Love Analogy Quotes

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People love to say, “Give a man a fish, and he’ll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he’ll eat for a lifetime.” What they don’t say is, “And it would be nice if you gave him a fishing rod.” That’s the part of the analogy that’s missing.
Trevor Noah (Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood)
I had been struck by the analogy between neurosis and romanticism. Romanticism was truly a parallel to neurosis. It demanded of reality an illusory world, love, an absolute which it could never obtain, and thus destroyed itself by the dream.
Anaïs Nin
A man fishes for two reasons: he’s either sport fishing or fishing to eat, which means he’s either going to try to catch the biggest fish he can, take a picture of it, admire it with his buddies and toss it back to sea, or he’s going to take that fish on home, scale it, fillet it, toss it in some cornmeal, fry it up, and put it on his plate. This, I think, is a great analogy for how men seek out women.
Steve Harvey (Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man: What Men Really Think About Love, Relationships, Intimacy, and Commitment)
There is one absolute truth. The sum of my existence equals you.
Kristen Callihan (The Friend Zone (Game On, #2))
He takes out a cigarette and offers one to me. "I try not to indulge. It's a filthy habit," I tell him. "I love that word filthy. I love the way you force it out of your mouth like it's some kind of vermin you want to get rid of." "You've had vermin in your mouth?" "You're mean in that way, you know. You don't let anyone get away with pathetic analogies.
Melina Marchetta (Saving Francesca)
For some people, getting pregnant is as easy as catching cold." And there certainly was an analogy there: Colds and babies were both caused by germs which loved nothing so much as a mucous membrane.
Kurt Vonnegut Jr. (Galápagos)
Freedom from stress, freedom from anxiety, freedom from depression; freedom is autonomy from all that stagnates growth in this ever complex and noisy world. By the fear of being in the unknown, we often overlook and forget the serene view of being on the raft: the glowing virgin stars, the gentle ways that the waves moves, and the endless possibilities that exist under the sun. The fundamental principle of freedom is to be lost and our state of mind never differs too far from this analogy of being stranded in the middle of the ocean.
Forrest Curran (Purple Buddha Project: Purple Book of Self-Love)
Please, enlighten me, Tom. What exactly did you observe?” “That men fly to you like a bug to a zapper.” “Lovely. That’s a lovely analogy. Yes, I’m a man-eater, Tom.
Fisher Amelie (Thomas & January (Sleepless, #2))
Relatives share the same bloodline, but FAMILY shares your successes, pains, ambitions, celebrations, failures, values, love and so much more. I realize that many friends have become Family and some relatives just are not. (Analogy: Blood scatters everywhere, when Family runs together...When I thought I needed "Blood" to survive, I realized that what I really needed was "Family"!)
Gaye Miller 2012
But the rhythm of the mix tape is the rhythm of romance, the analog hum of a physical connection between two sloppy, human bodies.
Rob Sheffield (Love Is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time)
People love to say, “Give a man a fish, and he’ll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he’ll eat for a lifetime.” What they don’t say is, “And it would be nice if you gave him a fishing rod.” That’s the part of the analogy that’s missing. Working with Andrew was the first time in my life I realized you need someone from the privileged world to come to you and say, “Okay, here’s what you need, and here’s how it works.” Talent alone would have gotten me nowhere without Andrew giving me the CD writer. People say, “Oh, that’s a handout.” No. I still have to work to profit by it.
Trevor Noah (Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood)
We think of English as a fortress to be defended, but a better analogy is to think of English as a child. We love and nurture it into being, and once it gains gross motor skills, it starts going exactly where we don't want it to go: it heads right for the goddamned electrical sockets. We dress it in fancy clothes and tell it to behave, and it comes home with its underwear on its head and wearing someone else's socks. As English grows, it lives its own life, and this is right and healthy. Sometimes English does exactly what we think it should; sometimes it goes places we don't like and thrives there in spite of all our worrying. We can tell it to clean itself up and act more like Latin; we can throw tantrums and start learning French instead. But we will never really be the boss of it. And that's why it flourishes.
Kory Stamper (Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries)
But criticism, for the most part, comes from the opposite place that book-enjoying should come from. To enjoy art one needs time, patience, and a generous heart, and criticism is done, by and large, by impatient people who have axes to grind. The worst sort of critics are (analogy coming) butterfly collectors - they chase something, ostensibly out of their search for beauty, then, once they get close, they catch that beautiful something, they kill it, they stick a pin through its abdomen, dissect it and label it. The whole process, I find, is not a happy or healthy one. Someone with his or her own shit figured out, without any emotional problems or bitterness or envy, instead of killing that which he loves, will simply let the goddamn butterfly fly, and instead of capturing and killing it and sticking it in a box, will simply point to it - "Hey everyone, look at that beautiful thing" - hoping everyone else will see the beautiful thing he has seen. Just as no one wants to grow up to be an IRS agent, no one should want to grow up to maliciously dissect books.
Dave Eggers
You can't turn love off like a light switch. If you could it wouldn't be love. It is something that you keep on, until the bulb burns out or someone replaces it.
Shannon L. Alder
But for me, if we're talking about romance, cassettes wipe the floor with MP3s. This has nothing to do with superstition, or nostalgia. MP3s buzz straight to your brain. That's part of what I love about them. But the rhythm of the mix tape is the rhythm of romance, the analog hum of a physical connection between two sloppy human bodies. The cassette is full of tape hiss and room tone; it's full of wasted space, unnecessary noise. Compared to the go-go-go rhythm of an MP3, mix tapes are hopelessly inefficient. You go back to a cassette the way a detective sits and pours drinks for the elderly motel clerk who tells stories about the old days--you know you might be somewhat bored, but there might be a clue in there somewhere. And if there isn't, what the hell? It's not a bad time. You know you will waste time. You plan on it.
Rob Sheffield (Love Is a Mix Tape: Life and Loss, One Song at a Time)
If God were a theory, the study of theology would be the way to understand Him. But God is alive and in need of love and worship. This is why thinking of God is related to our worship. In an analogy of artistic understanding, we sing to Him before we are able to understand Him. We have to love in order to know. Unless we learn how to sing, unless we know how to love, we will never learn to understand Him".
Abraham Joshua Heschel
People always lecture the poor: "Take responsibility for yourself! Make something of yourself!" But with what raw materials are the poor to make something of themselves? People love to say, "Give a man a fish, and he'll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he'll eat for a lifetime." What they don't say is, "And it would be nice if you gave him a fishing rod." That's the part of the analogy that's missing.
Trevor Noah (Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood)
I walk and walk with cold hands. Back at the house it is filled with longing, nothing to carry longing away. I look back over my life. I try to find analogies. There are none. I have longed for people before, I have loved people before. Not like this. It was not this.
Anne Carson
He was quiet for a moment. “So, in this analogy, you’re Mary Jane?” “You got that right, Tiger.
J.M. Richards (Tall, Dark Streak of Lightning (Dark Lightning Trilogy, #1))
Love for our neighbor, being made of creative attention, is analogous to genius.
Simone Weil (Waiting for God)
Love and guilt are like ham and eggs. So many people enjoy them together, but there’s no rule saying you must have one with the other. They don’t even come from the same animal.
Rachel Hartman (Tess of the Road (Tess of the Road, #1))
Ever make toast? The act of browning bread. Apply butter or maybe jam afterward. Once finished, you can’t unmake it. You can’t change it back to bread. That’s what love is. Toast.
Kelly Moran (Mistletoe Magic (Redwood Ridge, #6))
This life is a hospital in which each patient is possessed by the desire to change beds. One wants to suffer in front of the stove and another believes that he will get well near the window. It always seems to me that I will be better off there where I am not, and this question of moving about is one that I discuss endlessly with my soul "Tell me, my soul, my poor chilled soul, what would you think about going to live in Lisbon? It must be warm there, and you'll be able to soak up the sun like a lizard there. That city is on the shore; they say that it is built all out of marble, and that the people there have such a hatred of the vegetable, that they tear down all the trees. There's a country after your own heart -- a landscape made out of light and mineral, and liquid to reflect them!" My soul does not reply. "Because you love rest so much, combined with the spectacle of movement, do you want to come and live in Holland, that beatifying land? Perhaps you will be entertained in that country whose image you have so often admired in museums. What do you think of Rotterdam, you who love forests of masts and ships anchored at the foot of houses?" My soul remains mute. "Does Batavia please you more, perhaps? There we would find, after all, the European spirit married to tropical beauty." Not a word. -- Is my soul dead? Have you then reached such a degree of torpor that you are only happy with your illness? If that's the case, let us flee toward lands that are the analogies of Death. -- I've got it, poor soul! We'll pack our bags for Torneo. Let's go even further, to the far end of the Baltic. Even further from life if that is possible: let's go live at the pole. There the sun only grazes the earth obliquely, and the slow alternation of light and darkness suppresses variety and augments monotony, that half of nothingness. There we could take long baths in the shadows, while, to entertain us, the aurora borealis send us from time to time its pink sheaf of sparkling light, like the reflection of fireworks in Hell!" Finally, my soul explodes, and wisely she shrieks at me: "It doesn't matter where! It doesn't matter where! As long as it's out of this world!
Charles Baudelaire (Paris Spleen)
You have so much going on. It comes off like a..." "Static?" I suggested. "Exactly!" He snapped his fingers and pointed at me. "You need to tune it, get your frequencies in check, like a radio." "I would love to.Just tell me how." "It's not a matter of turning a dial. You have no on or off switch." He walked around in a large lazy circle. "It's something you have to practice. It's more like being potty-trained. You have to learn when to hold it and when to release." "That's a pretty sexy analogy," I said.
Amanda Hocking (Torn (Trylle, #2))
The minute I set eyes on your mother, I felt this thing happen in my gut, like the flu bug hit me worse than any sickness I’ve ever had, worse than the bubonic plague.” His love analogy could use a little work…
Debbie Macomber (Alaskan Holiday)
The vulgar think the God by analogy to man and so worship Him in the form of the Gods. The learned think the God by analogy to principles and so worship Him in the form of Love or Truth. But the wises think the God not at all. They know that thought, which is finite, can only do violence to the God, who is infinite. It is enough, they say, that the God thinks them.
R. Scott Bakker (The Warrior Prophet (The Prince of Nothing, #2))
It always rains on the unloved-wet dreams-a fishing expedition-she kisses wyverns (the disneyland analogy)-dinner etiquette and chocolate lovers-desire swears by the first circle-"things are changing"-what can possibly go wrong?
Neil Gaiman (The Sandman, Vol. 7: Brief Lives)
Sometimes it’s hard to grasp why it is that the answers to the present lie in the past. A simple analogy might be helpful: a leading psychiatrist in the field of sexual abuse once told me she had, in thirty years of extensive work with paedophiles, never met one who hadn’t himself been abused as a child. This doesn’t mean that all abused children go on to become abusers; but it is impossible for someone who was not abused to become an abuser. No one is born evil. As Winnicott put it: ‘A baby cannot hate the mother, without the mother first hating the baby.’ As babies, we are innocent sponges, blank slates – with only the most basic needs present: to eat, shit, love and be loved. But something goes wrong, depending on the circumstances into which we are born, and the house in which we grow up. A tormented, abused child can never take revenge in reality, as she is powerless and defenceless, but she can – and must – harbour vengeful fantasies in her imagination. Rage, like fear, is reactive in nature.
Alex Michaelides (The Silent Patient)
Semua yang indah, sia-sia kalau cuma 'pernah'.
Dara Prayoga (Analogi Cinta Berdua)
I especially love analogies, my most faithful masters, acquainted with all the secrets of nature… One should make great use of them.
Johannes Kepler
We tend to be taken aback by the thought that God could be angry. how can a deity who is perfect and loving ever be angry?...We take pride in our tolerance of the excesses of others. So what is God's problem?... But love detests what destroys the beloved. Real love stands against the deception, the lie, the sin that destroys. Nearly a century ago the theologian E.H. Glifford wrote: 'Human love here offers a true analogy: the more a father loves his son, the more he hates in him the drunkard, the liar, the traitor.'... Anger isn't the opposite of love. Hate is, and the final form of hate is indifference... How can a good God forgive bad people without compromising himself? Does he just play fast and loose with the facts? 'Oh, never mind...boys will be boys'. Try telling that to a survivor of the Cambodian 'killing fields' or to someone who lost an entire family in the Holocaust. No. To be truly good one has to be outraged by evil and implacably hostile to injustice.
Rebecca Manley Pippert
Love becomes the deposit of the heart, analogous in all degrees to the 'findings' in a tomb. As in one will be charted the taken place of the body, the raiment, the utensils necessary to its other life, so in the heart of the lover will be traced, as an indelible shadow, that which he loves.
Djuna Barnes (Nightwood)
Sometimes I like to compare people who don't like women to vegetarians." "Interesting analogy, and I do like the way your mind works, so lay it on me." He opened the door and waved her in. "If God had meant for people to be vegetarians, a good steak wouldn't taste so divine. Following that line of thinking, neither would a woman.
Ali Vali (The Devil Unleashed (Cain Casey, #2))
What if Loves are analogous to math? First, arithmetic, then geometry and algebra, then trig and quadratics…
J. Earp
I love violent Shakespeare. It is to me what steak is to some people: the bloodier the better.
Mara Wilson (Where Am I Now?)
that I ventured as far as my position would allow and by historical analogy warned men as solemnly as possible against half-educated leaders being permitted to lead nations into war.
Erik Larson (In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin)
Modern man has successfully razed the imaginative landscapes of primal peoples the whole world over. Kill the gods first, slaughter the sacred animals, rewrite the mythologies, and build roads through the holy places. Do all this and watch the people decline. Without souls, they soon die, leaving dead shells, zombie cultures, shambling aimlessly towards oblivion.
Grant Morrison (Doom Patrol, Vol. 6: Planet Love)
People love to say, "Give man a fish, and he'll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he'll eat for a lifetime." What they don't say is, "And it would be nice if you gave him a fishing rod." That's the part of the analogy that's missing. Working with Andrew is the first time in my life I realized you need someone from the privileged world to come to you and say, "Okay, here's what you need, and here's how it works." Talent alone would have gotten me nowhere without Andrew giving me the CD writer. People say , "Oh, that's a handout." No. I still have to work to profit by it. But I don't stand a chance without it.
Trevor Noah (Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood)
To learn is to broaden, to experience more, to snatch new aspects of life for yourself. To refuse to learn or to be relieved at not having to learn is to commit a form of suicide; in the long run, a more meaningful type of suicide than the mere ending of physical life. Knowledge is not only power; it is happiness, and being taught is the intellectual analog of being loved.
Isaac Asimov
No, no it is not man's nature. I will not allow it to be more man's nature than woman's to be inconstant and forget those they do love, or have loved. I believe the reverse. I believe in a true analogy between our bodily frames and our mental; and that as our bodies are the strongest, so are our feelings; capable of bearing most rough usage, and riding out the heaviest weather.
Jane Austen (Persuasion)
Is that shooting star just a happy accident or has the universe had it planned for a thousand years?” He tilted his face to the sky, his eyes tracking an imaginary star as it screamed to earth. He looked back to her. “Either way, you can’t stop it. You can beg it to slow down or you can just enjoy the show.” “Am I the star in this story or you?” Blake wrinkled his nose and chuckled. “Was that a bad analogy? I meant we’re the star, Livia. Us. This.” He shrugged his shoulders like it was the most obvious thing in the world. “Us being in the same atmosphere is either a great cosmic catastrophe or the most serendipitous rendezvous.
Debra Anastasia
I realised something else tonight. Something about pancakes.’ ‘What about them?’ ‘We both got so obsessed about that first pancake being thrown away that we forgot something really important,’ Max explained. ‘That first pancake tastes just as good as all the other ones. It’s not its fault that it was first in line and the pan wasn’t hot enough so it got a bit lumpy and misshapen.’ ‘And when you’re really famished that first pancake tastes better than all the ones that come after it,’ Neve said, and then she couldn’t wait any longer. Her arms were around Max before she’d even finished forming the thought, but his arms were around her too in that exact same moment. Just having him there to hold, warm and solid and real, was enough for five seconds, and then she was peppering his face with kisses – his forehead, his eyebrows, the tip of his crooked nose, along his cheekbones until she reached the glittering prize of his mouth. Sometimes Neve thought that her appetite was the most robust thing about her, and she didn’t kiss Max so much as she devoured him. Graceless, messy kisses without any thought or reason, but simply because she hungered for him. Kissed him with everything she had and everything she was, and she didn’t know why she could kiss Max and have him kiss her back with the same fierceness but still be greedy for the next kiss and the one after that and the one after that and the one…
Sarra Manning (You Don't Have to Say You Love Me)
The written, authoritative word of God is what keeps us on the right path. It keeps our metaphors and analogies in check. The law of the Lord revives the soul, makes us wise so we don’t say foolish things about God, enlightens our eyes so we see God everywhere, and guards us from error.
Joe Rigney (Strangely Bright: Can You Love God and Enjoy This World?)
No pain, no gain." You can hear the phrase in the world of physical exercise and conditioning. Muscles that feel no pain are probably getting neither stronger, nor more flexible. It presents an analogy for the exercise of the heart. Those who run the risk of genuine love alone must worry about emotional pain. The more friends; the more good-byes - and the more wakes to attend, the more graves to visit, the more deaths to share. Those who truly live life to the fullest will bear the full cup of suffering. Only those who are willing to pay the price in pain and anguish find life full to the brim. Happy people also suffer; they are no more lucky than the rest. They create their own happiness. That's the rule of thumb. Some thumbs, however, don't seem to rule very well. Slogans and catch-words, for all their conventional wisdom, fail to carry the whole weight of truth; they leave too much room for false inferences. "No pain, no gain" may leave one with nothing but pain - an intolerable amount of it. There is simply no guarantee that pain will bring gain, that hardship will yield happiness, that suffering will make one a better person. It may; but it's not inevitable.
Robert Dykstra (She Never Said Good-Bye)
We had one of those Friday dates that turned into an entire weekend, and by the end of it, I loved him so much my larynx ached. Vulnerable love, incorrigible love. Love in which he was both the nausea and the sodium bicarbonate.
Kathleen Rooney (Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk)
The analogy might be that love is like the sun. We cannot look directly at it, but we see our world because of it, and experience its many life-sustaining functions. Essentially, the “teleological” definitions of love point to it nurturing, healing and transforming humans (and societies) into the best versions of themselves
Trent Dalton (Love Stories)
Sight without color would be a good analogy...only being able to see in black and white rather than seeing in full color would be like experiencing an orgasm with a foreskin and without. There are feelings you’ll just never have without the foreskin.
Kristen O'Hara (Sex as Nature Intended It: The Most Important Thing You Need to Know about Making Love, but No One Could Tell You Until Now (2nd Edition))
It’s like bees and honey. Each bee makes only a tiny, tiny drop of honey. It takes thousands of them, millions perhaps, all working together to make the pot of honey you have on your breakfast table. Now imagine that you could eat nothing but honey. That’s what it’s like for my kind of people…we feed on belief, on prayers, on love. It takes a lot of people believing just the tiniest bit to sustain us. That’s what we need, instead of food. Belief.” “And Soma is…” “To take the analogy further, it’s honey wine. Mead.” He chuckled. “It’s a drink. Concentrated prayer and belief, distilled into a potent liqueur.
Neil Gaiman (American Gods)
No one tells you when you fall in love with a star, one day it might burn out and leave behind a black hole.
Analog De Leon (Vertigo: Of Love & Letting Go)
Sebaik-baiknya move on adalah jatuh cinta lagi.
Dara Prayoga (Analogi Cinta Berdua)
Eldridge misunderstood the white radical movement. He exploited their alienation and encouraged young whites to think of themselves as “bad” Blacks, thus driving them ever further away from their own community. At the same time, he seduced young Blacks into picturing themselves as bohemian expatriates from middle-class “Babylon” (as he poetically but mistakenly analogized superindustrial America). So we became temporarily alien to the Black community, while the white radicals were plunged deeper into their peculiar identity crisis. Cleaver’s genius for political and cultural schizophrenia infected us all, Black and white, and the opportunity was missed for youth of both races to express and make concrete their authentic underlying solidarity and love. This still remains to be done.
Huey P. Newton (Revolutionary Suicide)
I realized, when I saw the forest burning, how fascinating the firelight is. It's beautiful, and people stare at it, don't they? It destroys things and kills people, but humans love it. Is it because they crave their own destruction, Sam? I want to understand your kind. I am going out into the wider world, and I must learn. But first things first. First, to escape this shell, this egg in which I have gestated, all eyes will be on the fire, all eyes blinded by the smoke, and when I walk out of here, out into your large world with its billions, no one will even see. It's the beauty of light, don't you see, Sam? It reveals, but it also distracts and blinds. It's even better than darkness.
Michael Grant (Light (Gone, #6))
Punctuation has been defined many ways. Some grammarians use the analogy of stitching: punctuation as the basting that holds the fabric of language in shape. Another writer tells us that punctuation marks are the traffic signals of language: they tell us to slow down, notice this, take a detour, and stop. I have even seen a rather fanciful reference to the full stop and comma as “the invisible servants in fairy tales – the ones who bring glasses of water and pillows, not storms of weather or love”. But best of all, I think, is the simple advice given by the style book of a national newspaper: that punctuation is “a courtesy designed to help readers to understand a story without stumbling”.
Lynne Truss (Eats, Shoots & Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation)
Here's an analogy I like: guilt is a runaway wagon down the mountainside. It may carry you a long way, but it usually ends in disaster. Love, on the other hand, is much slower--just your own two feet, really," she said, casting a meaningful look at Tess. 'But it's more likely to take you somewhere worth going.
Rachel Hartman (Tess of the Road (Tess of the Road, #1))
I know it must seem a curious analogy, a man with a flower, but sometimes he seemed to me like a lily. Yes. A lily. Possessed of that strange, ominous calm of sentient vegetable, like one of those cobra-headed, funereal lilies whose white sheaths are curled out of flesh as thick and tensely yielding to the touch as vellum. When I said that I would marry him, not one muscle in his face stirred, but he let out a long, extinguished sigh. I thought: Oh! how he must want me! And it was as though the imponderable weight of his desire was a force I might not withstand, not by virtue of its violence, but because of its very gravity...and I began to shudder, like a race horse before a race, yet also with a kind of fear, for I felt both a strange, impersonal arousal at the thought of love and at the same time a repugnance I could not stifle for his white, heavy flesh that had too much in common with the armfuls of arum lilies that filled my bedroom in great glass jars, those undertakers' lilies with the heavy pollen that powders your fingers as if you had dipped them in turmeric. The lilies I always associate with him; that are white. And stain you.
Angela Carter (The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories)
The intimacy of love God has for us is hard to comprehend. The only comparison comes by analogy—the connection we feel with a best friend, the oneness we want with a spouse, our tender love and desire for our children—and yet there’s an intimacy that we seek with each other that always eludes us. We can never be as close, as intimate, or as one with another person as our souls crave. That’s because the oneness we crave will only be found when we are united by God with God. God likens it to his own marriage to all of us together.
John Burke (Imagine Heaven: Near-Death Experiences, God's Promises, and the Exhilarating Future That Awaits You)
He was rowed down from the north in a leather skiff manned by a crew of trolls. His fur cape was caked with candle wax, his brow stained blue by wine - though the latter was seldom noticed due to the fox mask he wore at-all times. A quill in his teeth, a solitary teardrop a-squirm in his palm, he was the young poet prince of Montreal, handsome, immaculate, searching for sturdier doors to nail his poignant verses on. In Manhattan, grit drifted into his ink bottle. In Vienna, his spice box exploded. On the Greek island of Hydra, Orpheus came to him at dawn astride a transparent donkey and restrung his cheap guitar. From that moment on, he shamelessly and willingly exposed himself to the contagion of music. To the secretly religious curiosity of the traveler was added the openly foolhardy dignity of the troubadour. By the time he returned to America, songs were working in him like bees in an attic. Connoisseurs developed cravings for his nocturnal honey, despite the fact that hearts were occasionally stung. Now, thirty years later, as society staggers towards the millennium - nailing and screeching at the while, like an orangutan with a steak knife in its side - Leonard Cohen, his vision, his gift, his perseverance, are finally getting their due. It may be because he speaks to this wounded zeitgeist with particular eloquence and accuracy, it may be merely cultural time-lag, another example of the slow-to-catch-on many opening their ears belatedly to what the few have been hearing all along. In any case, the sparkle curtain has shredded, the boogie-woogie gate has rocked loose from its hinges, and here sits L. Cohen at an altar in the garden, solemnly enjoying new-found popularity and expanded respect. From the beginning, his musical peers have recognized Cohen´s ability to establish succinct analogies among life´s realities, his talent for creating intimate relationships between the interior world of longing and language and the exterior world of trains and violins. Even those performers who have neither "covered" his compositions nor been overtly influenced by them have professed to admire their artfulness: the darkly delicious melodies - aural bouquets of gardenia and thistle - that bring to mind an electrified, de-Germanized Kurt Weill; the playfully (and therefore dangerously) mournful lyrics that can peel the apple of love and the peach of lust with a knife that cuts all the way to the mystery, a layer Cole Porter just could`t expose. It is their desire to honor L. Cohen, songwriter, that has prompted a delegation of our brightest artists to climb, one by one, joss sticks smoldering, the steep and salty staircase in the Tower of Song.
Tom Robbins
We think of English as a fortress to be defended, but a better analogy is to think of English as a child. We love and nurture it into being, and once it gains gross motor skills, it starts going exactly where we don’t want it to go: it heads right for the goddamned electrical sockets. We dress it in fancy clothes and tell it to behave, and it comes home with its underwear on its head and wearing someone else’s socks. As English grows, it lives its own life, and this is right and healthy. Sometimes English does exactly what we think it should; sometimes it goes places we don’t like and thrives there in spite of all our worrying. We can tell it to clean itself up and act more like Latin; we can throw tantrums and start learning French instead. But we will never really be the boss of it. And that’s why it flourishes.
Kory Stamper (Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries)
Imagine for a moment that you do not experience yourself as a "self." From this perspective, you can understand the difficulty the NPD person has in recognizing the unique and separate existence of another "self," or person. In a sense, the narcissist views others and the world around him as an extension of himself, perhaps as you might view your arm or leg. Because the narcissist can only understand others by absorbing them into his own experience of self, he determines that others should behave and act the way that HE behaves and acts. Again, to use the analogy of the arm and leg, he unconsciously expects you to conform to his will, just as his own arm or leg would do. When your behavior deviates from his expectations, he often becomes as upset with you as he would be if his arm or leg were no longer under his control.
Eleanor D. Payson (The Wizard of Oz and Other Narcissists: Coping with the One-Way Relationship in Work, Love, and Family)
Mom would hate it if she knew I told Coco this stuff. She'd hate it, and she wouldn't even admit that to me, because she'd be too worried about making me uncomfortable or ashamed. She's like a silverware divider with a conscience, trying to keep us all separate and safe without making the forks feel bad about not being spoons or the spoons feel worried that the forks shouldn't be so poky.
Emily Henry (The Love That Split the World)
To-day all our novels and newspapers will be found to be swarming with numberless allusions to the popular character called a Cave-Man. He seems to be quite familiar to us, not only as a public character but as a private character. His psychology is seriously taken into account in psychological fiction and psychological medicine. So far as I can understand, his chief occupation in life was knocking his wife about, or treating women in general with what is, I believe, known in the world of the film as 'rough stuff.' I have never happeend to come upon the evidence for this idea; and I do not know on what primitive diaries or prehistoric divorce-reports it is founded. Nor, as I have explained elsewhere, have I ever been able to see the probability of it, even considered a priori. We are always told without any explanation or authority that primitive man waved a club and knocked the woman down before he carried her off. But on every animal analogy, it would seem an almost morbid modesty and reluctance, on the part of the lady, always to insist on being knocked down before consenting to be carried off. And I repeat that I can never comprehend why, when the male was so very rude, the female should have been so very refined. The cave-man may have been a brute, but there is no reason why he should have been more brutal than the brutes. And the loves of the giraffes and the river romances of the hippopotami are affected without any of this preliminary fracas or shindy.
G.K. Chesterton (The Everlasting Man)
This is the first principle of democracy: that the essential things in men are the things they hold in common, not the things they hold separately. And the second principle is merely this: that the political instinct or desire is one of these things which they hold in common. Falling in love is more poetical than dropping into poetry. The democratic contention is that government ... is a thing like falling in love, and not a thing like dropping into poetry. It is not something analogous to playing the church organ, painting on vellum,..., being Astronomer Royal, and so on. For these things we do not wish a man to do at all unless he does them well. It is, on the contrary, a thing analogous to writing one's own love-letters or blowing one's own nose. These things we want a man to do for himself, even if he does them badly. .... In short, the democratic faith is this: that the most terribly important things must be left to ordinary men themselves--the mating of the sexes, the rearing of the young, the laws of the state. This is democracy; and in this I have always believed.
G.K. Chesterton
We think of English as a fortress to be defended, but a better analogy is to think of English as a child. We love and nurture it into being, and once it gains gross motor skills, it starts going exactly where we don’t want it to go: it heads right for the goddamned electrical sockets.
Kory Stamper (Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries)
The first condition, then, of what is called a selfish love among men is lacking with God. He has no natural necessities, no passion, to compete with His wish for the beloved's welfare; or if there is in Him something which we have to imagine after the analogy of a passion, a want it is there by His own will and for our sakes. And the second condition is lacking too. The real interests of a child may differ from that which his father's affection instinctively demands, because the child is a separate being from the father with a nature which has its own needs and does not exist solely for the father nor find its whole perfection in being loved by him and which the father does not fully understand. But creatures are not thus separate from their Creator, nor can He misunderstand them. The place for which He designs them in His scheme of things is the place they are made for. When they reach it their nature is fulfilled and their happiness attained: a broken bone in the universe has been set, the anguish is over. When we want to be something other than the thing God wants us to be, we must be wanting what, in fact, will not make us happy. Those Divine demands which sound to our natural ears most like those of a despot and least like those of a lover, in fact marshal us where we should want to go, if we knew what we wanted. He demands our worship, our obedience, our prostration.
C.S. Lewis (The Problem of Pain)
/A weekend toward the end of September, the bell above the door rang and there he was in the shop. Same old feeling in my guts. I’ll go if you want me to, he said. I smiled, I was so fucking happy to see him. You’ve only just got here, you twat, I said. Now give us a hand with this, and he took the other end of the trestle table and moved it over to the wall. Pub? I said. He grinned. And before I could say anything else he put his arms around me. And everything he couldn’t say in our room in France was said in that moment. I know, I said. I know. I’d already accepted I wasn’t the key to unlock him. She’d come later. It took a while to acknowledge the repercussions of that time. How the numbness in my fingertips traveled to my heart and I never even knew it. I had crushes, I had lovers, I had orgasms. My trilogy of desire, I liked to call it, but I’d no great love after him, not really. Love and sex became separated by a wide river and one the ferryman refused to cross. The psychiatrist liked that analogy. I watched him write it down. Chuckle, chuckle, his pen across the page.
Sarah Winman (Tin Man)
The morphine molecule exerts an analogous brainwashing on humans, pushing them to act contrary to their self-interest in pursuit of the molecule. Addicts betray loved ones, steal, live under freeways in harsh weather, and run similarly horrific risks to use the molecule. It became the poster molecule for an age of excess. No amount of it was ever enough. The molecule created ever-higher tolerance. Plus, it had a way of railing on when the body gathered the courage to throw it out. This wasn’t only during withdrawals. Most drugs are easily reduced to water-soluble glucose in the human body, which then expels them. Alone in nature, the morphine molecule rebelled. It resisted being turned into glucose and it stayed in the body. “We still can’t explain why this happens. It just doesn’t follow the rules. Every other drug in the world—thousands of them—follows this rule. Morphine doesn’t,” Coop said. “It really is almost like someone designed it that way—diabolically so.
Sam Quinones (Dreamland: The True Tale of America's Opiate Epidemic)
[The Devil] In my opinion, there is no need to destroy anything, one needs only destroy the idea of God in mankind, that's where the business should start! One should begin with that, with that--oh, blind men, of no understanding! Once mankind has renounced God, one and all (and I believe that this period, analogous to the geological periods, will come), then the entire old world view will fall of itself, without antrhopophagy, and, above all, the entire former morality, and everything will be new. People will come together in order to take from life all that it can give, but, of course, for happiness and joy in this world only. Man will be exalted with the spirit of the divine, tatanic pride, and the man-god will appear. Man, his will and his science no longer limited, conquering nature every hour, will thereby every hour experience such lofty delight as will replace for him all his former hopes of heavenly delight. Each will know himself utterly mortal, without resurrection, and will accept death proudly and calmly, like a god. Out of pride he will understand that he should not murmur against the momentariness of life, and he will love his brother then without any reward. Love will satisfy only the moment of life, but the very awareness of its momentariness will increase its fire, inasmuch as previously it was diffused in hopes of an eternal love beyond the grave.
Fyodor Dostoevsky (The Brothers Karamazov)
Cruelty links all three primitives [pleasure, pain, and desire]: Spinoza defines it as the desire to inflict pain on someone we love or pity. Financial speaking, cruelty is analogous to a convertible bond whose debt and equity depend on three economic underliers: the stock price, the level of interest rates, and the credit worthiness of the company's debt.
Emanuel Derman (Models.Behaving.Badly: Why Confusing Illusion with Reality Can Lead to Disaster, on Wall Street and in Life)
Hold your tongue, or I'll kill you! You'll kill me? No, excuse me, I will speak. I came to treat myself to that pleasure. Oh, I love the dreams of my ardent young friends, quivering with eagerness for life! 'There are new men,' you decided last spring, when you were meaning to come here, 'they propose to destroy everything and begin with cannibalism. Stupid fellows! they didn't ask my advice! I maintain that nothing need be destroyed, that we only need to destroy the idea of God in man, that's how we have to set to work. It's that, that we must begin with. Oh, blind race of men who have no understanding! As soon as men have all of them denied God -- and I believe that period, analogous with geological periods, will come to pass -- the old conception of the universe will fall of itself without cannibalism, and, what's more, the old morality, and everything will begin anew. Men will unite to take from life all it can give, but only for joy and happiness in the present world. Man will be lifted up with a spirit of divine Titanic pride and the man-god will appear. From hour to hour extending his conquest of nature infinitely by his will and his science, man will feel such lofty joy from hour to hour in doing it that it will make up for all his old dreams of the joys of heaven. Everyone will know that he is mortal and will accept death proudly and serenely like a god. His pride will teach him that it's useless for him to repine at life's being a moment, and he will love his brother without need of reward. Love will be sufficient only for a moment of life, but the very consciousness of its momentariness will intensify its fire, which now is dissipated in dreams of eternal love beyond the grave'... and so on and so on in the same style. Charming! Ivan sat with his eyes on the floor, and his hands pressed to his ears, but he began trembling all over. The voice continued. (The devil) The question now is, my young thinker reflected, is it possible that such a period will ever come? If it does, everything is determined and humanity is settled for ever. But as, owing to man's inveterate stupidity, this cannot come about for at least a thousand years, everyone who recognises the truth even now may legitimately order his life as he pleases, on the new principles. In that sense, 'all things are lawful' for him. What's more, even if this period never comes to pass, since there is anyway no God and no immortality, the new man may well become the man-god, even if he is the only one in the whole world, and promoted to his new position, he may lightheartedly overstep all the barriers of the old morality of the old slaveman, if necessary. There is no law for God. Where God stands, the place is holy. Where I stand will be at once the foremost place... 'all things are lawful' and that's the end of it! That's all very charming; but if you want to swindle why do you want a moral sanction for doing it? But that's our modern Russian all over. He can't bring himself to swindle without a moral sanction. He is so in love with truth-.
Fyodor Dostoevsky (The Brothers Karamazov)
The woman who was the director of the nursery school told me that she had never seen the children use puppets, and there were puppets all around. She said they used them imaginatively when I would come with my puppets. She made an analogy to a father of one of the children several years before. He was a sculptor. He would come to the school once a week just to fashion clay in the midst of the children, not to teach sculpting, but to show how you enjoy it in front of the children. He would come and love that clay in front of the children one day a week. She said that never before or since had the children used clay so imaginatively as when that man used to come and love it in front of them. Nothing didactic about it.
Fred Rogers (Fred Rogers: The Last Interview: and Other Conversations (The Last Interview Series))
It occurred to me, not exactly for the first time, that psychogeography didn't have much to do with the actual experience of walking. It was a nice idea, a clever idea, an art project, a conceit, but it had very little to do with any real walking, with any real experience of walking. And it confirmed for me what I'd really known all along, that walking isn't much good as a theoretical experience. You can dress it up any way you like, but walking remains resolutely simple, basic, analog. That's why I love it and love doing it. And in that respect--stay with me on this--it's not entirely unlike a martini. Sure you can add things to martinis, like chocolate or an olive stuffed with blue cheese or, God forbid, cotton candy, and similarly you can add things to your walks--constraints, shapes, notions of the mapping of utopian spaces--but you don't need to. And really, why would you? Why spoil a good drink? Why spoil a good walk?
Geoff Nicholson (The Lost Art of Walking: The History, Science, and Literature of Pedestrianism)
(An) Analogy has been drawn between the metaphysical experience of prayer and an ordinary human friendship. This may progress from initial civility, through engagement in common business, to conversations of mutual interest punctuated with companionable silences; after that meetings may become occasions for sudden outbursts of passionate conviction or declarations of love.
Adrian House (Francis of Assisi: A Revolutionary Life)
Whether we like it or not, if we are to pursue a career in science, eventually we have to learn the “language of nature”: mathematics. Without mathematics, we can only be passive observers to the dance of nature rather than active participants. As Einstein once said, “Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.” Let me offer an analogy. One may love French civilization and literature, but to truly understand the French mind, one must learn the French language and how to conjugate French verbs. The same is true of science and mathematics. Galileo once wrote, “[The universe] cannot be read until we have learnt the language and become familiar with the characters in which it is written. It is written in mathematical language, and the letters are triangles, circles, and other geometrical figures, without which means it is humanly impossible to understand a single word.
Michio Kaku (Parallel Worlds: A Journey Through Creation, Higher Dimensions, and the Future of the Cosmos)
Writing analogies are as abundant as ants at a picnic. We love nothing better than a good analogy, a “life-is-like-this” on the page. I breathe and out pops another analogy. As of this moment, I am sole owner of 1,643 analogies.
Chila Woychik (On Being a Rat and Other Observations)
That's where the importance of nurturing comes in; the already sculpted personality is not recast, but refined. Loving, caring families can sand and polish, but they can't chip away at a lawn ornament and turn it into Michelangelo's David. Or vice versa. Want another analogy? Regarding personality, I am convinced that at birth the cake is already baked. Nurture is the nuts or frosting, but if you're a spice cake you're a spice cake, and nothing is going to change you into an angel food.
Lorna Landvik
Man is made of thought, of will and of love: he can think truth or error, he can will good or evil, he can love beauty or ugliness. Now thought of the true — or knowledge of the real — demands on the one hand willing of the good and on the other love of the beautiful, hence virtue, for virtue is none other than beauty of soul; that is why the Greeks, who were aesthetes as well as thinkers, included virtue within philosophy. Without beauty of soul, all willing is sterile, it is petty and closes itself to grace; and in an analogous manner: without effort of will, all spiritual thought ultimately remains superficial and ineffectual and leads to pretension. Virtue coincides with a sensibility proportioned — or conformed — to the Truth, and that is why the soul of the sage soars above things and thereby above itself, if one may put it thus; whence the disinterestedness, nobleness and generosity of great souls. Quite clearly, the consciousness of metaphysical principles cannot go hand in hand with moral pettiness, such as ambition and hypocrisy : "Be ye perfect even as your Father in Heaven is perfect.
Frithjof Schuon (Survey of Metaphysics and Esoterism)
we should also consider the remoter analogy of the animals. Many birds and animals, especially the carnivorous, have only one mate, and the love and care of offspring which seems to be natural is inconsistent with the primitive theory of marriage. If we go back to an imaginary state in which men were almost animals and the companions of them, we have as much right to argue from what is animal to what is human as from the barbarous to the civilized man. The record of animal life on the globe is fragmentary,—the connecting links are wanting and cannot be supplied; the record of social life is still more fragmentary and precarious. Even if we admit that our first ancestors had no such institution as marriage, still the stages by which men passed from outer barbarism to the comparative civilization of China, Assyria, and Greece, or even of the ancient Germans, are wholly unknown to us. Such
Plato (The Republic)
People love to say, “Give a man a fish, and he’ll eat for a day. Teach a man to fish, and he’ll eat for a lifetime.” What they don’t say is, “And it would be nice if you gave him a fishing rod.” That’s the part of the analogy that’s missing. Working with Andrew was the first time in my life I realized you need someone from the privileged world to come to you and say, “Okay, here’s what you need, and here’s how it works.” Talent alone would have gotten me nowhere without Andrew giving me the CD writer. People say, “Oh, that’s a handout.” No. I still have to work to profit by it. But I don’t stand a chance without
Trevor Noah (Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood)
A man fishes for two reasons: he’s either sport fishing or fishing to eat, which means he’s either going to try to catch the biggest fish he can, take a picture of it, admire it with his buddies and toss it back to sea, or he’s going to take that fish on home, scale it, fillet it, toss it in some cornmeal, fry it up, and put it on his plate. This, I think, is a great analogy for how men seek out women. See, men are, by nature, hunters, and women have been put in the position of being the prey. Think about it: it used to be that a man “picked” a wife, a man “asked” a woman to dinner, a man had to get “permission” from a woman’s father to have her hand in marriage, and even, in some cases, to date her. We pursued—in fact, we’ve been taught all our lives that it was not only a good thing to chase women, but natural. Women have bought into this for years, too; how many times have you or one of your girls said, “I like it when a man pursues me,” or “I need him to romance me and give me flowers and make me feel like I’m wanted”? Flowers, jewelry, phone calls, dates, sweet talk—these are all the weapons in our hunting arsenal when we’re coming for you. But the question always remains: once we hook you, what will we do with you? Taking a cue from my love
Steve Harvey (Act Like a Lady, Think Like a Man, Expanded Edition: What Men Really Think About Love, Relationships, Intimacy, and Commitment)
With a tension in his stomach, such as one suffers when watching an acrobat leaving the virtuosity of his safety in a mad unraveling whirl into probable death, Felix watched the hand descend, take up the note, and disappear into the limbo of the doctor’s pocket. He knew that he would continue to like the doctor, though he was aware that it would be in spite of a long series of convulsions of the spirit, analogous to the displacement in the fluids of the oyster, that must cover its itch with a peal: so he would have to cover the doctor. He knew at the same time that this stricture of acceptance (by which what we must love is made into what we can love) would eventually be a part of himself, though originally brought on by no will of his own.
Djuna Barnes (Nightwood)
LOIS: The personal stuff you've been dealing with, did you feel like you needed someone to catch you? Were we not there for you? DIANA: (pauses) You know how when people talk of depression, they talk of it both coming in storms and coming stealthily? So that, for many, it is the status quo, before they realize... that we lose our self-awareness in that. So I can't... I can't fault the people who love and care for me for not seeing what I did not myself see. I think, again, when we have our moments of clarity, it is very easy to brush past them, to let the status quo continue. It can be very difficult and sometimes painful to turn and confront them. The only analogy I can think of is chronic pain. When that pain has been with you for so very long, it is background noise. And one is not aware of it until something happens that places it into relief. LOIS: But you're not talking about physical pain? DIANA: No. And I am not certain I am talking about emotional pain either. It has been difficult for me to untangle. I think there is a psychological element to it. I think it is important--and I think as a reporter that you would be inclined to agree--that we question those basic assumptions that we often decide are true. I have found myself in a position where a great deal of what I took as true no longer seems accurate. That may be because I have changed. That may be because the world has changed. Or it may be because I was mistaken. And it is that last that is the most concerning. I put great stock in truth--I think that's one of the reasons why we get along.
Greg Rucka
If the change be not from outward circumstances, it must be from within; it must be nature, man’s nature, which has done the business for Captain Benwick.’ ‘No, no, it is not man’s nature. I will not allow it to be more man’s nature than woman’s to be inconstant and forget those they do love, or have loved. I believe the reverse. I believe in a true analogy between our bodily frames and our mental; and that as our bodies are the strongest, so are our feelings; capable of bearing most rough usage, and riding out the heaviest weather.’ ‘Your feelings may be the strongest,’ replied Anne, ‘but the same spirit of analogy will authorise me to assert that ours are the most tender. Man is more robust than woman, but he is not longer-lived; which exactly explains my view of the nature of their attachments. Nay, it would be too hard upon you, if it were otherwise. You have difficulties, and privations, and dangers enough to struggle with. You are always labouring and toiling, exposed to every risk and hardship. Your home, country, friends, all quitted. Neither time, nor health, nor life, to be called your own. It would be to hard indeed if woman’s feelings were to be added to all this…
Jane Austen (Persuasion)
That’s why analogies can be such a useful tool in storytelling. They create a shorthand for complicated concepts—a bridge directly to a common experience. That’s another thing I learned from Steve Jobs. He’d always say that analogies give customers superpowers. A great analogy allows a customer to instantly grasp a difficult feature and then describe that feature to others. That’s why “1,000 songs in your pocket” was so powerful. Everyone had CDs and tapes in bulky players that only let you listen to 10–15 songs, one album at a time. So “1,000 songs in your pocket” was an incredible contrast—it let people visualize this intangible thing—all the music they loved all together in one place, easy to find, easy to hold—and gave them a way to tell their friends and family why this new iPod thing was so cool.
Tony Fadell (Build: An Unorthodox Guide to Making Things Worth Making)
You hate the very source of your life, it’s ultimate basis—for there’s no denying it, ‘sex is fundamental. And you hate it, hate it.’ ‘Me?’ It was a novel accusation. Spandrell was accustomed to hearing himself blamed for his excessive love of women and the sensual pleasures. ‘Not only you. All these people.’ With a jerk of his head he indicated the other diners. ‘And all the respectable ones too. Practically everyone. It’s the disease of modern man. I call it Jesus’s disease on the analogy of Bright’s disease. Or rather Jesus’s and Newton’s disease; for the scientists are as much responsible as the Christians. So are the big business men, for that matter. It’s Jesus’s and Newton’s and Henry Ford’s disease. Between them, the three have pretty well killed us. Ripped the life out of our bodies and stuffed us with hatred.’ Rampion
Aldous Huxley (Point Counter Point)
In the eyes of his contemporaries, Caesar was cast in the mold of a Catilina: bright, radical and scandalous. He had already acquired an exotic reputation. His adventures during his teens when he had been on the run from Sulla had been only the start. In his twenties, like many young upper-class Romans, he had gone soldiering in Asia and won the Civic Crown—an award analogous to the Medal of Honor—for conspicuous gallantry in action. He may also have had a brief love affair with the King of Bithynia, but it did not inhibit his vigorous sex life among the wives of his contemporaries back in Rome. A Senator once referred to him in a speech as “every woman’s man and every man’s woman” and for the rest of Caesar’s career he had to endure much heavy-handed jocularity about the incident. A few years later Caesar was captured by pirates, who were endemic in the Mediterranean; while waiting for his ransom to arrive he got onto friendly terms with his captors, but warned them that he would return and have them crucified. They thought he was joking. They were not the last to underestimate Caesar’s determination and regret it. AS soon as he was free, he raised a squadron on his own initiative, tracked down the pirates and executed them, just as he had promised.
Anthony Everitt (Cicero: The Life and Times of Rome's Greatest Politician)
I love analogies! Let’s have one. Imagine that you dearly love, absolutely crave, a particular kind of food. There are some places in town that do this particular cuisine just amazingly. Lots of people who are into this kind of food hold these restaurants in high regard. But let’s say, at every single one of these places, every now and then throughout the meal, at random moments, the waiter comes over and punches any women at the table right in the face. And people of color and/or LGBT folks as well! Now, most of the white straight cis guys who eat there, they have no problem–after all, the waiter isn’t punching them in the face, and the non-white, non-cis, non-straight, non-guys who love this cuisine keep coming back so it can’t be that bad, can it? Hell, half the time the white straight cis guys don’t even see it, because it’s always been like that and it just seems like part of the dining experience. Granted, some white straight cis guys have noticed and will talk about how they don’t like it and they wish it would stop. Every now and then, you go through a meal without the waiter punching you in the face–they just give you a small slap, or come over and sort of make a feint and then tell you they could have messed you up bad. Which, you know, that’s better, right? Kind of? Now. Somebody gets the idea to open a restaurant where everything is exactly as delicious as the other places–but the waiters won’t punch you in the face. Not even once, not even a little bit. Women and POC and LGBT and various combinations thereof flock to this place, and praise it to the skies. And then some white, straight, cis dude–one of the ones who’s on record as publicly disapproving of punching diners in the face, who has expressed the wish that it would stop (maybe even been very indignant on this topic in a blog post or two) says, “Sure, but it’s not anything really important or significant. It’s getting all blown out of proportion. The food is exactly the same! In fact, some of it is awfully retro. You’re just all relieved cause you’re not getting punched in the face, but it’s not really a significant development in this city’s culinary scene. Why couldn’t they have actually advanced the state of food preparation? Huh? Now that would have been worth getting excited about.” Think about that. Seriously, think. Let me tell you, being able to enjoy my delicious supper without being punched in the face is a pretty serious advancement. And only the folks who don’t get routinely assaulted when they try to eat could think otherwise.
Ann Leckie
we need a more capacious model of love. In this model, love is not predicated on sharing each other’s world as we might share a soul. It is predicated, instead, on sharing it as we might share a story. This analogy is not accidental. What is true of a story is true of love: for either one to work, you’d better be good at talking and good at listening. Likewise, if stories only succeed when we consent to suspend disbelief, relationships require of us something similar: the ability to let go of our own worldview long enough to be intrigued and moved by someone else’s. This is storybook love in a whole different sense of the phrase. It is not about living idyllically in our similarities, but about living peacefully and pleasurably in our differences. It is not bestowed from beyond the normal human realm but struggled for and gained, slowly and with effort. And it is not about unchanging love. It is about letting love change us.
Kathryn Schulz (Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error)
killing is the ultimate expression of hatred and fear, as sex is the ultimate expression of romantic love and desire. And, as with sex, killing a stranger who has otherwise provoked no emotion is inherently unnatural. I suppose you could say that a man who kills a stranger is not unlike a woman who has sex under analogous circumstances. That a man who is paid to kill is like a woman who is paid to fuck. Certainly the man is subject to the same reluctance, the same numbing, the same regrets. The same damage to the soul.
Barry Eisler (A Lonely Resurrection (John Rain, #2))
If sin is anything that separates us from God and from each other; and if God is to be “all in all,” then he must sooner or later destroy all sin and thus remove every stain from his creation. According to the New Testament as a whole, God has a two-fold strategy, I want to suggest, for accomplishing this end. On the one hand, he sent his Son in the flesh to defeat, in some unexplained mystical way, the powers of darkness and to pioneer the way of salvation (see Heb 2:10)—a way of repentance, forgiveness, and personal sacrifice. On the other hand, for those who refuse to step into his ordained system of repentance, forgiveness, and personal sacrifice, he has an alternative strategy: in their estrangement from God, they will experience his love as a consuming fire; that is, as wrath, as punishment, and, in the end, as a means of correction. So in that sense, they will literally pay for their sin; and God will never—not in this age and not in the age to come—forgive (or set aside) the final payment they owe, which is voluntarily to step inside the ordained system of repentance, forgiveness, and personal sacrifice. As Jesus said, using the analogy of someone being thrown into prison, “Truly I tell you, you will never get out until you have paid the last penny” (Matt 5:25). 97.
Thomas Talbott (The Inescapable Love of God)
You might imagine how a hypnotherapist views history. If not, here is a short analogy: Imagine the developing consciousness of an individual as the group mind, or Zeitgeist, of civilizations - observing, learning, stumbling and developing over thousands of years. Just as the individual goes through phases and fads - the terrible twos, pubescence, the rebellious teens, the urge to merge and to have families, learn a trade, etc., - so do nations and civilizations grow, have fads and phases. The individual acts through notions, precepts and ideals, oftentimes passed on through family and tradition (suggestions, to use a hypnotic term). And so edicts, commands and laws dictate actions in very large groups. One then can look back on history and see that nations were perhaps doing the best they could, but were stymied and hindered by narrow-minded thinking, superstitions, patriarchal and out-moded beliefs, and lack of information, much of it unexamined hand me down ideas and beliefs. Some nations are immature, stubborn and self-righteous. Just as individuals thrive and blossom with love, understanding, education and inspiration, so can nations, societies and civilizations. The key to a fair, just and caring world is positive ideals/ suggestions, and that brings us to the importance of environment, community and education.
Stephen Poplin (Inner Journeys, Cosmic Sojourns: Life transforming stories, adventures and messages from a spiritual hypnotherapist's casebook)
Wednesday got comfortable, ordered himself a Jack Daniel’s. “My kind of people see your kind of people…” He hesitated. “It’s like bees and honey. Each bee makes only a tiny, tiny drop of honey. It takes thousands of them, millions perhaps, all working together to make the pot of honey you have on your breakfast table. Now imagine that you could eat nothing but honey. That’s what it’s like for my kind of people…we feed on belief, on prayers, on love. It takes a lot of people believing just the tiniest bit to sustain us. That’s what we need, instead of food. Belief.” “And Soma is…” “To take the analogy further, it’s honey wine. Mead.” He chuckled. “It’s a drink. Concentrated prayer and belief, distilled into a potent liqueur.
Neil Gaiman (American Gods)
There is the space of encounters which allow one to trace out an absolute limit to the analogy between the social world and the physical world. This is basically because two particles never encounter one another except where their rupture phenomena can be deduced from laboratory observations. The encounter is that durable instant where intensities manifest between the forms-of-life present in each individual. It is, even above the social and communications, the territory that actualizes the potentials of bodies and actualizes itself in the differences of intensity that they give off and comprise. Encounters are above language, outside of words, in the virgin lands of the unspoken, in suspended animation, a potential of the world which is also its negation, its “power to not be.” What is other people? “Another possible world,” responds Deleuze. The Other incarnates the possibility that the world has of not being, of being otherwise. This is why in the so-called “primitive” societies war takes on the primordial importance of annihilating any other possible world. It is pointless, however, to think about conflict without also thinking about enjoyment, to think about war without thinking about love. In each tumultuous birth of love, the fundamental desire to transform oneself by transforming the world is reborn. The hate and suspicion that lovers excite around them is an automatic defensive response to the war they wage, merely by loving each other, against a world where all passion must misunderstand itself and die off.
Tiqqun (Cybernetikens hypotes)
the things common to all men are more important than the things peculiar to any men. Ordinary things are more valuable than extraordinary things; nay, they are more extraordinary. Man is something more awful than men; something more strange. The sense of the miracle of humanity itself should be always more vivid to us than any marvels of power, intellect, art, or civilization. The mere man on two legs, as such, should be felt as something more heartbreaking than any music and more startling than any caricature. Death is more tragic even than death by starvation. Having a nose is more comic even than having a Norman nose. This is the first principle of democracy: that the essential things in men are the things they hold in common, not the things they hold separately. And the second principle is merely this: that the political instinct or desire is one of these things which they hold in common. Falling in love is more poetical than dropping into poetry. The democratic contention is that government (helping to rule the tribe) is a thing like falling in love, and not a thing like dropping into poetry. It is not something analogous to playing the church organ, painting on vellum, discovering the North Pole (that insidious habit), looping the loop, being Astronomer Royal, and so on. For these things we do not wish a man to do at all unless he does them well. It is, on the contrary, a thing analogous to writing one's own love-letters or blowing one's own nose. These things we want a man to do for himself, even if he does them badly.
G.K. Chesterton (Orthodoxy)
The only thing I can’t figure out is why you still eat the food your captors fed you. Why don’t you hate it as much as you hate them?” Fila glanced down at her plate. It contained a strange mixture of Afghan and Mexican dishes. She held up a flatbread. “This isn’t Taliban food—it’s Afghan food. It’s my mother’s food. I grew up eating it before I was ever captured. To me it means love and tenderness, not hate and violence.” “Taliban, Afghan—it’s all the same.” She waved the bread. “No, it’s not. Not one bit. Afghan culture is over two thousand years old. And it’s a conservative culture—it’s had to be—but it’s not a culture of monsters. Afghans are people like you, Holt. They’re born, they grow up, they live and love and they die just like we do. I didn’t study much history before I was taken, but I know this much. America’s story is that of the frontier—of always having room to grow. Afghanistan’s story is that of occupation. By the Russians, the British, the Mongols—even the ancient Greeks. On and on for century after century. Imagine all those wars being fought in Montana. Foreign armies living among us, taking over your ranch, stealing everything you own, killing your wife and children, over and over and over again.” She paused to catch her breath. “Death is right around the corner for them—all the time. Is it any wonder that a movement that turns men into warriors and codes everything else into rigid rules might seem like the answer?” She still wasn’t sure if Holt was following her. What analogy would make sense to him? She wracked her brain. “If a bunch of Californians overran Chance Creek and forced everyone to eat tofu, would you refuse to ever eat steak again?” He made a face. “Of course not!” “Then imagine the Taliban are the Californians, forcing everyone to eat tofu. And everyone does it because they don’t know what else to do. They still love steak, but they will be severely punished if they eat it—so will their families. That’s what it’s like for many Afghans living under Taliban control. It’s not their choice. They still love their country. They still love their heritage. That doesn’t mean they love the group of extremists who have taken over.” “Even if those Taliban people went away, they still wouldn’t be anything like you and me.” Holt crossed his arms. Fila suppressed a smile at his inclusion of her. That was a step in the right direction even if the greater message was lost on him. “They’re more like you than you think. Defensive. Angry. Always on the lookout for trouble.” Holt straightened. “I have four sons. Of course I’m on the lookout for trouble.” “They have sons, too.” She waited to see if he understood. Holt shook his head. “We’re going to see different on this one. But I understand about the food. Everyone likes their mother’s cooking best.” He surveyed her plate. “You got any more of that bread?” She’d take that as a victory.
Cora Seton (The Cowboy Rescues a Bride (The Cowboys of Chance Creek, #7))
His months of teaching experience were now a lost age of youth and innocence. He could no longer sit in his office at Fort McNair, look out over the elm trees and the golf course, and encompass the world within "neat, geometric patterns" that fit within equally precise lectures. Policy planning was a very different responsibility, but explaining just how was "like trying to describe the mysteries of love to a person who has never experienced it." There was, however, an analogy that might help. "I have a largish farm in Pennsylvania."...it had 235 acres, on each of which things were happening. Weekends, in theory, were days of rest. But farms defied theory: Here a bridge is collapsing. No sooner do you start to repair it than a neighbor comes to complain about a hedge row which you haven't kept up half a mile away on the other side of the farm. At that very moment your daughter arrives to tell you that someone left the gate to the hog pasture open and the hogs are out. On the way to the hog pasture, you discover that the beagle hound is happily liquidating one of the children's pet kittens. In burying the kitten you look up and notice a whole section of the barn roof has been blown off and needs instant repair. Somebody shouts from the bathroom window that the pump has stopped working, and there's no water in the house. At that moment, a truck arrives with five tons of stone for the lane. And as you stand there hopelessly, wondering which of these crises to attend to first, you notice the farmer's little boy standing silently before you with that maddening smile, which is halfway a leer, on his face, and when you ask him what's up, he says triumphantly 'The bull's busted out and he's eating the strawberry bed'. Policy planning was like that. You might anticipate a problem three or four months into the future, but by the time you'd got your ideas down on paper, the months had shrunk to three to four weeks. Getting the paper approved took still more time, which left perhaps three or four days. And by the time others had translated those ideas into action, "the thing you were planning for took place the day before yesterday, and everyone wants to know why in the hell you didn't foresee it a long time ago." Meanwhile, 234 other problems were following similar trajectories, causing throngs of people to stand around trying to get your attention: "Say, do you know that the bull is out there in the strawberry patch again?
John Lewis Gaddis (George F. Kennan: An American Life)
Chitta means “mind” and also “heart” or “attitude.” Bodhi means “awake,” “enlightened,” or “completely open.” Sometimes the completely open heart and mind of bodhichitta is called the soft spot, a place as vulnerable and tender as an open wound. It is equated, in part, with our ability to love. Even the cruelest people have this soft spot. Even the most vicious animals love their offspring. As Trungpa Rinpoche put it, “Everybody loves something, even if it’s only tortillas.” Bodhichitta is also equated, in part, with compassion—our ability to feel the pain that we share with others. Without realizing it we continually shield ourselves from this pain because it scares us. We put up protective walls made of opinions, prejudices, and strategies, barriers that are built on a deep fear of being hurt. These walls are further fortified by emotions of all kinds: anger, craving, indifference, jealousy and envy, arrogance and pride. But fortunately for us, the soft spot—our innate ability to love and to care about things—is like a crack in these walls we erect. It’s a natural opening in the barriers we create when we’re afraid. With practice we can learn to find this opening. We can learn to seize that vulnerable moment—love, gratitude, loneliness, embarrassment, inadequacy—to awaken bodhichitta. An analogy for bodhichitta is the rawness of a broken heart. Sometimes this broken heart gives birth to anxiety and panic, sometimes to anger, resentment, and blame. But under the hardness of that armor there is the tenderness of genuine sadness. This is our link with all those who have ever loved. This genuine heart of sadness can teach us great compassion. It can humble us when we’re arrogant and soften us when we are unkind. It awakens us when we prefer to sleep and pierces through our indifference. This continual ache of the heart is a blessing that when accepted fully can be shared with all. The Buddha said that we are never separated from enlightenment. Even at the times we feel most stuck, we are never alienated from the awakened state. This is a revolutionary assertion. Even ordinary people like us with hang-ups and confusion have this mind of enlightenment called bodhichitta. The openness and warmth of bodhichitta is in fact our true nature and condition. Even when our neurosis feels far more basic than our wisdom, even when we’re feeling most confused and hopeless, bodhichitta—like the open sky—is always here, undiminished by the clouds that temporarily cover it.
Pema Chödrön (The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times)
In Amsterdam, I took a room in a small hotel located in the Jordann District and after lunch in a café went for a walk in the western parts of the city. In Flaubert’s Alexandria, the exotic had collected around camels, Arabs peacefully fishing and guttural cries. Modern Amsterdam provided different but analogous examples: buildings with elongated pale-pink bricks stuck together with curiously white mortar, long rows of narrow apartment blocks from the early twentieth century, with large ground-floor windows, bicycles parked outside every house, street furniture displaying a certain demographic scruffiness, an absence of ostentatious buildings, straight streets interspersed with small parks…..In one street lines with uniform apartment buildings, I stopped by a red front door and felt an intense longing to spend the rest of my life there. Above me, on the second floor, I could see an apartment with three large windows and no curtains. The walls were painted white and decorated with a single large painting covered with small blue and red dots. There was an oaken desk against a wall, a large bookshelf and an armchair. I wanted the life that this space implied. I wanted a bicycle; I wanted to put my key in that red front door every evening. Why be seduced by something as small as a front door in another country? Why fall in love with a place because it has trams and its people seldom have curtains in their homes? However absurd the intense reactions provoked by such small (and mute) foreign elements my seem, the pattern is at least familiar from our personal lives. My love for the apartment building was based on what I perceived to be its modesty. The building was comfortable but not grand. It suggested a society attracted to the financial mean. There was an honesty in its design. Whereas front doorways in London are prone to ape the look of classical temples, in Amsterdam they accept their status, avoiding pillars and plaster in favor of neat, undecorated brick. The building was modern in the best sense, speaking of order, cleanliness, and light. In the more fugitive, trivial associations of the word exotic, the charm of a foreign place arises from the simple idea of novelty and change-from finding camels where at home there are horses, for example, or unadorned apartment buildings where at home there are pillared ones. But there may be a more profound pleasure as well: we may value foreign elements not only because they are new but because they seem to accord more faithfully with our identity and commitments than anything our homeland can provide. And so it was with my enthusiasms in Amsterdam, which were connected to my dissatisfactions with my own country, including its lack of modernity and aesthetic simplicity, its resistance to urban life and its net-curtained mentality. What we find exotic abroad may be what we hunger for in vain at home.
Alain de Botton (The Art of Travel)
As in everything, nature is the best instructor, even as regards selection. One couldn't imagine a better activity on nature's part than that which consists in deciding the supremacy of one creature over another by means of a constant struggle. While we're on the subject, it's somewhat interesting to observe that our upper classes, who've never bothered about the hundreds of thousands of German emigrants or their poverty, give way to a feeling of compassion regarding the fate of the Jews whom we claim the right to expel. Our compatriots forget too easily that the Jews have accomplices all over the world, and that no beings have greater powers of resistance as regards adaptation to climate. Jews can prosper anywhere, even in Lapland and Siberia. All that love and sympathy, since our ruling class is capable of such sentiments, would by rights be applied exclusively—if that class were not corrupt—to the members of our national community. Here Christianity sets the example. What could be more fanatical, more exclusive and more intolerant than this religion which bases everything on the love of the one and only God whom it reveals? The affection that the German ruling class should devote to the good fellow-citizen who faithfully and courageously does his duty to the benefit of the community, why is it not just as fanatical, just as exclusive and just as intolerant? My attachment and sympathy belong in the first place to the front-line German soldier, who has had to overcome the rigours of the past winter. If there is a question of choosing men to rule us, it must not be forgotten that war is also a manifestation of life, that it is even life's most potent and most characteristic expression. Consequently, I consider that the only men suited to become rulers are those who have valiantly proved themselves in a war. In my eyes, firmness of character is more precious than any other quality. A well toughened character can be the characteristic of a man who, in other respects, is quite ignorant. In my view, the men who should be set at the head of an army are the toughest, bravest, boldest, and, above all, the most stubborn and hardest to wear down. The same men are also the best chosen for posts at the head of the State—otherwise the pen ends by rotting away what the sword has conquered. I shall go so far as to say that, in his own sphere, the statesman must be even more courageous than the soldier who leaps from his trench to face the enemy. There are cases, in fact, in which the courageous decision of a single statesman can save the lives of a great number of soldiers. That's why pessimism is a plague amongst statesmen. One should be able to weed out all the pessimists, so that at the decisive moment these men's knowledge may not inhibit their capacity for action. This last winter was a case in point. It supplied a test for the type of man who has extensive knowledge, for all the bookworms who become preoccupied by a situation's analogies, and are sensitive to the generally disastrous epilogue of the examples they invoke. Agreed, those who were capable of resisting the trend needed a hefty dose of optimism. One conclusion is inescapable: in times of crisis, the bookworms are too easily inclined to switch from the positive to the negative. They're waverers who find in public opinion additional encouragement for their wavering. By contrast, the courageous and energetic optimist—even although he has no wide knowledge— will always end, guided by his subconscious or by mere commonsense, in finding a way out.
Adolf Hitler (Hitler's Table Talk, 1941-1944)
And the ladies dressed in red for my pain and with my pain latched onto my breath, clinging like the fetuses of scorpions in the deepest crook of my neck, the mothers in red who sucked out the last bit of heat that my barely beating heart could give me — I always had to learn on my own the steps you take to drink and eat and breathe, I was never taught to cry and now will never learn to do this, least of all from the great ladies latched onto the lining of my breath with reddish spit and floating veils of blood, my blood, mine alone, which I drew myself and which they drink from now after murdering the king whose body is listing in the river and who moves his eyes and smiles, though he’s dead and when you’re dead, you’re dead, for all the smiling you do, and the great ladies, the tragic ladies in red have murdered the one who is floating down the river and I stay behind like a hostage in their eternal custody. I want to die to the letter of the law of the commonplace, where we are assured that dying is the same as dreaming. The light, the forbidden wine, the vertigo. Who is it you write for? The ruins of an abandoned temple. If only celebration were possible. A mournful vision, splintered, of a garden of broken statues. Numb time, time like a glove upon a drum. The three who compete in me remain on a shifting point and we neither are nor is. My eyes used to find rest in humiliated, forsaken things. Nowadays I see with them; I’ve seen and approved of nothing. Seated at the bottom of a lake. She has lost her shadow, but not the desire to be, to lose. She is alone with her images. Dressed in red, and unseeing. Who has reached this place that no one ever reaches? The lord of those dead who are dressed in red. The man who is masked in a faceless face. The one who came for her takes her without him. Dressed in black, and seeing. The one who didn’t know how to die of love and so couldn’t learn a thing. She is sad because she is not there. There are words with hands; barely written, they search my heart. There are words condemned like the lilac in a tempest. There are words resembling some among the dead, and from these I prefer the ones that evoke the doll of some unhappy girl. Ward 18 when I think of occupational therapy I think of poking out my eyes in a house in ruin then eating them while thinking of all my years of continuous writing, 15 or 20 hours writing without a break, whetted by the demon of analogies, trying to configure my terrible wandering verbal matter, because — oh dear old Sigmund Freud — psychoanalytic science forgot its key somewhere: to open it opens but how to close the wound? for other imponderables lovelier than the smile of the Virgin of the Rocks the shadows strike blows the black shadows of the dead nothing but blows and there were cries nothing but blows
Alejandra Pizarnik
In the light of the evidence it is hard to believe that most crusaders were motivated by crude materialism. Given their knowledge and expectations and the economic climate in which they lived, the disposal of assets to invest in the fairly remote possibility of settlement in the East would have been a stupid gamble. It makes much more sense to suppose, in so far as one can generalize about them, that they were moved by an idealism which must have inspired not only them but their families. Parents, brothers and sisters, wives and children had to face a long absence and must have worried about them: in 1098 Countess Ida of Boulogne made an endowment to the abbey of St Bertin 'for the safety of her sons, Godfrey and Baldwin, who have gone to Jerusalem'.83 And they and more distant relatives — cousins, uncles and nephews - were prepared to endow them out of the patrimonial lands. I have already stressed that no one can treat the phenomenal growth of monasticism in this period without taking into account not only those who entered the communities to be professed, but also the lay men and women who were prepared to endow new religious houses with lands and rents. The same is true of the crusading movement. Behind many crusaders stood a large body of men and women who were prepared to sacrifice interest to help them go. It is hard to avoid concluding that they were fired by the opportunity presented to a relative not only of making a penitential pilgrimage to Jerusalem but also of fighting in a holy cause. For almost a century great lords, castellans and knights had been subjected to abuse by the Church. Wilting under the torrent of invective and responding to the attempts of churchmen to reform their way of life in terms they could understand, they had become perceptibly more pious. Now they were presented by a pope who knew them intimately with the chance of performing a meritorious act which exactly fitted their upbringing and devotional needs and they seized it eagerly. But they responded, of course, in their own way. They were not theologians and were bound to react in ways consonant with their own ideas of right and wrong, ideas that did not always respond to those of senior churchmen. The emphasis that Urban had put on charity - love of Christian brothers under the heel of Islam, love of Christ whose land was subject to the Muslim yoke - could not but arouse in their minds analogies with their own kin and their own lords' patrimonies, and remind them of their obligations to avenge injuries to their relatives and lords. And that put the crusade on the level of a vendetta. Their leaders, writing to Urban in September 1098, informed him that 'The Turks, who inflicted much dishonour on Our Lord Jesus Christ, have been taken and killed and we Jerusalemites have avenged the injury to the supreme God Jesus Christ.
Jonathan Riley-Smith (The First Crusade and the Idea of Crusading)