Junction Of Life Quotes

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This is how....life happens. One small thing at a time. A series of inconsequential junctions, any or none of which can lead to salvation or disaster. There are no grand moments where a person does or does not perform the act that defines their humanity. There are only moments that appear, briefly, to be this way.
Steven Galloway (The Cellist of Sarajevo)
Let's get really fucked up and full of sentimental despair and then finally decide life, despite every heartbreak and anguished cry, is worth each pulse and breath.
Jim Dodge (Stone Junction)
Junction nineteen! Una, she came off at Junction nineteen! You've added an hour to your journey before you even started. Come on, let's get you a drink. How's your love life, anyway?" Oh GOD. Why can't married people understand that this is no longer a polite question to ask? We wouldn't rush up to THEM and roar, "How's your marriage going? Still having sex?" Everyone knows that dating in your thirties is not the happy-go-lucky free-for-it-all it was when you were twenty-two and that the honest answer is more likely to be, "Actually, last night my married lover appeared wearing suspenders and a darling little Angora crop-top, told me he was gay/a sex addict/a narcotic addict/a commitment phobic and beat me up with a dildo," than, "Super, thanks.
Helen Fielding (Bridget Jones's Diary (Bridget Jones, #1))
We believe and we hold our beliefs to be true and sacred until the day we discover that we were duped. The end of belief is a challenging moment. You feel lonely, unconnected, with nothing to hang on. Your life becomes empty and aimless. You curse the day doubt entered your mind but you cannot undo the damage. You need to find a new direction for your life, something new to hang your hope on to continue living. And most of the time that thing is you. At that junction in life you will need to believe in you to continue living.
Bangambiki Habyarimana (The Great Pearl of Wisdom)
Human beings are not made to take shortcuts,... You're to live your life, moment by moment. Your life isn't here to entertain you - it's to be lived.
David Rotenberg (The Placebo Effect (Junction Chronicles, #1))
Let's get really fucked up and full of sentimental despair and then finally decide life, despite every heartbreak and anguished cry, is worth each pulse and breath
Jim Dodge (Stone Junction)
We thought Bugles and a Tiger and its sequel, The Road Past Mandalay, plus Bhowani Junction, which was made into a movie starring Ava Gardner as a half-caste (or Chi Chi) East Indian and Stewart Granger playing an Indian Army
Daniel Hill (A Life Of Blood And Danger)
Life is a long road with lots of junctions and every time you chose to go one way, you may just have easily have gone the other. We don't make choices so much as choices are made like a new fashion we slip into without realising.
Chloe Thurlow (Katie in Love)
Time is such a crazy thing, a junction of every second turning into minutes then hours, and finally into a lifetime. More precious than gold, money, or talent. In the end, it all comes down to how long we still have left to live. And it’s never enough. 
Ivy Oakes (What if Stars Don't Die)
listen to your heart for guidance and be guided by its message of comfort or discomfort. Your heart is the junction point between your mind and your body. If the choice feels comfortable in your body, move into it with confidence. If the choice feels uncomfortable, pause and see the consequences of your action with your inner vision. Honoring the guidance that is provided by your body’s intelligence will help you make the most evolutionary choices for yourself and those in your life.
Deepak Chopra (The Seven Spiritual Laws of Yoga: A Practical Guide to Healing Body, Mind, and Spirit)
This is how she now believes life happens. One small thing at a time. A series of inconsequential junctions, any or none of which can lead to salvation or disaster. There are no grand moments where a person does or does not perform the act that defines their humanity. There are only moments that appear, briefly, to be this way.
Steven Galloway (The Cellist of Sarajevo)
Not all destinations are found in the junctions of your palm lines.
Romalyn Ante (Antiemetic for Homesickness)
Sometimes nations come to a junction: There, they have to make a choice between democracy and fascism, that is to say, between life and death!
Mehmet Murat ildan
deceivers shall always be at the junction of double mindedness
Ernest Agyemang Yeboah
...Be what you like' 'Some people, sir,' remarked Lamps, 'are sometimes what they don't like.' 'Nobody knows that better than I do,' sighed the other. 'I have been what I don't like, all my life.
Charles Dickens (Mugby Junction (Hesperus Classics))
You were right when you said I was holding onto April's apron strings even though she was trying to cut them. I've spent so long relying on her that it's sort of become a habit. It's time I relied on myself for a bit and took control of my life.
Nicola Sinclair (Promise (Peters Junction Series, #2))
It hides the seams in narrative the way a strip of molding hides the junction where walls and floor meet. And it allows a person to think beyond each new drama, thus moving the story forward and allowing unresolved issues to pile up and increase tension.
Chuck Palahniuk (Consider This: Moments in My Writing Life After Which Everything Was Different)
The Marquis stepped between Richard and Door. 'You can't go back to your old home or your old job or your old life,' he said to Richard almost gently. 'None of those things exist. Up there, you don't exist.' They had reached a junction: a place where three tunnels came together. Door and Hunter set off along one of them, the one that no water was coming down, and they did not look back. The Marquis lingered. 'You'll just have to make the best of it down here,' he said to Richard, 'in the sewers and the magic and the dark.
Neil Gaiman (Neverwhere (London Below, #1))
We believe and we hold our beliefs to be true and sacred until the day we discover that we were duped. The end of belief is a challenging moment. You feel lonely, unconnected, with nothing to hang on. Your life becomes empty and aimless. You curse the day doubt entered your mind but you cannot undo the damage. You need to find a new direction for your life, something new to hang your hope on to continue living. And most of the time that thing is you. At that junction in life you will need to believe in yourself to continue living.
Bangambiki Habyarimana (The Great Pearl of Wisdom)
And so Emma Morley walked home in the evening light, trailing her disappointment behind her. The day was cooling off now, and she shivered as she felt something in the air, an unexpected shudder of anxiety that ran the length of her spine, and was so intense as to make her stop walking for a moment. Fear of the future, she thought. She found herself at the imposing junction of George Street and Hanover Street as all around her people hurried home from work or out to meet friends or lovers, all with a sense of purpose and direction. And here she was, twenty-two and clueless and sloping back to a dingy flat, defeated once again. ‘What are you doing to do with your life?’ In one way or another it seemed that people had been asking her this forever, teachers. her parents, friends at three in the morning, but the question had never seemed this pressing and still she was no nearer an answer. The future rose up ahead of her, a succession of empty days, each more daunting and unknowable than the one before her. How would she ever fill them all? She began walking again, south towards The Mound. ‘Live each day as if it’s your last’, that was the conventional advice, but really, who had the energy for that? What if rained or you felt a bit glandy? It just wasn’t practical. Better by far to simply try and be good and be courageous and bold and to make a difference. Not change the world exactly, but the bit around you. Go out there with your passion and your electric typewriter and work hard at…something. Change lives through art maybe. Cherish your friends, stay true to your principles, live passionately and fully and well. Experience new things. Love and be loved, if you ever get the chance.
David Nicholls (One Day)
Some of the city legislators, whose concern for appropriate names and the maintenance of the city's landmarks was the principal part of their political life, saw to it that "Doctor Street" was never used in any official capacity. And since they knew that only Southside residents kept it up, they had notices posted in the stores, barbershops, and restaurants in that part of the city saying that the avenue running northerly and southerly from Shore Road fronting the lake to the junction of routes 6 and 2 leading to Pennsylvania, and also running parallel to and between Rutherford Avenue and Broadway, had always been and would always be known as Mains Avenue and not Doctor Street. It was a genuinely clarifying public notice because it gave Southside residents a way to keep their memories alive and please the city legislators as well. They called it Not Doctor Street, and were inclined to call the charity hospital at its northern end No Mercy Hospital since it was 1931, on the day following Mr. Smith's leap from its cupola, before the first colored expectant mother was allowed to give birth inside its wards and not on its steps.
Toni Morrison (Song of Solomon)
Mechanical stress on the bone produced a piezoelectric signal from the collagen. The signal was biphasic, switching polarity with each stress-and-release. The signal was rectified by the PN junction between apatite and collagen. This coherent signal did more than merely indicate that stress had occurred. Its strength told the cells how strong the stress was,and its polarity told them what direction it came from. Osteogenic cells where the potential was negative would be stimulated to grow more bone, while those in the positive area would close up shop and dismantle their matrix. If growth and resorption were considered as two aspects of one process, the electrical signal acted as an analog code to transfer information about stress to the cells and trigger the appropriate response.Now we knew how stress was converted into an electrical signal. We had discovered a transducer, a device that converts other forces into electricity or vice versa.
Robert O. Becker (The Body Electric: Electromagnetism and the Foundation of Life)
It's a child's world, full of separate places. Give me a paper and pencil now and ask me to draw a map of the fields I roamed when I was small, and I cannot do it. But change the question, and ask me to list what was there and I can fill pages. The wood ant's nest. The newt pond. The oak covered in marble galls. The birches by the motorway fence with fly agarics at their feet. These things were the waypoints of my world. And other places became magic through happenstance. When I found a huge red underwing moth behind the electricity junction box at the end of my road, that box became a magic place. I needed to check behind it every time I walked past, though nothing was ever there. I'd run to check the place where once I'd caught a grass snake, look up at the tree that one afternoon had held a roosting owl. These places had a magical importance, a pull on me that other places did not, however devoid of life they were in all the visits since.
Helen Macdonald (H is for Hawk)
Listen, does your boy know how to work? Try to teach him to work, to sacrifice, to fight. He better learn now, because he’s going to have to do it some day. Lloyd Hale was a sophomore on that first team we took to Junction, and he asked me one time what I meant by “fight.” Well, I don’t mean fistfight, like we used to do back in Arkansas, I told him. I mean, some morning when you’ve been out of school twenty years and you wake up and your house has burned down and your mother is in the hospital and the kids are all sick and you’re overdrawn at the bank and your wife has run off with the drummer, what are you going to do? Throw in?
Paul W. Bryant (Bear: The Hard Life & Good Times of Alabama's Coach Bryant)
The Truth! The one we seek throughout our life, without realizing that it is inside...in here, father...in here, where I am pointing to, in my chest, in a genetic junction of stories, in the violet and golden tones of a sky that hides nothing more than its beauty. While the goddess waves at me, I see the exact half of each one of us, the one that we'll tirelessly search for every year of our lives without letting us realize that the dream is crazy.
Pat R (Os Homens Nunca Saberão Nada Disto)
anyone before! Excited about his trip to Bombay, Ramkrishna trotted alongside his mama to the railway station. He patted the bundle of his life’s savings tied at his waist and felt secure. Soon they were inside a moving train. The train gathered speed and after a few hours stopped at a junction where they alighted to take another connection. They were waiting at a platform for the next train that would take them to their destination when an old man, bent over double, approached them.
Neelima Dalmia Adhar (Father Dearest: The Life and Times of R.K. Dalmia)
WITH NO REPLY from Halleck to his October 26 request for a plan of operations, Grant moved forward on his own initiative on November 2. He telegraphed the general in chief that he had “commenced a movement” on Grand Junction, a sought-after prize in West Tennessee that took its name from the intersection of the east–west Memphis and Charleston and the north–south Mississippi Central railroad lines. Grant intended to assemble five divisions there and move south into Mississippi toward Holly Springs and Grenada.
Ronald C. White Jr. (American Ulysses: A Life of Ulysses S. Grant)
True emotional healing lies somewhere between intentional choices and divine intervention, a junction of surrender, faith, trust, and action.
Jo Ann Fore (When a Woman Finds Her Voice: Overcoming Life's Hurts & Using Your Story to Make a Difference)
Instead of sashaying down the aisle to wedding bliss, I detoured over to Malfunction Junction.
Elaine Ambrose (Midlife Cabernet: Life, Love & Laughter after Fifty (Midlife Humor))
Now, all quiet, all rusty, wind and rain in possession, lamps extinguished, Mugby Junction dead and indistinct, with its robe drawn over its head, like Cæsar. Now, too, as the belated traveller plodded up and down, a shadowy train went by him in the gloom which was no other than the train of a life. From whatsoever intangible deep cutting or dark tunnel it emerged, here it came, unsummoned and unannounced, stealing upon him and passing away into obscurity. Here, mournfully went by, a child who had never had a childhood or known a parent, inseparable from a youth with a bitter sense of his namelessness, coupled to a man the enforced business of whose best years had been distasteful and oppressive, linked to an ungrateful friend, dragging after him a woman once beloved. Attendant, with many a clank and wrench, were lumbering cares, dark meditations, huge dim disappointments, monotonous years, a long jarring line of the discords of a solitary and unhappy existence.
Charles Dickens
She orders everyone to their feet & to their drink & to the junction where they can hold their love loves in a place of honor & delight. ... Celebrate the life that was before the death & what it gave you, & what you have even now.
Kris Radish (Annie Freeman's Fabulous Traveling Funeral)
Have you ever reached to a point where you asked God if the assignment is really from Him. In your account you have just 100 dollars and He is asking you to execute a 400 million dollar project. Have you reached to the point that you consider going further will make no sense? Have you reached the point where you asked God are you sure you are still with me? I just found myself in that Junction now. Turning back ....to realise I have gone too far for Him to forsake me. Moving forward I heard the voice saying ...be still and know that I am your God. Giving up.....Couldn't find it in my dictionary. Moral of the lesson. God cannot give you an assignment that is equal to your pocket. If it suits your pocket it is definitely not from God. Remember God will not take glory where nothing happen.
Patience Johnson (Why Does an Orderly God Allow Disorder)
( referring the old high level road) how come there are so many Bo trees along the old road especially where there was a junction of sorts? I wondered did a long time before I gathered much later in life that all those trees marked the spots where the legendary Buddhist revivalist Anagarika Dharmapala preached during his campaign and the British, sharp enough to observe that behind the Buddhist campaign was a national campaign, which in turn, was a political campaign, which again meant that the British rule was threatened, countered by building a public lavatory wherever the Buddhists had planted a Bo tree, and true enough there were public lavatories near Bo trees at Borella, Pettah, and Kirulapona
Tissa Abeysekara
( referring the old high level road) how come there are so many Bo trees along the old road especially where there was a junction of sorts? I wondered a long time before I gathered much later in life that all those trees marked the spots where the legendary Buddhist revivalist Anagarika Dharmapala preached during his campaign and the British, sharp enough to observe that behind the Buddhist campaign was a national campaign, which in turn, was a political campaign, which again meant that the British rule was threatened, countered by building a public lavatory wherever the Buddhists had planted a Bo tree, and true enough there were public lavatories near Bo trees at Borella, Pettah, and Kirulapona
Tissa Abeysekara (Bringing Tony Home)
Tell me about your home.” “My home?” It took me a moment to realize he didn’t mean here. When had I come to think of this place as home? I shook away my shock. “Downington.” He nodded and kept working. “It’s not much different than Prater’s Junction, really.” “I guess you miss your friends there.” “Friends?” He’d edged closer to me now, the basket resting at the far end of the line. I scooted toward the porch, eased down on the step, leaving him to hang the last few things. “I didn’t have any close friends there.” “Really? I imagined you to be in the center of the social whirlwind.” “That would be Mama. Not me.” I sighed. “I thought maybe if I were in a bigger place, with more to do, more people to meet, life would be more exciting. Without Mama to direct everything. But it’s likely that’s not meant to be.” “I’m sure you’re appreciated wherever you are.” His gaze captured mine, held it even as he picked up the empty basket.
Anne Mateer (Wings of a Dream)
Thank you.” I hated feeling indebted to him, but I took great comfort in the hams and bacon slabs soaking in the curing syrup. He shrugged. “Nothing one neighbor wouldn’t do for another.” “I think you are more neighborly than most.” He poked a stick into the cooling ash. “It isn’t hard to want to help you.” I sucked in the smoky night air, its cold stinging my nose and chest. Though that night with Arthur on the front steps of the schoolhouse in Downington hadn’t been cold, suddenly it seemed too similar to this one. All alone. In the dark. Words that could mean so many different things. “Thank you,” I said. His shoulder raised and lowered as he stared into the distance. I wondered what his life was like, a single man in this small town. No family to speak of. Prater’s Junction didn’t seem to have many girls of an age for him to be interested in. So why didn’t he go elsewhere? Nothing held him here that I could see. He threw the stick on top of the fire pit. “I did it.” I pulled my coat closer around me. “Did what?” “Asked to be considered for a Texas Ranger.” I shoved my hands into the pockets of my coat. “Congratulations. I hope they accept you.” He stepped closer, so close that I could see every inch of his face, in spite of the cloak of night. “I’d never have dared, but for you.” With a hard swallow, I stepped away. Away from the reach of his arms, his lips. I had no intention of falling for a man I didn’t really know. Not again. Besides, though the sheriff had endearing qualities, my heart didn’t leap at his nearness. “Rebekah?” Ollie’s voice, from the house. Sheriff Jeffries touched his hat, stepped back, and nodded. “See you at church on Sunday, Rebekah.
Anne Mateer (Wings of a Dream)
Use-induced cortical reorganization, says Taub, "involves alterations different from mere learning and memory. Rather than producing just increased synaptic strength at certain junctions, which is believed to underlie learning, some unknown mechanism is instead producing wholesale topographic reorganization." And more: we are seeing evidence of the brain's ability to remake itself throughout adult life, not only in response to outside stimuli but even in response to directed mental effort. We are seeing, in short, the brain's potential to correct its own flaws and enhance its own capacities.
Jeffrey M. Schwartz (The Mind and the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force)
However, the morphogenetic field no longer has to account for every-thing. Acceptance of dedifferentiation lets us divide regrowth into two phases and better understand each. The first phase begins with the cleanup of wound debris by phagocytes (the scavenger race of white blood cells) and culminates in dedifferentiation of tissue to form a blastema. Redifferentiation and orderly growth of the needed part constitute the second phase. Simplifying the problem in this way should give biologists an immediate sense of accomplishment, for the first stage is now well under-stood. After phagocytosis, while the other tissues are dying back a short distance behind the amputation line, the epidermal cells divide and mi-grate over the end of the stump. Then, as this epidermis thickens into an apical cap, nerve fibers grow outward and subdivide to form individual synapselike connections the neuroepidermal junction (NEJ) - with the cap cells. This connection transmits or generates a simple but highly specific electrical signal in regenerating animals: a few hundred nanoamperes of direct current, initially positive, then changing in the course of a few days to negative.
Robert O. Becker (The Body Electric: Electromagnetism and the Foundation of Life)
is to go home and open a Bible to four verses in the Gospel of John—the one I already mentioned, John 7:37, and also from John 3 the third verse and the sixteenth verse, and John 10:10.
Michael R. Phillips (Destiny Junction: Behind Every Door is a Life, and Behind Every Life is a Destiny)
The journey God has set before us isn’t a freeway; we are constantly encountering forks and junctions and crossroads. Which way will we go when we meet them? Life is filled with decisions, and we can’t avoid them.
Billy Graham (Billy Graham in Quotes)
A family isn’t simply a passive inheritance. It’s defined by the bonds its members choose, and not just the bonds assigned by genetics. Each time a family member joins their life to a biological stranger in marriage, adoption or through having children, a new clan joins itself to our family tree at the junction point of the union. New ancestors are fused with ours. New descendants are sired by the mingling of separate genetic codes. Without this chosen love our gene pool would stagnate. Without this new family, an assigned inheritance couldn’t continue. Genes might specify the way we’re put together, but without our human will to love beyond those specifications, a family can’t be all the things it might be.
Stephen McGann (Flesh and Blood: A History of My Family in Seven Maladies)
History proceeds from one junction to next, choosing for some mysterious reason to follow first this path, then another
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
I first made the acquaintance of the mercurial good lady, who would assume such prominence in my life as I could scarcely imagine, on board the Calcutta Tiger Express as it stopped at Guntakal junction to take on water and fuel.
A.M. Sardar (A Christmas in Calcutta (Charlotte Holmes #1))
All that had taken place in many years of life at Boranly-Burannyi junction, all this great strain over a long time, all the troubles, difficulties and joys he had lived through - all this had to be expressed in a few words of farewell in the few minutes of laying to rest. How much, yet how little, is given to a man!
Chingiz Aitmatov (The Day Lasts More than a Hundred Years)
हमारी दो जिंदगियां होती हैं एक जो हम हर दिन जी रहे हैं दूसरी जो हम हर दिन जीना चाहते हैं
Divya Prakash Dubey (October Junction (Preview Edition) (Hindi Edition))
Time traveller He calls himself a time traveller, He travels anywhere and anytime, He is a very adept traveller, Who knows how to bypass time, We once met suddenly, When the traveller was travelling the highway of life, He was pacing very efficiently, And that day I happened to be on the same highway of life, As I was about to cross a junction, He stopped there too, And enquired if I knew how this highway of life did function? “I may not know that better than you,” Was my polite and slow answer, “Ah haa, you appear to be a stranger on this highway, Come let me introduce you to few tricks old and quite a few newer, So, come let us go this way.” Said the traveller as we both stepped on the highway, And paced towards a destination of his choosing, It was a beautiful experience anyway, Though his few ways were very amusing, Then we stopped at a far away corner, And he pulled something from his bag, He was smart but this thing seemed smarter, He opened it and removed the safety tag, Now he turned to me and said, “Look at the sky, what do you see?” And I without being reticent said, “The sky, the Sun, that is all I see,” Looking at me he replied, “I thought so, and here is the fact, You see the sky and just the Sun, But you miss the real act, Time invested cannot be undone, You see I am a time traveller and I travel with it, Today on this highway, tomorrow on another, But I never miss the destination even by a bit, And as we were walking together, I asked you what you see when you look at the sky, You should have said, nothing, I have no time for it, Because the Sun will be there, so will be the sky, Being the time travellers we are not allowed to sit, We have to keep on moving and always seeking, Until we reach our destiny, Now this for you is my lesson worth heeding, If you are to find your final destiny, So let the Sun be, let the stars shine, and let the sky spread its magical blue, You keep travelling, moving, from one destination to another, Then you shall be a time traveller too, Like none other, like none other, So we switched lanes on the highway, He rode in a direction new, And now I was a lone rider on my life’s highway, Having realised what is known to just a few, That to be the time traveller, We should not wander but travel with a fixed aim, Because a true traveller is like a true lover, Who knows love and destiny are not a game, So for the real time traveller, it is always one destiny and one love, Though crossing many destinations is a part of it all, But the passion for love and to love, Supercedes the lure of destinations all! Now I often see the time traveller on the highways that I cross, We just bow our heads and move ahead, Because we have a destination to cross, To reach the final destiny of love, and in this pursuit we shall always stay ahead!
Javid Ahmad Tak (They Loved in 2075!)
To be sure, there were all these maddening permutations of what could be that were not to be ignored—possibilities that were still too many to consider to one’s satisfaction. Yet, there was also a stunning beauty to all of this that was so profound that one could not help but love every facet of every conceivability, whether realized or beyond reach. There was so much to capture even in stillness that was akin to grasping at grains of sand so fine as to elude the grip—it was all so intricate, so overwhelming and so rapid, and nothing ever ceased in its glorious transformation that it could be sufficiently arrested and processed and thoroughly acknowledged. But still, there was an exhilaration in being engrossed in the details that evaded capture and in being oneself ensconced in constant flux so as to surrender without recourse to what was to come. A train whistle blows and a new door is to open: the tracks have many junction points and no shortage of stopovers and destinations. Yet, there is no instance that ever becomes the destination, no circumstance the definitive possibility, and one, for that very fact, could scarcely help but be filled with a heartening love for all of creation, if, indeed, it could be called ‘creation’ and such a word held reasonable accuracy. The Moment, after all, was Always and thus there was no ‘before,’ no instance preceding the instance. There was no infinite regression of causality, no ‘hello’ or ‘goodbye’ and certainly no ‘take care of yourself’ that need wrench one’s heart. There was simply the EverToward: the shifting of Now and the reformulation of Then, wherein the form and essence engendered instantaneously a sculpting of arbitrary and historic juxtapositions—which, themselves, were composed of retroactively-shaped illusions. In spite of this, there still emerges a yearning for those prehistoric elements now faded, those characters for whom one has felt an affection and who nourished one’s growth and one’s formulations of what exists—if ‘exist’ indeed suffices as a descriptor. There is twinge of loss for what was, even if it has never been or has otherwise taken on new and ersatz constructions in mind. Notwithstanding this, one cannot help but perseverate upon the hypothetical stories of a speculative childhood that presumably nurtured imagination, the scoldings that established assumptive boundary, the conjectural sacrifices that ostensibly granted sustenance. So much of one’s respiration had been populated of this air and of this interplay of actors and elements. And yet, one’s breath cycles ceaselessly through many phases on a given day. In the morning, it is yet purging itself of that mythspell of yesterday; by afternoon, it consumes the horsefeathers of new dynamics, halted again by that which passes by too fast and which can never be frozen; as evening descends, it grows slow and pensive, sometimes coughing up senescent horsefeathers and fatigued by the persistent irregularities introduced by the day itself.
Ashim Shanker
stillness is the river and the railroad junction through which so much depends. It is the key . . . To thinking clearly. To seeing the whole chessboard. To making tough decisions. To managing our emotions. To identifying the right goals. To handling high-pressure situations. To maintaining relationships. To building good habits. To being productive. To physical excellence. To feeling fulfilled. To capturing moments of laughter and joy. Stillness is the key to, well, just about everything.
Ryan Holiday (Stillness is the Key: An Ancient Strategy for Modern Life)
In compassionate adepts, the brain’s insula begins to enlarge. The insula makes us aware of our internal emotional states and raises our level of attention to their signals. It also has rich connections to the heart and other visceral organs, allowing it to track and integrate signals coming from the body. In empathetic people, the insula responds strongly to the distress of others, just as though we were suffering ourselves. Activation of the temporoparietal junction (TPJ) indicates that we can see things from the perspective of another person. This allows us to put ourselves in their shoes and take their needs into consideration. 6.10. Empathy is a neurological event, not simply an emotional state. There’s a part of the anterior cingulate that lights up only when we’re contemplating actions that help others. It isn’t activated by outcomes that favor only us. This region is also associated with impulse control and decision-making; we can choose win-win options rather than the desire-driven cravings of the nucleus accumbens. When adepts are confronted by the suffering of others, the premotor cortex lights up. This means that the brain hasn’t just noticed the distress of a fellow being; it’s getting ready to take action. In experienced meditators, the nucleus accumbens shrinks. This structure, which we looked at in Chapter 3, is active in desire and addiction. Deactivation of the nucleus accumbens through empathetic connection equates to a weakening of self-centered attachment. Calming our emotions and focusing our attention, we’re no longer driven by our wants and compulsions, and the brain circuitry associated with this part of the reward circuit begins to wither. When training people in EcoMeditation retreats, I focus on the Empathy Network only after the first three networks are active. First I have them focus on self, then on just one other person. Only after that do we expand our compassion to the universal scale. That’s because thinking about other people can easily take us into mind wandering. People I love, people I don’t, and the things that happened to cause those feelings. Trying to be compassionate toward people who harmed us can lead us out of Bliss Brain. So I activate the Empathy Network only after the Attention Network is engaged. BRAIN CHANGE IS LIFE CHANGE The fact that blissful states, practiced consistently, become blissful traits is a profound gift to us human beings. It means that we aren’t condemned to live in the Caveman Brain with which evolution endowed us. That practice can evolve our brains, some parts slowly, some parts quickly, is a remarkable innovation.
Dawson Church (Bliss Brain: The Neuroscience of Remodeling Your Brain for Resilience, Creativity, and Joy)
There are cells throughout the body in specialised tissues with the beautiful name syncytium. They have multiple nuclei, formed when cells fuse with each other, which happens in the development of some muscle tissue, bone and heart cells. Syncytium in the placenta make up a highly specialised and essential tissue with the even more beautiful name syncytiotrophoblast. These are the spindly fingers from the growing placenta that invade the wall of the uterus and provide the interface between the mother and embryo, where liquids, waste and nutrients are exchanged. It’s also a tissue that suppresses the immune system of the mother, to stop her body automatically rejecting the growing child as an alien presence. These cells are at the junction of human reproduction, where one life is giving rise to the next. The genes that drive those placental cells to form are not human at all. Primates acquired them from a virus around forty-five million years ago;
Adam Rutherford (The Book of Humans: A Brief History of Culture, Sex, War and the Evolution of Us)
It is unknown how a thought is actually formed between brain cells or how the bewilderingly vast number of connections interrelate — millions of dendrites come together at major junction points in the body, such as the solar plexus, not to mention the billions to billions in the brain itself. Yet studies have shown that new dendrites will grow up to advanced old age all the way through life. The current view is that we easily get the physical structure for unimpaired brain function from this new growth. Senility is not Physically natural in a healthy brain. A rich multiplication of dendrites could even lie behind growing wise in old age, a time when more and more of life is being seen in its totality— in other words, more interconnected, just as the nerve cells are more interconnected through their new dendrites.
Adrian Satyam (Energy Healing: 6 in 1: Medicine for Body, Mind and Spirit. An extraordinary guide to Chakra and Quantum Healing, Kundalini and Third Eye Awakening, Reiki and Meditation and Mindfulness.)
Now we see the connection to the Josephson junction. This sine function is the same one that appeared earlier in the direct-current Josephson effect, where the supercurrent is proportional to the sine of the phase across the junction. That’s the analogy: The phase across the junction is like the angle of the pendulum. As it turns out, all the other terms in the equation have counterparts as well. The flow of normal electrons corresponds to the damping of the pendulum caused by friction. The pendulum’s mass is like the junction’s capacitance. And the torque applied to the pendulum is like the external current driving the junction.
Steven H. Strogatz (Sync: How Order Emerges From Chaos In the Universe, Nature, and Daily Life)
If we make things even more complicated and allow the torque itself to vary in time, like the back and forth agitation of a washing machine, the pendulum’s whirling can become chaotic, rotating this way and that, changing direction haphazardly. The verification of the corresponding electrical spasms in a Josephson junction was one of the early experimental triumphs of chaos theory. Before that, physicists had always seen the pendulum as a symbol of clockwork regularity. Suddenly it was a paradigm of chaos.
Steven H. Strogatz (Sync: How Order Emerges From Chaos In the Universe, Nature, and Daily Life)
Although a single Josephson junction produces only about a microwatt of power—too puny to be practical for anything—its output could be greatly amplified by cooperation. Just as an audience clapping in sync makes a lot more noise than any individual person, a synchronized array of Josephson junctions would be a much more potent source of radiation than any solitary one. For example, if you could find a way to coax a thousand junctions to oscillate in phase, the power delivered to another device—a “load” in parallel with the array—would be amplified a millionfold. (The combined power is proportional to the square of the number of junctions.) The hard part is figuring out a way to sync them.
Steven H. Strogatz (Sync: How Order Emerges From Chaos In the Universe, Nature, and Daily Life)
There, staring us in the face, was the Kuramoto model—an enigma like the monolith in 2001: A Space Odyssey, buried under the soil, waiting for us apes to find it, beckoning, the key to sync. Until now, the Kuramoto model had been thought to be nothing more than a convenient abstraction, the simplest way to understand how groups of dissimilar oscillators could spontaneously synchronize, and under what circumstances. It was born out of pure imagination, concocted as a caricature of biological oscillators: crickets, fireflies, cardiac pacemaker cells. Now here it was, unearthed, in the dynamics of superconducting Josephson junctions. It reminded me of that wonderful feeling that Einstein talked about, the recognition of hidden unity. Soon
Steven H. Strogatz (Sync: How Order Emerges From Chaos In the Universe, Nature, and Daily Life)
It was the sunset when he put his had on my shoulders. Blue-red skies, so blue as the farewell might be, so red as the life will be. - How long? - For them? Maybe forever, maybe one day longer... - My Jinn is sad today and I'm not sure, why? - Want to see them back? - It was just my faith in impossibility. - Want to give them a few seconds more? - The stone is the stone, Eve. The not-alive is... - We can try, Jinnie, why not? You tried. - Tears warmed my face. What the day is today? - Do you believe in magic, Eve? When were you crying last time? Honestly, I don't remember. What can it change, my tears? Terracotta cheeks, porcelain temples, stony trap, the eternity. - Are you still afraid of the sarcophagus? - Just my thought, his crazy and psychedelic fear, conjecture. Do the Genies have a kind of trauma?? - We do have the hearts. Is it making you better? - I hear his question, I can't find his mind, the one I feel, skies in fire and howling wind. -It is the Time, Eve, that wind, it is the breeze, uncommonly, experienced. Nothing cannot be back, we have to pay for this, from us, our particles, all who we are... The man on crossing, perception of junction, step forward step back, I saw him before. Before of what? Where is he going now? - That moment when can go to nowhere, Eve. How many times were you dying? Honestly, I don't remember, what can it change, my death? Terracotta palms, porcelain thumbs, stony breath after all. - Jinnie, what day is today? You are talking about the Death, yes? - The warm touch, route, depth. - Why here is so cold? - Do you know what was before them, Eve? Do you want to see? - No!!! - My feeling was No, my blood said Back, my senses Stroke pushing me back. Do not be imprisoned, Do not let Them to imprison you. - You and Us... - His whisper, his step, gates slam shut. WTF... Terracotta-Stony gates. Nothing more, nothing less, nothingness. I am smashed. With them... With??? Oh no, whatever, not they!!! Buried alive. Do not move, do not turn back, this is a delusion, you do not hear them, you are only the... Author??? - RED! - Shreds of his voice. - Blue and Red. - What is she doing here??? - Rustle - Is she our Salvation??? They stepped, closer, they are the coldest I ever met. - Hey, I am not him!!! - I was shouting. - Do not step on me!!! There was something crushing under my feet. Sounds like... Ice? Not possible. Or yes, it is the frozen stone, millions of them, buttered Time. - Go! - This is my Jinn - Get out from ice!!! Go where? I am stuck, for eternity. With them and their horses. What the Jinn said? 'Ride them'. It was about the Dragons. Sorry, this is what I said! Was it? Upper, North, South. Go upper. Before they will arise... - The woman is a woman is a woman... - Sometimes the thoughts are touching, the desires surrounding.
Eve Janson
Over the past 40 years, a number of practical applications have been found for these remarkable manifestations of quantum sync. Josephson’s superconducting sandwiches, now known universally as “Josephson junctions,” have spawned the most sensitive detectors known to science. For instance, a device called a SQUID (for superconducting quantum interference device) takes advantage of the extreme sensitivity of a supercurrent to a magnetic field. A SQUID can measure a displacement a thousand times smaller than an atomic nucleus, or a magnetic field 100 billion times weaker than Earth’s. SQUIDs are used in astronomy, to detect faint radiation from distant galaxies; in nondestructive testing, to spot hidden corrosion beneath the aluminum skin of airplanes; and in geophysics, to help locate sources of oil deep underground.
Steven H. Strogatz (Sync: How Order Emerges From Chaos In the Universe, Nature, and Daily Life)
The principle underlying a SQUID is that variations in a magnetic field alter the phase difference between the quantum waves on either side of its two junctions, and therefore change the supercurrents tunneling through them. Just as ripples on a pond can either add up when they collide (if a crest meets a crest) or cancel each other out (if a crest meets a trough), the quantum waves in the two arms of a SQUID interfere in a way that depends sensitively on their phases, and hence on the amount of magnetic flux passing through the loop. In this way, a SQUID transforms tiny variations in magnetic flux into measurable changes in current and voltage across the device, allowing ultrafaint electromagnetic signals to be detected and quantified.
Steven H. Strogatz (Sync: How Order Emerges From Chaos In the Universe, Nature, and Daily Life)
Josephson junctions have also been considered as possible components for a new generation of supercomputers. One attractive feature is their raw speed: They can be switched on and off at frequencies of several hundred billion cycles per second. But perhaps even more important, Josephson transistors produce a thousand times less heat than conventional semiconductors, which means they can be packed tighter on a chip without burning themselves up. Dense packing is always desirable because smaller computers are faster. By using less wire, they are less burdened by the speed of light, which ultimately determines the time it takes for signals to travel from one part of the circuitry to another.
Steven H. Strogatz (Sync: How Order Emerges From Chaos In the Universe, Nature, and Daily Life)
i allowed you to destroy me, my self-confidence, my ego, my identity as a human being and as a man. for years i was a shadow of my former self. the pain you caused was brutal and intense but i have a new life and a new incarnation and you’re hardly worth thinking about anymore and being free at last of your clutches, I have a new world to look forward to.
Scott C. Holstad (Junction City)
The physicist’s picture of the world encompasses the entire sweep from future to past. The junction between the two, that minuscule ring of the present that matters so much to us, has no distinctive theoretical role.
Alexander Masters (A Life Discarded: 148 Diaries Found in a Skip)
Soon after three o'clock on the afternoon of April 22nd 1973, a 35-year-old architect named Robert Maitland was driving down the high-speed exit lane of the Westway interchange in central London. Six hundred yards from the junction with the newly built spur of the M4 motorway, when the Jaguar had already passed the 70 m.p.h. speed limit, a blow-out collapsed the front nearside tyre. The exploding air reflected from the concrete parapet seemed to detonate inside Robert Maitland's skull. During the few seconds before his crash he clutched at the whiplashing spokes of the steering wheel, dazed by the impact of the chromium window pillar against his head. The car veered from side to side across the empty traffic lanes, jerking his hands like a puppet's. The shredding tyre laid a black diagonal stroke across the white marker lines that followed the long curve of the motorway embankment. Out of control, the car burst through the palisade of pinewood trestles that formed a temporary barrier along the edge of the road. Leaving the hard shoulder, the car plunged down the grass slope of the embankment. Thirty yards ahead, it came to a halt against the rusting chassis of an overturned taxi. Barely injured by this violent tangent that had grazed his life, Robert Maitland lay across his steering wheel, his jacket and trousers studded with windshield fragments like a suit of lights.
J.G. Ballard (Concrete Island)
Your brain contains about as many neurons as there are stars in our Galaxy: in the ballpark of a hundred billion. On average, each of these neurons is connected to about a thousand others via junctions called synapses, and it’s the strengths of these roughly hundred trillion synapse connections that encode most of the information in your brain.
Max Tegmark (Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence)
Use-induced cortical reorganization, says Taub, “involves alterations different from mere learning and memory. Rather than producing just increased synaptic strength at certain junctions, which is believed to underlie learning, some unknown mechanism is instead producing wholesale topographic reorganization.” And more: we are seeing evidence of the brain’s ability to remake itself throughout adult life, not only in response to outside stimuli but even in response to directed mental effort. We are seeing, in short, the brain’s potential to correct its own flaws and enhance its own capacities.
Jeffrey M. Schwartz (The Mind and the Brain: Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force)
In geological terms, Japan is in an appalling situation, on top of not one, but two so-called triple junctions—points at which three of the Earth’s tectonic plates collide and grate against one another. Fire, wind, flood, landslide, earthquake, and tsunami: it is a country of intense, elemental violence. Harsh natural environments often breed qualities that take on the status of national characteristics—the dark fatalism of Russians, the pioneer toughness of frontier Americans. Japanese identify in themselves the virtue of nintai or gaman, variously rendered as endurance, patience, or perseverance
Richard Lloyd Parry (Ghosts of the Tsunami: Death and Life in Japan's Disaster Zone)