arms wrap around me, pulling me off her, and a fist meets my side. I groan, and lunge toward her, held at bay by Peter. “Pain can’t make me tell you. Truth serum can’t make me tell you. Simulations can’t make me tell you. I’m immune to all three.” Her nose is bleeding, and I see lines of fingernail scrapes in her cheeks, on the side of her throat, turning red with blossoming blood. She glares at me, pinching her nose closed, her hair disheveled, her free hand trembling. “You have failed. You can’t control me!” I scream, so loud it hurts my throat. I stop struggling and sag against Peter’s chest. “You will never be able to control me.” I laugh, mirthless, a mad laugh. I savor the scowl on her face, the hate in her eyes. She was like a machine; she was cold and emotionless, bound by logic alone. And I broke her. I broke her.

ability to know that you’re not perfect but that you can get better if you look within, internalize the struggle, and work harder, instead of bringing everyone else down.

we send out calls for connection tinged with anger and frustration because we do not feel confident and safe in our relationships. We wind up demanding rather than requesting, which often leads to power struggles rather than embraces. Some of us try to minimize our natural longing to be emotionally close and focus instead on actions that give only limited expression to our need. The most common: focusing on sex. Disguised and distorted messages keep us from being exposed in all our naked longing, but they also make it harder for our lovers to respond.

Right now, within each of us there are two voices fighting to be heard: the voice of reason, good conscience, and the good of the greater whole; and the voice of fear, shame, and selfishness. The voice of our higher self versus the voice of our lower self. This is the dilemma, the inner struggle between the dark and the light aspects of our humanity. One voice is relaxed, trusting, and stable, while the other is fearful, nervous, and calculating. One holds the promise of serenity, peace of mind, and an innate knowledge that things are as they should be, while the other echoes the fragmented uncertainty of the unknown. One tells us to do the right thing, not to worry if our neighbors have more than us, and the other tells us to work harder, to find a way to get, collect, and win the prize for having the most toys. One tells us that we are in an abusive situation and should get out, while the other minimizes the destruction, saying, “You’ll never find better than this.” One says, “You are perfect as you are,” while the other insists, “You’re not pretty enough, smart enough, thin enough, or successful enough.” One urges, “Get help, it’s OK, we all have struggles to overcome,” and the other taunts, teases, and humiliates us, constantly warning us that if we speak up about our dark thoughts, insecurities, and fears, we will be shunned, punished, or abandoned.

Bloody hell, what did he hit me with? An anvil?" "His fist." "You should put that fool in a bear-baiting pit. You'd make a fortune." Dougal struggled to rise. Sophia helped him on one side, Mary slipping under his other arm. The wind swirled a bit harder, sending dust into the air. "Heavens!" Mary said, glancing over their heads at the sky. "That's the third thunderhead as has passed this way today." Sophia turned. A huge bank of thunderclouds hung overhead, roiling as if alive. "We should get inside," she said uneasily. Dougal didn't even glance at the clouds as he held a hand over his bruised eye and cheek. "Bloody hell, I can barely see.

Every single child is gifted. And every single child has challenges. It's just that in the educational system, some gifts and challenges are harder to see...We can help our kids who struggle in school believe that they're okay. It's just that there's only one way to help them. And it's hard. We have to actually believe that our kids are okay. We can start believing by erasing the idea that education is a race. It's not. We unwrap our gifts at different times. In the meantime, we have to believe that every last one of our kids is okay. The straight-A ones and the ones with autism and the naughty ones and the chunky ones and the shy ones and the loud ones and the so-far-behind ones.

Because I have so many deeply held opinions about gender equality, I feel a lot of pressure to live up to certain ideals. I am supposed to be a good feminist who is having it all, doing it all. Really, though, I’m a woman in her thirties struggling to accept herself and her credit score. For so long I told myself I was not this woman—utterly human and flawed. I worked overtime to be anything but this woman, and it was exhausting and unsustainable and even harder than simply embracing who I am.

The Russian, Chinese, and Cuban revolutions were made by people who were vital to the economy but who lacked political power; in 2016, Trump and Brexit were supported by many people who still enjoyed political power but who feared that they were losing their economic worth. Perhaps in the twenty-first century populist revolts will be staged not against an economic elite that exploits people but against an economic elite that does not need them anymore.6 This may well be a losing battle. It is much harder to struggle against irrelevance than against exploitation.

The harder you struggle to fit everything in, the more of your time you’ll find yourself spending on the least meaningful things. … The reason for this effect is straightforward: the more firmly you believe it ought to be possible to find time for everything, the less pressure you’ll feel to ask whether any given activity is the best use for a portion of your time. Whenever you encounter some potential new item for your to-do list or your social calendar, you’ll be strongly biased in favor of accepting it, because you’ll assume you needn’t sacrifice any other tasks or opportunities in order to make space for it … If you never stop to ask yourself if the sacrifice is worth it, your days will automatically begin to fill not just with more things, but with more trivial or tedious things, because they’ve never had to clear the hurdle of being judged more important than something else.

In the twentieth century, the masses revolted against exploitation, and sought to translate their vital role in the economy into political power. Now the masses fear irrelevance, and they are frantic to use their remaining political power before it is too late. Brexit and the rise of Trump might thus demonstrate an opposite trajectory to that of traditional socialist revolutions. The Russian, Chinese and Cuban revolutions were made by people who were vital for the economy, but who lacked political power; in 2016, Trump and Brexit were supported by many people who still enjoyed political power, but who feared that they were losing their economic worth. Perhaps in the twenty-first century populist revolts will be staged not against an economic elite that exploits people, but against an economic elite that does not need them any more.6 This may well be a losing battle. It is much harder to struggle against irrelevance than against

The career world is like an ecological system: People occupy particular fields within which they must compete for resources and survival. The more people there are crowded into a space, the harder it becomes to thrive there. Working in such a field will tend to wear you out as you struggle to get attention, to play the political games, to win scarce resources for yourself. You spend so much time at these games that you have little time left over for true mastery. You are seduced into such fields because you see others there making a living, treading the familiar path. You are not aware of how difficult such a life can be.

It is ironic that some left intellectuals should deem class struggle to be largely irrelevant at the very time class power is becoming increasingly transparent, at the very time corporate concentration and profit accumulation is more rapacious than ever, and the tax system has become more regressive and oppressive, the upward transfer of income and wealth has accelerated, public sector assets are being privatized, corporate money exercises an increasing control over the political process, people at home and abroad are working harder for less, and throughout the world poverty is growing at a faster rate than overall population.

Dick tried to rest - the struggle would come presently at home and he might have to sit a long time, restating the universe for her. A "schizophrêne" is well named as a split personality - Nicole was alternately a person to whom nothing need be explained and one to whom nothing could be explained. It was necessary to treat her with active and affirmative insistence, keeping the road to reality always open, making the road to escape harder going. But the brilliance, the versatility of madness is akin to the resourcefulness of water seeping through, over and around a dike. It requires the united front of many people to work against it.

Office Peone looked at John and wondered what mental illness he had. The Seattle streets were filled with the mostly-crazy, half-crazy, nearly crazy, and soon-to-be crazy. Indian, white, Chicano, Asian, men, women, children. The social workers did not have anywhere near enough money, training, or time to help them. The city government hated the crazies because they were a threat to the public image of the urban core. Private citizens ignored them at all times of the year except the few charitable days leading up to and following Christmas. In the end, the police had to do most of the work. Police did crisis counseling, transporting them howling to detox, the dangerous to jail, racing the sick to the hospitals, to a safer place. At the academy, Officer Peone figured he would be fighting bad guys. He did not imagine he would spend most of his time taking care of the refuse of the world. Peone found it easier when the refuse were all nuts or dumb-ass drunks, harder when they were just regular folks struggling to find their way off the streets.

Where’s new-Jay?” Jules asked, and then she and Chelsea exchanged a look and started cracking up at their own joke. Even Claire, who was generally so serious about everything, giggled a little. Violet rolled her eyes. “How long did it take you geniuses to plan that little gem?” she accused her friends, which only made them laugh harder. She shook her head. “You two are idiots,” she said, biting into her apple again and deciding to ignore them. “Which is it, Violet?” Claire asked. “Are they geniuses or idiots?” Chelsea leaned into Jules now, laughing so hard at their stupid joke that no sound was even coming out of her mouth anymore. Violet looked up from Chelsea to Jules and then back to Claire. “Idiots,” she stated flatly. There was another long moment as the Two Stooges struggled to regain their composure. “Come on, Vi. If we can’t joke about new-Jay, who can we joke about?” Chelsea asked, finally getting herself under control. She used a paper napkin to dab at her watering eyes. “Joke about whatever you want,” Violet stated as blandly as possible. “It’s not your fault you’re not funny.

Victory may not be promised to any of us, but possessing an undefeated mind means behaving as though it is, as though to win we only need wage an all-out struggle and work harder than everyone else, trying everything we can, and when that fails trying everything we think we can’t, in full understanding that we have no one on whom we can rely for victory but ourselves.

The joy of life is living, is to put out all one's powers as far as they will go; that the measure of power is obstacle overcome; to ride boldly at what is in front of you, be it fence or enemy; to pray, not for comfort, but for combat; to keep the soldier's faith against the doubts of civil life, more besetting and harder to overcome than all the misgivings of the battle-field, and to remember that duty is not to be proved in the evil day, but then to be obeyed unquestioning; to love glory than the temptations of wallowing ease, but to know that one's final judge and only rival is oneself: with all our failures in act and thought, these things we learned from noble enemies in Virginia or Georgia or on the Mississippi, thirty years ago; these things we believe to be true.

No longer satisfied with easy answers, I started asking harder questions. I questioned what I thought were fundamentals — the eternal damnation of all non-Christians, the scientific and historical accuracy of the Bible, the ability to know absolute truth, and the politicization of evangelicalism. I questioned God: his fairness, regarding salvation; his goodness, for allowing poverty and injustice in the world; and his intelligence, for entrusting Christians to fix things. I wrestled with passages of Scripture that seemed to condone genocide and the oppression of women and struggled to make sense of the pride and hypocrisy within the church. I wondered if the God of my childhood was really the kind of God I wanted to worship, and at times I wondered if he even exists at all.

The truth was that the only thing that kept the prison running smoothly under these circumstances was that the prisoners usually followed the rules and did what the officer in charge asked them to do. But as the number of men at Attica grew, order and calm were harder to come by. Significantly, the profile of the average prisoner coming to Attica had changed. Many more prisoners were young, politically aware, and determined to speak out when they saw injustices in the facility. These were black and brown youth who had been deeply impacted by the civil rights struggles of this period as well as by the writings of Malcolm X, Mao, and Che Guevara. These younger men made it clear that they were more willing to stand up for themselves—less likely to put up with poor treatment than were Attica’s veterans. Correction

Ash!” Keath said tightly. “Please don’t do this. Do you know how hard this is for me? Do you know what this is doing to me? It feels as if my heart is being cut to pieces, and you’re making it harder.” Ashley breathed in sharply and instantly stopped struggling. When he was sure she wasn't going to run again, Keath slowly released her. He didn't get off her though, and she didn't try to push him away. They just stared at each other, caught up in the same terror.

Almost everyone can remember losing his or her virginity, and most writers can remember the first book he/she walked away from thinking, "I can do better that this. Hell, I am doing better than this!" What could be more encouraging to the struggling writer than to realize that his/her work is unquestionably better than that of someone who actually got paid for his/her stuff? Good writing on the other hand, teaches the learning writer about style, graceful narration, plot development, the creation of believable characters, and truth-telling. A novel like The Grapes of Wrath may fill a new writer with feelings of despair and good old-fashioned jealousy--"I'll never be able to write anything that good, not if I live to be a thousand"--but such feelings can also serve as a spur, goading the writer to work harder and aim higher. Being swept away by a combination of great story and great writing--of being flattened, in fact--is part of every writer's necessary formation. You cannot hope to sweep someone else away by the force of your writing until it has been done to you. So we read to experience the mediocre and the outright rotten; such experience helps us to recognize those things when they begin to creep into our own work, and to steer clear of them. We also read in order to measure ourselves against the good and the great, to get a sense of all that can be done. And we read in order to experience different styles.

To start with the essential point, comradeship completely destroys the sense of responsibility for oneself, be it in the civilian or, worse still, the religious sense. A man bedded in comradeship is relieved of all personal worries, and of the rigors of the struggle for life. He has his bed in the barracks, his meals, and his uniform. His daily life is prescribed from morning to night. He need not concern himself with anything. He lives, not under the severe rule of “each for himself,” but in the generous softness of “one for all and all for one.” It is one of the most unpleasant falsehoods that the laws of comradeship are harder than those of ordinary civilian life. On the contrary, they are of a debilitating softness, and they are justified only for soldiers in the field, for men facing death. Only the threat of death justifies and makes this egregious dispensation from responsibility acceptable. Indeed, it is a familiar story that brave soldiers, who have been too long bedded on the soft cushions of comradeship, often find it impossible to cope with the harshness of civilian life. It is even worse that comradeship relieves men of responsibility for their actions, before themselves, before God, before their consciences. They do what all their comrades do. They have no choice. They have no time for thought (except when they unfortunately wake up at night). Their comrades are their conscience and give absolution for everything, provided they do what everybody else does.

For years, black political leaders in New York City aligned themselves with labor unions to block the construction of a Walmart in a low-income community with persistently high unemployment. According to a Marist poll taken in 2011, 69 percent of blacks in New York would welcome a Walmart in their neighborhood. Yet these black leaders put the interests of Big Labor, which doesn’t like the retailer’s stance toward unions, ahead of the interests of struggling black people who could use the jobs and low-priced goods.

To start with the essential point, comradeship completely destroys the sense of responsibility for oneself, be it in the civilian or, worse still, the religious sense. A man bedded in comradeship is relieved of all personal worries, and of the rigors of the struggle for life. He has his bed in the barracks, his meals, and his uniform. His daily life is prescribed from morning to night. He need not concern himself with anything. He lives, not under the severe rule of “each for himself,” but in the generous softness of “one for all and all for one.” It is one of the most unpleasant falsehoods that the laws of comradeship are harder than those of ordinary civilian life. On the contrary, they are of a debilitating softness, and they are justified only for soldiers in the field, for men facing death. Only the threat of death justifies and makes this egregious dispensation from responsibility acceptable. Indeed, it is a familiar story that brave soldiers, who have been too long bedded on the soft cushions of comradeship, often find it impossible to cope with the harshness of civilian life.

heard a story awhile back about some friends who went swimming in a river. It was spring, and the glacier runoff had made the river pretty dangerous. Nonetheless one of the guys jumped in, got caught in the current, and was taken to the dangerous part of the rapids. One of his friends on the shore was a lifeguard, and all the other friends looked at him to do something. He just stood there, though, not moving, just staring at his friend. The others began to panic and yell at him and tell him to go save his friend! Still nothing. They looked out into the river and saw their friend struggling desperately. In an instant, though, the struggle stopped. He could no longer fight and began to drown. When that happened, the lifeguard jumped in and with a few swift strokes rescued the friend and brought him to shore. With the adrenaline wearing off, the group yelled at the lifeguard, “Why didn’t you jump in earlier? He could’ve died!” He calmly looked at them and said, “I had to wait until he fully gave up. Unless he stopped fighting, he would have dragged me under and drowned me with him. But the minute he gave up, I could save him.

Kestrel listened to the slap of waves against the ship, the cries of struggle and death. She remembered how her heart, so tight, like a scroll, had opened when Arin kissed her. It had unfurled. If her heart were truly a scroll, she could burn it. It would become a tunnel of flame, a handful of ash. The secrets she had written inside herself would be gone. No one would know. Her father would choose the water for Kestrel if he knew. Yet she couldn’t. In the end, it wasn’t cunning that kept her from jumping, or determination. It was a glassy fear. She didn’t want to die. Arin was right. She played a game until its end. Suddenly, Kestrel heard his voice. She opened her eyes. He was shouting. He was shouting her name. He was barreling past people, driving a path between the mainmast and the railing alongside the launch. Kestrel saw the horror in him mirror what she had felt when facing the water. Kestrel gathered the strength in her legs and jumped onto the deck. Her feet hit the planks, the force of movement toppling her. But she had learned from fighting Rax how to protect her hands. She tucked them to her, pressed the hard knots of her bonds against her chest, fell shoulder first, and rolled. Arin hauled her to her feet. And even though he had seen her choice, must have seen it still blazing on her face, he shook her. He kept saying the words he had been shouting as he had neared the railing. “Don’t, Kestrel. Don’t.” His hands cradled her face. “Don’t touch me,” she said. Arin’s hands fell. “Gods,” he said hoarsely. “Yes, it would be rather unfortunate for you, wouldn’t it, if you lost your little bargaining chip against the general? Never fear.” She smiled a brittle smile. “It turns out that I am a coward.” Arin shook his head. “It’s harder to live.

A colleague told me that he thinks of his life as an orchestra. Reclaiming his integrity reminds him of that moment before the concert when the concertmaster asks the oboist to sound an A. 'At first there is chaos and noise as all parts of the orchestra try to align themselves with that note. But as each instrument moves closer and closer to it, the noise diminishes and when they all finally sound it together, there is a moment of rest, of homecoming.' 'That is how it feels to me,' he told me. 'I am always tuning my orchestra. Somewhere deep inside there is a sound that is mine alone, and I struggle daily to hear it and tune my life to it. Sometimes there are people and situations that help me to hear my note more clearly; other times, people and situations make it harder for me to hear. A lot depends on my commitment to listening and my intention to stay coherent with this note. It is only when my life is tuned to my note that I can play life's mysterious and holy music without tainting it with my own discordance, my own bitterness, resentment, agenda, and fears.' Deep inside, our integrity sings to us whether we are listening or not. It is a note that only we can hear.

This is something that has been going on forever,” Craig Spencer, the director of global health in emergency medicine at Columbia University, says about the variability of human response to infection. “I wouldn’t be surprised if people are walking about with long Epstein-Barr virus, or long influenza. We all know someone who is low energy, who’s told to work harder. We have all heard about chronic Lyme sufferers, and those with ME/CFS. But they get written off.” Spencer understands something about how infections can do long-term damage, because he contracted Ebola while working in Guinea, fell ill upon his return to New York City, and then struggled with the virus’s ongoing effects. (Studies have suggested that the Ebola virus may linger in the body for years.) The difference between long COVID and other infection-associated illnesses is that it is happening “on such a huge scale—unlike anything we’ve seen before. It is harder for the medical community to write off,” Spencer told me. Indeed, many researchers I spoke with for this book hope that the race to understand long COVID will advance our understanding of other chronic conditions that follow infection, transforming medicine in the process.

You, my dear, do not know how to have fun." "I do, too!" "You do not. You are as bad as Lucien. And do you know something? I think it's time someone showed you how to have fun. Namely, me. You can worry all you like about our situation tomorrow, but tonight ... tonight I'm going to make you laugh so hard that you'll forget all about how afraid of me you are." "I am not afraid of you!" "You are." And with that, he pushed his chair back, stalked around the table, and in a single easy movement, swept her right out of her chair and into his arms. "Gareth!  Put me down!" He only laughed, easily carrying her toward the bed. "Gareth, I am a grown woman!" "You are a grown woman who behaves in a manner far too old for her years," he countered, still striding toward the bed. "As the wife of a Den member, that just will not do." "Gareth, I don't want — I mean, I'm not ready for that!" "That? Who said anything about that?"  He tossed her lightly onto the bed. "Oh, no, my dear Juliet. I'm not going to do that —" She tried to scoot away. "Then what are you going to do?" "Why, I'm going to wipe that sadness out of your eyes if only for tonight. I'm going to make you forget your troubles, forget your fears, forget everything but me. And you know how I'm going to do that, O dearest wife?"  He grabbed a fistful of her petticoats as she tried to escape. "I'm going to tickle you until you giggle ... until you laugh ... until you're hooting so loudly that all of London hears you!" He fell upon the bed like a swooping hawk, and Juliet let out a helpless shriek as his fingers found her ribs and began tickling her madly. "Stop!  We just ate!  You'll make me sick!" "What's this? Your husband makes you sick?" "No, it's just that — aaaoooooo!" He tickled her harder. She flailed and giggled and cried out, embarrassed about each loud shriek but helpless to prevent them. He was laughing as hard as she. Catching one thrashing leg, he unlaced her boot and deftly removed it. She yelped as his fingers found the sensitive instep, and she kicked out reflexively. He neatly ducked just in time to avoid having his nose broken, catching her by the ankle and tickling her toes, her soles, her arch through her stockings. "Stop, Gareth!"  She was laughing so hard, tears were streaming from her eyes. "Stop it, damn it!" Thank goodness Charlotte, worn out by her earlier tantrum, was such a sound sleeper! The tickling continued. Juliet kicked and fought, her struggles tossing the heavy, ruffled petticoats and skirts of her lovely blue gown halfway up her thigh to reveal a long, slender calf sheathed in silk. She saw his gaze taking it all in, even as he made a grab for her other foot. "No!  Gareth, I shall lose my supper if you keep this up, I swear it I will — oooahhhhh!" He seized her other ankle, yanked off the remaining boot, and began torturing that foot as well, until Juliet was writhing and shrieking on the bed in a fit of laughter. The tears streamed down her cheeks, and her stomach ached with the force of her mirth. And when, at last, he let up and she lay exhausted across the bed in a twisted tangle of skirts, petticoats, and chemise, her chest heaving and her hair in a hopeless tumbled-down flood of silken mahogany beneath her head, she looked up to see him grinning down at her, his own hair hanging over his brow in tousled, seductive disarray.

There was a beat of silence in which I digested what he’d said. He wasn’t mean or menacing this time. There was no edge to his voice. “What?” I gasped. “I’m trying really hard not to hurt you, but I’m struggling. You need to take a step back before I do something I’ll regret,” he explained. “Who said I can leave you alone?” I asked breathlessly, not really deciphering my own words. “You think I haven’t tried?” “Try harder, Luna. I know you can, because for about eight years, you did. Three unreciprocated kisses. You sleeping with someone else. You did a pretty darn good job, so just keep doing it, okay?” I remembered what he’d said about my presence feeling like a metal chain. A heavy burden he wanted to shake off. Guess it had always been easy for me to choose Knight, because I didn’t have any options. Because Knight always chose me. But his choice came with a bigger sacrifice. He was the one getting me out of trouble, shooing off the bullies, making sure I had someone to sit with at recess. He was the one who constantly gave up the opportunity to actually date the hottest girls. “Moonshine,” he pushed through the fog in my head, pulling me back to reality. “Give it a rest. You’re poking the bear.” “You didn’t even say anything about my talking,” I sulked, feeling the anger clogging my throat. I didn’t know why it was so important to address it right this second. I could hear the smile in his voice. “I always knew you’d talk, and not just to me. To everyone. I watched you crawl out of your shell, and it was slow, but by fucking God, it was beautiful. Have you spoken to anyone else?” He sounded warm, conversational now—the Knight I was used to, who looked at me with admiration and delight.

You choose this moment to act like the Abnegation?” His voice fills the room and makes fear prickle in my chest. His anger seems too sudden. Too strange. “All that time you spent insisting that you were too selfish for them, and now, when your life is on the line, you’ve got to be a hero? What’s wrong with you?” “What’s wrong with you? People died. They walked right off the edge of a building! And I can stop it from happening again!” “You’re too important to just…die.” He shakes his head. He won’t even look at me--his eyes keep shifting across my face, to the wall behind me or the ceiling above me, to everything but me. I am too stunned to be angry. “I’m not important. Everyone will do just fine without me,” I say. “Who cares about everyone? What about me?” He lowers his head into his hand, covering his eyes. His fingers are trembling. Then he crosses the room in two long strides and touches his lips to mine. Their gentle pressure erases the past few months, and I am the girl who sat on the rocks next to the chasm, with river spray on her ankles, and kissed him for the first time. I am the girl who grabbed his hand in the hallway just because I wanted to. I pull back, my hand on his chest to keep him away. The problem is, I am also the girl who shot Will and lied about it, and chose between Hector and Marlene, and now a thousand other things besides. And I can’t erase those things. “You would be fine.” I don’t look at him. I stare at his T-shirt between my fingers and the black ink curling around his neck, but I don’t look at his face. “Not at first. But you would move on, and do what you have to.” He wraps an arm around my waist and pulls me against him. “That’s a lie,” he says, before he kisses me again. This is wrong. It’s wrong to forget who I have become, and to let him kiss me when I know what I’m about to do. But I want to. Oh, I want to. I stand on my tiptoes and wrap my arms around him. I press one hand between his shoulder blades and curl the other one around the back of his neck. I can feel his breaths against my palm, his body expanding and contracting, and I know he’s strong, steady, unstoppable. All things I need to be, but I am not, I am not. He walks backward, pulling me with him so I stumble. I stumble right out of my shoes. He sits on the edge of the bed and I stand in front of him, and we’re finally eye to eye. He touches my face, covering my cheeks with his hands, sliding his fingertips down my neck, fitting his fingers to the slight curve of my hips. I can’t stop. I fit my mouth to his, and he tastes like water and smells like fresh air. I drag my hand from his neck to the small of his back, and put it under his shirt. He kisses me harder. I knew he was strong; I didn’t know how strong until I felt it myself, the muscles in his back tightening beneath my fingers. Stop, I tell myself. Suddenly it’s as if we’re in a hurry, his fingertips brushing my side under my shirt, my hands clutching at him, struggling closer but there is no closer. I have never longed for someone this way, or this much. He pulls back just enough to look into my eyes, his eyelids lowered. “Promise me,” he whispers, “that you won’t go. For me. Do this one thing for me.” Could I do that? Could I stay here, fix things with him, let someone else die in my place? Looking up at him, I believe for a moment that I could. And then I see Will. The crease between his eyebrows. The empty, simulation-bound eyes. The slumped body. Do this one thing for me. Tobias’s dark eyes plead with me. But if I don’t go to Erudite, who will? Tobias? It’s the kind of thing he would do. I feel a stab of pain in my chest as I lie to him. “Okay.” “Promise,” he says, frowning. The pain becomes an ache, spreads everywhere--all mixed together, guilt and terror and longing. “I promise.

Occasionally, a prickly pear cactus blocked my path. I maneuvered around the larger, invincible plants, but stomped down the weaker, two-foot-high cacti that were in my way As we struggled to carry the two hundred pound litter, twilight deepened and it became harder and harder to see. I aggressively stomped what I thought was a small cactus that was in my way. In the growing shadows I didn’t realize that I was only seeing the top two feet of a giant cactus that jutted above the lip of an arroyo. The rest of the massive cactus was hidden below the edge of the gully. My stomp carried me forward over the edge of the drop-off. I instinctively let go of the litter, extended my arms to break my fall and tumbled into the welcoming embrace of the “mother of all” cacti. My spontaneous girlish, high pitched scream startled everyone into immobility, stopping their forward travel. My bemused teammates cautiously peered over the ledge and saw me crucified on a giant prickly pear cactus. I felt like I was nailed to the plant, unable to move a muscle. Apparently, my rampant stomping of baby cacti had earned me bad cactus karma and the enmity of Mother Nature. As my teammates carefully pried me off the bloody cactus patch, I swear I could hear the other nearby cacti chuckling softly.

The calf is capable of walking quite well now," Dazu said. "He never stumbles." "But I told you to carry him back here," the teacher said. "The first thing a soldier must learn is to obey orders." Every day, the calf grew a little heavier, and every day, Dazu had to struggle a little harder. He would collapse, exhausted, when he finally got to the ranch, and the calf would bound out of his arms, glad to be able to walk on his own and stretch out. When winter rolled around again, Médo handed him a wooden sword and asked him to strike as hard as he could at the practice dummy. Dazu looked with distaste at the crude weapon with no edge, but he swung obediently. The wooden dummy fell in half, cut clean through. He looked at the sword in his hand with wonder. "It's not the sword," his teacher said. "Have you looked at yourself lately?" He brought Dazu to stand in front of a brightly polished shield. The young man could hardly recognize the reflection. His shoulders filled the frame of the mirror. His arms and thighs were twice as thick as he remembered, and his chest bulged over his narrow waist. "A great warrior trusts not his weapons, but himself. When you possess true strength, you can deal a killing blow even if all you have is a blade of grass. "Now you're finally ready to learn from me. But first, go thank the calf for making you strong.

Why do we despise, ostracize and punish the drug addict when as a social collective we share the same blindness and engage in the same rationalizations? To pose that question is to answer it. We despise, ostracize and punish the addict because we don’t wish to see how much we resemble him. In his dark mirror our own features are unmistakable. We shudder at the recognition. This mirror is not for us, we say to the addict. You are different, and you don’t belong with us. Like the hardcore addict’s pursuit of drugs, much of our economic and cultural life caters to people’s craving to escape mental and emotional distress. In an apt phrase, Lewis Lapham, long-time publisher of Harper’s Magazine, derides “consumer markets selling promises of instant relief from the pain of thought, loneliness, doubt, experience, envy, and old age.” According to a Statistics Canada study, 31 per cent of working adults aged nineteen to sixty-four consider themselves workaholics, who attach excessive importance to their work and are “overdedicated and perhaps overwhelmed by their jobs.” “They have trouble sleeping, are more likely to be stressed out and unhealthy, and feel they don’t spend enough time with their families,” reports the Globe and Mail. Work doesn’t necessarily give them greater satisfaction, suggested Vishwanath Baba, a professor of Human Resources and Management at McMaster University. “These people turn to work to occupy their time and energy” — as compensation for what is lacking in their lives, much as the drug addict employs substances. At the core of every addiction is an emptiness based in abject fear. The addict dreads and abhors the present moment; she bends feverishly only towards the next time, the moment when her brain, infused with her drug of choice, will briefly experience itself as liberated from the burden of the past and the fear of the future — the two elements that make the present intolerable. Many of us resemble the drug addict in our ineffectual efforts to fill in the spiritual black hole, the void at the centre, where we have lost touch with our souls, our spirit, with those sources of meaning and value that are not contingent or fleeting. Our consumerist, acquisition-, action- and image-mad culture only serves to deepen the hole, leaving us emptier than before. The constant, intrusive and meaningless mind-whirl that characterizes the way so many of us experience our silent moments is, itself, a form of addiction— and it serves the same purpose. “One of the main tasks of the mind is to fight or remove the emotional pain, which is one of the reasons for its incessant activity, but all it can ever achieve is to cover it up temporarily. In fact, the harder the mind struggles to get rid of the pain, the greater the pain.” So writes Eckhart Tolle. Even our 24/7 self-exposure to noise, emails, cell phones, TV, Internet chats, media outlets, music downloads, videogames and non-stop internal and external chatter cannot succeed in drowning out the fearful voices within.

Taking the catcher’s place, he sank to his haunches and gestured to Arthur. “Throw some easy ones to begin with,” he called, and Arthur nodded, seeming to lose his apprehensiveness. “Yes, milord!” Arthur wound up and released a relaxed, straight pitch. Squinting in determination, Lilian gripped the bat hard, stepped into the swing, and turned her hips to lend more impetus to the motion. To her disgust, she missed the ball completely. Turning around, she gave Westcliff a pointed glance. “Well, your advice certainly helped,” she muttered sarcastically. “Elbows,” came his succinct reminder, and he tossed the ball to Arthur. “Try again.” Heaving a sigh, Lillian raised the bat and faced the pitcher once more. Arthur drew his arm back, and lunged forward as he delivered another fast ball. Lillian brought the bat around with a grunt of effort, finding an unexpected ease in adjusting the swing to just the right angle, and she received a jolt of visceral delight as she felt the solid connection between the bat and the leather ball. With a loud crack the ball was catapulted high into the air, over Arthur’s head, beyond the reach of those in the back field. Shrieking in triumph, Lillian dropped the bat and ran headlong toward the first sanctuary post, rounding it and heading toward second. Out of the corner of her eye, she saw Daisy hurtling across the field to scoop up the ball, and in nearly the same motion, throwing it to the nearest boy. Increasing her pace, her feet flying beneath her skirts, Lillian rounded third, while the ball was tossed to Arthur. Before her disbelieving eyes, she saw Westcliff standing at the last post, Castle Rock, with his hands held up in readiness to catch the ball. How could he? After showing her how to hit the ball, he was now going to tag her out? “Get out of my way!” Lillian shouted, running pellmell toward the post, determined to reach it before he caught the ball. “I’m not going to stop!” “Oh, I’ll stop you,” Westcliff assured her with a grin, standing right in front of the post. He called to the pitcher. “Throw it home, Arthur!” She would go through him, if necessary. Letting out a warlike cry, Lillian slammed full-length into him, causing him to stagger backward just as his fingers closed over the ball. Though he could have fought for balance, he chose not to, collapsing backward onto the soft earth with Lillian tumbling on top of him, burying him in a heap of skirts and wayward limbs. A cloud of fine beige dust enveloped them upon their descent. Lillian lifted herself on his chest and glared down at him. At first she thought that he had been winded, but it immediately became apparent that he was choking with laughter. “You cheated!” she accused, which only seemed to make him laugh harder. She struggled for breath, drawing in huge lungfuls of air. “You’re not supposed…to stand in front…of the post…you dirty cheater!” Gasping and snorting, Westcliff handed her the ball with the ginger reverence of someone yielding a priceless artifact to a museum curator. Lillian took the ball and hurled it aside. “I was not out,” she told him, jabbing her finger into his hard chest for emphasis. It felt as if she were poking a hearthstone. “I was safe, do you…hear me?” She heard Arthur’s amused voice as he approached them. “Actually, miss—” “Never argue with a lady, Arthur,” the earl interrupted, having managed to regain his powers of speech, and the boy grinned at him. “Yes, milord.” “Are there ladies here?” Daisy asked cheerfully, coming from the field. “I don’t see any.” Still smiling, the earl looked up at Lillian.

The pacifist-humanitarian idea may indeed become an excellent one when the most superior type of manhood will have succeeded in subjugating the world to such an extent that this type is then sole master of the earth. This idea could have an injurious effect only in the measure in which its application became difficult and finally impossible. So, first of all, the fight, and then pacifism. If it were otherwise, it would mean that mankind has already passed the zenith of its development, and accordingly, the end would not be the supremacy of some moral ideal, but degeneration into barbarism and consequent chaos. People may laugh at this statement, but our planet moved through space for millions of years, uninhabited by men, and at some future date may easily begin to do so again, if men should forget that wherever they have reached a superior level of existence, it was not as a result of following the ideas of crazy visionaries but by acknowledging and rigorously observing the iron laws of Nature. What reduces one race to starvation stimulates another to harder work. All the great civilisations of the past became decadent because the originally creative race died out, as a result of contamination of the blood. The most profound cause of such a decline is to be found in the fact that the people ignored the principle that all culture depends on men, and not the reverse. In other words, in order to preserve a certain culture, the type of manhood that creates such a culture must be preserved, but such a preservation goes hand in hand with the inexorable law that it is the strongest and the best who must triumph and that they have the right to endure. He who would live must fight. He who does not wish to fight in this world, where permanent struggle is the law of life, has not the right to exist. Such a saying may sound hard, but, after all, that is how the matter really stands. Yet far harder is the lot of him who believes that he can overcome Nature, and thus in reality insults her. Distress, misery, and disease, are her rejoinders. Whoever ignores or despises the laws of race really deprives himself of the happiness to which he believes he can attain, for he places an obstacle in the victorious path of the superior race and, by so doing, he interferes with a prerequisite condition of, all human progress. Loaded with the burden of human sentiment, he falls back to the level of a helpless animal. It would be futile to attempt to discuss the question as to what race or races were the original champions of human culture and were thereby the real founders of all that we understand by the word ‘humanity.’ It is much simpler to deal with this question in so far as it relates to the present time. Here the answer is simple and clear. Every manifestation of human culture, every product of art, science and technical skill, which we see before our eyes to-day, is almost, exclusively the product of the Aryan creative power. All that we admire in the world to-day, its science and its art, its technical developments and discoveries, are the products of the creative activities of a few peoples, and it may be true that their first beginnings must be attributed to one race. The existence of civilisation is wholly dependent on such peoples. Should they perish, all that makes this earth beautiful will descend with them into the grave. He is the Prometheus of mankind, from whose shining brow the divine spark of genius has at all times flashed forth, always kindling anew that fire which, in the form of knowledge, illuminated the dark night by drawing aside the veil of mystery and thus showing man how to rise and become master over all the other beings on the earth. Should he be forced to disappear, a profound darkness will descend on the earth; within a few thousand years human culture will vanish and the world will become a desert.

Matthew knew it was wrong the instant their lips met. Because nothing would ever equal the perfection of Daisy in his arms. He was ruined for life. God help him, he didn’t care. Her mouth was soft and hot, like sunshine, like the white blaze of a heartwood fire. She gasped as he touched her lower lip with the tip of his tongue. Slowly her hands came to his shoulders, and then he felt her fingers at the back of his head, sliding into his hair to keep him from pulling away. There wasn’t a chance in hell of that happening. Nothing could have made him stop. A tremor shook his fingers as he bracketed the exquisite line of her jaw in the open framework of his hand, gently angling her face upward. The flavor of her mouth, sweet and elusive, fueled a hunger that threatened to rage out of control… he searched the damp silk beyond her lips, deeper, harder, until she began to breathe in long sighs, her body molding against his. He let her feel how much stronger he was, how much heavier, one muscular arm clamped along her back, his feet spread to hold her between the powerful length of his thighs. Her upper half was bound in a laced and padded corset. He was almost overcome by a savage desire to tear away the stays and quilting and find the tender flesh beneath. Instead he sank his fingers into her pinned-up hair and tugged it backward until the weight of her head was cradled in his hand, and her pale throat was exposed. He searched for the pulse he had seen earlier, his lips dragging softly along the secret pathway of nerves beneath her skin. When he reached a senstive spot, he felt the vibration of her suppressed moan against his mouth. This was what it would be like to make love to her, he thought dazedly… the sweet shivering of her flesh as he entered her, the delicate chaos of her breath, the helpless sounds that rustled in her throat. Her skin, warm and female, scented like tea and talcum and a trace of salt. He found her mouth again, opened it, delving into wet silk, heat, and an intimate flavor that drove him mad. She should have struggled, but there was only yielding and more softness, driving him past all limits. He began to ravish her mouth with deep, twisting kisses, bringing her body rhythmically against his. He felt her legs part beneath her gown, his thigh fitting neatly between them. She squirmed with innocent desire, her face blooming with the color of late summer poppies. Had she understood exactly what he wanted from her, she would have done more than blush. She would have fainted on the spot. Lifting his mouth from hers, Matthew pressed his jaw against the side of her head. “I think,” he said raggedly, “this puts to rest any question of whether I find you desirable or not.

What would be the natural thing? A man goes to college. He works as he wants to work, he plays as he wants to play, he exercises for the fun of the game, he makes friends where he wants to make them, he is held in by no fear of criticism above, for the class ahead of him has nothing to do with his standing in his own class. Everything he does has the one vital quality: it is spontaneous. That is the flame of youth itself. Now, what really exists?" "...I say our colleges to-day are business colleges—Yale more so, perhaps, because it is more sensitively American. Let's take up any side of our life here. Begin with athletics. What has become of the natural, spontaneous joy of contest? Instead you have one of the most perfectly organized business systems for achieving a required result—success. Football is driving, slavish work; there isn't one man in twenty who gets any real pleasure out of it. Professional baseball is not more rigorously disciplined and driven than our 'amateur' teams. Add the crew and the track. Play, the fun of the thing itself, doesn't exist; and why? Because we have made a business out of it all, and the college is scoured for material, just as drummers are sent out to bring in business. "Take another case. A man has a knack at the banjo or guitar, or has a good voice. What is the spontaneous thing? To meet with other kindred spirits in informal gatherings in one another's rooms or at the fence, according to the whim of the moment. Instead what happens? You have our university musical clubs, thoroughly professional organizations. If you are material, you must get out and begin to work for them—coach with a professional coach, make the Apollo clubs, and, working on, some day in junior year reach the varsity organization and go out on a professional tour. Again an organization conceived on business lines. "The same is true with the competition for our papers: the struggle for existence outside in a business world is not one whit more intense than the struggle to win out in the News or Lit competition. We are like a beef trust, with every by-product organized, down to the last possibility. You come to Yale—what is said to you? 'Be natural, be spontaneous, revel in a certain freedom, enjoy a leisure you'll never get again, browse around, give your imagination a chance, see every one, rub wits with every one, get to know yourself.' "Is that what's said? No. What are you told, instead? 'Here are twenty great machines that need new bolts and wheels. Get out and work. Work harder than the next man, who is going to try to outwork you. And, in order to succeed, work at only one thing. You don't count—everything for the college.' Regan says the colleges don't represent the nation; I say they don't even represent the individual.