Itw Quotes

If we can stay with the tension of opposites long enough —sustain it, be true to it—we can sometimes become vessels within which the divine opposites come together and give birth to a new reality.

We live in a world that assumes that the quality of a decision is directly related to the time and effort that went into making it...We believe that we are always better off gathering as much information as possible an depending as much time as possible in deliberation. We really only trust conscious decision making. But there are moments, particularly in times of stress, when haste does not make waste, when our snap judgments and first impressions can offer a much better means of making sense of the world. The first task of Blink is to convince you of a simple fact: decisions made very quickly can be every bit as good as decisions made cautiously and deliberately.

Alone, i am nothing. i have nothing.we have power.but we will never know it,we will never see it work.unless we come together to make it work.

It's hard to know whether to laugh or to cry at the human predicament. Here we are with so much wisdom and tenderness, and—without even knowing it—we cover it over to protect ourselves from insecurity. Although we have the potential to experience the freedom of a butterfly, we mysteriously prefer the small and fearful cocoon of ego.

Don't be an asshole" Rhage summed up the regurgitation with two words: "Kettle.Black." Fucking hell. "Did you guys plan that out?" "Yeah and if you don't fight us"- Hollywood bit down on the grape Tootsie Pop-"we'll do it again- only with the dance moves this time" "Spare me." "Fine.Unless you agree to home it,we WILL rock the dance moves." To prove the point ,the moron linked his palms behind his head and started doing something obscene with his hips. Which was backed up by a series of,"Uh-huh,uh-huh,ohhhh, yeeeeeeah,who's your daddy..." The others looked at Rhage like he'd grown a horn in the middle of his forehead. Nothing unusual there. And Tohr knew that, in spite of this ridiculous diversion,if he didn't cave,the lot of them would crawl so far up his ass,he'd be coughing up shitkickers. Rhage wheeled around,shoved out his butt,and started slapping his moneymaker like it was bread dough. "For the love of the Virgin Scribe,"Z muttered "put us out of this misery, and go the fuck home" Someone else chimed in, "You know, I never thought there were advantages to being blind..." "Or deaf" "Or mute," somebody added

We don't forgive people because they deserve it. We forgive them because they need itwe need it.

You experienced pain yesterday and you discovered that it led to pleasure.You experienced it today and found peace.That's why I'm telling you:Don't get used to it,because it's very easy to become habituated:it's a very powerful drug.It's in our daily lives,in our hidden sufferings,in the sacrifices we make,blaming love for the destruction of our dreams.Pain is frightening when it shows its real face, but it's seductive when it comes disguised as sacrifice or se-denial.Or cowardice.However much we may reject it,we human human beings always find a way of being with pain,of flirting with it and making it part of our lives.

ONLY THE DAY DAWNS TO WHICH WE ARE AWAKE,IF WE ARE TO GRASP THE REALITY OF OUR LIFE WHILE WE HAVE IT,WE WILL NEED TO WAKE UP TO OUR MOMENTS,OTHERWISE,WHOLE DAYS,EVEN A WHOLE LIFE COULD SLIP BY UNNOTICED..

And yet many of us do it without families," Nynaeve said. "Without love, without passion beyond our own particular interests. So even while we try to guide the world, we separate ourselves from it.We risk arrogance, Egwene. We always assume we know best, but risk making ourselves unable to fathom the people we claim to serve.

It is only the story...that saves our progeny from blundering like blind beggars into the spikes of the cactus fence.The story is our escort;without it,we are blind.Does the blind man own his escort?No,neither do we the story;rather,it is the story that owns us.

It may be said of Socialism, therefore, that its friends recommended it as increasing equality, while its foes resisted it as decreasing liberty….The compromise eventually made was one of the most interesting and even curious cases in history. It was decided to do everything that had ever been denounced in Socialism, and nothing that had ever been desired in it…we proceeded to prove that it was possible to sacrifice liberty without gaining equality….In short, people decided that it was impossible to achieve any of the good of Socialism, but they comforted themselves by achieving all the bad.

He's on the verge of it--we can tell. He is on the verge of finding that very hard truth--that it will never be complete, or feel complete. This is usually something you only have to learn once--that just like there is no such thing as forever, there is no such thing as total. When you're in the thrall of your first love, this discovery feels like the breaking of all momentum, the undermining of all promise. For the past year, Neil has assumed that love was like a liquid pouring into a vessel, and that the longer you loved, the more full the vessel became, until it was entirely full. The truth is that over time, the vessel expands as well. You grow. Your life wides. And you can't expect your partner's love alone to fill you. There will always be space for other things. And that space isn't empty as much as it's filled by another element. Even though the liquid is easier to see, you have to learn to appreciate the air.

veterans and remarkable rookies. International Thriller Writers, Inc. (ITW) cofounder, David

As she bends for a Kleenex in the dark, I am thinking of other girls: the girl I loved who fell in love with a lion--she lost her head over it--we just necked a lot; of the girl who fell in love with the tightrope, got addicted to getting high wired and nothing else was enough; all the beautiful, damaged women who have come through my life and I wonder what would have happened if I'd met them sooner, what they were like before they were so badly wounded. All this time I thought I'd been kissing, but maybe I'm always doing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, kissing dead girls in hopes that the heart will start again. Where there's breath, I've heard, there's hope.

I missed him, almost more than I could bear. This was never supposed to have happened to us. We were supposed to make it…we should have made it.

This is why, when we have been particularly impressed by a book, we feel the need to talk about it; we do not want to get away from it by talking about it—we simply want to understand more clearly what it is in which we have been entangled. We have undergone an experience, and now we want to know consciously what we have experienced. Perhaps this is the prime usefulness of literary criticism—it helps to make conscious those aspects of the text which would otherwise remain concealed in the subconscious; it satisfies (or helps to satisfy) our desire to talk about what we have read.

You see, my son, a city is all about how you look at it...We must learn to see it in many ways, so that when one of the ways of looking hurts us, we can take refuge in another way of looking. You must always love the city.

Bear one another’s burdens, the Bible says. It is a lesson about pain that we all can agree on. Some of us will not see pain as a gift; some will always accuse God of being unfair for allowing it. But, the fact is, pain and suffering are here among us, and we need to respond in some way. The response Jesus gave was to bear the burdens of those he touched. To live in the world as his body, his emotional incarnation, we must follow his example. The image of the body accurately portrays how God is working in the world. Sometimes he does enter in, occasionally by performing miracles, and often by giving supernatural strength to those in need. But mainly he relies on us, his agents, to do his work in the world.We are asked to live out the life of Christ in the world, not just to refer back to it or describe it.We announce his message, work for justice, pray for mercy . . . and suffer with the sufferers.

AT NIGHT My bedroom,as I drift. Every night,Jack is with me. He lies down on his side, lengthwise on my bed,and props his head on my pillow. I mirrow his position. He places his hand over mine. I see it,but I don't feel it.We discovered long ago that we can't touch,even in our dreams. I am as much of a ghost to him as he is to me. We are a breath away-and a world apart-from each other. He doesn't know where he goes when he's not with me.He doesn't think he exists anymore,except for in my dreams. I think he is right.And I tell him to hang on.I will never stop dreaming of him. I will find him.

I palmed his face and mushed him away from me before I got too angry and started really wailing on him. “Grab Alex’s guitar then and see if you can even remember how to hold it.”We all watched in horror as Tucker drunkenly tried to strap Alex’s precious guitar on,banging it into the speakers and amps, stumbling and struggling with it as he tried to stand up straight. “You have got you be kidding me,” Ethan growled when Tucker finally got the guitar strapped to him. Backwards. Then his legs seemed to buckle under him and he dropped heavily to his knees on the floor. Alex’s eyes widened and his jaw flew open. “Get my guitar! Get it away from him! Get it! Geeeeet Ittttttttt!” he yelled.

Not for the first time, I wish just once when I asked my grandmother about the war, instead of her telling me “that was a terrible time, I don’t want to talk about it,” she’d been able to say something more. Anything more. Maybe if she could have shared some of her story, I could have learned from it, I could have taught my children from it—we could have built a better world from the hard lessons she surely learned.

The ability to overcome failure—to live through it and move on—is crucial. If we are not willing to face failure—if we don't have the skills to survive it—we have precluded any real creativity or risk. Failure may never become our friend, but if we are to do meaningful work, perhaps failure needs to be our companion.

Our Western minds are trained to go down the path of explaining. We think if we can understand it, then we can control it...We are conditioned to believe the only reason we should do things is if we know why, where we are headed, and for what purpose. No wonder we have trouble making decisions. If we don't have clear answers or sure things, then taking a big step feels like a risk at best and a wasteful mistake at worst.

…the good we get from art is not what we learn from it; it is what we become through it…We

had no name for the color blue but managed rather well without it—we stayed for a long part of our history culturally, not biologically, color blind.

A great painter forces the world to see nature as he sees it....We paint from within outwards.

Children are the only brave philosophers. And brave philosophers are, inevitably, children. And that’s just it—we must always think like children with their what-happens-nexts.

When we regret our own decisions—and do nothing about it—we are no better than a whining employee complaining about his superiors. We are yelling at an empty boat, except it’s our boat.

Gently, I caressed along the puckered, angry scar slanting in a long, jagged line across my lower abdomen to where it crossed the smooth, silvered scar running in a horizontal line just above my pelvis, wishing she could somehow find comfort in my touch. Chills shook my body as I ran my fingers over the still sensitive skin, and just like every night, the bitterness and anger I found myself feeling faded away into sadness as I lost myself in this tangible reminder of my child. I loved her, so much. Steam filled the room, and I eased myself into the water, allowing myself to drift back to Daniel. I missed him, almost more than I could bear. This was never supposed to have happened to us. We were supposed to make it…we should have made it.

In the Finnish War we undertook our first experiment in convicting our war prisoners as traitors to the Motherland. The first such experiment in human history; and would you believe it?—we didn’t notice!

We had a hard life but we didn't know it...We had power....it's a power of transformation you have, when you're stuffed full of fear and eagerness - not a thing in your life can escape being momentous. A power you never think of losing because you never know you have it.

Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it...We might expect that we will be prostrate, inconsolable, crazy with loss. We do not expect to be literally crazy, cool customers who believe that their husband is about to return and need his shoes. In the version of grief we imagine, the model will be 'healing.' A Certain forward movement will prevail. The worst days will be the earliest days. We imagine that the moment to most severely test us will be the funeral, after which this hypothetical healing will take place. When we anticipate the funeral we wonder about failing to 'get through it,' rise to the occasion, exhibit the 'strength' that invariably gets mentioned as the correct response to death. We anticipate needing to steel ourselves for the moment: will I be able to greet people, will I be able to leave the scene, will I be able even to get dressed that day? We have no way of knowing that this will not be the issue. We have no way of knowing that the funeral itself will be anodyne, a kind of narcotic regression in which we are wrapped in the care of others and the gravity and meaning of the occasion. Nor can we know ahead of the fact the unending absence that follows, the void, the very opposite of meaning, the relentless succession of moments during which we will confront the experience of meaninglessness itself.

Oh shit, this is taking a turn. I can feel it—we both feel it. This isn’t puck bunny energy. In all those exchanges, I’m the one taking the lead. I pick the bunny; the bunny never picks me. This is totally different. This girl is different. It feels crazy to say it when I don’t even know her, but she’s way out of my league.

You should not let yourself be confused in your solitude by the fact that there is some thing in you that wants to move out of it…We know little, but that we must trust in what is difficult is a certainty that will never abandon us; it is good to be solitary, for solitude is difficult; that something is difficult must be one more reason for us to do it.

Our lives today are the culmination of every thought we’ve ever had. Once we embrace this concept—once we recognize we have created our world and take responsibility for it—we also realize we have the power to change our world by simply changing our thoughts. We can rewrite our story through new experiences and different responses, and enjoy a renewal of our inner lives.

What I say, what I have always said, is there has got to be an end to it. Now is the time to make an end. There will never be a better time, because there is always a reason to fight and kill and build more guns and weapons. Twenty years ago when we founded this Council we said, ‘Make an end to it—we will not waste what hope is left to us by building weapons of war.’ We knew this day would come; we hoped only that when it did we would have other kinds of weapons to fight with. Now it’s here. Now we had better be ready to take up the challenge, as Lily said. Or we will die, and perhaps the earth will rethink this whole experiment in consciousness and start afresh to grow some other form, less aggressive maybe, less extreme, less surprising.

She said nothing. She walked beside me, under my elbow sort of, eating. We went on. It was quiet, hardly anyone about getting the odor of honeysuckle all mixed She would have told me not to let me sit there on the steps hearing her door twilight slamming hearing Benjy still crying Supper she would have to come down then getting honeysuckle all mixed up in it   We reached the corner.

Frey goes on to elaborate, “a thriller is a story of a hero who has a mission to foil evil. Not just a hero—a clever hero. Not just a mission—an ‘impossible’ mission. An ‘impossible’ mission that will put our hero into terrible trouble.” According to International Thriller Writers, a thriller is characterized by “the sudden rush of emotions, the excitement, sense of suspense, apprehension, and exhilaration that drive the narrative, sometimes subtly with peaks and lulls, sometimes at a constant, breakneck pace.” ITW defines thrillers as a genre in which “tough, resourceful, but essentially ordinary heroes are pitted against villains determined to destroy them, their country, or the stability of the free world.” Part of the allure of thrillers, they say, comes from not only what their stories are about but also how they are told. “High stakes, nonstop action, plot twists that both surprise and excite, settings that are both vibrant and exotic, and an intense pace that never lets up until the adrenaline-packed climax.

To surrender to God means to let go and just love. By affirming that love is our priority in a situation, we actualize the power of God. This is not metaphor; it’s fact. We literally use our minds to co-create with Him. Through a mental decision—a conscious recognition of love’s importance and our willingness to experience it—we “call on a higher power.” We set aside our normal mental habit patterns and allow them to be superseded by a different, gentler mode of perception. That is what it means to let a power greater than we are direct our lives.

empirical evidence is precisely that which is sacred in so-called scientific thought, and by these means—there’s no point in denying it—we can go far, but at the same time, by following this method, we greatly distance ourselves from the problem, because it’s so, but so manifest that empirical proof itself is something that no one has ever heretofore truly dealt with, namely, no one has ever wished genuinely to confront the deeply problematic nature of empirical verification as such, because whoever did this went mad, or appeared to be a pure dilettante,

The quality of silence in my life speaks to the health of my soul/mind. If the silence is deafening, suppressive, terrifying... (it speaks to a fever raging silently in the psyche because the life I am living doesn’t align with your core values and/or the presence of something or someone harmful.) This quality of silence holds within it the unfelt, the unsaid, the unspeakable, the unrecognized, the unhealed, the unreconciled, the unconscionable...in addressing what lives in the silence and learning how to tolerate it—just sit with it—we begin the work that need be done to integrate the parts of ourselves sequestered into suppression.

i HAVE A STRONG UNDERSTANDING OF SUTTLE ENERGIES ,I MUST LEARN MORE, HOWEVER EVERYONE IS ASLEEP,AFRAID,I HAVE A GOOD IDEA ON HOW YHE PRAMID WAS BUILT HOWEVER I HAVE`NT ADEGREE [THE SITOM IS BROKE]IT USED TO BE A GOOD FEASIBLE IDEA WAS TRIED ,BUT BETEEWN,GOV,CHURCH,AN GOOD OLD FEARI`M AFRAID WE WILL ONLY NO GAS, COAL ,AN NUCLUER POWER THE UNWORLDLY FORCES DID`T GIVE US TECK THEY SHOWED US WHAT WAS ALREADY HERE AND HOW TO USE IT!WE NOT ANY SMARTER NOW THEN WE WERE THEN,GREED AND FEAR WILL ONLY PROVED SAFTY IN THE END TO THOSE FIEW WHO HAVE REMOVED THE LEAD SHADEDS THOSE WHO CONTROLL THE FEAR !IF WE WERE TO ACTUALLY LISTEN TO ONEANTHER KNOWAGE WILL DISOLVE FEAR ,BALANCEING THE POWER

It is probably a universal teaching of all cultures that putting a name to a demon helps to decrease its fearsomeness. I sometimes wonder whether the real, perhaps culturally subconscious, reason that medical pioneers have always sought to identify and classify specific diseases is less to understand than to beard them. Confrontation, somehow, is safer once we have set a label on a thing, as if the very process makes the beast sit still for a while and appear susceptible to taming; it puts under some element of control what has previously been a wilderness of unrestrained terror. When we give sickness a name, we civilize it—we make it play the game by our own rules. Naming a disease is the first step in organizing against it.

Then suddenly comes a lull in the tumult. Ludwig Breyer has stepped out to the front. There is silence. “Mr. Principal,” says Ludwig in a clear voice, “you have seen the war after your fashion—with flying banners, martial music, and with glamour. But you saw it only to the railway station from which we set off. —We do not mean to blame you. We, too, thought as you did. But we have seen the other side since then, and against that the heroics of 1914 soon wilted to nothing. Yet we went through with it—we went through with it because there was something deeper that held us together, something that only showed up out there, a responsibility perhaps, but at any rate something of which you know nothing and about which there can be no speeches.

The unconscious no sooner touches us than we are it―we become unconscious of ourselves. That is the age-old danger, instinctively known and feared by primitive man, who himself stands so very close to this pleroma. His consciousness is still uncertain, wobbling on its feet. It is still childish, having just emerged from the primal waters. A wave of the unconscious may easily roll over it, and then he forgets who he was and does things that are strange to him. Hence primitives are afraid of uncontrolled emotions, because consciousness breaks down under them and gives way to possession. All man's strivings have therefore been directed towards the consolidation of consciousness. This was the purpose of rite and dogma; they were dams and walls to keep back the dangers of the unconscious, the "perils of the soul." Primitive rites consist accordingly in the exorcising of spirits, the lifting of spells, the averting of the evil omen, propitiation, purification, and the production by sympathetic magic of helpful occurrences.

One way of phrasing it might be to say that injustice and irrationality are inevitable parts of the human condition, but that challenges to them are inevitable also. On Sigmund Freud’s memorial in Vienna appear the words: 'The voice of reason is small, but very persistent.' Philosophers and theologians have cogitated or defined this in differing ways, postulating that we respond to a divinely implanted 'conscience' or that—as Adam Smith had it—we carry around an unseen witness to our thoughts and doings and seek to make a good impression on this worthy bystander. Neither assumption need be valid; it’s enough that we know that this innate spirit exists. We have to add the qualification, however, that even if it is presumptively latent in all of us, it very often remains just that—latent. Its existence guarantees nothing in itself, and the catalytic or Promethean moment only occurs when one individual is prepared to cease being the passive listener to such a voice and to become instead its spokesman, or representative.

He’s on the verge of it—we can tell. He is on the verge of finding that very hard truth—that it will never be complete, or feel complete. This is usually something you only have to learn once—that just like there is no such thing as forever, there is no such thing as total. When you’re in the thrall of your first love, this discovery feels like the breaking of all momentum, the undermining of all promise. For the past year, Neil has assumed that love was like a liquid pouring into a vessel, and that the longer you loved, the more full the vessel became, until it was entirely full. The truth is that over time, the vessel expands as well. You grow. Your life widens. And you can’t expect your partner’s love alone to fill you. There will always be space for other things. And that space isn’t empty as much as it’s filled by another element. Even though the liquid is easier to see, you have to learn to appreciate the air. We didn’t learn this all at once. Some of us didn’t learn it at all, or learned it and then forgot it as things became really bad. But for all of us, there was a moment like this—the record skips, and you have the chance to either switch away from the song or to let it play through, a little more flawed than before.

He’s on the verge of it—we can tell. He is on the verge of finding that very hard truth—that it will never be complete, or feel complete. This is usually something you only have to learn once—that just like there is no such thing as forever, there is no such thing as total. When you’re in the thrall of your first love, this discovery feels like the breaking of all momentum, the undermining of all promise. For the past year, Neil has assumed that love was like a liquid pouring into a vessel, and that the longer you loved, the more full the vessel became, until it was entirely full. The truth is that over time, the vessel expands as well. You grow. Your life widens. And you can’t expect your partner’s love alone to fill you. There will always be space for other things. And that space isn’t empty as much as it’s filled by another element. Even though the liquid is easier to see, you have to learn to appreciate the air. We didn’t learn this all at once. Some of us didn’t learn it at all, or learned it and then forgot it as things became really bad. But for all of us, there was a moment like this—the record skips, and you have the chance to either switch away from the song or to let it play through, a little more flawed than before.

Reasons to keep books: To read them one day! If you hope to read the book one day, definitely keep it. It’s fine to be aspirational; no one else will keep score on what you have actually read. It’s great to dream and hope that one day you do have the time to read all your books. To tell your story. Some people give away every book they’ve read explaining, “What’s the point in keeping a book after I’ve read it if I’m not going to read it again? It’s someone else’s turn to read my copy now.” If that works for you, then only keep books on your shelves that you haven’t read yet. However you can probably understand that the books that you haven’t yet read only tell the story of your future, they don’t say much about where you’ve been and what made you who you are today. To make people think you’ve read the book! This one may be hard or easy for you to admit, but we don’t think there is any shame in it. Sometimes we hold on to books because they represent our aspirational selves, supporting the perception of how well read or intelligent we are. They are certainly the books our ideal selves would read, but in reality—if we had to admit it—we probably never will. We would argue that you should still have these books around. They are part of your story and who you want to be. To inspire someone else in your household to read those books one day. Perhaps it’s your kids or maybe your guests. Keeping books for the benefit of others is thoughtful and generous. At the very least, anyone who comes into your home will know that these are important books and will be exposed to the subjects and authors that you feel are important. Whether they actually read Charles Dickens or just know that he existed and was a prolific writer after seeing your books: mission accomplished! To retain sentimental value. People keep a lot of things that have sentimental value: photographs, concert ticket stubs, travel knickknacks. Books, we would argue, have deeper meaning as sentimental objects. That childhood book of your grandmother's— she may have spent hours and hours with it and perhaps it was instrumental in her education. That is much more impactful than a photograph or a ceramic figurine. You are holding in your hands what she held in her hands. This brings her into the present and into your home, taking up space on your shelves and acknowledging the thread of family and history that unites you. Books can do that in ways that other objects cannot. To prove to someone that you still have it! This may be a book that you are otherwise ready to give away, but because a friend gifted it, you want to make sure you have it on display when they visit. This I’ve found happens a lot with coffee table books. It can be a little frustrating when the biggest books are the ones you want to get rid of the most, yet, you are beholden to keeping them. This dilemma is probably better suited to “Dear Abby” than to our guidance here. You will know if it’s time to part ways with a book if you notice it frequently and agonize over the need to keep it to stay friends with your friend. You should probably donate it to a good organization and then tell your friend you spilled coffee all over it and had to give it away! To make your shelves look good! There is no shame in keeping books just because they look good. It’s great if your books all belong on your shelves for multiple reasons, but if it’s only one reason and that it is that it looks good, that is good enough for us. When you need room for new acquisitions, maybe cull some books that only look good and aren’t serving other purposes.

several of which are in development as films. His fiction has been nominated for or won an Anthony, Barry, Macavity, Strand Critic’s Circle, Readers’ Choice, Crimespree, Dilys, Crime Shot, Indie Lit, Romantic Times, and ITW Thriller

Paris around, doubtless, was awakening to its utmost gayety, its wildest whirl of pleasure; but here we knew nothing of it—we only knew that bread would be dearer, and that the very aged and the very young would soon perish of cold, and that wood would be scarce for the stove, and that in the little chamber under the roof there lay a woman dying. Ah! that is all the poor ever do know of what there is on earth. That there is pain, and there is cold, and there is death. With other things they have no part nor portion.

I shared with Fleur the mysterious self-contempt of the survivor. There were times we hated who we were, and who we had to become, in order not to follow those we loved into the next world. We grew hard. We became impenetrable, sparing of our pity. Sorrows that leveled other people were small to us. We made no move to avoid pain. Sometimes we even welcomed it--we were clumsy with knives, fire, boiling water, steel traps. Pain took our minds off the greater pain that was the mistake that we still existed.

You won’t have to provide it—we can bring our own,” Mavis said. “And Prudence here’s one of the best shots in the county.” “In case you’re on the fence, I can take out a pea at a hundred yards, open scope,” Prudence added.

What humanizes the speaker’s rage, what keeps the poem a poem, is the grief which colors it—we understand that the speaker’s immoderation and anger come from deep personal injury. We recognize that the rage comes out of an experience of empathy, and that forcefield between love and denunciation moves us as much as Lear’s rage on the mountainside. It amounts to the difference between poetic terrorism and poetic tragedy.

Time just is, and we move through it, around it, over it, under it…we are always dead and alive and unborn and stardust, all at once, all the time.

Why even smart people get bad results by Warren Buffett It' ego, greed, envy, fear…It's mindless imitation of other people. I mean, there are a variety of factors that cause that horsepower of the mind to get diminished dramatically before the output turns out. And I would say if Charlie and I have any advantage it's not because we're so smart, it's because we're rational and we very seldom let extraneous factors interfere with our thoughts. We don't let other people's opinion interfere with it…we try to get fearful when others are greedy. We try to get greedy when others are fearful. We try to avoid any kind of imitation of other people's behavior. And those are the factors that cause smart people to get average to bad results. I always look at IQ and talent as representing the horsepower of the motor, but in terms of output, the efficiency with which the motor works, depends on rationality. That's because a lot of people start out with 400-horsepower motor and get a hundred horsepower of output. So why do smart people do things that interfere with getting the output they're entitled to? It gets into the habits, and character and temperament, and it really gets into behaving in a rational manner. Not getting in your own way.

we want to see less of it—we tend to see more of that behavior. The same dynamic works in romantic relations and with co-workers too: praise what you love and you tend to get more of it. In fact, many proponents of the study of positive psychology talk about how our subconscious mind cannot understand the word don’t. So when interacting with others, it’s much more impactful to say what you want from someone rather than you don’t want. For example, while on a crowded street with a child, you could say, “Walk by my side so I can keep you safe,” rather than, “Don’t run ahead of me.” Putting our attention on what we want rather than what we don’t want is not only incredibly powerful from a manifesting and law of attraction standpoint, it’s also incredibly powerful when making requests of others in our lives.

And what I most remember was that this guy told us that—because we are in the middle of it—we will not live long enough to see how it plays out in this world.

Because that is how we do it—we approach pregnancy like a job, gobbling up everything we can on the subject so that we are experts on every theory. And, as with most jobs, a certain amount of drudgery accrues. I have discovered that, in addition to ensuring mastery of these theories, this strategy to parenting also, unfortunately, results in utter confusion and frustration.

Let’s face it—we are sinners living with sinners, so there is never a day when forgiveness isn’t needed. The refusal to forgive, the temptation to replay an offense in our minds, and our thoughts of punishment and revenge all damage the relationships God wants to use to make us more like him. They are workrooms for his grace. In this important area of forgiveness, (1) the Cross causes me to want others to know the same forgiveness Christ purchased for me, and (2) it changes me, enabling me to genuinely forgive others.

Live your life,Imogen.Suck every bit of happiness out of it.You deserve it.We all do.

Human beings have one of the poorest senses of smell of all the organisms on Earth, so weak that we have only a tiny vocabulary to express it...We depend on the sophistication of trained dogs to lead us through the olfactory world, tracking individual people, detecting even the slightest trace of explosives and other dangerous chemicals.

We had better rate our important parts-our thoughts, feelings, and actions-to see how they helped or hindered us. But-damn it!-we didn't have to rate our self, our being, our essence. Our self or personhood was too complex to be given a global rating. We could say, for practical reasons, it was "good"-meaning it helped us to live and enjoy. Or we could say that it just didn't have to be rated at all. Use our self but not rate it!

One faithful witness is worth a thousand mute professors of religion . . . Our faith grows by expression . . . we must share it—we must witness.

When we see diversity as a blessing and a gift—one that carries challenges with it—we see the world from God’s view. And when we minister with children in light of this blessing, we turn our churches and our ministries with children into places of radical hospitality.

To put it still more plainly: the desire for security and the feeling of insecurity are the same thing. To hold your breath is to lose your breath. We worry because we feel unsafe, and want to be safe. Yet it is perfectly useless to say that we should not want to be safe. Calling a desire bad names doesn’t get rid of it. What we have to discover is that there is no safety, that seeking it is painful, and that when we imagine that we have found it, we don’t like it. In other words, if we can really understand what we are looking for—that safety is isolation, and what we do to ourselves when we look for it—we shall see that we do not want it at all. No one has to tell you that you should not hold your breath for ten minutes. You know that you can’t do it, and that the attempt is most uncomfortable.

September 1962, John Kennedy spoke before the start of the America’s Cup about the allure of water and of the Cup, saying, “All of us have in our veins the exact same percentage of salt in our blood that exists in the ocean, and, therefore, we have salt in our blood, in our sweat, in our tears. We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea—whether it is to sail or to watch it—we are going back from whence we came.

The church is in God's keeping. We do not have the right to be anxious about it.We have our Lord's word that the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.

In the Cymek we call it furiach-yajh-hett: the dancing mad god. I never thought to see one. It came out of a funnel in the world to stand between us and the lawgivers. Their pistols were silent. Words died in throats like flies in a web. The dancing mad god moved through the room with a savage and alien step. It gathered us to it-we renegades, we criminals. We refugees. Constructs that tell tales; earthbound garuda; reporters who make the news; criminal scientists and scientific criminals. The dancing mad god collected us all like errant worshippers, chiding us for going astray.

As members of the Church, if we chart a course leading to eternal life; if we begin the processes of spiritual rebirth, and are going in the right direction; if we chart a course of sanctifying our souls, and degree by degree are going in that direction; and if we chart a course of becoming perfect, and, step by step and phase by phase, are perfecting our souls by overcoming the world, then it is absolutely guaranteed—there is no question whatever about it—we shall gain eternal life.

We are told that the Bible must be put in such simple terms of language that anybody taking it up and reading it is going to understand it right away. My friends, this is sheer nonsense. What we must do is educate the masses of the people up to the Bible not bring the Bible down to their level. One of the greatest troubles today is that everything is being brought down to the same level; everything is cheapened. The common man is made the standard of authority; he decides everything, and everything has to be brought down to him…we need to do is not to replace it...we need to reach and train people up to the standard and the language, the dignity and glory of the old Authorized Version.

most remember was that this guy told us that—because we are in the middle of it—we will not live long enough to see how it plays out in this world.” I told Bob that it made me think of my sister and how she got her news probably on the internet in places I would never think to go to.

We love the girls—yes, I dare say it—we love them more. Even this present moment, the evening city gliding past the taxi window, where the world is going wrong and time is out of joint, is a crime. This needs to be righted. To be solved. No peace. No truce with the furies!

For once, Win, I wish you would fucking listen to me.” “Vane!” “What?” he barks. “Your eyes are black.” He rushes over to a tide pool and looks at his reflection. The words I chose while reaching out to Vane echo in my head. If you choose me, you choose him too. That’s what I told the shadow. “Vane, I think—” He turns around and meets my gaze. Even though his eyes are black, I can still sense him searching mine. I know he can feel it—we are sharing the Neverland Death Shadow. The shadow is split between us.

She tells me that’s just the way we do it—we look death in the face. She doesn’t know about the death industry. The money made from pumping a body full of pink liquid, how they peel a face off then back on, prick needles into the corners of eyes to make you look like you’re sleeping.

if we can really understand what we are looking for—that safety is isolation, and what we do to ourselves when we look for it—we shall see that we do not want it at all.

If we practice moving toward our body’s distress, however—meaning noticing our body’s reactions, taking them seriously, and working with our body, not against it—we give ourselves a better chance of mitigating or reducing distress or harm to ourselves or those who love us.

Remember, “smoker” is not a protected class, so you can discriminate against it—we do! If you smoke, you will not be approved for one of our rentals.

we visited the Cape Coast Castle, one of around forty “slave castles” that had served as prisons for slaves en route to the Americas. We were greeted by a tour guide, who walked Mrs. Trump through many rooms and told stories of how the slave trade had begun. We were shown a room that had held hundreds of men and women, with tiny windows that barely let in light. There was a small ditch dug down the middle of the room, maybe six inches deep and wide, and it was explained to us that it had been used as a bathroom. Each room was horrible, and the tour guide was brilliant in the way he told us the grim and heartbreaking story of the way the people kept there had lived. And when I say brilliant, I mean that he told it in a way that we almost lived it—we felt their pain, their misery, almost understood what it must have been like to be treated as cattle. The thought that human beings were held in such horrific conditions until they were placed on ships in the middle of the night, only to live in even worse conditions until they arrived at their destination, was hard to stomach. There were rooms for the women that were equally as brutal. We stopped at an altar to pay tribute to all those who had lost their lives and those who had lived under such cruel circumstances. I remember feeling distinctly ashamed that that had ever been allowed to happen and about our country’s complicity, since so many of the people had been shipped to the United States. Mrs. Trump felt deeply impacted as well. In conversations later that day she said, “I did not know. The conditions were so horrible. Did you see the rooms? How can people do that? Everyone should see these things, and we should talk about it openly.” We all, of course, knew about and abhorred slavery, but were less familiar with all the details of its brutal origins. The emotional visit concluded with Mrs. Trump walking through the “door of no return,” the door that the people had left through to be loaded onto ships to be taken to the various countries that used slave labor.

What was that about the family investment project?” she asks. “Just that without your cooperation your family will likely go the way of the bird,” her mother cuts in before Sirhan can muster a reply. “Not that I expect you to care.” Boris butts in. “Core worlds are teeming with corporates. Is bad business for us, good business for them. If you are seeing what we are seen—” “Don’t remember you being there,” Pierre says grumpily. “In any event,” Sirhan says smoothly, “the core isn’t healthy for us one-time fleshbodies anymore. There are still lots of people there, but the ones who uploaded expecting a boom economy were sadly disappointed. Originality is at a premium, and the human neural architecture isn’t optimized for it—we are, by disposition, a conservative species, because in a static ecosystem that provides the best return on sunk reproductive investment costs. Yes, we change over time—we’re more flexible than almost any other animal species to arise on Earth—but we’re like granite statues compared to organisms adapted to life under Economics 2.0.” “You tell ’em, boy,” Pamela chirps, almost mockingly. “It wasn’t that bloodless when I lived through it.” Amber casts her a cool stare. “Where was I?” Sirhan snaps his fingers, and a glass of fizzy grape juice appears between them. “Early upload entrepreneurs forked repeatedly, discovered they could scale linearly to occupy processor capacity proportional to the mass of computronium available, and that computationally trivial tasks became tractable. They could also run faster, or slower, than real time. But they were still human, and unable to operate effectively outside human constraints. Take

We have honor. If we hold to that, we will win. If we don’t hold to it…we don’t deserve to win.

But to find the murderer and maybe the Horn, and to make sure there’s an afterward for you and me”—because there would be a you and me for them; he’d do whatever it took to ensure it—“we need to be smart.

I told him how this lecturing man said that there had been three major revolutions in the history of man’s world: the first, the agricultural revolution; the second, the industrial revolution; and the third was this social revolution—meaning the way the internet was changing the world. I said, “And what I most remember was that this guy told us that—because we are in the middle of it—we will not live long enough to see how it plays out in this world.” I told Bob that it made

Life has its own ways of teaching us, its being & it got its ups & downs but We hold the decisions to accept what Life throws at us & We're Life itself.Whatever we stand to change, gives us a life that was chosen.So whatever We choose to be or want, need or aspire; We're sure the benefactors of such Life & We got to be responsible for whatever comes with it.We got to sacrifice almost everything for the kind of life We want & need.We got to always understand that there're pains attached to it.We got to be bruised no matter what, wounded in other to be moulded & mounted on a larger milestone of a desired dream and life of goodness.So Wherever we find ourselves then, We don't quit or give excuses for not moving forward.We just have to embrace the results & stories and then Push On to Rewriting a Matchless story,With Resounding results.The truth is, We were Given this Life, to decide what's best for Us & in it lies death. Death is, not wanting to try but accepting that- It's Over.As a result of this, Possibility Neurons Die & guess what, Failure of self & being,Failure of will comes with it.We're the architects of Our lives, however We see it, Life runs in the directions of Our Choices.

The kinds of attention we get on social media is really very much like crack cocaine. We have social obesity I call it—we can’t stop our consumption of opportunities to display ourselves and get feedback from other people.

There's a story written in us, added to with each conception' it remembers and it changes us' we move to something from something.' Abbess Glass held her two hands before her side by side, palms out, thumbs folded in, very close together so that the narrowest of gaps stood between the index finger of both.'Life.' She raised one hand a fraction.'Death.' She raised the other to match it.'We spend all our years on the short journey across this gap. But look' the gap is narrow if you cross it, but follow it and it's long. As long as you like. You and I journey across the gap, but as a people we follow it. The Ancestor stands at both ends. The Ancestor watches us from before the flight' before the shiphearts first beat their rhythm. That is the Ancestor of singular form, the origin, the alpha. Along our journey we have become many and varied. The Ancestor watches us from the start and from the end, from beyond the death of stars, in the cold dark of beyond. That is the Ancestor of singular mind, the destination, the omega.'The Ancestor is meaning in chaos, memory in time, and that is holy. The ritual that Sister Wheel teaches is part of that memory' our connection to it, and it is important, whatever you think about the person who delivers the message. But what I really care about is the knowing behind it. We are many parts of the one. We are the steps, the Ancestor is the journey.

I treat you with my heart,you treat me like idiot,i deserve it,we don't owe anyone

Today, the energy most of us use is owned by a tiny number of corporations that generate it for the profit of their shareholders. Their primary goal, indeed their fiduciary duty, is to produce maximum profit—which is why most energy companies have been so reluctant to switch to renewables. But what, we asked, if the energy we use was owned by ordinary citizens, and controlled democratically? What if we changed the nature of the energy and the structure of its ownership? So we decided that we didn’t want to be buying renewable power from ExxonMobil and Shell, even if they were offering it—we wanted that power generation to be owned by the public, by communities, or by energy cooperatives. If energy systems are owned by us, democratically, then we can use the revenues to build social services needed in rural areas, towns, and cities—day cares, elder care, community centers, and transit systems (instead of wasting it on, say, $180-million retirement packages for the likes of Rex Tillerson).

We worry because we feel unsafe, and want to be safe. Yet it is perfectly useless to say that we should not want to be safe. Calling a desire bad names doesn’t get rid of it. What we have to discover is that there is no safety, that seeking it is painful, and that when we imagine that we have found it, we don’t like it. In other words, if we can really understand what we are looking for—that safety is isolation, and what we do to ourselves when we look for it—we shall see that we do not want it at all. No one has to tell you that you should not hold your breath for ten minutes. You know that you can’t do it, and that the attempt is most uncomfortable.

To argue in the face of our fear brings on the _magical “yes,”_ the simple affirmation of our being _Argument_ springs out of our authority. It escapes from us as our thought and feeling, as our sounds, our music, our rhythms. When we give ourselves _permission_, the argument bursts from our lungs, out of our throats, out of words formed and caressed by our lips, out of words born of our hearts. When we give ourselves _permission_, we rediscover our will to win—may I say it?—we become born-again gladiators.

It's not unusual to feel emotionally split, as if living a dual reality. How we are functioning on the outside is often not reflective of what is happening on the inside. If we could photograph this, it might look like a double exposure. Grief is a layer that we wear on our hearts and spirits, at least for a time. Initially, it might be like outerwear. We wrap ourselves in it—we may even lose ourselves in it—and others understand that we cannot take it off in their presence, even if we tried. When it becomes too heavy or uncomfortable to lug around, we tuck it under the surface of our skin or pack it away in an interior closet. But we never forget it is there.