Intermittent Love Quotes

I acquired expensive habits and affected manners. I got a third-class degree and a first-class illusion: that I was a poet. But nothing could have been less poetic that my seeing-through-all boredom with life in general and with making a living in particular. I was too green to know that all cynicism masks a failure to cope-- an impotence, in short; and that to despise all effort is the greatest effort of all. But I did absorb a small dose of one permanently useful thing, Oxford's greatest gift to civilized life: Socratic honesty. It showed me, very intermittently, that it is not enough to revolt against one's past. One day I was outrageously bitter among some friends about the Army; back in my own rooms later it suddenly struck me that just because I said with impunity things that would have apoplexed my dead father, I was still no less under his influence. The truth was I was not a cynic by nature, only by revolt. I had got away from what I hated, but I hadn't found where I loved, and so I pretended that there was nowhere to love. Handsomely equipped to fail, I went out into the world.

It’s not just children who are childlike. Adults, too, are – beneath the bluster – intermittently playful, silly, fanciful, vulnerable, hysterical, terrified, and pitiful and in search of consolation and forgiveness. We’re well versed at seeing the sweet and the fragile in children and offering them help and comfort accordingly. Around them, we know how to put aside the worst of our compulsions, vindictiveness and fury. We can recalibrate our expectations and demand a little less than we normally do; we’re slower to anger and a bit more aware of unrealised potential. We readily treat children with a degree of kindness that we are oddly and woefully reluctant to show to our peers. It is a wonderful thing to live in a world where so many people are nice to children. It would be even better if we lived in one where we were a little nicer to the childlike sides of one another.

I had read it some time ago but was so completely immersed that I retained nothing. This has been an intermittent, lifelong enigma. Through early adolescence I sat and read for hours in a small grove of weed trees near the railroad track in Germantown. Like Gumby I would enter a book wholeheartedly and sometimes venture so deeply it was as if I were living within it. I finished many books in such a manner there, closing the covers ecstatically yet having no memory of the content by the time I returned home. This disturbed me but I kept this strange affliction to myself. I look at the covers of such books and their contents remain a mystery that I cannot bring myself to solve. Certain books I loved and lived within yet cannot remember.

They say that people who live next to waterfalls don't hear the water. It was terrible at first. We couldn't stand to be in the house for more than a few hours at a time. The first two weeks were filled with nights of intermittent sleep and quarreling for the sake of being heard over the water. We fought so much just to remind ourselves that we were in love, and not in hate. But the next weeks were a little better. It was possible to sleep a few good hours each night and eat in only mild discomfort. [We] still cursed the water, but less frequently, and with less fury. Her attacks on me also quieted. It's your fault, she would say. You wanted to live here. Life continued, as life continues, and time passed, as time passes, and after a little more than two months: Do you hear that? I asked her one of the rare mornings we sat at the table together. Hear it? I put down my coffee and rose from my chair. You hear that thing? What thing? she asked. Exactly! I said, running outside to pump my fist at the waterfall. Exactly! We danced, throwing handfuls of water in the air, hearing nothing at all. We alternated hugs of forgiveness and shouts of human triumph at the water. Who wins the day? Who wins the day, waterfall? We do! We do! And this is what living next to a waterfall is like. Every widow wakes one morning, perhaps after years of pure and unwavering grieving, to realize she slept a good night's sleep and will be able to eat breakfast, and doesn't hear her husband's ghost all the time, but only some of the time. Her grief is replaced with a useful sadness. Every parent who loses a child finds a way to laugh again. The timbre begins to fade. The edge dulls. The hurt lessens. Every love is carved from loss. Mine was. Yours is. Your great-great-great-grandchildren's will be. But we learn to live in that love.

Given the existence as uttered forth in the public works of Puncher and Wattmann of a personal God quaquaquaquaquaquaqua with white beard quaquaquaquaquaqua outside time without extension who from the heights of divine apathia divine athambia divine aphasia loves us dearly with some exceptions for reasons unknown but time will tell and suffers like the divine Miranda with those who for reasons unknown but time will tell are plunged into torment plunged into fire whose fire flames if that continues and who can doubt it will fire the firmament that is to say blast hell to heaven so blue still and calm so calm with a calm which even though intermittent is better than nothing but not so fast and considering what is more that as a result of the labors left unfinished

Love imposes obligations and these are constant. An intermittent lover is no use to a person of dignity and courage.

Random intermittent positive reinforcement can be found in gambling... and bad relationships.

Almost no abuser is mean or frightening all the time. At least occasionally, he is loving, gentle, and humorous and perhaps even capable of compassion and empathy. This intermittent, and usually unpredictable, kindness is critical to forming traumatic attachments. When a person, male or female, has suffered harsh, painful treatment over an extended period of time, he or she naturally feels a flood of love and gratitude toward anyone who brings relief, like the surge of affection one might feel for the hand that offers a glass of water on a scorching day. But in situations of abuse, the rescuer and the tormentor are the very same person.

Even that night, the night he touched one inch of her in the dark, how simply Avery seemed to accept the facts – that they were on the edge of lifelong happiness and, therefore, inescapable sorrow. It was as if, long ago, a part of him had broken off inside, and now finally, he recognized the dangerous fragment that had been floating in his system, causing him intermittent pain over the years. As if he could now say of that ache: “Ah. It was you.

Why then do you fear love in particular more than earthly existence in general?” Kafka replied as if from an astral distance: “You write: ‘Why be more afraid of love than of other things in life?’ And just before that: ‘I experienced the intermittently divine for the first time, and more frequently than elsewhere, in love.’ If you conjoin these two sentences, it’s as if you had said: ‘Why not fear every bush in the same way that you fear the burning bush?

There is nothing stranger than to love somebody who is mad, or who is intermittently so. The weight, the strain, the anxiety is a heavy load to bear – if only because among these confusional states and hysterias loom dreadful probabilities like suicide or murder. It shakes one’s hold also on one’s own grasp of reality; one realises how precariously we manage

Success is not a destination, it is a journey. Failure is not permanent, it is transient. So continue your journey with intermittent roadblocks.

And she knew for the first time that someone can wire your skin in a single evening, and that love arrives not by accumulating to a moment, like a drop of water focused on the tip of a branch - it is not the moment of bringing your whole life to another - but rather, it is everything you leave behind. At that moment. Even that night, the night he touched one inch of her in the dark, how simply Avery seemed to accept the facts - that they were on the edge of lifelong happiness and, therefore, inescapable sorrow. It was as if, long ago, a part of him had broken off inside, and now finally, he recognised the dangerous fragment that had been floating in his system, causing him intermittent pain over the years. As if he could now say of that ache: "Ah. It was you.

Keep an eye out for her, she tends to disappear intermittently, leaving no note for one to know, as to where she is going and if she'll be showing up for supper that day, or in the dark, wander away. But soon she will map her way back to your lap timidly, in need for a warm, caring body to conform. She likes to play with things, but often her mood swings. To hurt is not her intention, all she wants is your attention, and if you give your love to her, she’ll not smile but perhaps purr.

Modern relationships are cauldrons of contradictory longings: safety and excitement, grounding and transcendence, the comfort of love and the heat of passion We want it all, and we want it with one person. Reconciling the domestic and the erotic is a delicate balancing act that we achieve intermittently at best. It requires knowing your partner while remaining open to the unknown, cultivating intimacy that respects privacy. Separateness and togetherness alternate, or proceed in counterpoint. Desire resists confinement, and commitment mustn't swallow freedom whole.

My pristine grief was intermittently marred by dread. I thought of the chilling words a friend of mine had once used to explain why his older sister had married a man she did not love when she was reaching the end of her childbearing years: She had run out of runway.

One of the powers that love has, is to grow wings in the mind of a pedestrian, though sometimes you just need to walk and stay on your feet.

Our poor human heart is flawed: it is like a cake without the frosting: the first two acts of the theatre without the climax. Even its design is marred for a small piece is missing out of the side. That is why it remains so unsatisfied: it wants life and it gets death: it wants Truth and it has to settle for an education; it craves love and gets only intermittent euphoria’s with satieties. Samples, reflections and fractions are only tastes, not mouthfuls. A divine trick has been played on the human heart as if a violin teacher gave his pupil an instrument with one string missing. God kept a part of man's heart in Heaven, so that discontent would drive him back again to Him Who is Eternal Life, All-Knowing Truth and the Abiding Ecstasy of Love.

Love is intermittent reinforcement with spouses and children alike. The child is love-bombed when the narcissist feels the child reflects their false self. The moment the child fails to do so, the narcissistic parent blithely discards them.

Father xmas is like the love from a prostitute, it doesn’t exist and it makes you spend loads of money.

...but there is, i am almost sure, a bit of contentment, somewhere, defrosting the cockles of my heart.

Intermittent reinforcement in the context of a relationship is when kindness and loving acts are not given consistently, but rather intermittently. In 30 Covert Emotional Manipulation Tactics, author Adelyn Birch writes, “This is an extremely powerful and effective manipulation tactic. In fact, psychology experts consider it the most powerful motivator in existence.

Dating from a place of co-dependency, like a lot of us do, is immediately feeling as though the guy you went on a few dates with (who keeps ghosting you) is suddenly the one - just because he ticks a few of your boxes, texts you back sometimes and happens to be cute. But no, he's not being mysterious for intermittently disappearing on you. He's actually keeping you at a distance and playing on your need for validation, so that when he's done with his other options, he can return to you with minimal effort, knowing that you've been waiting for him all this time.

This calm which I had just enjoyed was the first apparition of that great intermittent force which was to wage war in me against grief, against love, and would ultimately get the better of them.

When I asked "How are you," she answered with a report on Lucia or her boyfriend, Jim, who was also intermittently in recovery. No, how are you, I wanted to say, but I thought the distinction would be lost on her.

We make up stories about why things are the way they are. If our mothers are depressed, if our fathers are drunks, we are still dependent on them for love and for survival. When the love is not attuned, when it is abusive, when it is scarce or intermittent, we often blame ourselves. We can’t blame our parents because we need them too much; blaming them means rejecting them and rejecting them means dying. So we decide we are too needy, too intense, too fat. We were born defective. These things aren’t true, but we believe they are. They get wired into our brains and hearts at the same time our nervous systems develop, and unless we question them head-on, we believe them for the rest of our lives.

Almost no abuser is mean or frightening all the time. At least occasionally, he is loving, gentle, and humorous and perhaps even capable of compassion and empathy. This intermittent, and usually unpredictable, kindness is critical to forming traumatic attachments. When a person has suffered harsh, painful treatment over an extended period of time, s/he naturally feels a flood of love and gratitude toward anyone who brings relief. But in situations of abuse, the rescuer and the tormentor are the very same person.

If you’re a victim of this tactic, you will sense the manipulator is withdrawing. He or she is not giving you the attention and affection that they used to, and you will fear that something is wrong and that you are losing them. If you ask them if something is wrong, they will deny it or blame you. At some point the manipulator will act once again like the attentive, romantic, interested and loving person they once were. Your anxiety and doubt are relieved, and you are on top of the world. But then they withdraw again, and you are consumed with anxiety once more. By using intermittent reinforcement the manipulator will have you riding an emotional roller coaster, your moods and emotional well-being dependent upon whether he or she is withholding from you or rewarding you.

I call it your source-fracture wound, the original break in your heart from long ago. It may have happened in an instant--a little rejection, a shocking abandonment, or a slight misattunement that suddenly made you realize how alone you were in this world. Or perhaps it was a bit-bu-bit splintering as over the years you met with an intermittent meanness, an unpredictable but repetitive abuse, or a neglect that stole your childhood inches at a time. Wherever, however, or whenever it happened, one thing we can assume is that no adult helped you make accurate meaning of your confusing and painful experience. No grown up sat you down and lovingly said, "No, honey, it's not that you're stupid. It's that your big brother is scared and insecure." "It's not that you don't matter, angel. It's that Daddy has a drinking problem and needs help." "It's not that you're not enough. It's that Mommy has clinical depression, dear, and it's neither your fault nor yours to fix." Without this mature presence to help explain to you what was happening to your little world, you probably came to some pretty strong and wrong conclusions about who you were and what was possible for you to have in life. And those conclusions became a habit of consciousness, a filter through which you interpret and then respond to the events of your life, making your grief all the more complex.

Even now, I see his damp hair crowding at his forehead. His eyes, cerulean, the same as my mother's. Him, favoring the skin of any water to me. I remember him moving with it, and staying. That ripe light and intermittence. Sometimes I wonder if I'll ever stop looking for him there.

Last night there was intermittent rain, a gusty wind. Deep sleep did not relieve me of The last effects of wine. I ask the maid rolling up the blinds, But she replies: "The crab-apple is lovely as before." "Don't you know?" "Oh, don't you know?" "The green should be plump and the red lean?

I went to the room in Great Jones Street, a small crooked room, cold as a penny, looking out on warehouses, trucks and rubble. There was snow on the windowledge. Some rags and an unloved ruffled shirt of mine had been stuffed into places where the window frame was warped and cold air entered. The refrigerator was unplugged, full of record albums, tapes, and old magazines. I went to the sink and turned on both taps all the way, drawing an intermittent trickle. Least is best. I tried the radio, picking up AM only at the top of the dial, FM not at all." The industrial loft buildings along Great Jones seemed misproportioned, broad structures half as tall as they should have been, as if deprived of light by the great skyscraper ranges to the north and south." Transparanoia owns this building," he said. She wanted to be lead singer in a coke-snorting hard-rock band but was prepared to be content beating a tambourine at studio parties. Her mind was exceptional, a fact she preferred to ignore. All she desired was the brute electricity of that sound. To make the men who made it. To keep moving. To forget everything. To be that sound. That was the only tide she heeded. She wanted to exist as music does, nowhere, beyond maps of language. Opal knew almost every important figure in the business, in the culture, in the various subcultures. But she had no talent as a performer, not the slightest, and so drifted along the jet trajectories from band to band, keeping near the fervers of her love, that obliterating sound, until we met eventually in Mexico, in somebody's sister's bed, where the tiny surprise of her name, dropping like a pebble on chrome, brought our incoherent night to proper conclusion, the first of all the rest, transactions in reciprocal tourism. She was beautiful in a neutral way, emitting no light, defining herself in terms of attrition, a skinny thing, near blond, far beyond recall from the hard-edged rhythms of her life, Southwestern woman, hard to remember and forget...There was never a moment between us that did not measure the extent of our true connection. To go harder, take more, die first.

And with the intermittent coarseness that reappeared in him as soon as he was no longer unhappy and the level of his morality dropped accordingly, he exclaimed to himself: “To think that I wasted years of my life, that I wanted to die, that I felt my deepest love, for a woman who did not appeal to me, who was not my type!

I am a mess. I feel him right there behind me but I know he isn't. I want to call out to him, to ask him what's for breakfast. I want to hear the even cadence of his footsteps, the intermittent snap of the newspaper as he reads. All these instincts seem to live so close to the surface that they warp and weave through the fabric of possibility. Maybe he is downstairs, reading. Maybe he is just getting out of the shower. It's these tiny reminders that hurt, the tiny moments where you think--let me just call out to him. *Ah, right. He's dead.* And you wonder how it happened, did it hurt, does he see me here in a sodden, sobbing puddle on his floor?

Perhaps others, cut from different cloth, could pick and choose their conquests. Live their lives as patient fishermen, searching with intermittent success within a vast sea full of alluring fish. If the circumstances of one catch proved inconvenient, these fictional fishermen need only toss back the lure and wait for another. Not so for me. I vehemently rejected this belief that our souls could thrive with any number of partners, a good-enough rodstvennaya dusha. One. One half of one soul. It is popular to say that one must find love within oneself before knowing how to love another. I rejected this statement outright, as both imbecilic in theory and impossible in practice.

Please guide this ship away from harm and make her safe - keep her warm... Attention and lust all she desires - and the time it takes to stoke those fires You may invite her to your lair with sensuousness and a passionate flair her draw irresistible, hunger insatiable  -  your thoughts no more your own For she has taken place there, in you, the queen upon her throne..... Sensual bliss one of many rewards, but stolen heart and pointy swords Your skills and gift of most import, for when they wane, pain, and love's cut short.... May crack your inner strength some day and truly steal your time (heart) away.... For a muse but one of intermittent bliss starting from the first kiss And ending only when she's done - then you're left alone as one.....

I perceived that I was on a little round grain of rock and metal, filmed with water and with air, whirling in sunlight and darkness. And on the skin of that little grain all the swarms of men, generation by generation, had lived in labour and blindness, with intermittent joy and intermittent lucidity of spirit. And all their history, with its folk-wanderings, its empires, its philosophies, its proud sciences, its social revolutions, its increasing hunger for community, was but a flicker in one day of the lives of stars. If one could know whether among that glittering host there were here and there other spirit-inhabited grains of rock and metal, whether man’s blundering search for wisdom and for love was a sole and insignificant tremor, or part of a universal movement!

Throughout her life, Jane had tried to believe in things—astrology, Catholicism, change, herself, intermittent fasting, love, life after love, mindfulness, Pilates, poetry, recycling, retinol, tarot. Her belief in Cass’s power felt urgent in an unfamiliar way. She willed Cass to understand that although she didn’t believe zucchini was any better than eggplant, or that ice water was reckless, she believed the power was real.

What could not be expected from any of his children was affection. Stalin showed none for his two legitimate sons, and his love for his daughter, though genuine, was intermittent. There is abundant testimony that Stalin had charm when he chose to exercise it. He made constant jokes. He did imitations. He was particularly keen on doing “Red Indian” war dances, which he got from The Last of the Mohicans, a favorite book. His war whoop was bloodcurdling.

tell me off or worse—beat me? What can I say? I stare momentarily out of the window. The car is heading back across the bridge. We are both shrouded in darkness, masking our thoughts and feelings, but we don’t need the night for that. “Why, Anastasia?” Christian presses me for an answer. I shrug, trapped. I don’t want to lose him. In spite of all his demands, his need to control, his scary vices, I have never felt as alive as I do now. It’s a thrill to be sitting here beside him. He’s so unpredictable, sexy, smart, and funny. But his moods…oh—and he wants to hurt me. He says he’ll think about my reservations, but it still scares me. I close my eyes. What can I say? Deep down I would just like more, more affection, more playful Christian, more…love. He squeezes my hand. “Talk to me, Anastasia. I don’t want to lose you. This last week…” We’re coming near to the end of the bridge, and the road is once more bathed in the neon light of the street lamps so his face is intermittently in the light and the dark. And it’s such a

What is it like, the biblical writers seek to know through their art, to be a human being with a divided consciousness—intermittently loving your brother but hating him even more; resentful or perhaps contemptuous of your father but also capable of the deepest filial regard; stumbling between disastrous ignorance and imperfect knowledge; fiercely asserting your own independence but caught in a tissue of events divinely contrived; outwardly a definite character and inwardly an unstable vortex of greed, ambition, jealousy, lust, piety, courage, compassion, and much more?

Though with the baby her breasts are used without shame, tools like her hands, before his eyes she is still shy, and quick to cover herself if he watches too openly. But he feels a difference between now and when they first loved, lying side by side on the borrowed bed, his eyes closed, together making the filmy sideways descent into one another. Now, she is intermittently careless, walks out of the bathroom naked, lets her straps hang down while she burps the baby, seems to accept herself with casual gratitude as a machine, a white, pliant machine for loving, hatching, feeding.

Chapter I. Ignorance is Strength.   Throughout recorded time, and probably since the end of the Neolithic Age, there have been three kinds of people in the world, the High, the Middle and the Low. They have been subdivided in many ways, they have borne countless different names, and their relative numbers, as well as their attitude towards one another, have varied from age to age: but the essential structure of society has never altered. Even after enormous upheavals and seemingly irrevocable changes, the same pattern has always reasserted itself, just as a gyroscope will always return to equilibrium, however far it is pushed one way or the other.   ‘Julia, are you awake?’ said Winston. ‘Yes, my love, I’m listening. Go on. It’s marvellous.’ He continued reading:   The aims of these three groups are entirely irreconcilable. The aim of the High is to remain where they are. The aim of the Middle is to change places with the High. The aim of the Low, when they have an aim—for it is an abiding characteristic of the Low that they are too much crushed by drudgery to be more than intermittently conscious of anything outside their daily lives—is to abolish all distinctions and create a society in which all men shall be equal. Thus throughout history a struggle which is the same in its main outlines recurs over and over again. For long periods the High seem to be securely in power, but sooner or later there always comes a moment when they lose either their belief in themselves or their capacity to govern efficiently, or both. They are then overthrown by the Middle, who enlist the Low on their side by pretending to them that they are fighting for liberty and justice. As soon as they have reached their objective, the Middle thrust the Low back into their old position of servitude, and themselves become the High. Presently a new Middle group splits off from one of the other groups, or from both of them, and the struggle begins over again. Of the three groups, only the Low are never even temporarily successful in achieving their aims. It would be an exaggeration to say that throughout history there has been no progress of a material kind. Even today, in a period of decline, the average human being is physically better off than he was a few centuries ago. But no advance in wealth, no softening of manners, no reform or revolution has ever brought human equality a millimetre nearer. From the point of view of the Low, no historic change has ever meant much more than a change in the name of their masters.

By using intermittent reinforcement the manipulator will have you riding an emotional roller coaster, your moods and emotional well-being dependent upon whether he or she is withholding from you or rewarding you. The manipulator does this on purpose to increase his or her power and control over you and to make you ever more desperate for their love, attention or approval. You will have become the proverbial lab rat living for a randomly dispensed morsel. The rat thinks of nothing else, and either will you. Your bond with the manipulator will become stronger in response to intermittent reinforcement, along with your desire to please them and your fear of losing them.

I had read it some time ago but was so completely immersed that I retained nothing. This has been an intermittent, lifelong enigma. Through early adolescence I sat and read for hours in a small grove of weed trees. . . I would enter a book wholeheartedly and sometimes venture so deeply it was as if I were living within it. I finished many books in such a manner there, closing the covers ecstatically yet having no memory of the content by the time I returned home. This disturbed me but I kept this strange affliction to myself. I look at the covers of such books and their contents remain a mystery that I cannot bring myself to solve. Certain books I loved and lived within yet cannot remember.

But there are human beings who, though of necessity single in body, are dual in character; — in whose breasts not only is evil always fighting against good, — but to whom evil is sometimes horribly, hideously evil, but is sometimes also not hideous at all. Of such men it may be said that Satan obtains an intermittent grasp, from which, when it is released, the rebound carries them high amidst virtuous resolutions and a thorough love of things good and noble. Such men, — or women, — may hardly, perhaps, debase themselves with the more vulgar vices. They will not be rogues, or thieves, or drunkards, — or, perhaps, liars; but ambition, luxury, self-indulgence, pride, and covetousness will get a hold of them, and in various moods will be to them virtues in lieu of vices.

I watched her. I was a ghost in the woods, silent, still, cold. I was winter embodied, the frigid wind given physical form. I stood near the edge of the woods, where the trees began to thin, and scented the air: mostly dead smells to find this time of the season. The bite of conifer, the musk of wolf, the sweetness of her, nothing else to smell. She stood in the doorway for the space of several breaths. Her face was turned towards the trees, but I was invisible, intangible, nothing but eyes in the woods. The intermittent breeze carried her scent to me again and again, singing in another language of memories from another form. Finally, finally, she stepped on the deck and pressed the first footprint into the snow of the yard. And I was right here, almost right within reach, but still one thousand miles away.

I sat at my table, had my brown toast with olive oil, and opened Camus’s The First Man. I had read it some time ago but was so completely immersed that I retained nothing. This has been an intermittent, lifelong enigma. Through early adolescence I sat and read for hours in a small grove of weed trees near the railroad track in Germantown. Like Gumby I would enter a book wholeheartedly and sometimes venture so deeply it was as if I were living within it. I finished many books in such a manner there, closing the covers ecstatically yet having no memory of the content by the time I returned home. This disturbed me but I kept this strange affliction to myself. I look at the covers of such books and their contents remain a mystery that I cannot bring myself to solve. Certain books I loved and lived within yet cannot remember.

Phases of the Love Cloud Week 1: A cloud of feelings form around you. Week 2: It has the texture of cotton candy with an implied sweetness and suggestion of sensuality. Week 3: It lightens to a blinding brightness, as if barely covering the sun. Week 4: The texture become less permeable and hardens like sugar caramelized when making leche flan on too high a fire. Week 5: The cloud darkens gradually and lightning blinks intermittently like a firefly convention in Georgia. Week 6: There’s an eerie silence gathering around the cloud which is growing way out of proportion. Week 8: 200 MPH winds hit, torrential rains and the roof comes off the house. Week 10: There’s not a cloud in the sky. The sun appears. Weeks11-25: Inside you there's a storm of tears that makes Noah's flood look a kiddie-pool. Week 26: A new cloud of feelings form around you...

The narcissistic love match is inherently unstable. Any intrusion of reality can destabilize the relationship, leading to chronic or intermittent conflict, misery, trips to the couple counselor, or traumatic ruptures that bring the union to an end. When the narcissist can find support outside the relationship – career, family, friends, or other interests- that keep him or her feeling pumped up, the pressure on the partner may be minimal. But frustrations at work, job loss or retirement, disruptions in other needed relationships, and losses in status or rewards from other pipelines usually lead to more demands on the partner to pick up the slack. It is the nature of human beings to seek more satisfying solutions to life’s challenges over time and to strive toward a fully realized evolution of Self. Even a seed of emotional health wants to grow. Just as primary narcissism is a transient state in early childhood, so may narcissistic relationships be way stations on our journey to mature love. But sometimes the hard part is figuring out if, when, and how to move on.

In the passion of love, for instance, a cause unknown to the sufferer, but which is doubtless the spring-flood of hereditary instincts accidentally let loose, suddenly checks the young man's gayety, dispels his random curiosity, arrests perhaps his very breath; and when he looks for a cause to explain his suspended faculties, he can find it only in the presence or image of another being, of whose character, possibly, he knows nothing and whose beauty may not be remarkable; yet that image pursues him everywhere, and he is dominated by an unaccustomed tragic earnestness and a new capacity for suffering and joy. If the passion be strong there is no previous interest or duty that will be remembered before it; if it be lasting the whole life may be reorganized by it, it may impose new habits, other manners, and another religion. Yet what is the root of all this idealism? An irrational instinct, normally intermittent, such as all dumb creatures share, which has here managed to dominate a human soul and to enlist all the mental powers in its more or less permanent service, upsetting their usual equilibrium. This madness, however, inspires method; and for the first time, perhaps, in his life, the man has something to live for.

emotionally immature people are more like an amalgam of various borrowed parts, many of which don’t go together well. Because they had to shut down important parts of themselves out of fear of their parents’ reactions, their personalities formed in isolated clumps, like pieces of a puzzle that don’t fit together. This explains their inconsistent reactions, which make them so difficult to understand. Because they probably weren’t allowed to express and integrate their emotional experiences in childhood, these people grow up to be emotionally inconsistent adults. Their personalities are weakly structured, and they often express contradictory emotions and behaviors. They step in and out of emotional states, never noticing their inconsistency. When they become parents, these traits create emotional bafflement in their children. One woman described her mother’s behavior as chaotic, “flip-flopping in ways that made no sense.” This inconsistency means that, as parents, emotionally immature people may be either loving or detached, depending on their mood. Their children feel fleeting moments of connection with them but don’t know when or under what conditions their parent might be emotionally available again. This sets up what behavioral psychologists call an intermittent reward situation, meaning that getting a reward for your efforts is possible but completely unpredictable. This creates a tenacious resolve to keep trying to get the reward, because once in a while these efforts do pay off. In this way, parental inconsistency can be the quality that binds children most closely to their parent, as they keep hoping to get that infrequent and elusive positive response.

Only then comes the fourth and last movement, the Adagio, the final farewell. It takes the form of a prayer, Mahler's last chorale, his closing hymn, so to speak; and it prays for the restoration of life, of tonality, of faith. This is tonality unashamed, presented in all aspects ranging from the diatonic simplicity of the hymn tune that opens it through every possible chromatic ambiguity. It's also a passionate prayer, moving from one climax to another, each more searing than the last. But there are no solutions. And between these surges of prayer there is intermittently a sudden coolness, a wide-spaced transparency, like an icy burning — a Zen-like immobility of pure meditation. This is a whole other world of prayer, of egoless acceptance. But again, there are no solutions. "Heftig ausbrechend!" he writes, as again the despairing chorale breaks out with greatly magnified intensity. This is the dual Mahler, flinging himself back into his burning Christian prayer, then again freezing into his Eastern one. This vacillation is his final duality. In the very last return of the hymn he is close to prostration; it is all he can give in prayer, a sobbing, sacrificial last try. But suddenly this climax fails, unachieved — the one that might have worked, that might have brought solutions. This last desperate reach falls short of its goal, subsides into a hint of resignation, then another hint, then into resignation itself. And so we come to the final incredible page. And this page, I think, is the closest we have ever come, in any work of art, to experiencing the very act of dying, of giving it all up. The slowness of this page is terrifying: Adagissimo, he writes, the slowest possible musical direction; and then langsam (slow), ersterbend (dying away), zögernd (hesitat-ing); and as if all those were not enough to indicate the near stoppage of time, he adds äusserst langsam (extremely slow) in the very last bars. It is terrifying, and paralyzing, as the strands of sound disintegrate. We hold on to them, hovering between hope and submission. And one by one, these spidery strands connecting us to life melt away, vanish from our fingers even as we hold them. We cling to them as they dematerialize; we are holding two-then one. One, and suddenly none. For a petrifying moment there is only silence. Then again, a strand, a broken strand, two strands, one ... none. We are half in love with easeful death ... now more than ever seems it rich to die, to cease upon the midnight with no pain ... And in ceasing, we lose it all. But in letting go, we have gained everything.

A third assumption: a commitment to monogamy is an admirable consequence of love, stemming from a deep-seated generosity and an intimate interest in the other’s flourishing and well-being. A call for monogamy is a sure indication that one partner has the other’s best interests at heart. To Rabih’s new way of thinking, it seems anything but kind or considerate to insist that a spouse return to his room alone to watch CNN and eat yet another club sandwich while perched on the edge of his bed, when he has perhaps only a few more decades of life left on the planet, an increasingly dishevelled physique, an at best intermittent track record with the opposite sex, and a young woman from California standing before him who sincerely wishes to remove her dress in his honour. If love is to be defined as a genuine concern for the well-being of another person, then it must surely be deemed compatible with granting permission for an often harassed and rather browbeaten husband to step off the elevator on the eighteenth floor, in order to enjoy ten minutes of rejuvenating cunnilingus with a near-stranger. Otherwise it may seem that what we are dealing with is not really love at all but rather a kind of small-minded and hypocritical possessiveness, a desire to make one’s partner happy if, but only if, that happiness involves oneself. It’s past midnight already, yet Rabih is just hitting his stride, knowing there might be objections but sidestepping them nimbly and, in the process, acquiring an ever more brittle sense of self-righteousness. A fourth assumption: monogamy is the natural state of love. A sane person can only ever want to love one other person. Monogamy is the bellwether of emotional health. Is there not, wonders Rabih, an infantile idealism in our wish to find everything in one other being – someone who will be simultaneously a best friend, a lover, a co-parent, a co-chauffeur and a business partner? What a recipe for disappointment and resentment in this notion, upon which millions of otherwise perfectly good marriages regularly founder. What could be more natural than to feel an occasional desire for another person? How can anyone be expected to grow up in hedonistic, liberated circles, experience the sweat and excitement of nightclubs and summer parks, listen to music full of longing and lust and then, immediately upon signing a piece of paper, renounce all outside sexual interest, not in the name of any particular god or higher commandment but merely from an unexplored supposition that it must be very wrong? Is there not instead something inhuman, indeed ‘wrong’, in failing to be tempted, in failing to realize just how short of time we all are and therefore with what urgent curiosity we should want to explore the unique fleshly individuality of more than one of our contemporaries? To moralize against adultery is to deny the legitimacy of a range of sensory high points – Rabih thinks of Lauren’s shoulder blades – in their own way just as worthy of reverence as more acceptable attractions such as the last moments of ‘Hey Jude’ or the ceilings of the Alhambra Palace. Isn’t the rejection of adulterous possibilities tantamount to an infidelity towards the richness of life itself? To turn the equation on its head: would it be rational to trust anyone who wasn’t, under certain circumstances, really pretty interested in being unfaithful?

Tolstoy was always as keen to do as to teach. As with most intellectuals, there came a time in his life when he felt the need to identify himself with ‘the workers’. It popped up intermittently in the 1860s and 1870s, then began in earnest in January 1884. He dropped his title (though not his authoritative manner) and insisted on being called ‘plain Leo Nikolayevich’. This mood coincided with one of those sartorial gestures intellectuals love: dressing as a peasant. The class transvestism suited Tolstoy’s love of drama and costume. It also suited him physically, for he had the build and features of a peasant. His boots, his smock, his beard, his cap became the uniform of the new Tolstoy, the world-seer. It was a prominent part of that instinctive talent for public relations which most of these great secular intellectuals seem to possess. Newspaper reporters came thousands of miles to see him. Photography was now universal, the newsreel just beginning in Tolstoy’s old age. His peasant dress was ideally suited to his epiphany as the first media prophet.

Many people say that when things are good, they’re really good. The flattery, attention, and obsessiveness are exhilarating to the ego. To feel so important to someone can be exciting and empowering. The exhilaration can be recognized immediately, especially if you have not been in this position of being an “idol” before. You may also begin to look for the exhilaration—to anticipate the flattery and attention. And, after a while, when the flattery begins to gradually fade, you will miss it and may even make attempts to get your loved one with BPD to idolize you again. The law of intermittent reinforcement applies here again, since your loved one may intermittently engage in obsessiveness and flattery throughout the relationship. This in turn reinforces your commitment to the relationship. Jim

Standing at a distance ( Part 1 ) I stand at a distance intermittently looking at her, Envying the Sun rays that bathe her from head to toe, While I from the distance keep looking at her, With longing eyes and my head slightly bent low, In the distance rainbow appears in the sky, And the rain drops kiss her skin, And I only glance at her by and by, With a deep desire to win, Her heart and her gaze of affection, I see the raindrop dripping down through her backbone, And oh my imagination and its dereliction, With the wish to be the lucky Sun that over her had shone, Before the daylight embraced her from everywhere, And it was just the light that covered her, And in this light she was everywhere, Now it was the light and her, and just her, While I stood in the distance waiting for my chance, Turning my head and ogling at her, Hoping she would smile someday, and I shall live my moment of romance, To be the sunshine and the raindrop always kissing her, And melt everywhere over her skin, And never to return to the light nor to this world, I shall now forever reside in this beauty’s eternal inn, Sometimes spreading over her skin, & often like the sun rays around her hair curled, But for now she is busy with the rain drops, the Sun, the Moon, I wonder if she even notices my presence, So I often wish the Sun and the Moon to set soon, So that she could somehow notice my presence, Alas the time too loves to love her, And when the Sun shines over her it seems to shine forever, And time remains there circling around her, And ah my pain to keep hoping in this moment that lasts forever, That she would someday acknowledge my smile, Nevertheless, I am happy as long as I can see her, I shall manage to walk a million mile, Just for that glimpse of her,

What fascinates me about the app, in particular, is its ability to hear a bird in my yard, which also has constant white noise from the freeway, the intermittent revving of engines (it’s recently popular in my area to remove mufflers, so that’s fun), and the regular passing by of planes from our nearby airport. Engine after engine roars around my house, and yet I tap “sound ID” and the app tunes in to just the songs of the birds, hiding in plain sight in the branches nearby. Anchoring to a God who is with us is about finding the spiritual equivalent of Merlin Bird ID. It’s about the practices, habits, or rhythms that help us notice the music of God’s nearness amid the din of daily life. Like the birds in my yard, God is always there, and yet without tuning myself in to God’s presence, I’m liable to go long stretches not hearing the song of love that’s calling to me. How

Intermittent reinforcement is a conditioning behavior where CNs set the rules. Their love is inconsistent and on their terms. This leaves you feeling unstable and longing for their love and attention. The relationship becomes a mixture of subtle cruelty and periodic affection. They will woo you and withhold from you. This conditions you to keep trying to please them in order to get the reward of love. It brings you to a place where you lower your standards so much that you become grateful for mediocre treatment that you never would have tolerated when you first met them. You end up believing you don’t deserve any better and that you are not worthy of love and affection.

I still enjoyed the quiet, upholstered warmth of the front seat of his min-van. I'd spent so many hours in his car, en route to soccer games, school functions, parties, and dates, comforted by the casual strength of his hands, the dry knuckles of his long fingers spread along the steering wheel. My dad knew every road, every vein and artery in the whole state, and he drove confidently, making intermittent conversation while the radio was on, and then turning it off to gently interview me.

Kristofer had loved Avelot. He said it often. Only to herself did Avelot ever admit this: that she did not believe love was real. But certainly Kristofer wished to believe what he felt was returned. He had been intermittently satisfied by her pretense of it.

Life Formulas I (2008) These are notes to myself. Your frame of reference, and therefore your calculations, may vary. These are not definitions—these are algorithms for success. Contributions are welcome. Happiness = Health + Wealth + Good Relationships Health = Exercise + Diet + Sleep Exercise = High Intensity Resistance Training + Sports + Rest Diet = Natural Foods + Intermittent Fasting + Plants Sleep = No alarms + 8–9 hours + Circadian rhythms Wealth = Income + Wealth * (Return on Investment) Income = Accountability + Leverage + Specific Knowledge Accountability = Personal Branding + Personal Platform + Taking Risk? Leverage = Capital + People + Intellectual Property Specific Knowledge = Knowing how to do something society cannot yet easily train other people to do Return on Investment = “Buy-and-Hold” + Valuation + Margin of Safety [72] Naval’s Rules (2016) Be present above all else. Desire is suffering. (Buddha) Anger is a hot coal you hold in your hand while waiting to throw it at someone else. (Buddha) If you can’t see yourself working with someone for life, don’t work with them for a day. Reading (learning) is the ultimate meta-skill and can be traded for anything else. All the real benefits in life come from compound interest. Earn with your mind, not your time. 99 percent of all effort is wasted. Total honesty at all times. It’s almost always possible to be honest and positive. Praise specifically, criticize generally. (Warren Buffett) Truth is that which has predictive power. Watch every thought. (Ask “Why am I having this thought?”) All greatness comes from suffering. Love is given, not received. Enlightenment is the space between your thoughts. (Eckhart Tolle) Mathematics is the language of nature.

This inconsistency means that, as parents, emotionally immature people may be either loving or detached, depending on their mood. Their children feel fleeting moments of connection with them but don’t know when or under what conditions their parent might be emotionally available again. This sets up what behavioral psychologists call an intermittent reward situation, meaning that getting a reward for your efforts is possible but completely unpredictable.

This was true mountain country, now, and true wilderness. Valley meadows, leafy trees halfway up the slopes, then evergreens gradually taking over at the higher altitudes... their road wound its way up and down through tree-tunnels that only intermittently allowed them to see the sky. It would have been a lovely journey under other circumstances. The weather remained fair, and remarkably pleasant, even if the night was going to be cold. She had only read about the wilderness, never experienced it for herself, and she found herself liking it a lot. Or- parts of it, anyway. The way it was never entirely silent, but simply 'quiet'- birdsong and insect noises, the rustle of leaves, the distant sound of water. She had never before realized how noisy people were. And the forest was so beautiful. She wasn't at all used to deep forest; it was like being inside a living cathedral, with beams of light penetrating the tree-canopy and illuminating unexpected treasures, a moss-covered rock, a small cluster of flowers, a spray of ferns. These woods were 'old', too, the trees had trunks so big it would take three people to put their arms around them, and there was a scent to the place that somehow conveyed that centuries of leaves had fallen here and become earth.

When we start at the centre of ourselves, we discover something worthwhile extending towards the periphery of the circle. We find again some of the joy in the now, some of the peace in the here, some of the love in me and thee which go to make up the kingdom of heaven on earth. The waves echo behind me. Patience - Faith - Openness are what the sea has to teach; Simplicity - Solitude - Intermittency. But there are other beaches to explore. There are more shells to find. This is only a beginning.

And the time to say it was days ago, perhaps weeks ago, but it was never said. Like the fireflies she used to keep in Mason jars, the promise of its telling had glowed intermittently. "I love you," he said. And now the fireflies shone with a constant light.

My new life was marking me. It was happening so quickly. There were intermittent spells of resistance, during which I'd pluck and moisturize and exfoliate, and then there was a period of grieving for my old self, who seemed to be disappearing toward the horizon, and then I relaxed into it.

The distant mountains, the intermittent honking of irritable trucks and cars, and the short-lived of the smooth roads were something she wanted to live through. She felt so much at home, even though she hadn't reached it yet. Or was the city itself her home? It did indeed bring back memories of times long past. And that hurt like a thousand piercing knives.

We are born alone, live alone, and die alone. We create the illusion of relationship, love, and friendship during the intermittent. A Maya who makes us feel like we're not alone.

Seriously. I’ll wager you aren’t ten years older than me.” “I bet I am.” “So what? So when I’m eighty, you’ll be ninety. It’s just a number.” I relaxed on a pile of pillows on my end of the boat. Eyes closed, I enjoyed the sunshine’s warmth on my face with the intermittent quack of ducks floating on the cool breeze. “I’m just saying, I’m not sure your eighty-year-old self will enjoy being chased by a gaggle of ninety-year-old women at the old folks’ home.” “And I’m just saying if you were there, I’d let you catch me.

If the phrase “reading spiritually” conjures up a yogi with closed eyes chanting on his carpet, then we need to replace that image and any hurdles it causes for readers. Instead, imagine a mother reading aloud to her children in the living room, each child snuggled beside her, as she intones the words with her young ones, pausing intermittently to ask what they are feeling, thinking, and delighting in. Or try to go back in time and picture Julian of Norwich, in her anchoress cell attached to the cathedral, mulling over the visions that God lay before her, realizing in her heart that the meaning of the showings was love, always love, forever love. Maybe you hear monks humming like bees as they read the texts they are copying aloud and ruminating—meditating— on the words before them. Or you might see a pastor walking up and down in his office, wearing thin the beige carpet beneath his feet, asking himself questions and mumbling answers. (p. 111)

Her love was the ultimate dopamine hit—intermittent and unpredictable—and now I look for it everywhere.

-give it a break, it says- It's an art to realize our worst fears Glee is the body turned out of shape, where meaningless expectations drool a string stiffened at both ends in fists of life and failures belief pirouette, bows and falls Those milky decision exiled in dust of time She says, "this year is raving, its skeleton has crippled the soil" Code blue has alarmed electronic crickets chime on monitor rhythms of farewell dance of death lodestar grins at distance. (Give it a break) The stars are gleaming outside the window birds chirruping intermittently valid sound of crickets dust settling on painted cities A cyclic equilibrium, I tell you, to bring the body in shape.

Nothing is more oppressive than the affection of others--not even the hatred of others, since hatred is at least more intermittent than affection; being an unpleasant emotion, it naturally tends to be less frequent in those who feel it. But hatred as well as love is oppressive; both seek us, pursue us, won't leave us alone.

I became too tangled in it to back out – caught in his well-made web of gaslighting, control and intermittent handing out of ‘love’ for the times I ‘behaved’.

Hill-walkers are adventurers all, they know not when they set out what the results of the day's walk will be; yet it is a strange experience, is it not, that such bountiful gifts and refreshing fruits may come to him, -- that he may attain to this mood of tranquil meditation, out of which arise intermittent musings, half-conscious soliloquies, and a sort of feast of mental orderliness -- a frame of mind in which decisions are made without effort, and truth comes without argument? Every such adventure that is contained in this simple and primitive pastime, so near to mother earth, attracts not only the walker who would claim no other qualifications than that he loves to tramp the old highways and the hills, but philosophers and poets and men great in simplicity.

with Pittodrie Stadium – home to the intermittently disastrous Aberdeen Football Club – lurking in the background, drab and dreary in the rain. Lovely.

The Primary Fear For some it is strong, persistent, always there. For others, the fear strikes infrequently and intermittently, but remains powerful: on some deep level, I am not something enough as a person. I am not smart enough. I am not good-looking enough. I am not attractive enough. I am not strong enough. I am not clever enough. I am not successful enough. I am not motivated enough. I am not rich enough. And because I am not enough in this way, I will not be loved. People will not accept me. They will judge me, mock me, and reject me. I will lose connection and be isolated and alone.

A deeper aspect of letting go is releasing our attachments and preferences around words and concepts. This is a truly sticky, messy job and the only thing that keeps us going on letting go are the intermittent glimpses of what hides beneath...the eternal sunshine of the spotless mind.

A person who fasts has a different mindset altogether. There is no temptation for food, just a focus on getting through the fast. The added benefits of intermittent fasting should replace the temptation for food. Instead of thinking about your next meal, think about how your fast is going to benefit you by helping you to lose weight.

What’s even stranger is the second definition: ‘Being enamored of a member of the opposite sex, sometimes accompanied by sexual desire. Romantic love.’” “What’s strange about that?” Majime looked at her, trying to read her face. He seemed to have lost all confidence. “Why limit it to a member of the opposite sex? If a homosexual person is enamored of someone and feels intermittent sexual desire for them, are we saying it’s not love?” “No, I didn’t have any such intention. But does it really—” “Matter?” She cut him off. “Yes, it matters. The Great Passage is supposed to be a dictionary for a new age. If we yield to the majority and stay bound to stale ways of thinking and feeling, how can we ever offer true definitions of kaleidoscopic words—words that are in constant flux but have underlying bedrock meanings?

The result is that we have been able to commit, in cold blood and over long periods of time, acts of which the brutes are capable only for brief moments and at the frantic height of Rage, desire, or fear. Because they use and worship symbols, men can become idealists; and, being idealists, they can transform the animal's intermittent greed into the grandiose imperialism of a Rhodes or a JPMorgan; the animal's intermittent love of bullying into Stalinism or the Spanish Inquisition; the animal's intermittent attachment to its territory into the calculated frenzies of nationalism.

kumquat and ginger chutney Serves 8 to 10             2½ pounds fresh kumquats, quartered and pitted             2 tablespoons kosher salt             ½ cup canola oil             1 teaspoon fennel seeds             1 dozen fresh medium curry leaves, torn into small pieces             3 tablespoons minced fresh ginger             8 small green serrano chilies, chopped or sliced in half lengthwise             6 whole fresh kaffir lime leaves             ½ teaspoon sambar or Madras curry powder (I prefer 777 brand)             ½ cup water, plus more if needed             2 tablespoons light brown sugar In a large bowl, mix the kumquats with the kosher salt. Let them rest for 2 to 3 hours, or overnight in the fridge, if possible. Heat the oil in a deep pan for a few minutes on medium heat. Add the fennel seeds. When they sizzle and darken slightly, after about 2 to 3 minutes, add the curry leaves, ginger, and chilies, frying and stirring for just a minute or two. Then add the kaffir lime leaves and kumquats. Stir well. After 5 minutes add the curry powder and stir again. After 5 minutes more, stir in the water and sugar. Reduce the heat to medium-low and cook covered for 10 minutes, stirring intermittently to ensure the chutney does not stick to the bottom of the pan. If this happens, stir in more water, ¼ cup at a time, but the mixture should remain thick and gooey. Cook just until the chutney has a chunky jamlike consistency.

A woman intermittently kissing two men: does this constellation not merely explicate the fact that, while a man cheats his feminine partner with another real woman, a woman can cheat a man even if she makes love only with him, since her pleasure is never fully contained in enjoying him?