How To Diagram Direct Quotes

He sits on the edge of the couch, his hair damp and ruffled in every direction. I turn the page and unfortunately a lurid diagram of an erect penis glares up at me. “I am trying to be a bit more normal.” He looks at the page. “How’s it working out so far?” “I’m glad this isn’t a pop-up book.

He looked past Chin toward streams of numbers running in opposite directions. He understood how much it meant to him, the roll and flip of data on a screen. He studied the figural diagrams that brought organic patterns into play, birdwing and chambered shell. It was shallow thinking to maintain that numbers and charts were the cold compression of unruly human energies, every sort of yearning and midnight sweat reduced to lucid units in the financial markets. "In fact data itself was soulful and glowing, a dynamic aspect of the life process. This was the eloquence of alphabets and numeric systems, now fully realized in electronic form, in the zero-oneness of the world, the digital imperative that defined every breath of the planet's living billions. Here was the heave of the biosphere. Our bodies and oceans were here, knowable and whole.

The way a star compass works is this: You begin by envisioning the horizon as a circle marking the meeting point of the earth and the sky—which, of course, is exactly how it looks from a boat on the ocean or the high point of a small island. In the mind of an experienced navigator, this circle is dotted with points marking the rising and setting positions of particular stars. When the navigator imagines himself at the center of this circle and his destination as a point on the horizon, the star compass becomes a plotting diagram, giving the bearing of his target island in terms of the rising and setting points of particular stars. A “star path” is a course defined by the series of stars that rise over the course of a night in a particular direction.

When we become lost in this process, we miss out on our crucial emotional need to experience a sense of belonging. We live in permanent estrangement oscillating between the extremes of too good for others or too unlikeable to be included. This is the excruciating social perfectionism of the Janus-faced critic: others are too flawed to love and we are too defective to be lovable. A verbal diagram of a typical critic-looping scenario looks like this. The outer critic’s judgmentalness is activated by the need to escape the “in-danger” feeling that is triggered by socializing. Even the thought of relating can set off our disapproval programs so that we feel justified in isolating. Extended withdrawal however, reawakens our relational hunger and our impulses to connect. This simultaneously reverses the critic from outer to inner mode. The critic then laundry lists our inadequacies, convincing us that we are too odious to others to socialize. This then generates self-pitying persecution fantasies, which eventually re-invites the outer critic to build a case about how awful people are…ad infinitum…ad nauseam. This looping then keeps us “safe” in the hiding of silent disengagement. When it emanates from the inner critic direction, the vacillating critic can look like this. The survivor’s negative self-noticing drives her to strive to be perfect. She works so hard and incessantly at it that she begins to resent others who do not. Once the resentment accumulates enough, a minor faux pas in another triggers her to shift into extreme outer critic disappointment and frustration. She then silently perseverates and laundry lists “people” for all their faults and betrayals.

At AnswerThePublic, you type in your keyword or search phrase and the tool generates a diagram of related searches. Depending on your search term, you can get hundreds of results that give you direct insight into what your audience is thinking, the kind of questions they’re asking, and the hot-button issues they’re struggling with. And once you know their questions and issues, you can provide the solution.

Term definitions: 401(k): A U.S. retirement plan developed by the ERISA Act of 1974 when companies realized they could not provide for retirees’ health care. ASSET: Something that puts money “in your pocket” with minimum labor. BALANCE SHEET: The lower part of an income-statement diagram, so called because it’s supposed to balance assets against liabilities. CASH FLOW: Cash coming in (as income) and cash going out (as expenses). It is the direction of cash flow that determines whether something is income, expense, asset, or liability. Cash flow tells the story. FINANCIAL APTITUDE: What you do with the money once you make it, how to keep people from taking it from you, how to keep it longer, and how to make that money work hard for you. GOLDEN RULE: He who has the gold makes the rules.