Lifelong Friend Quotes

The lifelong friends, he said. We sometimes wait a lifetime for them.

Books are more than doctors, of course. Some novels are loving, lifelong companions; some give you a clip around the ear; others are friends who wrap you in warm towels when you've got those autumn blues. And some...well, some are pink candy floss that tingles in your brain for three seconds and leaves a blissful voice. Like a short, torrid love affair.

You may have noticed that the books you really love are bound together by a secret thread. You know very well what is the common quality that makes you love them, though you cannot put it into words: but most of your friends do not see it at all, and often wonder why, liking this, you should also like that. Again, you have stood before some landscape, which seems to embody what you have been looking for all your life; and then turned to the friend at your side who appears to be seeing what you saw -- but at the first words a gulf yawns between you, and you realise that this landscape means something totally different to him, that he is pursuing an alien vision and cares nothing for the ineffable suggestion by which you are transported. Even in your hobbies, has there not always been some secret attraction which the others are curiously ignorant of -- something, not to be identified with, but always on the verge of breaking through, the smell of cut wood in the workshop or the clap-clap of water against the boat's side? Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it. All the things that have ever deeply possessed your soul have been but hints of it -- tantalising glimpses, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest -- if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself -- you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say "Here at last is the thing I was made for". We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the thing we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work. While we are, this is. If we lose this, we lose all.

A blessed companion is a book--a book that, fitly chosen, is a lifelong friend...a book that, at a touch, pours its heart into your own.

Life isn’t a hundred-meter race against your friends, but a lifelong marathon against yourself.

An adult friend of Lincoln's: "Life was to him a school.

When it comes to books...They're like lifelong friends to me; I need to know they're there, even if I don't check in with them on a regular basis.

Librarians. . . have been my lifelong friends, guides and heroes.

If you want to build lifelong, loyal friendships, if you want to build trust, learn to protect your family members and friends even when they make mistakes.

The two of you fight like an old married couple, flirt like you’re in high school, and confide in each other like you’re lifelong best friends.

Holding myself to perfectionistic standards, I used to think I had to become lifelong friends with everyone who entered my life. This was exhausting, and I now know it’s not true. I believe the old saying that people come into your life for a reason, a season, or a lifetime.” (127)

A blessed companion is a book! A book that, fitly chosen, is a life-long friend.

Even in your hobbies, has there not always been some secret attraction which the others are curiously ignorant of--something, not to be identified with, but always on the verge of breaking through, the smell of cut wood in the workshop or the clap-clap of water against the boat's side? Are not all lifelong friendships born at the moment when at last you meet another human being who has some inkling (but faint and uncertain even in the best) of that something which you were born desiring, and which, beneath the flux of other desires and in all the momentary silences between the louder passions, night and day, year by year, from childhood to old age, you are looking for, watching for, listening for? You have never had it. All the things that have ever deeply possesed your soul have been but hints of it--tantalizing glimspes, promises never quite fulfilled, echoes that died away just as they caught your ear. But if it should really become manifest--if there ever came an echo that did not die away but swelled into the sound itself--you would know it. Beyond all possibility of doubt you would say 'Here at last is the thing I was made for.' We cannot tell each other about it. It is the secret signature of each soul, the incommunicable and unappeasable want, the things we desired before we met our wives or made our friends or chose our work, and which we shall still desire on our deathbeds, when the mind no longer knows wife or friend or work. While we are, this is. If we lose this, we lose all.

Some novels are loving, lifelong companions; some give you a clip around the ear; others are friends who wrap you in warm towels when you’ve got those autumn blues. And some…well, some are pink candy floss that tingles in your brain for three seconds and leaves a blissful void. Like a short, torrid love affair.

MOST OF LIFE’S defining moments happen unexpectedly; sometimes they slide past you completely unnoticed until afterward, if at all. The last time your child is small enough to carry on your hip. An eye roll exchanged with a stranger who becomes your life-long best friend. The summer job you apply for on impulse and stay at for the next twenty years. Those kinds of things.

It is the fate of great achievements, born from a way of life that sets truth before security, to be gobbled up by you and excreted in the form of shit. For centuries great, brave, lonely men have been telling you what to do. Time and again you have corrupted, diminished and demolished their teachings; time and again you have been captivated by their weakest points, taken not the great truth, but some trifling error as your guiding principal. This, little man, is what you have done with Christianity, with the doctrine of sovereign people, with socialism, with everything you touch. Why, you ask, do you do this? I don't believe you really want an answer. When you hear the truth you'll cry bloody murder, or commit it. … You had your choice between soaring to superhuman heights with Nietzsche and sinking into subhuman depths with Hitler. You shouted Heil! Heil! and chose the subhuman. You had the choice between Lenin's truly democratic constitution and Stalin's dictatorship. You chose Stalin's dictatorship. You had your choice between Freud's elucidation of the sexual core of your psychic disorders and his theory of cultural adaptation. You dropped the theory of sexuality and chose his theory of cultural adaptation, which left you hanging in mid-air. You had your choice between Jesus and his majestic simplicity and Paul with his celibacy for priests and life-long compulsory marriage for yourself. You chose the celibacy and compulsory marriage and forgot the simplicity of Jesus' mother, who bore her child for love and love alone. You had your choice between Marx's insight into the productivity of your living labor power, which alone creates the value of commodities and the idea of the state. You forgot the living energy of your labor and chose the idea of the state. In the French Revolution, you had your choice between the cruel Robespierre and the great Danton. You chose cruelty and sent greatness and goodness to the guillotine. In Germany you had your choice between Goring and Himmler on the one hand and Liebknecht, Landau, and Muhsam on the other. You made Himmler your police chief and murdered your great friends. You had your choice between Julius Streicher and Walter Rathenau. You murdered Rathenau. You had your choice between Lodge and Wilson. You murdered Wilson. You had your choice between the cruel Inquisition and Galileo's truth. You tortured and humiliated the great Galileo, from whose inventions you are still benefiting, and now, in the twentieth century, you have brought the methods of the Inquisition to a new flowering. … Every one of your acts of smallness and meanness throws light on the boundless wretchedness of the human animal. 'Why so tragic?' you ask. 'Do you feel responsible for all evil?' With remarks like that you condemn yourself. If, little man among millions, you were to shoulder the barest fraction of your responsibility, the world would be a very different place. Your great friends wouldn't perish, struck down by your smallness.

Loyalty between lifelong friends is complicated and runs deep. More deeply, even, than I think you realize, until just how different you and your friends have become is practically unavoidable.

Serving my country was a life-changing experience for me. It was during those years that I realized the importance of commitment, dedication, honor, and discipline. I have never laughed so much; nor have I ever prayed so much. I made life-long friends. The leaders and heroes I served with helped shape me into the man I am today. I feel honored to have been a part of such a great tradition and grateful to others who have walked the same path. Thank you!

the little girl isn’t listening to you— she’s way too busy staring out the window, fantasizing about a world of magical accidents, flying envelopes, screeching owls, adoring giants, brooms that do more than sweep, friends who are always loyal, & a train that will take her to an enchanted place far far far away from here. - put under a lifelong spell.

Mentors have their own strengths and weaknesses. The good ones allow you to develop your own style and then to leave them when the time is right. Such types can remain lifelong friends and allies. But often the opposite will occur. They grow dependent on your services and want to keep you indentured. They envy your youth and unconsciously hinder you, or become overcritical. You must be aware of this as it develops. Your goal is to get as much out of them as possible, but at a certain point you may pay a price if you stay too long and let them subvert your confidence. Your submitting to their authority is by no means unconditional, and in fact your goal all along is eventually to find your way to independence, having internalized and adapted their wisdom.

No, dear, but speaking of Father reminded me how much I miss him, how much I owe him, and how faithfully I should watch and work to keep his little daughters safe and good for him. Yet you told him to go, Mother, and didn’t cry when he went, and never complain now, or seem as if you needed any help, said Jo, wondering. I gave my best to the country I love, and kept my tears till he was gone. Why should I complain, when we both have merely done our duty and will surely be the happier for it in the end? If I don’t seem to need help, it is because I have a better friend, even than Father, to comfort and sustain me. My child, the troubles and temptations of your life are beginning and may be many, but you can overcome and outlive them all if you learn to feel the strength and tenderness of your Heavenly Father as you do that of your earthly one. The more you love and trust Him, and the less you will depend on human power and wisdom. His love and care never tire or change, can never be taken from you, but my become the source of lifelong peace, happiness, and strength. Believe this heartily, and go to God with all your little cares, and hopes, and sins, and sorrows, as freely and confidingly as you come to your mother.

She says I shall now have one mouth the more to fill and two feet the more to shoe, more disturbed nights, more laborious days, and less leisure or visiting, reading, music, and drawing. Well! This is one side of the story, to be sure, but I look at the other. Here is a sweet, fragrant mouth to kiss; here are two more feet to make music with their pattering about my nursery. Here is a soul to train for God; and the body in which it dwells is worth all it will cost, since it is the abode of a kingly tenant. I may see less of friends, but I have gained one dearer than them all, to whom, while I minister in Christ's name, I make a willing sacrifice of what little leisure for my own recreation my other darlings had left me. Yes, my precious baby, you are welcome to your mother's heart, welcome to her time, her strength, her health, her tenderest cares, to her lifelong prayers! Oh, how rich I am, how truly, how wondrously blest!

it is very telling what we don’t hear in eulogies. We almost never hear things like: “The crowning achievement of his life was when he made senior vice president.” Or: “He increased market share for his company multiple times during his tenure.” Or: “She never stopped working. She ate lunch at her desk. Every day.” Or: “He never made it to his kid’s Little League games because he always had to go over those figures one more time.” Or: “While she didn’t have any real friends, she had six hundred Facebook friends, and she dealt with every email in her in-box every night.” Or: “His PowerPoint slides were always meticulously prepared.” Our eulogies are always about the other stuff: what we gave, how we connected, how much we meant to our family and friends, small kindnesses, lifelong passions, and the things that made us laugh.

What is it worth to see two former bitter enemies transform weapons into transport for exploration and the pursuit of scientific knowledge? What is it worth to see former enemy nations turn their warriors into crewmates and lifelong friends? This is impossible to put a dollar figure on, but to me it’s one of the things that makes this project worth the expense, even worth risking our lives.

George Cukor was still a young emerging talent at RKO, but they were to become lifelong friends after making Dinner at Eight and Camille together. Cukor called Frances a “Holy Wonder—so ravishingly beautiful and so talented.

If you are lucky enough to have a childhood friend, try your hardest to grow old with them. These friends are a unique, irreplaceable breed. These friends lived through curfews and Polaroid pictures with you. These friends know your parents and siblings because they had to call your house first to speak with you. Your memories are not frozen in time on social media, but live on nonetheless. Most importantly, they remember the person you were before the world got ahold of you, so they have this crazy ability to love you no matter what. They are the living, breathing reflection of where you have been. And so, just when you think you’ve lost yourself for good, they are there to bring you face-to-face with your true self, simply by sharing a cup of coffee with them. As your world grows and becomes larger and more complicated than your backyard, even if you establish a life elsewhere, I hope your childhood friends remain lifelong allies, because mine have saved my life on more than one occasion.

Sometimes when we least expect it, a small cross proves a lovely crown, a seemingly unimportant event becomes a lifelong experience, or a stranger becomes a friend

It is true that you can't choose your family, but you can choose your friends. It is also true that you can choose your partner and in doing so, you end up choosing the family you've always wanted.

Above everything else, beyond the long hardships, one out- come is the most invaluable. The sisterhoods. The lifelong friends and bonds that will never lessen. Years can go by, and I will pick up with each of those sisters as if a single day hasn’t passed. Only we can truly understand one another; not even our husbands can fully grasp what we’ve been through with each other and how ironclad those bonds are.

In theory, you’re supposed to get everyone’s names and become lifelong friends. I literally had contact with half the kids here last night, but how in hell do they expect me to differentiate one of my butt-to-butt dancing partners from another? Am I supposed to randomly rub my buttocks up against people to see if we’ve bonded booties before? “Yes, the particular musculature of your ass does feel familiar. 1 remember you now!” Duh.

If the world gives you the blues, if you wake up in the middle of the night with waves of fear and senseless panic washing over you, I am your friend. If you’re overcome by a desperation that makes your mouth open for a scream that never comes out but just freezes your face in mute despair, then you and I have something in common. If you can’t understand them for the life of you, even though you’ve tried so hard, when that dislocation makes you feel like you’re the only one of your species on the planet, I know I can confide in you. If this endless ghetto of lies and heart break, this life-long run of fences and flickering neon signs, night sweats and suicidal urges makes you feel like stopping, just stopping, like stopping breathing, wait. Wait. You don’t have to tell me your name. You don’t have to prove yourself to me. I accept you. If you’re finding life to be the one thing that’s trying to kill you, I want you to stay alive to rise with the sun and fight back.

When my father was vigorous and lucid, (my mother) regarded medicine as her wily ally in a lifelong campaign to keep old age, sickness, and death at bay. Now ally and foe exchanged masks. Medicine looked more like the enemy, and death the friend. (p. 184)

Madeline traveled with ease through dozens of overlapping social circles, making both lifelong friends and lifetime enemies along the way; probably more of the latter.

...she was a lifelong friend of some of us, and there comes a time when there are very few left who knew you as a girl, and the sudden breaking of such a tie is indeed a matter of sorrow.

The guilt you felt when you were smiling and others were suffering, the guilt you felt when you were petty with friends and impatient with your parents, when you were rude to your teachers and didn’t stand up for strangers, that guilt is marvellous. It proves that you are human, that you want to be better. Thank this guilt for teaching you, for making you aware. And now endeavour to better yourself. It is a lifelong work to become the person we want to be.

The life I lead now was the stuff of fantasy during my childhood. So many people helped create that fantasy. At every level of my life and in every environment, I have found family and mentors and lifelong friends who supported and

Although Gora had tried his best to dissuade Anandamoyi from attending Binoy's marriage ceremony he was not in his heart of hearts very much pained when, taking no account of his anger or distress, she refused to listen to him, in fact he really felt delighted. Feeling so certain that however great the gulf between Binoy and himself might become, Binoy could be never deprived of that part of his mother's immeasurable love which was showered upon him like nectar, Gora's heart was satisfied and at peace. From every other standpoint he might be separated ever so far from Binoy, but by this one bond of imperishable love of a mother these two lifelong friends would be united by the closest and deepest ties for life.

During his hajj, Malcolm [Malcolm X] fell into a new Islam with the same blind faith that he had given to Elijah. Since he lived just a year after his hajj, Mecca became the neatly presented and cinema-friendly conclusion to his lifelong thread of transformations: but he finally found the Truth and then Allah took him home. But if he lived longer, I think he would have called out the Arabs.

Josh? Can you come to my room?” My wolfish grin broke some of the tension on her face. “Oh, stop. There’s a spider. I need you to kill it. Please. Before it disappears and I have to burn my whole house down.” I laughed. “Should I get my gun or…?” She bounced nervously. “Josh, I’m serious. I hate them. Please help me.” I pulled a few tissues from the box on my nightstand. “You know, you seem too fearless to be afraid of spiders.” “A black widow killed my schnauzer when I was a kid. Embracing a lifelong debilitating fear of spiders is cheaper than therapy.” She stopped in the doorway of her room like there was an invisible force field, and I almost bumped into her back.

August is the month when wars start. It’s when the water dries up and the spirit begins to wither. Insomniacs pull down their shades and lock themselves in their rooms in August. Lifelong friends have fist fights. People feel like they’re going to burst. Sometimes they do.

I'm just so proud of all of you who have grown up with us. And I know how tough it is some days to look with hope and confidence on the months and years ahead. But I would like to tell you what I often told you when you were much younger: I like you just the way you are. And what's more, I'm so grateful to you for helping the children in your life to know that you'll do everything you can to keep them safe and to help them express their feelings in ways that will bring healing in many different neighborhoods. It's such a good feeling to know that we're lifelong friends. -Fred Rogers

What a need we humans have for confession. To a priest, to a friend, to a psychoanalyst, to a relative, to an enemy, even to a torturer when there is no one else, it doesn't matter so long as we speak out what moves within us. Even the most secretive of us do it, if no more than writing in a private diary. And I have often thought as I read stories and novels and poems, especially poems, that they are no more than authors' confessions transformed by their art into something that confesses for us all. Indeed, looking back on my life-long passion for reading, the one activity that has kept me going and given me the most and only lasting pleasure, I think this is the reason that explains why it means so much to me. The books, the authors who matter the most are those who speak to me and speak for me all those things about life I most need to hear as the confession of myself.

There’s a word for the first blush of youthful love free of desire. For longing to be with someone so much you would rather throw yourself to the tides than be without them. For the stale but steady relationship between faithful members of an arranged marriage. For how to feel about someone you thought was everything but ended up never feeling the same way about you. For the poison left over when you love someone and it ends so badly you cannot release the feelings. For the love between a mother and her children, a father and his children, a grandmother and her progeny, the love between two dear friends, the love that is the first building block of a lifelong affair. There’s even a word for a love so devastating nothing before or after is ever seen the same.

Many ex-Muslims do have lifelong Muslim friends and family who are supportive, moderate, or liberal, even if they disagree. This was a common theme in the #ExMuslimBecause tweets: most participants, while certainly unreserved in their criticism of the faith, made it a point to differentiate between criticizing Islam (an idea) and demonizing Muslims (a people). Human beings have rights and are entitled to respect. Ideas, books, and beliefs don’t, and aren’t.

..The people you lose here on this side of eternity, whom you can no longer call or text, will live fully again both in your heart and in the world. They will make you smile and talk out loud at the most inappropriate times. Of course, their absence will cause lifelong pangs of homesickness, but grief, friends, time, and tears will heal you to some extent. Tears will bathe, baptize, and hydrate you and the seeds beneath the surface of the ground on which you walk.

In the end, a person is only know by the impact he or she has on others. The Gift of Work: He who loves his work never labors. The Gift of Money: Money is nothing more than a tool. It can be a force for good, a force for evil, or simple be idle. The Gift of Friends: It is a wealthy person, indeed, who calculates riches not in gold but in friends. The Gift of Learning: Education is a lifelong journey whose destination expands as you travel. The desire and hunger for education is the key to real learning. The Gift of Problems: Problems can only be avoided by exercising good judgment. Good judgment can only be gained by experiencing life's problems. The Gift of Family: Some people are born into wonderful families. Others have to find or create them. Being a member of a family is a priceless privilege which costs nothing but love. The Gift of Laughter: Laughter is good medicine for the soul. Our world is desperately in need of more such medicine. The Gift of Dreams: Faith is all that dreamers need to see into the future. The Gift of Giving: The only way you can truly get more out of life for yourself is to give part of yourself away. One of the key principles in giving, is that the gift must be yours to give-either something you earned or created or maybe, simply, part of yourself. The Gift of Gratitude: In those times when we yearn to have more in our lives, we should dwell on the things we already have. In doing so, we will often find that our lives are already full to overflowing. The Golden List: Every morning before getting up visualize a golden tablet on which is written ten things in your life you are especially thankful for. The Gift of a Day: Life at its essence boils down to one day at a time. Today is the Day! If we can learn how to live one day to its fullest, our lives will be rich and meaningful. The Gift of Love: Love is a treasure for which we can never pay. The only way we keep it is to give it away. The Ultimate Gift: In the end, life lived to its fullest is its own ultimate gift.

Aaron Copland, whom Bernstein had met when he was in his junior year at Harvard and who would become a lifelong friend and mentor, wrote him encouraging letters. “Don’t expect miracles,” Copland advised the young man, “and don’t get depressed if nothing happens for a while. That’s NY.” But on August 25, 1943, his twenty-fifth birthday, Bernstein got his first professional break when Artur Rodzinski, then the music director of the New York Philharmonic, chose him to become his conducting assistant. “I have gone through all the conductors I know of in my mind,” Rodzinski explained to his new assistant, “and I finally asked God whom I should take, and God said, ‘Take Bernstein.

There was nothing wrong with him. In fact, he often wondered why it was that more people weren’t as obsessed with these stories as he was. Angsty romances involving lifelong friends, vampires that were portrayed as the monsters they were, and countless bloody murders? Every box of his was checked. He just needed more people to get up to speed.

It’s often the case that in the bodies of several friends we see one soul. —Marsilio Ficino, Letter to Almanno Donati

back to reality. His attention snapped to his life-long friend, and some of the pressure weighing him down lifted. As usual, Kenny had managed

I should have been struck down by the despair a young lover feels who has sworn lifelong fidelity, when a friend speaks to him of the other mistresses he will have in time to come.

To talk less and be a better listener is the lifelong quest of a good friend.

... I should have been struck down by the despair a young lover feels who has sworn lifelong fidelity, when a friend speaks to him of the other mistresses he will have in time to come.

Responsible for every successful connection ever made between a book and a reader--no less than between people--is that deepest of all human mysteries, emotional readiness: upon which the shape of every life is vitally dependent. How morbidly circumstantial life can seem when we think of the apparent randomness with which we welcome or repel what will turn out to be--or what might have turned out to be--some of the most important relationships of our lives. How often have lifelong friends or lovers shuddered to think, 'If I had met you at any other time...' It's the same between a reader and a book that becomes an intimate you very nearly did not encounter with an open mind or a welcoming heart because you were not in the right mood; that is, in a state of readiness.

To lose a parent or a lifelong friend is often to lose the past: the person who died may be the only other living witness to golden events of long ago. But to lose a child is to lose the future: what is lost is no less than one’s life project—what one lives for, how one projects oneself into the future, how one may hope to transcend death (indeed, one’s child becomes one’s immortality project).

If on the other hand we found even one reader to whom the cheap little book with its double columns and the lurid daub on its cover had been a lifelong delight, who had read and reread it, who would notice, and object, if a single word were changed, then, however little we could see in it ourselves and however it was despised by our friends and colleagues, we should not dare to put it beyond the pale.

The first lifelong friend I made at Oxford was A. K. Hamilton Jenkin, since known for his books on Cornwall. He continued (what Arthur had begun) my education as a seeing, listening, smelling, receptive creature. Arthur had had his preference for the Homely. But Jenkin seemed able to enjoy everything; even ugliness. I learned from him that we should attempt a total surrender to whatever atmosphere was offering itself at the moment; in a squalid town to seek out those very places where its squalor rose to grimness and almost grandeur, on a dismal day to find the most dismal and dripping wood, on a windy day to seek the windiest ridge. There was no Betjemannic irony about it; only a serious, yet gleeful, determination to rub one’s nose in the very quiddity of each thing, to rejoice in its being (so magnificently) what it was.

I think if a person can find a dream worthy of a lifelong commitment, that person is lucky. If one can find friends with which to spend one's life, that person is also lucky. But also, a "lifelong friendship" is not so weak a thing that it must be surrendered to one's "lifelong dream." I believe that those who have the strength of spirit to commit their lives to a dream should also be able to make room for lifelong friends.

It was soothing to sit with life-long friends, the cacophony of bar sounds around us while we caught up on our lives and talked about the glory days of high school. My life since then had been on an accelerated trajectory, not always aimed in the best direction. I acquired a sense of well-being from those friends who married their high school sweethearts, set up housekeeping a stone's throw from where they grew up, and kept the heartbeat of small-town living beating rhythmically.

Evie, Duchess of Kingston, had spent a perfectly wonderful afternoon with her three closest friends at Lord Westcliff's estate. Long ago, she had met Annabelle, Lillian, and Daisy during her first London Season, when they had been a group of wallflowers sitting in chairs at the side of the ballroom. While becoming acquainted, it had occurred to them that instead of competing for gentlemen's attentions, they would do better to help each other, and so a lifelong friendship had blossomed.

Verbal ventilation is the key way that people make friends. It parallels the way tender touch, soothing voice, and welcoming facial expressions helps infants and toddlers establish bonding and attachment. When we practice the emotionally based communication of verbal ventilation in a safe environment, we repair the damage of not having had this need met in childhood. This in turn opens up the possibility of finally attaining the verbal-emotional intimacy that is an essential lifelong need for all human beings.

WILDE: Oh — Bosie! (He weeps.) I have to go back to him, you know. Robbie will be furious but it can't be helped. The betrayal of one's friends is a bagatelle in the stakes of love, but the betrayal of oneself is a lifelong regret. Bosie is what became of me. He is spoiled, vindictive, utterly selfish and not very talented, but these are merely the facts. The truth is he was Hyacinth when Apollo loved him, he is ivory and gold, from his red rose-leaf lips comes music that fills me with joy, he is the only one who understands me. 'Even as a teething child throbs with ferment, so does the soul of him who gazes upon the boy's beauty; he can neither sleep at night nor keep still by day,' and a lot more besides, but before Plato could describe love, the loved one had to be invented. We would never love anybody if we could see past our invention. Bosie is my creation, my poem. In the mirror of invention, love discovered itself. Then we saw what we had made — the piece of ice in the fist you cannot hold or let go. (He weeps.)

Sparks of tension are swirling all around us, filling the air with all the things we’re not addressing. Most of the time, we’re as comfortable as life-long friends. But every now and then, it’s like even the most innocent of remarks will give away more than we can bear, so we clam up.

Whatever one makes of these seven passages in Scripture, it seems clear that they must not be used in the service of condemning homosexuality as we know it today. [...] There is, however, much in Scripture about compassion for one's fellow human beings, a call for empathy and justice for the marginalized, and a standard of honesty, mutuality, and love in all relationships. In the end, God believes in love. Therefore, I would argue that Scripture gives us great and lasting guidance for the conduct of our relationships, whether they be with strangers, friends, or lifelong partners.

It is part of the nature of a strong erotic passion—as distinct from a transient fit of appetite—that makes more towering promises than any other emotion. No doubt all our desires makes promises, but not so impressively. To be in love involves the almost irresistible conviction that one will go on being in love until one dies, and that possession of the beloved will confer, not merely frequent ecstasies, but settled, fruitful, deep-rooted, lifelong happiness. Hence all seems to be at stake. If we miss this chance we shall have lived in vain. At the very thought of such a doom we sink into fathomless depths of self-pity. Unfortunately these promises are found often to be quite untrue. Every experienced adult knows this to be so as regards all erotic passions (except the one he himself is feeling at the moment). We discount the world-without-end pretensions of our friends’ amours easily enough. We know that such things sometimes last—and sometimes don’t. And when they do last, this is not because they promised at the outset to do so. When two people achieve lasting happiness, this is not solely because they are great lovers but because they are also—I must put it crudely—good people; controlled, loyal, fair-minded, mutually adaptable people. If we establish a “right to (sexual) happiness” which supersedes all the ordinary rules of behavior, we do so not because of what our passion shows itself to be in experience but because of what it professes to be while we are in the grip of it.

Much of the back row of America, both white and black, is humiliated. The good jobs they could get straight out of high school and gave the stability of a lifelong career have left. The churches providing them a place in the world have been cast as irrational, backward, and lacking. The communities that provided pride are dying, and into this vacuum have come drugs. Their entire worldview is collapsing, and then they are told this is their own fault: they suck at school and are dumb, not focused enough, not disciplined enough. It is a wholesale rejection that cuts to the core. It isn’t just about them; it is about their friends, family, congregation, union, and all they know. Whole towns and neighborhoods have been forgotten and destroyed, and when they point this out, they are told they should just get up and move (as if anyone can do that) and if they don’t, then they are clearly lazy, weak, and unmotivated.

Here is a sweet, fragrant mouth to kiss; here are two more feet to make music with their pattering about my nursery. Here is a soul to train for God; and the body in which it dwells is worthy all it will cost, since it is the abode of a kingly tenant. I may see less of friends, but I have gained one dearer than them all, to whom, while I minister in Christ’s name, I make a willing sacrifice of what little leisure for my own recreation my other darlings had left me. Yes, my precious baby, you are welcome to your mother’s heart, welcome to her time, her strength, her health, her tenderest cares, to her lifelong prayers! Oh, how rich I am, how truly, how wondrously blest!

Right after Matt died, I was afraid to do basically everything. I couldn’t even bite my nails or sniff my shirt to see if I needed deodorant without feeling like he was watching me. I willed and prayed and begged him to give me a sign that he was watching, that he was with me, so I would know. But he never did. Time moved on. And I stopped being afraid. Until right now, vulnerable and insecure and a little bit drunk. Lying in the sand and falling in crazy love with someone I just met. Matt is watching me. Observing. Possibly judging. And the worst part of it is, I don’t want to wake up under his landslide of sad rocks anymore. I don’t want to taste the marzipan frosting and the clove cigarettes. I don’t want to think about the blue glass necklace or the books he read to me on his bed or the piles of college stuff or some random boy in the grocery store wearing his donated clothes. I don’t want to be the dead boy’s best-friend-turned-something-else. Or the really supportive neighbor friend. Or the lifelong keeper of broken-hearted secrets.

No, we never sicken with love twice. Cupid spends no second arrow on the same heart. Love's handmaids are our life-long friends. Respect, and admiration, and affection, our doors may always be left open for, but their great celestial master, in his royal progress, pays but one visit and departs. We like, we cherish, we are very, very fond of--but we never love again.

Well, let me put it this way: the only thing about the King of Wands that doesn’t quite fit with you is that he is a man of fiery passions.” He raised his brows. “And I am not?” She smirked at him. “I don’t know. Are you?” Such a question. He dismissed it as rhetorical until she laid the king on the table and locked eyes with him. Boldly. And as he studied her expression, he sensed an invitation. A dare. A challenge for him to answer her about whether he was a man of fiery passions. He nearly succumbed to the temptation to show her just how fiery his passions could be. Restraint, Charles. Hold yourself in check. He sobered, as temperance, his lifelong, rational, and calming friend, curbed his urge to kiss the question right off her lips.

If I don’t seem to need help, it is because I have a better friend, even than Father, to comfort and sustain me. My child, the troubles and temptations of your life are beginning and may be many, but you can overcome and outlive them all if you learn to feel the strength and tenderness of your Heavenly Father as you do that of your earthly one. The more you love and trust Him, the nearer you will feel to Him, and the less you will depend on human power and wisdom. His love and care never tire or change, can never be taken from you, but may become the source of lifelong peace, happiness, and strength. Believe this heartily, and go to God with all your little cares, and hopes, and sins, and sorrows, as freely and confidingly as you come to your mother.

Gennady, Misha, and I all served in our militaries before being chosen to fly in space, and though it’s something we never talk about, we all know we could have been ordered to kill one another. Now we are taking part in the largest peaceful international collaboration in history. When people ask whether the space station is worth the expense, this is something I always point out. What is it worth to see two former bitter enemies transform weapons into transport for exploration and the pursuit of scientific knowledge? What is it worth to see former enemy nations turn their warriors into crewmates and lifelong friends? This is impossible to put a dollar figure on, but to me it’s one of the things that makes this project worth the expense, even worth risking our lives.

What if I ran all my actions through this grid: “If my son-in-law treated my daughter the way I’m treating my wife, how would I feel?” Men, that’s the way what you’re doing looks like to God. Women, just switch the genders. Imagine hearing your (perhaps future) daughter-in-law talking to her friends about your son with the same tone and words you use to describe your husband: How does that feel?

In May 1992, I went to Ixtapa with my son, Sam, who was then two and a half. At the time, my best friend of twenty years, named Pammy, had been battling breast cancer for two years. I also had a boyfriend with whom I spoke two or three times a day, whom I loved and who loved me. Then, in early November of that year, the big eraser came down and got Pammy, and it also got the boyfriend, from whom I parted by mutual agreement. The grief was huge, monolithic. All those years I fell for the great palace lie that grief should be gotten over as quickly and as privately as possible. But what I’ve discovered since is that the lifelong fear of grief keeps us in a barren, isolated place and that only grieving can heal grief; the passage of time will lessen the acuteness, but time alone, without the direct experience of grief, will not heal it.

The New York Times recently reported that the most expensive schools are paradoxically cheaper for low-income students. Take, for example, a student whose parents earn thirty thousand per year—not a lot of money but not poverty level, either. That student would pay ten thousand for one of the less selective branch campuses of the University of Wisconsin but would pay six thousand at the school’s flagship Madison campus. At Harvard, the student would pay only about thirteen hundred despite tuition of over forty thousand. Of course, kids like me don’t know this. My buddy Nate, a lifelong friend and one of the smartest people I know, wanted to go to the University of Chicago as an undergraduate, but he didn’t apply because he knew he couldn’t afford it. It likely would have cost him considerably less than Ohio State, just as Yale cost considerably less for me than any other school.

I gave my best to the country I love, and kept my tears till he was gone. Why should I complain, when we both have merely done our duty and will surely be the happier for it in the end? If I don't seem to need help, it is because I have a better friend, even than Father, to comfort and sustain me. My child, the troubles and temptations of your life are beginning and may be many, but you can overcome and outlive them all if you learn to feel the strength and tenderness of your Heavenly Father as you do that of your earthly one. The more you love and trust Him, the nearer you will feel to Him, and the less you will depend on human power and wisdom. His love and care never tire or change, can never be taken from you, but may become the source of lifelong peace, happiness, and strength. Believe this heartily, and go to God with all your little cares, and hopes, and sins, and sorrows, as freely and confidingly as you come to your mother.

We've all got scars. Words that were said to you when you were young... Things you saw that you should never have seen... Lifelong consequences from stupid decisions, whether ours or someone else's... Men, make sure that they are SCARS not WOUNDS. If you keep finding that you are sensitive about certain things, held back by the same unreasonable fears, or that you keep making the same bad decisions repeatedly, or that you have habits you just can't quit.... chances are good that you have a wound that never healed right. It's not a scar, it's a wound or an infection. Get it cleaned out and get it healed. If that means you need to get some professional help, to talk to a trusted friend about it, or whatever - the only person that can make the decision to get that part of your life healed is you. A scar shows you've been through the process. An overly sensitive attitude, a destructive habit, a fearful mindset just show that you have a wound you need to work on.

I promise that those people you lose here on this side of eternity, with whom you can no longer call or text, will live fully again in your heart & in the world. Of course, Absence will cause life-long pangs of homesickness, but grief, friends, time, & tears will heal you to some extent. Tears will bathe, baptize, & hydrate you and the seeds beneath the surface of the ground on which you walk. Somehow, as we get older, death becomes as sacred as birth, and while we don’t exactly welcome it, death becomes a friend.

Friends and family arrived at the church: Becky and Connell, my two lifelong friends and bridesmaids. Marlboro Man’s cousins and college friends. And Mike. My dear brother Mike, who hugged everyone who entered the church, from the little old ladies to the strapping former college football players. And just as I was greeting my Uncle John, I saw Mike go in for the kill as Tony, Marlboro Man’s good college friend, entered the door. “Wh-wh-wh-what is you name?” Mike’s thundering voice echoed through the church. “Hi, I’m Tony,” Marlboro Man’s friend said, extending his hand. “It’s n-n-n-nice to meet you, Tony,” Mike shouted back, not letting go of Tony’s hand. “Nice to meet you too, Mike,” Tony said, likely wondering when he would get his hand back. “You so handsome,” Mike said. Oh, Lord. Please, no, I thought. “Why…thank you, Mike,” Tony replied, smiling uncomfortably. If it hadn’t been my wedding rehearsal, I might have popped some popcorn, sat back, and enjoyed the show. But I just couldn’t watch. Mike’s affection had never been any respecter of persons.

And I realized that people, from new-made friends to life-long family, inevitably come and go in the composition of our lives, but that once they have appeared, they never really leave. And I realized too that the people we love—the memory of the people we love, their enduring, pulsing presence in our lives—is like those violins. Every day, in one form or another, we take them out and play them, if just for a while. We become them, swooping, spiraling, soaring to the apex of our minds. We honor them and keep them alive—as they do us, intertwined.

Intervention strategies like Circle of Security, Group Attachment-Based Intervention, and Attachment and Biobehavioral Catch-Up essentially teach parents of young children how to listen and respond to their babies and toddlers before dysfunctional neural patterns get grooved into their tiny developing brains—that is, before children develop lifelong anxious and/or avoidant approaches to relationships. While the programs focus on helping parents listen to their kids, participants report using the same strategies to improve their relationships with spouses, coworkers, and friends.

In the second story, which reminds me to look inward for solutions to what may be troubling me, the ninth-century sage Rabia was looking for a lost key under a streetlight. Her neighbors turned out to help, but without success. Finally, they asked where she might have dropped the key, so that they could better focus their search. “Actually,” said Rabia, “I lost it in my house.” Bemused, they asked her why she didn’t look for it there. “Because,” she said, “there’s no light in my house, but out here the light is bright!” The neighbors laughed, and Rabia seized the moment to make her point. “Friends,” she said, “you are intelligent people and that is why you laugh. But tell me: When you lose your joy or peace of mind because of some disappointment or hardship, did you lose it out there [gesturing around her] or in here [gesturing to her heart]?” We tend to lay blame on our external circumstances and seek superficial solutions, but the truth is that we lost our peace and joy inside ourselves. We avoid looking inside us, where the light is dim. When we make it a lifelong practice to shine the light of compassionate awareness on ourself, our shadow gently begins to diminish, and we come closer to discovering our radiant, divine Self.

Shortly after I returned home from the Ukraine, I became severely ill with what doctors believed was a parasite. I couldn’t hold my food down and lost a lot of weight. Different doctors kept prescribing me antibiotics, but none of them seemed to help. For a couple of months, I was poked and tested in a variety of ways, only to have more questions surface than answers. Then I was sent to an ear, nose, and throat doctor for an evaluation. I was sitting in a waiting room with a bunch of toddlers, when my name was called. By the time I got into the examination room I knew I’d had enough. “Hey, I’m outta here,” I told the doctor. “I’ll take my chance with the resurrection.” Well, a couple of weeks later, my insurance agent called me. He was one of my lifelong friends and sounded concerned. “Hey, Jase,” he said. “Your insurance company wants you to see a psychiatrist.” Apparently, the ear, nose, and throat doctor recommended I undergo a full psychiatric evaluation based on my refusal to be examined, along with my speech on the resurrection! Apparently, he thought I was crazy. I convinced my buddy that I didn’t need a psychiatrist and eventually got over my illness. I would later read a passage of scripture in the Bible that caused me to smile in reflection on the entire ordeal. Second Corinthians 5:13 says: “If we are out of our mind, as some say, it is for God; if we are in our right mind, it is for you.

As in most obituaries, the author said little about the man; they rarely do. But the reticence here was greater than usual. It mentioned that Ravenscliff left a wife, but did not say when they married. It said nothing at all about his life, nor where he lived. There were not even any of the usual phrases to give a slight hint: ‘a natural raconteur’ (loved the sound of his own voice); ‘Noted for his generosity to friends’ (profligate); ‘a formidable enemy . . .’ (a brute); ‘a severe but fair employer . . .’ (a slave-driver); ‘devoted to the turf’ (never read a book in his life); ‘a life-long bachelor’ (vice); ‘a collector of flowers’ (this meant a great womaniser. Why it came to mean such a thing I do not know.) More browsing

Obviously, in those situations, we lose the sale. But we’re not trying to maximize each and every transaction. Instead, we’re trying to build a lifelong relationship with each customer, one phone call at a time. A lot of people may think it’s strange that an Internet company is so focused on the telephone, when only about 5 percent of our sales happen through the telephone. In fact, most of our phone calls don’t even result in sales. But what we’ve found is that on average, every customer contacts us at least once sometime during his or her lifetime, and we just need to make sure that we use that opportunity to create a lasting memory. The majority of phone calls don’t result in an immediate order. Sometimes a customer may be calling because it’s her first time returning an item, and she just wants a little help stepping through the process. Other times, a customer may call because there’s a wedding coming up this weekend and he wants a little fashion advice. And sometimes, we get customers who call simply because they’re a little lonely and want someone to talk to. I’m reminded of a time when I was in Santa Monica, California, a few years ago at a Skechers sales conference. After a long night of bar-hopping, a small group of us headed up to someone’s hotel room to order some food. My friend from Skechers tried to order a pepperoni pizza from the room-service menu, but was disappointed to learn that the hotel we were staying at did not deliver hot food after 11:00 PM. We had missed the deadline by several hours. In our inebriated state, a few of us cajoled her into calling Zappos to try to order a pizza. She took us up on our dare, turned on the speakerphone, and explained to the (very) patient Zappos rep that she was staying in a Santa Monica hotel and really craving a pepperoni pizza, that room service was no longer delivering hot food, and that she wanted to know if there was anything Zappos could do to help. The Zappos rep was initially a bit confused by the request, but she quickly recovered and put us on hold. She returned two minutes later, listing the five closest places in the Santa Monica area that were still open and delivering pizzas at that time. Now, truth be told, I was a little hesitant to include this story because I don’t actually want everyone who reads this book to start calling Zappos and ordering pizza. But I just think it’s a fun story to illustrate the power of not having scripts in your call center and empowering your employees to do what’s right for your brand, no matter how unusual or bizarre the situation. As for my friend from Skechers? After that phone call, she’s now a customer for life. Top 10 Ways to Instill Customer Service into Your Company   1. Make customer service a priority for the whole company, not just a department. A customer service attitude needs to come from the top.   2. Make WOW a verb that is part of your company’s everyday vocabulary.   3. Empower and trust your customer service reps. Trust that they want to provide great service… because they actually do. Escalations to a supervisor should be rare.   4. Realize that it’s okay to fire customers who are insatiable or abuse your employees.   5. Don’t measure call times, don’t force employees to upsell, and don’t use scripts.   6. Don’t hide your 1-800 number. It’s a message not just to your customers, but to your employees as well.   7. View each call as an investment in building a customer service brand, not as an expense you’re seeking to minimize.   8. Have the entire company celebrate great service. Tell stories of WOW experiences to everyone in the company.   9. Find and hire people who are already passionate about customer service. 10. Give great service to everyone: customers, employees, and vendors.

The primary culprit is assumed to be peer rejection: shunning, exclusion, shaming, taunting, mocking, bullying. The conclusion reached by some experts is that peer acceptance is absolutely necessary for a child's emotional health and well-being, and that there is nothing worse than not being liked by peers. It is assumed that peer rejection is an automatic sentence to lifelong self-doubt. Many parents today live in fear of their children's not having friends, not being esteemed by their peers. This way of thinking fails to consider two fundamental questions: What renders a child so vulnerable in the first place? And why is this vulnerability increasing? It is absolutely true that children snub, ignore, shun, shame, taunt, and mock. Children have always done these things when not sufficiently supervised by the adults in charge. But it is attachment, not the insensitive behavior or language of peers, that creates vulnerability. The current focus on the impact of peer rejection and peer acceptance has completely overlooked the role of attachment. If the child is attached primarily to the parents, it is parental acceptance that is vital to emotional health and well-being, and not being liked by parents is the devastating blow to self-esteem. The capacity of children to be inhumane has probably not changed, but, as research shows, the wounding of our children by one another is increasing. If many kids are damaged these days by the insensitivity of their peers, it is not necessarily because children today are more cruel than in the past, but because peer orientation has made them more susceptible to one anothers taunts and emotional assaults.

What was clear to me was that something was happening, and that something was a train I couldn't stop or slow down or get off. What was clear too was when it ended. I knew the exact moment. I could feel it. Even then, in that hour, I understood that the experience was of supreme value and importance. I didn't need hindsight. I knew in the moment. My family may have been repelled, even appalled by where I had been and what I had done; my friends may have feared for my sanity; others who cared for me may have shaken their heads at the waste and folly and futility. Even I understood it would take me years to recover. I didn't care. The trip was worth it. Why? Because I now had a history that was mine alone. I had an ordeal that I had survived and a passage that I had paid for with my own blood. Nobody knew about this passage but me. Nobody would ever know, nor did I feel the slightest urge to communicate it. This was mine, and nobody could ever take it away from me. I had punched my ticket. I had filled in the blanks.

Majesty, A frozen swamp. Icicles on branches and uprooted trees. That was our crystal palace, once upon a time. I was your king and you were my queen. I promised you I’d always try to give you your desires. I meant that. And since you wanted Derek, I tried to get him for you. I tried to get Derek to see how beautiful, sweet and amazing you are, in spite of myself, in spite of my rending heart. He never saw you the way I did, and you never saw me at all. I thought maybe if I found love with someone else, I’d be rid of my feelings for you, but that empty relationship only made me long for you more. I’ve offered you the most support and devotion a person can give an unwanting heart, but all I get in return are your mocking advances, which blatantly scream and reiterate the fact that you’ll never love me. It’s been so excruciating to be around you lately. You’re always teasing me, and it kills me. That’s why I’ve been so irritable and angry. It’s inconceivable to me how you could think I’d EVER hurt you, when all I’ve been living for is to try and make you happy. Well, I’m done. Your doubt has caused me more pain than anything I’ve ever known. I always thought we’d be life-long friends, but this fairytale has no happy ending. The crystal has shattered. I can’t be your king anymore. Then again, I never really was. I’ve always been the lowly jester. And everyone knows a fool can never be with a queen. Goodbye, Alec

It was as if we had made something very simple incredibly complicated. Here were these bodies, ready to reproduce, controlled against reproduction, then stimulated for an eventual reproduction that was put on ice. My friends who wanted to prolong their fertility did so, now that they were in their thirties and professionally successful, because circumstances in their lives had not lined up as planned. They had excelled at their jobs. They had nice apartments and enough money to comfortably start a family, but they lacked a domestic companion who would provide the necessary genetic material, lifelong support, and love. They wanted to be the parents they had grown up under, but love couldn't be engineered, and ovaries could. Hanging over all of this was an idea of choice, an arbitrary linking of goals and outcomes, which reduced structural, economic and technological change to individual decision. "The right to choose"―the right to birth control and abortion services―is different from the idea of choice I mean here. I mean that the baby question justified a fiction that one had to conform one's life to a uniform box by a certain deadline. If the choice were only to have a baby or not, then anybody who wanted a baby and was physically able would simply have one (as many people did), but what I saw with my friends was that it wasn’t actually about the choice of having a baby but of setting up a nuclear family, which unfortunately could not, unlike making a baby, happen more or less by fiat.

I soon found my feet, and was much less homesick than I was at prep school. Thank God. I learned that with plenty of free time on our hands, and being encouraged to fill the time with “interests,” I could come up with some great adventures. A couple of my best friends and I started climbing the huge old oak trees around the grounds, finding monkey routes through the branches that allowed us to travel between the trees, high up above the ground. It was brilliant. We soon had built a real-life Robin Hood den, with full-on branch swings, pulleys, and balancing bars high up in the treetops. We crossed the Thames on the high girders above a railway bridge, we built rafts out of old Styrofoam and even made a boat out of an old bathtub to go down the river in. (Sadly this sank, as the water came in through the overflow hole, which was a fundamental flaw. Note to self: Test rafts before committing to big rivers in them.) We spied on the beautiful French girls who worked in the kitchens, and even made camps on the rooftops overlooking the walkway they used on their way back from work. We would vainly attempt to try and chat them up as they passed. In between many of these antics we had to work hard academically, as well as dress in ridiculous clothes, consisting of long tailcoats and waistcoats. This developed in me the art of making smart clothes look ragged, and ever since, I have maintained a lifelong love of wearing good-quality clothes in a messy way. It even earned me the nickname of “Scug,” from the deputy-headmaster. In Eton slang this roughly translates as: “A person of no account, and of dirty appearance.

Christmas In India Dim dawn behind the tamerisks -- the sky is saffron-yellow -- As the women in the village grind the corn, And the parrots seek the riverside, each calling to his fellow That the Day, the staring Easter Day is born. Oh the white dust on the highway! Oh the stenches in the byway! Oh the clammy fog that hovers And at Home they're making merry 'neath the white and scarlet berry -- What part have India's exiles in their mirth? Full day begind the tamarisks -- the sky is blue and staring -- As the cattle crawl afield beneath the yoke, And they bear One o'er the field-path, who is past all hope or caring, To the ghat below the curling wreaths of smoke. Call on Rama, going slowly, as ye bear a brother lowly -- Call on Rama -- he may hear, perhaps, your voice! With our hymn-books and our psalters we appeal to other altars, And to-day we bid "good Christian men rejoice!" High noon behind the tamarisks -- the sun is hot above us -- As at Home the Christmas Day is breaking wan. They will drink our healths at dinner -- those who tell us how they love us, And forget us till another year be gone! Oh the toil that knows no breaking! Oh the Heimweh, ceaseless, aching! Oh the black dividing Sea and alien Plain! Youth was cheap -- wherefore we sold it. Gold was good -- we hoped to hold it, And to-day we know the fulness of our gain. Grey dusk behind the tamarisks -- the parrots fly together -- As the sun is sinking slowly over Home; And his last ray seems to mock us shackled in a lifelong tether. That drags us back how'er so far we roam. Hard her service, poor her payment -- she is ancient, tattered raiment -- India, she the grim Stepmother of our kind. If a year of life be lent her, if her temple's shrine we enter, The door is hut -- we may not look behind. Black night behind the tamarisks -- the owls begin their chorus -- As the conches from the temple scream and bray. With the fruitless years behind us, and the hopeless years before us, Let us honor, O my brother, Christmas Day! Call a truce, then, to our labors -- let us feast with friends and neighbors, And be merry as the custom of our caste; For if "faint and forced the laughter," and if sadness follow after, We are richer by one mocking Christmas past.

Almost as though this thought had fluttered through the open window, Vernon Dursley, Harry’s uncle, suddenly spoke. “Glad to see the boy’s stopped trying to butt in. Where is he anyway?” “I don’t know,” said Aunt Petunia unconcernedly. “Not in the house.” Uncle Vernon grunted. “Watching the news . . .” he said scathingly. “I’d like to know what he’s really up to. As if a normal boy cares what’s on the news — Dudley hasn’t got a clue what’s going on, doubt he knows who the Prime Minister is! Anyway, it’s not as if there’d be anything about his lot on our news —” “Vernon, shh!” said Aunt Petunia. “The window’s open!” “Oh — yes — sorry, dear . . .” The Dursleys fell silent. Harry listened to a jingle about Fruit ’N Bran breakfast cereal while he watched Mrs. Figg, a batty, cat-loving old lady from nearby Wisteria Walk, amble slowly past. She was frowning and muttering to herself. Harry was very pleased that he was concealed behind the bush; Mrs. Figg had recently taken to asking him around for tea whenever she met him in the street. She had rounded the corner and vanished from view before Uncle Vernon’s voice floated out of the window again. “Dudders out for tea?” “At the Polkisses’,” said Aunt Petunia fondly. “He’s got so many little friends, he’s so popular . . .” Harry repressed a snort with difficulty. The Dursleys really were astonishingly stupid about their son, Dudley; they had swallowed all his dim-witted lies about having tea with a different member of his gang every night of the summer holidays. Harry knew perfectly well that Dudley had not been to tea anywhere; he and his gang spent every evening vandalizing the play park, smoking on street corners, and throwing stones at passing cars and children. Harry had seen them at it during his evening walks around Little Whinging; he had spent most of the holidays wandering the streets, scavenging newspapers from bins along the way. The opening notes of the music that heralded the seven o’clock news reached Harry’s ears and his stomach turned over. Perhaps tonight — after a month of waiting — would be the night — “Record numbers of stranded holidaymakers fill airports as the Spanish baggage-handlers’ strike reaches its second week —” “Give ’em a lifelong siesta, I would,” snarled Uncle Vernon over the end of the newsreader’s sentence, but no matter: Outside in the flower bed, Harry’s stomach seemed to unclench.

Every human being with normal mental and emotional faculties longs for more. People typically associate their longing for more with a desire to somehow improve their lot in life—to get a better job, a nicer house, a more loving spouse, become famous, and so on. If only this, that, or some other thing were different, we say to ourselves, then we’d feel complete and happy. Some chase this “if only” all their lives. For others, the “if only” turns into resentment when they lose hope of ever acquiring completeness. But even if we get lucky and acquire our “if only,” it never quite satisfies. Acquiring the better job, the bigger house, the new spouse, or world fame we longed for may provide a temporary sense of happiness and completeness, but it never lasts. Sooner or later, the hunger returns. The best word in any language that captures this vague, unquenchable yearning, according to C. S. Lewis and other writers, is the German word Sehnsucht (pronounced “zane-zookt”).[9] It’s an unusual word that is hard to translate, for it expresses a deep longing or craving for something that you can’t quite identify and that always feels just out of reach. Some have described Sehnsucht as a vague and bittersweet nostalgia and/or longing for a distant country, but one that cannot be found on earth. Others have described it as a quasi-mystical sense that we (and our present world) are incomplete, combined with an unattainable yearning for whatever it is that would complete it. Scientists have offered several different explanations for this puzzling phenomenon—puzzling, because it’s hard to understand how natural processes alone could have evolved beings that hunger for something nature itself doesn’t provide.[10] But this longing is not puzzling from a biblical perspective, for Scripture teaches us that humans and the entire creation are fallen and estranged from God. Lewis saw Sehnsucht as reflective of our “pilgrim status.” It indicates that we are not where we were meant to be, where we are destined to be; we are not home. Lewis once wrote to a friend that “our best havings are wantings,” for our “wantings” are reminders that humans are meant for a different and better state.[11] In another place he wrote: Our lifelong nostalgia, our longing to be reunited with something in the universe from which we now feel cut off, to be on the inside of some door which we have always seen from the outside is . . . the truest index of our real situation.[12] With Lewis, Christians have always identified this Sehnsucht that resides in the human heart as a yearning for God. As St. Augustine famously prayed, “You have made us for yourself, and our hearts are restless till they find their rest in you.”[13] In this light, we might think of Sehnsucht as a sort of homing device placed in us by our Creator to lead us into a passionate relationship with him.

There is a third premise of the recovery movement that I do endorse enthusiastically: The patterns of problems in childhood that recur into adulthood are significant. They can be found by exploring your past, by looking into the corners of your childhood. Coming to grips with your childhood will not yield insight into how you became the adult you are: The causal links between childhood events and what you have now become are simply too weak. Coming to grips with your childhood will not make your adult problems go away: Working through the past does not seem to be any sort of cure for troubles. Coming to grips with your childhood will not make you feel any better for long, nor will it raise your self-esteem. Coming to grips with childhood is a different and special voyage. The sages urged us to know ourselves, and Plato warned us that the unexamined life is not worth living. Knowledge acquired on this voyage is about patterns, about the tapestry that we have woven. It is not knowledge about causes. Are there consistent mistakes we have made and still make? In the flush of victory, do I forget my friends—in the Little League and when I got that last big raise? (People have always told me I'm a good loser but a bad winner.) Do I usually succeed in one domain but fail in another? (I wish I could get along with the people I really love as well as I do with my employers.) Does a surprising emotion arise again and again? (I always pick fights with people I love right before they have to go away.) Does my body often betray me? (I get a lot of colds when big projects are due.) You probably want to know why you are a bad winner, why you get colds when others expect a lot of you, and why you react to abandonment with anger. You will not find out. As important and magnetic as the “why” questions are, they are questions that psychology cannot now answer. One of the two clearest findings of one hundred years of therapy is that satisfactory answers to the great “why” questions are not easily found; maybe in fifty years things will be different; maybe never. When purveyors of the evils of “toxic shame” tell you that they know it comes from parental abuse, don't believe them. No one knows any such thing. Be skeptical even of your own “Aha!” experiences: When you unearth the fury you felt that first kindergarten day, do not assume that you have found the source of your lifelong terror of abandonment. The causal links may be illusions, and humility is in order here. The other clearest finding of the whole therapeutic endeavor, however, is that change is within our grasp, almost routine, throughout adult life. So even if why we are what we are is a mystery, how to change ourselves is not. Mind the pattern. A pattern of mistakes is a call to change your life. The rest of the tapestry is not determined by what has been woven before. The weaver herself, blessed with knowledge and with freedom, can change—if not the material she must work with—the design of what comes next.

They have fought on the frontlines for their people and suffered the consequences. They have lost those that are dear to them and watched lifelong friends take their last breaths in their arms, my sons, Ethelred, will come home from war flying the house banners or they will be wrapped in them, either way, they will come home.

Friendship! Lifelong friends are important. Energy! Morning jogs are nice. Victory! I'd rather be a winner not a loser. Take that advice to heart!

I pray that we will always be able to overcome any challenges life may throw our way. My best friend, you are so dear to me. I am very grateful to have you as a friend as I reflect on the goodness of the Lord in my life. I make a lifelong commitment to never lose touch with you.

That or some kind of glass bead or lesser gemstone made to look like a ruby,” Sera said. “It’s hard to tell while it’s still in the dirt.” Josh and Lauren’s animated conversation as they took measurements and recorded data sparked a fire in the pit of Sera’s stomach. It wasn’t like her to be so possessive over a find, but she couldn’t help the jealousy that burned inside, especially because she couldn’t hear what they were saying about the amulet. She dropped her gaze. Gulping half of her water bottle, she choked on the last bit as it went down the wrong tube. Nora gave her a few hard pats on the shoulder to help clear her airway. Sera waved her away as she coughed. Hardly the first time she needed rescuing while doing something as simple as drinking water. Being the opposite of graceful came with risks, a fact Nora knew well when it came to Sera. It wasn’t all that unusual to still be friends with the same people from elementary school, but it was far less common to share similar interests all the way through college. Serafina and Eleanor had formed a lifelong bond the moment they met in their Li’l Archaeologists summer program, despite being opposites in just about every way. Nora was the light to her dark—blonde and outgoing next to brunette and reserved. “Didn’t Chad tell you not to dig in that area? I’ll bet he’s kicking himself so hard right now.

In the experts’ view, you should marry your friend and, if possible, your best friend. Quite literally, they suggest you consider what you would like in a lifelong friend and look for that in a potential spouse. As a relationship is moving into a serious phase, questions couples can and should discuss are: If we weren’t in love, would be friends? And if we, as most couples do, downshift to something other than heart-thumping passion, what is there that will keep us together? (Hint: the answer should not be kids.) The answer is friendship, and if you don’t have it, don’t get married—it’s that simple.

Keen to bring about a cease-fire, on November 6, Election Day, Eisenhower unleashed an impassioned campaign of personal diplomacy aimed mostly at Whitehall. But it was old-fashioned power politics that enabled him to get the job done. He mobilized world opinion against England and France through the UN Security Council—an embarrassing project that placed him in alignment with his Soviet counterparts against his lifelong friends. Ike knew his best play was to exploit Britain’s fiscal weakness, which was driving Prime Minister Eden’s notably deteriorating domestic political situation. Britain was running out of financial reserves. Refusing to repatriate dollars that Britain had supplied to the International Monetary Fund, Eisenhower muscled Great Britain into

If this man is so cold-blooded that he can kill a lifelong friend for his son’s mistake, he’s not going to think twice about getting rid of Max and me.

Those with a fully developed sense of being alive and engaged in a lifelong task of collaboration with other human beings, are those who are most likely to be living an unfettered life, a simple life, and one in which there is time for people. Those who are harried and preoccupied by work, acquisition and the quest for success, are those most likely to have sacrificed family and friends.

They are toxic, and we know they are toxic, but perhaps they’re a lifelong friend, relative, or coworker. You can’t avoid all troublesome people, can you? And aren’t we supposed to reach difficult people? Didn’t Jesus tell us to search for sinners? And so we keep engaging them, keep running into a wall, all the while thinking we’re doing the Lord’s work. But what if we’re not? What if there’s another way of looking at how we handle toxic people in our lives? What if the way and work of Christ are so compelling, so urgent, and so important that allowing ourselves to become bogged down by toxic people is an offense to God rather than a service to God?

Generous, amiable, and cultured, Atticus was not remarkable for the intensity of his devotion either to principles or persons. “That he was the lifelong friend of Cicero,” says Professor Tyrrell, “is the best title which Atticus has to remembrance. As a man he was kindly, careful, and shrewd, but nothing more: there was never anything grand or noble in his character. He was the quintessence of prudent mediocrity.

Not that he truly wished them dead--that wasn't quite it--but more and more often, when the man considered his lifelong friends, his colleagues, even his wife and sons, he felt that their image of him had become so mildewed by habit or complicated by misunderstanding that he took comfort in the idea of their mortality: the thought that soon, very soon, they would die and he would no longer have to be the person they had concluded he was.

These are the magic moments that you will remember on your deathbed. The things that made life worth living. Your first love, the birth of your child, achieving that lifelong dream, sharing great food and sights with friends and loved ones.

Talk about anything except the food. The idea is to socialize your child in mealtime behavior and that means not paying attention to the food they eat. For some parents this is a hard shift to make. But think about how it would feel to you if your friends commented on how much you ate of a meal. Or maybe you remember your own parent shaming you: “You don’t like that? Why’d you eat so little?” Children actually eat more when no one notices or comments on what they are eating

Had I spent the previous twenty years on a couch, the chances of being able to protect my son and his friends would have been slim to none. As a lifelong martial artist, first responder and athlete, those chances were significantly higher.

Voltaire had exercised the greatest intellectual influence on Catherine, and Diderot was the only one of the major philosophes she actually met, but it was in Friedrich Melchoir Grimm that the empress found a lifelong friend.

The first thought / the functional job When did you first realize you needed something to solve [your problem]? What were you doing, or trying to do, when this happened? Before you began [using the current solution], how did you solve these same problems in the past? When did you realize the old way wasn’t working? When were you forced to make a change? Was there a deadline or specific event you needed to be ready for? What alternatives did you consider before using [the solution]? What was good or bad about each of those? What was the hardest part of figuring out what solution to use? Was there any point where you got stuck? With [the solution], what can you do that you couldn’t do before? Did you alone make this decision to change, or was someone else involved? What other changes did you have to make to integrate [the solution] into your life? Emotional and social jobs Tell me about how you looked for a product to solve your problem. What job are you ultimately trying to get done? Were you able to accomplish this with [your product]? What kind of solutions did you try? Or not try? Why or why not? Did you ask anyone else what they thought about the purchase you were about to make? What was the conversation like when you talked about purchasing the product with your [friend/colleague/ boss/parents]? Before you purchased it, did you imagine what using the product would be like? Where were you when you were thinking this? Did you have any anxiety about the purchase? Did you hear something about the product that made you nervous? What was it? Why did it make you nervous? How do you use the product you’ve purchased? Are there features you use all the time? How? Are there features you never use? Why not? What’s something you wish [your product] could do?

You can run from your demons, but they will always find you. In fact, they were never gone at all, but remained lurking in the shadows, nipping at your heels, until you could no longer ignore them. What brings us all to this understanding—this impasse—is unique for each of us. It may be the loss of a job, a sudden illness, a tough-love confrontation from a lifelong friend, or even your nemesis. It is something that stops you in your tracks and causes you to take inventory of your life and its direction. It may even be a perfect stranger who steps on the scene at just the right time.

Anna Mikhaylovna’s arms were round her. She was weeping, and the countess wept too. They wept for their friendship, their kind-heartedness and the unfortunate need for lifelong friends to soil their hands with anything as sordid as money, and they wept also for their lost youth … But the tears of both women were sweet …

The concept of family is strange, really; to have a lifelong relationship with people you don’t really know and have nothing in common with other than arbitrary bloodlines. It’s like friends of friends, but you didn’t even choose the first friends. I know it’s not like that for everyone. But it’s like that for me.

THE WOMEN in Lucas’s life reduced him to a chattering-chipmunk state about once a month. If not Letty, then Weather; if not Weather, then Jennifer Carey, mother of his other daughter; if not Carey, then Elle Kruger, a nun and lifelong friend; if not her, then Carol, his secretary. They were, he sometimes thought, when he had time to think about it, all crazier than a barrel of hair. All of them together, and also taken as individuals. But this, he thought, took the everlasting triple-decker chocolate-fudge cake.

Bruce realizes that in all his months and years interviewing addicts about their lives, they had been telling him the answer all along. “People explained over and over before I got it,” Bruce tells me. Before they became junkies, these young people were sitting in a room alone, cut off from meaning. Most of them could hope at best for a McJob with a shrinking minimum wage—a lifelong burger-flip punctuated by watching TV and scrimping for minor consumer objects. “My job was basically to say—why don’t you stop taking drugs?” Bruce says. “And one guy explained to me very beautifully. He said, ‘Well, think about that for a minute. What would I do if I stopped taking drugs? Maybe I could get myself a job as a janitor or something like that.’ ” Compare that, he said, to “what I’m doing right now, which is really exciting. Because I’ve got friends down here and we do exciting things like rob stores and hang around with hookers.” Suddenly you are part of a world where, together with other addicts, you are embarked on a crusade—a constant frenetic crusade to steal enough to buy the drugs, dodge the police, keep out of jail, and stay alive. If your problem is being chronically starved of social bonds, then part of the solution is to bond with the heroin itself and the relief it gives you. But a bigger part is to bond with the subculture that comes with taking heroin—the tribe of fellow users all embarked on the same mission and facing the same threats and risking death every day with you. It gives you an identity. It gives you a life of highs and lows, instead of relentless monotony. The world stops being indifferent to you, and starts being hostile—which is at least proof that you exist, that you aren’t dead already. The heroin helps users deal with the pain of being unable to form normal bonds with other humans. The heroin subculture gives them bonds with other human beings.

Each part of the EKG system works together as a puzzle, and each part contains a number of potential strategies that you can choose from to create your desired Nomad Capitalist lifestyle: E - Enhance Your Personal Freedom ● Living Overseas - Whether in one place, a few places, or as a perpetual traveler. ● Second Passports and Residencies - Obtain a residence permit or citizenship in another country for better travel, better treatment, and more options. ● Digital Privacy - Host your website overseas or use secure offshore email. ● Socializing Overseas - Make friends, dates, or a lifelong partner in another country. ● Personal Happiness - Find the place where you feel totally at home. K - Keep More of Your Money ● Tax Reduction - Legally reduce or eliminate your personal taxes by relocating your business the right way. ● Offshore Banking - Protect your money in quality banks and earn higher returns. ● Offshore Companies - Legally choose the tax rate for your business. G - Grow Your Money ● Frontier Market Entrepreneurship - Start a business in a less developed market. ● Foreign Real Estate - Buy, rent, sell, or hold property in fast-growing markets. ● Foreign Currencies - Earn high rates of return just by holding another currency.

Married to Leonard Woolf in 1912 in a partnership that continued until her death in 1941, Virginia Woolf had intense and enduring relationships with a number of women friends, including Violet Trefusis, the writer Vita Sackville-West and the composer Ethel Smyth, as well as a lifelong bond with her elder sister, the artist Vanessa Bell

Generally, Morgenthau ignored the hate mail, though he occasionally responded to the more temperate letters. But one public attack that he chose to answer came from the influential, nationally syndicated columnist Joseph Alsop. Among the members of the press, he was the most vociferous of hawks. Even lifelong friends like Isaiah Berlin thought his views on Vietnam “a trifle mad . . . even odious.” In March 1965 Alsop wrote a column directed at Morgenthau that began: “One proof of the wisdom of President Johnson’s Vietnamese policy is its marked success to date.” But that success had generated criticism from credulous politicians like Fulbright and “pompous” professors like Morgenthau, whom Alsop labeled an “appeaser” in the mold of “the be-nice-to-Hitler group in England before 1939.” The mention of Hitler had to be especially wounding to Morgenthau, who said “the gates of the political underworld seem to have opened.” Before Alsop’s column appeared, Morgenthau reported, even those who disagreed with him did so respectfully, but now “I receive every day letters with xenophobic, red-baiting, and anti-Semitic attacks.” Morgenthau responded to Alsop with a long letter to the editor of the Washington Post. The debate, such as it was, turned on the intentions of the Communist Chinese. To Alsop, who prided himself on his knowledge and appreciation of Chinese civilization, the Chinese were historically expansionist, always bent on conquest and therefore analogous to the Nazis of the Third Reich. To which Morgenthau rejoined that “Mao Zedong is not Hitler, that the position of China in Asia is not like that of Nazi Germany in Europe,” and that his opposition to the war in Vietnam could not be equated with the appeasers of the 1930s. No doubt wearily, he took up the task once again of explaining that spheres of influence were a reality of international relations, ignored only at one’s peril, and that if China had managed to extend its power in Asia it was “primarily through its political and cultural superiority and not through conquest.” (Years later, Kissinger would offer a similar assessment of the Chinese.)

Not all that long ago, I was in a room with Jewish and Gentile leaders in the larger body of Jesus-followers. The horror of the Holocaust was being discussed, and one of the Gentile pastors looked over at one of my Jewish friends and remarked almost casually, "Next time we'll stand with you." Almost reflexively, as if responding from lifelong pain and betrayal, my Jewish friend blurted out, "I don't believe you!" I think he was shocked at his own words, but added, "That has never been the case in history." I was heavily impacted by the encounter. Somewhere it was stored in the inner recesses of my soul, so that on another occasion, following a showing of films from the Holocaust, I turned to this same Jewish friend and said, under a Holy Spirit anointing and with tears streaming down my cheeks, "I vow to you in the name of Yeshua, that I will stand with you even to death." His response? "I believe you, Don." My prayer for all of us is that we establish such deep friendships across these turbulent ancient "racial" lines, so that even among Jewish people who are not believers in Yeshua, we Gentiles will become the Corrie ten Booms and the Oskar Schindlers of our time.

Don’t stress that your friendships are changing as marriages and children bring challenges to them. New wonderful friends will appear in the next eight years that will bring you lifelong friends and so much happiness. JONATHAN AND ANGELA SCOTT, WILDLIFE AND TRAVEL PHOTOGRAPHERS – THE BIG CAT PEOPLE 1.

Coll swung a glare on Kruppe. ‘What outrageous lies have you uttered now?’ The round man looked offended. ‘Kruppe and the truth are lifelong partners, friend Coll! Indeed, wedded bliss – we only yesterday celebrated our fortieth anniversary, the mistress of veracity and I.

Unkind words are ruthless murderers of lifelong friendships and the harmony of homes. Banish unkind words from your lips forever, and make your home life safe from trouble. Sincere, sweet words are nectar to thirsty souls. They are in demand everywhere. Sweet words create happiness in friends, enemies, churches, business offices, and everywhere. People feel happy when a crabby person leaves the room, and they are glad when a sweet-voiced, sincere friend appears.

Matt officially died in a hospital in Fort Collins, Colorado. He actually died in the outskirts of Laramie, tied to a fence. You, Mr. McKinney, with your friend Mr. Henderson left them out there by himself, but he wasn't alone. There were his lifelong friends with him, friends that he had grown up with. You're probably wondering who these friends were. First, he had the beautiful night sky and the same stars and moon that we used to see through a telescope. Then he had the daylight and the sun to shine on him. And through it all he was breathing in the scent of pine trees from the snowy range. He heard the wind, the ever-present Wyoming wind, for the last time. He had one more friend with him, he had God. And I feel better knowing he wasn't alone.

You went on and on about how excited you were to move away. You couldn’t wait to get out of Hamilton and get away from me. I got the message. Loud and clear. It might’ve been the first time in our lives that one of us actually took a hint, ha. I went to Stanford, ready for a fresh start, but instead I spent my entire freshman year thinking about transferring to Duke. I didn’t join any clubs or make those lifelong friends that end up being your groomsmen. I hung out in my dorm room and listened to those CDs you used to make for Madeleine. (I stole most of her collection before I moved.) There was something comforting about listening to the songs you’d handpicked, even if they weren’t for me.

Making enough money to pay for your kids’ college or take your dream vacation? The Serhants and the Badavas family have been lifelong friends since the day we showed up at their front door. I never could have imagined such a risk would pay off in such a good way. If there’s the possibility of that big reward on the other side of the door, just knock on it. Go ahead, take a risk. What are you waiting for? See? You’re still alive! Take another one. Then do it again.

I'm reminded that romance isn't the only great love story of our lives. Sometimes the love we have with our lifelong friends, the ones we can depend on through changes and fights and joys and heartbreaks - sometimes those are the greatest love stories we have.

Summer 1963: I had graduated with HONORS, and was going off to HUNTINGDON COLLEGE in the fall. Several people told me: 'You have to learn to smoke, if you are going to HUNTINGDON.' So---I tried to learn to smoke---and I just could not learn to smoke. Well---when I got to HUNTINGDON---I fit right in-------NOBODY WAS SMOKING!!!!!!

There are a lot of mantras going around these days about how “other people’s feelings about you are none of your business.” There are mantras about not owning the feelings of others, or about not having to apologize. I get it. As a lifelong codependent I can see where I have spent way too many hours worrying about what others think or if someone is upset with me. I don’t think we need to concern ourselves with the opinions or feelings of every person we know. We don’t need to morph ourselves into being liked by everyone. However, I do want my kids to be concerned with how they are making the people in their inner circle feel. I don’t want them to have an entitled self-esteem that is unable to consider feedback. If their younger sibling feels they are a bully, I want them to be concerned with that. If their reputation among their close friends is for being a backstabbing mean girl, I want them to be concerned with that. We should all be mindful of how the trusted people in our inner circle experience us, because sometimes we need that mirror to see ourselves clearly.

The three volumes on the case compiled by Police Captain Vincent Doyle and exhaustive investigations by Captain Wilmott’s lifelong friend Captain George Seeth provide further evidence. As far as is known, Doyle and Seeth never met. Neither was even aware of the other’s existence. Yet, somewhat astonishingly, both came to the conclusion that Rogers poisoned Captain Wilmott as a deliberate act of retaliation.

In the seven years I lived in New York, the perpetual youth machine kept me preoccupied. I hardly noticed that my Baltimore friends were buying houses, getting married, having children, and growing into lined faces. It happened gradually, but when I return to Maryland it stuns me. I arrive at a dinner party and my clothes feel the wrong size. I get brunch with couples and their kids and my mouth feels the wrong size. I can’t say the right thing. Or speak like a normal person. My volume knob is broken. I seem only to holler when saying something inappropriate or mumble incomprehensibly when trying to explain myself. I feel the coil centered in my belly winding tighter. The easier the conversation, the tighter that coil seems to wind. I find myself looking at my friends for weaknesses, getting angry at the smallest perceived slights. I challenge lifelong confidants in tight-lipped arguments over truly trivial matters. I can’t find a job. I apply for bartending jobs and construction work, mostly.

In this chapter I tried to show that Hume was right: • The mind is divided into parts, like a rider (controlled processes) on an elephant (automatic processes). The rider evolved to serve the elephant. • You can see the rider serving the elephant when people are morally dumbfounded. They have strong gut feelings about what is right and wrong, and they struggle to construct post hoc justifications for those feelings. Even when the servant (reasoning) comes back empty-handed, the master (intuition) doesn’t change his judgment. • The social intuitionist model starts with Hume’s model and makes it more social. Moral reasoning is part of our lifelong struggle to win friends and influence people. That’s why I say that “intuitions come first, strategic reasoning second.” You’ll misunderstand moral reasoning if you think about it as something people do by themselves in order to figure out the truth. • Therefore, if you want to change someone’s mind about a moral or political issue, talk to the elephant first. If you ask people to believe something that violates their intuitions, they will devote their efforts to finding an escape hatch—a reason to doubt your argument or conclusion. They will almost always succeed.

I’m reminded that romance isn’t the only great love story of our lives. Sometimes the love we have with our lifelong friends, the ones we can depend on through changes and fights and joys and heartbreaks—sometimes those are the greatest love stories we have.

Lifelong friends enjoy walking alongside each other no matter what life brings.

We need a meritocracy where people’s skills and interests are identified when they are children, and they are given 10,000 hours of training in what they love so that they can become expert in it. When they leave education, they will be able to pour their heart and soul into their work because it’s the thing they find most fulfilling. “Laziness” will be eliminated. We will have a hard-working, high-achieving, inspired population of meritocrats with high self esteem and confidence. We want everyone to love what they do for work, and be surrounded by great, lifelong friends who share their passion.

Many more looked around at happy and unhappy things alike, left the room, and agreed to the pen. It’s a weird occasion, writing is. It appears as peaceful, silent years of nothing, but implies the valor of someone fighting a lifelong monster. To decide to wield the pen is a win with no victory. But some lines of theirs were more important than satisfaction. What is a bookshelf but a place for us to see all the nights our dearest of friends did not see their own?

Influential educational school in Abu Dhabi: Reach British School Selecting schools that speak about the type of education you want to impart to your kid is an important decision. Like all other difficult decisions that parenthood brings with it, this one too cannot be decided based on one impulsive thought. School is an important part of any child's growth. They learn, they giggle, and grow into beautiful individuals. Thus, schools build them into responsible beings. However, finding the right school can be research-heavy and hectic. International education in the United Arab Emirates is not cheap, and this adds to an extra load of pressure on deciding parents. Yet, Abu Dhabi is known to host an excellent range of international schools that are somewhat budget-friendly. The British International School is one such example, they surely secure a place in the list of best schools in Abu Dhabi. Why choose Reach British School? Reading through different curriculums, and googling into millions of school websites is a part of this decision-making. You look for that spark, one that you look for in any relationship. Yes, choosing a school is the beginning of a life-long relationship, an important part of your child’s life. This article will push you towards decision making, as it lists the points on why you should choose Reach British School. The following reasons will convince you that it fits into the best schools in Abu Dhabi. English proficiency The staff is filled with native English-speaking teachers. Thus, they bring with them, years of experience in the language field and absolute English proficiency. Being native English speakers, they can showcase experience in the UK or other international schools. Excellent facilities Schooling is a part of a child's overall growth, and there is more to it than just academics. Being one of the best schools in Abu Dhabi, they support an exciting curriculum. It includes sports, arts, academic subjects, and a bunch of other extra-curricular activities. High Academic standards and behavioral expectations A child grows into a successful human being, who is also a responsible citizen. Thus, the school sets a strong focus on the academic depth and the behavioral patterns of the child. They ensure that your child reaches their fullest potential in a safe and secure environment. Student progress tracking You will get a chance to be deeply involved in your child's progress. The school will provide regular reports on your child's growth that will give you a fair idea about their needs, likes, and dislikes. Thus, you can take an active part in their academic progress, social and emotional well-being. Secondary scholarships The school funds a scholarship program to motivate students to achieve their dreams. The program attracts bright minds and pushes them to reach their potential in the fields they are passionate about. Amazing learning Not just the staff, but also the environment of the school will enable your child to go through an amazing learning experience. Your child will be motivated and encouraged to perform better as that is the base for amazing learning. Endnotes Reach British School wants to let your child shine, in the truest sense possible. Keeping the tag of being one of the best schools in Abu Dhabi, is difficult. Thus, they aspire to be better every day and sculpt new souls into responsible adults, while protecting their innocence and childhood.

people who were raised by one or more narcissists often gravitate toward narcissistic partners, friends, and work situations, because it is what they know. Overall, this suggests that a person with a narcissistic parent, who struggles lifelong with the feeling of being “not good enough,” becomes easy prey for other narcissists.

A part war drama, part coming-of-age story, part spiritual pilgrimage, Surviving Hitler, Evading Stalin is the story of a young woman who experienced more hardships before graduating high school than most people do in a lifetime. Yet her heartaches are only half the story; the other half is a story of resilience, of leaving her lifelong home in Germany to find a new home, a new life, and a new love in America. Mildred Schindler Janzen has given us a time capsule of World War II and the years following it, filled with pristinely preserved memories of a bygone era. Ken Gire New York Times bestselling author of All the Gallant Men The memoir of Mildred Schindler Janzen will inform and inspire all who read it. This is a work that pays tribute to the power and resiliency of the human spirit to endure, survive, and overcome in pursuit of the freedom and liberty that all too many take for granted. Kirk Ford, Jr., Professor Emeritus, History Mississippi College Author of OSS and the Yugoslav Resistance, 1943-1945 A compelling first-person account of life in Germany during the rise of Adolph Hitler and the Nazi Party. A well written, true story of a young woman overcoming the odds and rising above the tragedies of loss of family and friends during a savage and brutal war, culminating in her triumph in life through sheer determination and will. A life lesson for us all. Col. Frank Janotta (Retired), Mississippi Army National Guard Mildred Schindler Janzen’s touching memoir is a testimony to God’s power to deliver us from the worst evil that men can devise. The vivid details of Janzen’s amazing life have been lovingly mined and beautifully wrought by Sherye Green into a tender story of love, gratitude, and immeasurable hope. Janzen’s rich, post-war life in Kansas serves as a powerful reminder of the great promise of America. Troy Matthew Carnes, Author of Rasputin’s Legacy and Dudgeons and Daggers World War II was horrific, and we must never forget. Surviving Hitler, Evading Stalin is a must-read that sheds light on the pain the Nazis and then the Russians inflicted on the German Jews and the German people. Mildred Schindler Janzen’s story, of how she and her mother and brother survived the war and of the special document that allowed Mildred to come to America, is compelling. Mildred’s faith sustained her during the war's horrors and being away from her family, as her faith still sustains her today. Surviving Hitler, Evading Stalin is a book worth buying for your library, so we never forget. Cynthia Akagi, Ph.D. Northcentral University I wish all in the world could read Mildred’s story about this loving steel magnolia of a woman who survived life under Hitler’s reign. Mildred never gave up, but with each suffering, grew stronger in God’s strength and eternal hope. Beautifully written, this life story will captivate, encourage, and empower its readers to stretch themselves in life, in love, and with God, regardless of their circumstances. I will certainly recommend this book. Renae Brame, Author of Daily Devotions with Our Beloved, God’s Peaceful Waters Flow, and Snow and the Eternal Hope How utterly inspiring to read the life story of a woman whose every season reflects God’s safe protection and unfailing love. When young Mildred Schindler escaped Nazi Germany, only to have her father taken by Russians and her mother and brother hidden behind Eastern Europe’s Iron Curtain, she courageously found a new life in America. Surviving Hitler, Evading Stalin is her personal witness to God’s guidance and provision at every step of that perilous journey. How refreshing to view a full life from beginning to remarkable end – always validating that nothing is impossible with God. Read this book and you will discover the author’s secret to life: “My story is a declaration that choosing joy and thankfulness over bitterness and anger, even amid difficult circumsta

May you be blessed with a special handful of both lifelong and seasonal friends. May each, a treasure in his or her own right, support you where you are and push you toward where you want to go.

Our eulogies are always about the other stuff: what we gave, how we connected, how much we meant to our family and friends, small kindnesses, lifelong passions, and the things that made us laugh.

There is an uncharacteristic radicalism to Lewis’s further suggestion that if we can find “even one reader to whom the cheap little book with its double columns and the lurid daub on its cover had been a lifelong delight, who had read and reread it, who would notice, and object, if a single word were changed, then, however little we could see in it ourselves and however it was despised by our friends and colleagues, we should not dare to put it beyond the pale.

Our eulogies are always about the other stuff: what we gave, how we connected, how much we meant to our family and friends, small kindnesses, lifelong passions, and the things that made us laugh.

theatre, pioneering artists such as Fatima Rouschdie and Naguib Al-Rihani introduced popular comedies as well as melodramas (Al-Rihani 1889–1948, ‘the father of Egyptian comedy’, worked with his lifelong friend Badeih Khairy on Egyptianizing a number of French theatre hits and presenting them in Egyptian theatre, and later cinema). Egyptian cinema, introduced in the early 1920s by Italians and Armenians living in Egypt, was boosted by the creation of Studio Misr (under the patronage of Talaat Harb Pasha, the era's most prominent capitalist).

Our nation was settled and populated by Christians who could not abide persecution. Shipload after shipload of our Christian ancestors, for decade after decade, chose to move from their homeland in Europe immigrating to a land known for its religious freedom. Their decision to leave their own nation, leaving most of their family members and lifelong friends, in almost all cases to never see them in this world again, had to be gut-wrenching and tearful. They left their nation because the level of religious persecution they were experiencing was not tolerable.

Our eulogies are always about the other stuff: what we gave, how we connected, how much we meant to our family and friends, small kindnesses, lifelong passions, and the things that made us laugh. So why do we spend so much of our limited time on this earth focusing on all the things our eulogy will never cover?

Why did these men fight? The answer is simple. We were ordinary people molded into Marines. The same can be said of those who served in the army. We all had the proper upbringings of common folk, when you have a task to do, you work hard, give it your best and get the job done. We came from different backgrounds; however, we became a team, moving and fighting as if we had known each other all of our lives. All of us have bonded for life and still keep in touch by phone, letters, and visits. If anyone of the second squad needs help you can be sure the rest of the squad would be there. All of those I have kept in touch with have been successful in the life endeavors they chose. "Not one of them is bitter about giving up two years of their life to 'Serve Their Country'" -George E. Krug

Show me your friends, and I’ll show you your future… John Wooden

and offered them little in any event. There was even talk of pressuring North Korea to demilitarize significantly. The Chinese wished for peace, not conflict, in the region and James Marshall was the president’s man to make it happen. Lifelong friends, they had both excelled in their fields, President Jack King in the military and James Marshall in business. When James had announced his retirement on his fifty-fifth birthday, President King had pounced; Marshall was perfect to obtain the treaties that would secure the Far East. Jack loved and trusted him like a brother. With over four hundred million dollars in the bank, all James Marshall had wanted was to enjoy life but he’d never let Jack down and he’d certainly never

A eulogy is often the first formal marking down of what our lives were about—the foundational document of our legacy. It is how people remember us and how we live on in the minds and hearts of others. And it is very telling what we don’t hear in eulogies. We almost never hear things like: “The crowning achievement of his life was when he made senior vice president.” Or: “He increased market share for his company multiple times during his tenure.” Or: “She never stopped working. She ate lunch at her desk. Every day.” Or: “He never made it to his kid’s Little League games because he always had to go over those figures one more time.” Or: “While she didn’t have any real friends, she had six hundred Facebook friends, and she dealt with every email in her in-box every night.” Or: “His PowerPoint slides were always meticulously prepared.” Our eulogies are always about the other stuff: what we gave, how we connected, how much we meant to our family and friends, small kindnesses, lifelong passions, and the things that made us laugh.

But too many kids get to college and try to collapse it, to make it as comfortable and recognizable as possible. They replicate the friends and friendships they've previously enjoyed. They join groups that perpetuate their high school cliques. Concerned with establishing a "network" they seek out peers with aspirations identical to their own. In doing so, they frequently default to a clannishness that too easily becomes a lifelong habit. ....Open your laptops . Delete at least one of every four bookmarks. Replace it with something entirely different, even anti ethical. Go to twitter, Facebook etc start falling or connecting with views that diverge from your own. Conduct your social lives along the same lines, mixing it up. Do not go only to the campus basketball games....wander beyond the periphery of campus, and not to find equally enchanted realms-if you study abroad, don't choose the destination for its picturesqueness-but to see something else.

In October 2011, Heinz UK launched a Facebook promotion where, when someone complained of being ill on their Facebook page, friends could have them sent a tin of either Cream of Chicken or Cream of Tomato soup with a personalised ‘get well’ message on the label. By such means are lifelong brand associations built.

what she ought to have done as soon as she discovered that Lady Webb was not in London to help her. She was going to find the Earl of Durbury if he was still in town. If he was not, she was going to find out where the Bow Street Runners had their headquarters and go there. She was going to write to Charles. She was going to tell her story to anyone who would listen. She was going to embrace her fate. Perhaps she would be arrested and tried and convicted of murder. Perhaps that would mean a hanging or at the very least transportation or lifelong imprisonment. But she would not give in meekly. She would fight like the very devil to the last moment—but not by running away and hiding. She was going to come out into the open at last and fight. But not just yet. That was the agreement she made with herself as she pulled weeds from about the rosebushes and turned the soil until it was a richer brown. A definite time limit must be set so that she would not continue to procrastinate week after week, month after month. She was going to give herself one month, one calendar month, starting today. One month to be Jocelyn’s mistress, his love, though he would not be aware of the latter, of course. One month to spend with him as a person, as a friend in the den, if he ever returned there, as a lover in the bed upstairs. One month. And then she was going to give herself up. Without telling him. There might be scandal for him, of course, when it became known that he had harbored her at Dudley House for three weeks, or if anyone knew that she had been his mistress here. But she would not worry about that. His life had been one scandal after another. He appeared to thrive on them. She thought he would probably be rather amused by this particular one. One month. Jane leaned back on her heels to inspect her work, but Phillip was approaching from the direction of the house. “Mr. Jacobs sent me, ma’am,” he said, “to tell you that a new pianoforte just arrived and an easel and other parcels too. He wants to know where you want them put.” Jane got to her feet, her heart soaring, and followed him back to the house. One glorious month, in which she would not even try to guard her feelings. One month of love. There followed a week during

A lifelong friend of left-wing political causes and supporter of Scotland’s full independence from the UK, he found England in the Thatcher years a hard place to like, an impossible place to live in, and a dark place to observe from next door, having to witness its influence on Scottish life. In

Without a song, the day would never end; without a song, a man ain’t got no friend; without a song, the road would never bend. Without a song.’ So I keep singing a song. Good-night.

You weren't just teasing me, were you?" "About what?" "About your having wanted to do this for nearly two years?" She paused, her fingertips still against his lips, and gazed into his eyes.  "No, I wasn't just teasing you.  I once told you that I've always loved you, Charles.  But I would never, ever have acted on that.  Not with you betrothed to Juliet." "And how do you feel about me now that I am a free man?" "I still love you.  Of course." "Would you marry me if I asked you?" "I . . . I don't know, Charles.  You were born to something I will never know, can never be.  I'm afraid that I could never fit into your world.  That you would, eventually, come to resent me." "Juliet was not of my world either.  Do you think I would have resented her?" "Yes, but for different reasons." "Well then, do you think that Gareth will come to resent her?" "I don't know," she said honestly.  And then, in a little voice:  "Are you asking me to marry you?" "I . . . I am asking myself if I am ready to ask you to marry me.  Does that make sense, Amy?  With all my heart, I want you as my wife, as my lifelong companion, as my best friend forevermore — but I am so afraid, after all that has happened to me, that I will let you down.  That I am not worthy of you.  You think you don't deserve me, because of the differences in our backgrounds.  Well, I don't think I deserve you, because I'm but a mere shell of the man I once was, and you are entitled to far more than that." "Charles —" "No, please.  Hear me out.  When I feel confident in my abilities again, when I am once again the man I was before that fateful day in April, then . . . then, Amy, I will feel worthy of you.  Then I will ask you to be my wife, and by God, you had better accept." She shook her head and gazed at him with a mixture of love, frustration, and affection.  "Oh, Charles." "What?" "You're doing it again.  Being the perfectionist, all or nothing." "I know."  He grinned.  "But you're doing it again, too." "Doing what?" "Belittling yourself." He

For me, real achievement is traveling to a foreign country, learning some of the language, and finding my way around on my own. Real achievement is learning to be self-sufficient. Real achievement is making lifelong friends.

Among the many other researchers that the sugar industry would begin supporting during the war years, two of them—Ancel Keys, at the University of Minnesota, and Fred Stare, founder of the department of nutrition at Harvard—would become lifelong friends of the industry. Stare

Every early metaphysical sensation happened there, too—the feeling on a canoe trip of seeing a mountain at dawn, the way a simple rock can be coated with enchantment when it was the place you sat during the first raptures of teenage love. I have few friends left over from high school or college, but I have about forty or fifty lifelong friends from camp, and for decades they did not even realize that Brooksie had a first name.

Among Churchill’s visitors in the spring of 1933 was German-born Albert Einstein, who had been in the United States when Hitler came to power. Being Jewish, neither his fame nor his Nobel Prize could help him. In Nazi eyes, as a Jew he was an outcast. Einstein, who was five years younger than Churchill, visited him at Chartwell, where he asked Churchill’s help in bringing Jewish scientists from Germany. Churchill responded at once, encouraging his friend Professor Frederick Lindemann – who was at Chartwell during Einstein’s visit – to travel to Germany and seek out Jewish scientists who could be found places at British universities.8 Lindemann did so. As part of a nationwide British university effort, he was able to offer university places to German Jewish scientists who, as a result of these invitations, were able to leave Germany.

A second legacy from Nancy might seem more a curse than a gift, but it may have helped to give us the Lincoln our nation reveres. She would pass on to him her own struggle with depression, with that enveloping darkness that lurks, for some, ever at the soul’s door. This would merge with a Lincoln family heritage of mental illness to become a force in Abraham that he fought to subdue all his days. It would leave him scarred, and it would even deform parts of his personality, but by striving to master it and by remembering what he had experienced in those hours of suffocating gloom, he emerged a man of greater wisdom, wit, and humanity. It was said by those who knew Nancy that her life was “beclouded by a spirit of sadness.”13 Herndon, Lincoln’s friend, law partner, and biographer, wrote that her face “was marked with an expression of melancholy which fixed itself in the memory of everyone who ever saw or knew her.”14 It is tempting to believe that this was simply fruit of the life she led. It was true she passed most of her days in bleak frontier settlements, the wife of an unsympathetic man and chained to mindless, soul-numbing work. Sandburg wrote that when she died, she had only “memories of monotonous, endless everyday chores.”15 Then, too, there was the lifelong cloud of her illegitimacy. Lesser burdens were known to drive some frontier women insane. But something darker, more ominous, tortured her, and it was more than what we now call “the

A good book can introduce you to new places and people. A great book, on the other hand, introduces you to a life-long friend.

I need him only because I happen to adore him, because his company brings me gladness and comfort, and because, as a friend's grandfather once put it, “Sometimes life is too hard to be alone, and sometimes life is too good to be alone.” The same goes for Felipe: He needs me only for my companionship as well. Seems like a lot, but it isn't much at all; it is only love. And a love-based marriage does not guarantee the lifelong binding contract of a clan-based marriage or an asset-based marriage; it cannot. By unnerving definition, anything that the heart has chosen for its own mysterious reasons it can always unchoose later--again, for its own mysterious reasons. And a shared private heaven can quickly descend into a failed private hell.

March 8: Love Happy is released. Marilyn’s total screen time is thirty-eight seconds—long enough for Groucho to respond to her slinking into his detective agency office with the question, “Is there anything I can do for you?” He promptly responds, “What a ridiculous statement.” Marilyn tells him that men keep following her and sways out of camera range as Groucho comments, “Really? I can’t understand why.” Marilyn later recalled, “There were three girls there and Groucho had us each walk away from him. . . . I was the only one he asked to do it twice. Then he whispered in my ear, ‘You have the prettiest ass in the business.’ I’m sure he meant it in the nicest way.” Groucho later said Marilyn was “Mae West, Theda Bara and Bo Peep rolled into one.” Marilyn received $500 for her appearance and another three hundred to pose for promotional photographs. Marilyn is sent on a promotional tour for a fee of one hundred dollars a week. She meets dress manufacturer Henry Rosenfeld in New York City, and they become lifelong friends. During this period she also does her famous Jones Beach photo sessions with Andre de Dienes. The tour takes her to Detroit, Cleveland, Chicago, Milwaukee, and Rockford, Illinois. Marilyn attends a party at the Chicago nightclub Ricketts with Roddy McDowell. Marilyn appears in print advertisement for Kyron diet pills, with accompanying text: “If you want slim youthful lines like Miss Monroe and other stars, start the KYRON Way to slenderness—today!

a person who feels confident to explore the world around him with excitement and curiosity, who is not afraid to make mistakes, who feels secure enough to begin to make friends, and who feels well-adjusted enough to bounce back when she is disappointed.

A BLESSED COMPANION IS A BOOK, - A BOOK THAT FITLY CHOSEN IS A LIFE-LONG FRIEND. - DOUGLAS JERROULD [sic].

Before they became junkies, these young people were sitting in a room alone, cut off from meaning. Most of them could hope at best for a McJob with a shrinking minimum wage—a lifelong burger-flip punctuated by watching TV and scrimping for minor consumer objects. “My job was basically to say—why don’t you stop taking drugs?” Bruce says. “And one guy explained to me very beautifully. He said, ‘Well, think about that for a minute. What would I do if I stopped taking drugs? Maybe I could get myself a job as a janitor or something like that.’ ” Compare that, he said, to “what I’m doing right now, which is really exciting. Because I’ve got friends down here and we do exciting things like rob stores and hang around with hookers.” Suddenly you are part of a world where, together with other addicts, you are embarked on a crusade—a constant frenetic crusade to steal enough to buy the drugs, dodge the police, keep out of jail, and stay alive. If your problem is being chronically starved of social bonds, then part of the solution is to bond with the heroin itself and the relief it gives you. But a bigger part is to bond with the subculture that comes with taking heroin—the tribe of fellow users all embarked on the same mission and facing the same threats and risking death every day with you. It gives you an identity. It gives you a life of highs and lows, instead of relentless monotony. The world stops being indifferent to you, and starts being hostile—which is at least proof that you exist, that you aren’t dead already.

A CLASSIC WAITS for me, it contains all, nothing is lacking, Yet all were lacking if taste were lacking, or if the endorsement of the right man were lacking. O clublife, and the pleasures of membership, O volumes for sheer fascination unrivalled. Into an armchair endlessly rocking, Walter J. Black my president, I, freely invited, cordially welcomed to membership, My arm around John Kieran, Pearl S. Buck, My taste in books guarded by the spirits of William Lyon Phelps, Hendrik Willem Van Loon, (From your memories, sad brothers, from the fitful risings and callings I heard), I to the classics devoted, brother of rough mechanics, beauty-parlor technicians, spot welders, radio-program directors (It is not necessary to have a higher education to appreciate these books), I, connoisseur of good reading, friend of connoisseurs of good reading everywhere, I, not obligated to take any specific number of books, free to reject any volume, perfectly free to reject Montaigne, Erasmus, Milton, I, in perfect health except for a slight cold, pressed for time, having only a few more years to live, Now celebrate this opportunity. Come, I will make the club indissoluble, I will read the most splendid books the sun ever shone upon, I will start divine magnetic groups, With the love of comrades, With the life-long love of distinguished committees. I strike up for an Old Book. Long the best-read figure in America, my dues paid, sitter in armchairs everywhere, wanderer in populous cities, weeping with Hecuba and with the late William Lyon Phelps, Free to cancel my membership whenever I wish, Turbulent, fleshy, sensible, Never tiring of clublife, Always ready to read another masterpiece provided it has the approval of my president, Walter J. Black, Me imperturbe, standing at ease among writers, Rais'd by a perfect mother and now belonging to a perfect book club, Bearded, sunburnt, gray-neck'd, astigmatic, Loving the masters and the masters only (I am mad for them to be in contact with me), My arm around Pearl S. Buck, only American woman to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature, I celebrate this opportunity. And I will not read a book nor the least part of a book but has the approval of the Committee, For all is useless without that which you may guess at many times and not hit, that which they hinted at, All is useless without readability. By God! I will accept nothing which all cannot have their counterpart of on the same terms (89¢ for the Regular Edition or $1.39 for the DeLuxe Edition, plus a few cents postage). I will make inseparable readers with their arms around each other's necks, By the love of classics, By the manly love of classics.

addition to Debussy, Ravel had begun to attract the interest of patrons such as the Princesse Edmond de Polignac, to whom he dedicated the Pavane pour une Infante défunte, and Misia Natanson, who became a lifelong devotee.

But no one came. My father was safe, and his family was together in a free land. We’d left virtually everything we had behind—our home, furniture, clothes, and possessions. Our lifelong friends, too. We’d left behind the fields we’d lovingly tilled, the fig and cherry trees that I cherished, and the farm animals that were once so important to us. My father had nothing to show for the business that he’d worked so hard to establish and grow.

Hmmm, doesn’t ring a bell, which means she doesn’t matter. You need to make some more friends. More important friends. Remember, it isn’t what you know, it’s who you know, that will get you places. This is the perfect school for you to make those kinds of friends, so don’t waste this opportunity. You aren’t here to make lifelong friends. You’re here to make connections, Willow.

Books are more than doctors, of course. Some novels are loving, lifelong companions; some give you a clip around the ear; others are friends who wrap you in warm towels when you’ve got those autumn blues. And some…well, some are pink candy floss that tingles in your brain for three seconds and leaves a blissful void. Like a short, torrid love affair.

Never underestimate the value of a scholarship. That is what sent me off to university and opened a whole new world of opportunity. Its why I continue to believe passionately in Lifelong Learning.

Sally loves spending time reading stories and getting tips from other mums, and learning about parenthood in the Mothers of Melbourne Facebook group. It’s a much cherished pastime of hers. Her biggest frustration being a mother of two is simply that there is not enough hours in the day to do everything. When she’s in research mode, the first place she goes is Google on her iPad in the kitchen. She’s a frequent (kinda obsessive) visitor of mummy blogs like Rockin Mama and Mamavation. Her life-long dream is to start her own interior design business, so she can have a creative outlet and more ‘me time’. Last week when she was shopping at her local farmers market and browsing Instagram, an ad popped up with an invitation to download a new app for environmentally-friendly cleaning products’.

European converts to Islam were more vulnerable to extremist groups because many lacked this lifelong socialization. Many came from deprived social backgrounds and were primed to be drawn to aggressive, militant strains of anything, from local gangs to local extremist ideologues. They were quick to subsume their personal grudges against family and society into transnational political grudges against the West. Cuspert fell readily into the arms of shadowy German jihadist figures who promised that extreme stance. In fact, Cuspert didn't convert to Islam so much as initiate himself straight into a radical Islamist group called The True Religion. It was as though he had pressed a button and changed the aesthetic theme of the WordPress site of his life from gangsta to mujahid; the chaotic structure and violent impulses were all the same, but were now overlaid with Islamist imagery and themes. Suddenly causes like Iraq, Chechnya, and Afghanistan mattered to him deeply, and Germans, Westerners, and a broad swath of humanity became "unbelievers" who were complicit in Muslim suffering. His old friends on the Berlin rap scene were devastated, and furious. They were from "good enough" Muslim families and were adept at living and rapping about the painful contradictions. They didn't turn to violence. They all knew where the lines were. His record producer later complained bitterly about Cuspert's betrayal: "He disgraced everyone, all of the Muslim MCs. He ruined the community. May Allah forgive him. But we don't.

Verbal ventilation is the key way that people make friends. It parallels the way tender touch, soothing voice, and welcoming facial expressions helps infants and toddlers establish bonding and attachment. When we practice the emotionally based communication of verbal ventilation in a safe environment, we repair the damage of not having had this need met in childhood. This in turn opens up the possibility of finally attaining the verbal-emotional intimacy that is an essential lifelong need for all human beings. Committing to this type of practice typically requires courage and perseverance. Authentic sharing can be triggering, and sometimes flashes the survivor back to being punished or rejected for being vulnerable. Therapy, individual or group, can help greatly to overcome and work through these obstacles to vitalizing your self-expression.

We are asked to “freely love God” under threat of eternal torture? Why not remove the torture and see how much we love him? Why not remove the carrot of heaven and then see how many freely love God? Take away all the perks and you will see it’s really not love at all. The faithful have been indoctrinated by those with an interest in keeping them in an in-group, tithing, and believing exactly what they are told. Note how much of religious education is rote training and not an open inquiry. In many Muslim countries, apostasy (changing one’s religion) is forbidden–and a death sentence. In the Sudan a Muslim woman cannot marry a Christian man. Changing your faith, Christian or Muslim, would be a bold act of willful disobedience–against your God, your family, your church, your friends, and your lifelong set of beliefs. It would be considered heresy and evil. You would be accused of being infected by Satan against the one true God. Yet, that is exactly what would be required of you to escape damnation in any one of the countries where Christianity is a minority faith.

Meanwhile, our friends Pam Briskman and Randy Weiner, lifelong educators and entrepreneurs, give out teeth from different animals when their daughters lose their own. So far, the lineup has included shark, coyote, lion, sheep, alligator, and rattlesnake—usually in glass jars filled with pink-colored water and glitter. The prize is accompanied by a note written backward so they have to hold it up to a mirror to read it, and it gives clues as to which animal the tooth once belonged to. They buy the teeth from a store in Albany, California, called the Bone Room. (It takes phone orders, in case you want to swipe the idea.)

To help Jack through his painful last months, I moved into his home on Lake Dallas in Denton County, Texas. In the months that followed, Jack Adkisson and I would become the closest of friends. I did my best to take care of him and make his final days as pleasant as possible until he passed away in September of that year. I considered it a privilege to spend those last few months with a man I have always considered my life-long hero. Being by his side as he passed from this world was an experience that has touched my life in so many ways.

Do you love me, Hunter? Truly love me?” “I have great love for you.” “Then take me away from here,” she whispered raggedly. “It’s the only way for us to have a future together. The only way. Please think about it? If you love me, truly love me, you won’t torture me like this.” The words of the prophecy returned to haunt Hunter. Lifting his hand, he touched Loretta’s braid and lost himself in the fascinating azure depths of her gaze. As the song predicted, she had divided his Comanche heart. Only moments ago he had turned his back on a lifelong friend. Now she asked him to turn his back on his people. “Blue Eyes, I cannot leave.” Tears welled in her eyes. “I love you, Hunter, but my mother’s screams call out to me. I’ll never be free of that, not as long as I stay here. One morning you will awaken and I won’t be here. And I’ll make sure this time that you never find me.” He started to speak, but she silenced him, touching her fingertips to his lips. “Don’t. Empty threats won’t keep me here. You won’t beat me.” She moved her palm to his cheek. “Do you think I don’t know that by now?” He clamped a hand behind her head and drew her against his chest, burying his face in the hollow of her shoulder. “It is not the way of a Comanche to beat his woman,” he rasped. “Just as it is not his way to let her go away from him.” She turned her face to touch her lips to his neck. “Make a memory with me, Hunter,” she whispered huskily. “One more beautiful memory.” Cinching an arm around her waist, Hunter stretched out with her on the fur. Never before had she initiated lovemaking. His hand trembled as he skimmed his palm down her spine. Make a memory with me, Hunter. As he dipped his head to kiss her, he wondered why it was that those words had a ring of farewell. One more beautiful memory.

In 1961, at Robert Kennedy’s first press conference as attorney general, he spoke of an “alarming increase” in juvenile delinquency. Juvenile delinquents intrigued Kennedy; he identified with outsiders, “young toughs,” underdogs. Bobby once said that if he had not been born a Kennedy he would have become “perhaps a juvenile delinquent or a revolutionary.” The issue of juvenile delinquency was something of a vogue among social scientists in the early 1960s, though on its face delinquency was a law enforcement issue. In May 1961, John Kennedy installed his attorney general as chairman of the President’s Committee on Juvenile Delinquency (PCJD); Bobby appointed a lifelong friend, David Hackett, as director. The square-jawed Hackett was a former Olympic hockey player and, though not exactly the administration’s best or brightest, possessed a shrewd intelligence. He knew nothing, however, about juvenile delinquency.

A CHANGING SOCIETY What does today’s high incidence of social anxiety tell us about modern society? As we’ve seen, social anxiety is connected to a person’s drive for self-preservation and a feeling of safety. It is natural to withdraw from situations that we expect will lead to pain. Avoidance—while not necessarily healthy—is logical. Because the negative social experience of a growing number of people has caused them emotional pain and suffering, the number of individuals who choose to avoid socializing is increasing at an alarming rate. The sometimes wide distance among family members these days only adds to isolation. And the anonymity of large cities creates a vacuum in which many lonely people co-exist, often leading solitary lives in which they pursue their interests and activities alone. We live in a society in which social fears are perhaps not unjustified. As cities become denser, isolation seems to be the best way to counter urban decay. Consider the dangers of the outside world: Crime rates are soaring. Caution—and its companion, fear—are in the air. As the twentieth century draws to a close, we find ourselves in a society where meeting people can be difficult. These larger forces can combine to create a further sense of distance among people. Particularly significant is the change that has taken place as the social organization of the smaller-scale community gives way to that of the larger, increasingly fragmented city. In a “hometown” setting, the character of daily life is largely composed of face-to-face relations with friends, neighbors, co-workers, and family members. But in the hustle and bustle of today’s cities, whose urban sprawls extend to what author Joel Garreau has called Edge Cities—creating light industrial suburbs even larger than the cities they surround—the individual can get lost. It is common in these areas for people to focus solely on themselves, seldom getting to know their neighbors, and rarely living close to family. We may call these places home, but they are a far cry from the destination of that word as we knew it when we were children. Today’s cities are hotbeds of competition on all levels, from the professional to the social. It often seems as if only the most sophisticated “win.” To be ready for this constant challenge, you have to be able to manage in a stressful environment, relying on a whole repertoire of social skills just to stay afloat. This competitive environment can be terrifying for the socially anxious person. The 1980s were a consumer decade in which picture-perfect images on television and in magazines caused many of us to cast our lots with either the haves or the have-nots. Pressure to succeed grew to an all-time high. For those who felt they could not measure up, the challenge seemed daunting. I think the escalating crime rate in today’s urban centers—drugs, burglary, rape, and murder—ties into this trend and society’s response to the pressure. In looking at the forces that influence the social context of modern life, it is clear that feelings of frustration at not “making it” socially and financially are a component in many people’s choosing a life of crime. Interactive ability determines success in establishing a rewarding career, in experiencing relationships. Without these prospects, crime can appear to be a quick fix for a lifelong problem.

If, as I suspect, Tom Sheridan was The Caller, then his secret relationship with Levitt not only violated his ethical obligation to his client, it represents a breathtaking act of treachery toward his best friend and lifelong patron.

Sharing the good and bad times with a lifelong friend made the business of living a lot more bearable.

This was the end of some of those friendships. They were left behind, artifacts of youth, boxed up with my comic books, my sketchbooks ans journals, and the rest of my teenage mementos. Only a select few of my high school comrades, like Mike, would remain lifelong pals.

Stuyvesant Town also was a safe haven, yielding a community of loyal, lifelong friends. As kids, we would hang out at the playgrounds until it was too dark to see. Later, we shared the raptures and torments of adolescence in a wild 1960s New York City scene. With numerous temptations and very few limits, we hung together and guided one another through many storms. Maybe that’s why I have always found comfort in community. Whether in newsrooms, campaigns, or the White House, I have thrived in communal settings, finding emotional nourishment in the friendships and camaraderie of the team.

The shine on your spouse was supposed to wear off. He’d seen it in his parents, how they had never really touched, how all their conversations were part of a single soft argument with buried razors. He’d seen it in his friends. Frank and Leah were comfortable. They’d settled into lifelong friendship; like a limb you’d not known you were missing until it appeared. Reliable, essential, but not something you burned for. No one ached; he told himself it was good to ache.

lifelong friend, or even your nemesis.

To apply first principles thinking to the field of value investing, consider several fundamental truths. Understand and practice the following if you want to become a good investor: 1. Look at stocks as part ownership of a business. 2. Look at Mr. Market—volatile stock price fluctuations—as your friend rather than your enemy. View risk as the possibility of permanent loss of purchasing power, and uncertainty as the unpredictability regarding the degree of variability in the possible range of outcomes. 3. Remember the three most important words in investing: “margin of safety.” 4. Evaluate any news item or event only in terms of its impact on (a) future interest rates and (b) the intrinsic value of the business, which is the discounted value of the cash that can be taken out during its remaining life, adjusted for the uncertainty around receiving those cash flows. 5. Think in terms of opportunity costs when evaluating new ideas and keep a very high hurdle rate for incoming investments. Be unreasonable. When you look at a business and get a strong desire from within saying, “I wish I owned this business,” that is the kind of business in which you should be investing. A great investment idea doesn’t need hours to analyze. More often than not, it is love at first sight. 6. Think probabilistically rather than deterministically, because the future is never certain and it is really a set of branching probability streams. At the same time, avoid the risk of ruin, when making decisions, by focusing on consequences rather than just on raw probabilities in isolation. Some risks are just not worth taking, whatever the potential upside may be. 7. Never underestimate the power of incentives in any given situation. 8. When making decisions, involve both the left side of your brain (logic, analysis, and math) and the right side (intuition, creativity, and emotions). 9. Engage in visual thinking, which helps us to better understand complex information, organize our thoughts, and improve our ability to think and communicate. 10. Invert, always invert. You can avoid a lot of pain by visualizing your life after you have lost a lot of money trading or speculating using derivatives or leverage. If the visuals unnerve you, don’t do anything that could get you remotely close to reaching such a situation. 11. Vicariously learn from others throughout life. Embrace everlasting humility to succeed in this endeavor. 12. Embrace the power of long-term compounding. All the great things in life come from compound interest.

People are not controlled by some internal calculator that crudely motivates them to maximize their reproductive success. Instead, people form deep, lifelong emotional attachments and experience loves and hates that shape their lives. They have religious beliefs that guide their behavior, and they have idiosyncratic goals and ambitions. They have networks of friends and relatives.

Lots of people lose lifelong friends, lose their families, their husbands, their jobs, their money, their homes, their footing, their sense of self, their place in the world. They don’t go running around town sprouting extra personalities. I wouldn’t argue with you. I don’t know why it was. All I can tell you is that in my heart, in my mind, in my spirit: I broke. I broke into pieces. There are only tiny shards left now, a mosaic almost pretty if the pattern weren’t so irregular, in place of what was whole.

You’re right. He does. The two of you fight like an old married couple, flirt like you’re in high school, and confide in each other like you’re lifelong best friends. My grandson isn’t pushing you away because he’s afraid to fall for you. He’s pushing you away because he already has.” “What do I do?

Key Apache Warriors Cochise—one of the great Chiricahua (Chokonen) chiefs. Born c. 1805. No known pictures exist but he was said to be very tall and imposing, over six feet and very muscular. Son-in-law to Mangas Coloradas. Died in 1874, probably from stomach cancer. Chihuahua—chief of the Warm Springs band (Red Paint people) of the Chiricahua. Fought alongside Geronimo in the resistance. Died in 1901. Fun—probably a cousin to Geronimo and among his best, most trusted warriors. Fun committed suicide in captivity in 1892, after becoming jealous over his young wife, whom he also shot. Only slightly wounded, she recovered. Juh—pronounced “Whoa,” “Ho,” or sometimes “Who.” Chief of the Nedhni band of the Apache, he married Ishton, Geronimo’s “favorite” sister. Juh and Geronimo were lifelong friends and battle brothers. Juh died in 1883. Loco—chief of the Warm Springs band. Born in 1823, the same year as Geronimo. Once was mauled by a bear and killed it single-handedly with a knife, but his face was clawed and his left eye was blinded and disfigured. Known as the “Apache Peacemaker,” he preferred peace to war and tried to live under reservation rules. Died as a prisoner of war from “causes unknown” in 1905, at age eighty-two. Lozen—warrior woman and Chief Victorio’s sister. She was a medicine woman and frequent messenger for Geronimo. She fought alongside Geronimo in his long resistance. Mangas Coloradas—Born in 1790, he was the most noted chief of the Bedonkohe Apache. A massive man for his era, at 6'6” and 250 pounds, he was Geronimo’s central mentor and influence. He was betrayed and murdered by the U.S. military in 1863. Geronimo called his murder “the greatest wrong ever done to the Indians.” Mangas—son of the great chief Mangas Coloradas, but did not succeed his father as chief because of his youth and lack of leadership. Died as a prisoner of war in 1901. Naiche—Cochise’s youngest son. Succeeded older brother Taza after he died, becoming the last chief of the free Chiricahua Apache. Nana—brother-in-law to Geronimo and chief of the Warm Springs band. Sometimes referred to as “Old Nana.” Died as a prisoner of war in 1896. Victorio—chief of the Warm Springs band. Noted and courageous leader and a brilliant military strategist. Brother and mentor to warrior woman Lozen. Slain by Mexicans in the massacre of Tres Castillos in 1880.

He brought the full force of his empathy to his every conversation with me. He could do this because he kept his commitments to other people to a minimum. He was pathologically disinterested in status or pleasing people on a large scale. He knew this often worked against him -- made him seem hard to get to know, made him appear boring or icy in social situations. Some people dismissed him quickly, but he barely noticed this and cared not at all. He was uncompromising in his priorities. He had chosen to love a small group of people -- a few lifelong friends, a few family members, Wolfgang, me -- and he gave us the gift of his full attention and energy.

No one would choose this sort of painful adolescence, but the fact is that the solitude of Woz’s teens, and the single-minded focus on what would turn out to be a lifelong passion, is typical for highly creative people. According to the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who between 1990 and 1995 studied the lives of ninety-one exceptionally creative people in the arts, sciences, business, and government, many of his subjects were on the social margins during adolescence, partly because “intense curiosity or focused interest seems odd to their peers.” Teens who are too gregarious to spend time alone often fail to cultivate their talents “because practicing music or studying math requires a solitude they dread.” Madeleine L’Engle, the author of the classic young adult novel A Wrinkle in Time and more than sixty other books, says that she would never have developed into such a bold thinker had she not spent so much of her childhood alone with books and ideas. As a young boy, Charles Darwin made friends easily but preferred to spend his time taking long, solitary nature walks. (As an adult he was no different. “My dear Mr. Babbage,” he wrote to the famous mathematician who had invited him to a dinner party, “I am very much obliged to you for sending me cards for your parties, but I am afraid of accepting them, for I should meet some people there, to whom I have sworn by all the saints in Heaven, I never go out.”)

They would remain lifelong friends,

But it is only the beginning of a lifelong process of spiritual renewal and growth.

Why am I so nervous all of a sudden? Oh right – because I haven’t gotten naked with anyone new since I was in college. And Matteo is a lifelong friend. What if we have the most awkward sex in the history of sex?