Love On The Spectrum Quotes

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What was it that made this human love so much more desirable to me than the love of my own kind? Was it because it was exclusive and capricious? The souls offered love and acceptance to all. Did I crave a greater challenge?...Or was it simply better somehow? Because these humans hate with so much fury, was the other end of the spectrum that they could love with more heart and zeal and fire?
Stephenie Meyer (The Host (The Host, #1))
Of course, we can't visit every place or meet every person or do every job, yet most of what we'd feel in any life is still available. We don't have to play every game to know what winning feels like. We don't have to hear every piece of music in the world to understand music. We don't have to have tried every variety of grape from every vineyard to know the pleasure of wine. Love and laughter and fear and pain are universal currencies. We just have to close our eyes and savour the taste of the drink in front of us and listen to the song as it plays. We are as completely and utterly alive as we are in any other life and have access to the same emotional spectrum.
Matt Haig (The Midnight Library)
Because love and hate were supposed to stand cleanly on opposite sides of the spectrum. The division seemed as clear as...well, angels and demons would once have seemed to her. Not anymore.
Lauren Kate (Torment (Fallen, #2))
I like grit, I like love and death, I'm tired of irony. ... A lot of good fiction is sentimental. ... The novelist who refuses sentiment refuses the full spectrum of human behavior, and then he just dries up. ... I would rather give full vent to all human loves and disappointments, and take a chance on being corny, than die a smartass.
Jim Harrison
When I set a glass prism on a windowsill and allow the sun to flood through it, a spectrum of colors dances on the floor. What we call "white" is a rainbow of colored rays packed into a small space. The prism sets them free. Love is the white light of emotion.
Diane Ackerman (A Natural History of Love)
and I love her in the dark. I mean, fuck it—I down and out love her in all spectrums of light, even the absence of it.
Jessa Hastings (Magnolia Parks (Magnolia Parks Universe, #1))
Love is not black and white. It’s not even gray. Love is every shade of color in the spectrum, changing with every ray of light given and stolen.
Cassia Leo (Bring Me Home (Shattered Hearts, #4))
If cynicism and love lie at opposite ends of a spectrum, do we not sometimes fall in love in order to escape the debilitating cynicism to which we are prone? Is there not in every coup de foudre a certain willful exaggeration of the qualities of the beloved, an exaggeration which distracts us from our habitual pessimism and focuses our energies on someone in whom we can believe in a way we have never believed in ourselves?
Alain de Botton (On Love)
When we hold health and abundance in our self-identity, we create experiences of that quality. If we choose to be attuned to the energy of our heart and feel love and compassion, we create experiences in the same energy spectrum as that of peace, love and joy.
Kenneth Schmitt (Quantum Energetics and Spirituality Volume 1: Aligning with Universal Consciousness)
To control the breathing is to control the mind. With different patterns of breathing, you can fall in love, you can hate someone, you can feel the whole spectrum of feelings by changing your breathing.
Marina Abramović
This love was tricky...was it simply better somehow? Because these humans could hate with so much fury, was the other end of the spectrum that they could love with more heart and zeal and fire?
Stephenie Meyer (The Host (The Host, #1))
And that’s how it was. We walked the same way, no more running, no more fear, no more secrets. Just me and her, in sync and together, even though we came from two separate sides of the spectrum. I was her perfect future and she was my perfect love and that was how every good love song should end. So it ends....at least for now.
Jay Crownover (Jet (Marked Men, #2))
What is love, after all, if not an affectionate acceptance of the lover's full spectrum of being, the silly along with the solemn?
Maria Popova (Figuring)
Juliana?” the words were low and far—too calm for her husband, who had found that he rather enjoyed the full spectrum of emotion now that he had experienced it. “Yes?” “What are you doing twenty feet in the air?” “Looking for a book.” “Would you mind very much returning to the earth?” “What are you thinking, climbing to the rafters in your condition?” “I am not an invalid, Simon, I still have use of all my extremes.” “You do indeed—particularly your extreme ability to try my patience—I believe, however, that you mean extremities.
Sarah MacLean (Eleven Scandals to Start to Win a Duke's Heart (Love By Numbers, #3))
The spectrum is long and wide, and we're all on it. Once you believe this, it becomes easy to see how we're all connected. p306 Author's notes
Lisa Genova (Love Anthony)
What was it that made this human love so much more desirable to me than the love of my own kind? Was it because it was exclusive and capricious? The souls offered love and acceptance to all. Did I crave a greater challenge? This love was tricky; it had no hard-and-fast rules - it might be given for free, as with Jamie, or earned through time and hard work, as with Ian, or completely and heartbreakingly unattainable, as with Jared. Or was it simply better somehow? Because these humans could hate with so much fury, was the other end of the spectrum that they could love with more heart and zeal and fire?
Stephenie Meyer (The Host (The Host, #1))
No relationship is without its difficulties and this is certainly true when one or both of the persons involved has an autistic spectrum disorder. Even so, I believe what is truly essential to the success of any relationship is not so much compatibility, but love. When you love someone, virtually anything is possible.
Daniel Tammet (Born on a Blue Day)
Technically, on the spectrum of very bad things, they did nothing truly wicked. But of course, that spectrum has no measure for the greatest of all carnal sins, the kind that occurs before skin touches skin, before wondering turns to yearning, yearning to having, having to holding for dear life, when two people cling to each other so desperately that even when they lie, inches apart, neither is fully satisfied until the light between them turns to darkness.
Galt Niederhoffer (The Romantics)
Buddhist discipline is designed to transmute trishna, or egoic narcissism, into Karuna, Divine Narcissism; that is, to transmute self-love, which excludes love of others, into Self-love, which is love of others.
Ken Wilber (The Spectrum of Consciousness)
Nothing can invade our being without our permission. It is energetically impossible. We can be confident in our eternal being of infinite abilities of every kind, limited only by our imagination, emotional spectrum and personal beliefs and perspectives. These are all things that can be resolved, as our conscious awareness greatly expands in understanding and can create experiences in the spectrum of beauty, joy and love.
Kenneth Schmitt (Quantum Energetics and Spirituality Volume 1: Aligning with Universal Consciousness)
Red is such an interesting color to correlate with emotion, because it’s on both ends of the spectrum. On one end you have happiness, falling in love, infatuation with someone, passion, all that. On the other end, you’ve got obsession, jealousy, danger, fear, anger and frustration. All those emotions — spanning from intense love, intense frustration, jealousy, confusion, all of that — in my mind, all those emotions are red. You know, there’s nothing in between. There’s nothing beige about any of those feelings, it all comes back to me, and it’s red.
Taylor Swift
The spectrum is long and wide, and we’re all on it. Once you believe this, it becomes easy to see how we’re all connected.
Lisa Genova (Love Anthony)
Words form the sinew and muscle that hold societies upright, he argued. Consider the Koran, the Bible, the American Constitution, but also letters from fathers to sons, last wills, blessings, curses. Thousands upon thousands of words infused with the full spectrum of emotions fill in the nooks and corners of human life.
National Geographic Society
The usual antonym for the word “spiritual” is “material.” That at least is what I believed when I began this inquiry—that the whole issue with spirituality turned on a question of metaphysics. Now I’m inclined to think a much better and certainly more useful antonym for “spiritual” might be “egotistical.” Self and Spirit define the opposite ends of a spectrum, but that spectrum needn’t reach clear to the heavens to have meaning for us. It can stay right here on earth. When the ego dissolves, so does a bounded conception not only of our self but of our self-interest. What emerges in its place is invariably a broader, more openhearted and altruistic—that is, more spiritual—idea of what matters in life. One in which a new sense of connection, or love, however defined, seems to figure prominently.
Michael Pollan (How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence)
The porn films are not about sex. Sex is airbrushed and digitally washed out of the films. There is no acting because none of the women are permitted to have what amounts to a personality. The one emotion they are allowed to display is an unquenchable desire to satisfy men, especially if that desire involves the women’s physical and emotional degradation. The lightning in the films is harsh and clinical. Pubic hair is shaved off to give the women the look of young girls or rubber dolls. Porn, which advertises itself as sex, is a bizarre, bleached pantomime of sex. The acts onscreen are beyond human endurance. The scenarios are absurd. The manicured and groomed bodies, the huge artificial breasts, the pouting oversized lips, the erections that never go down, and the sculpted bodies are unreal. Makeup and production mask blemishes. There are no beads of sweat, no wrinkle lines, no human imperfections. Sex is reduced to a narrow spectrum of sterilized dimensions. It does not include the dank smell of human bodies, the thump of a pulse, taste, breath—or tenderness. Those in films are puppets, packaged female commodities. They have no honest emotion, are devoid of authentic human beauty, and resemble plastic. Pornography does not promote sex, if one defines sex as a shared act between two partners. It promotes masturbation. It promotes the solitary auto-arousal that precludes intimacy and love. Pornography is about getting yourself off at someone else’s expense.
Chris Hedges (Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle)
As married people, we dwell on a spectrum between happy and unhappy, in love and out of love, and we move back and forth on that line decade by decade, year by year, week by week, even hour by hour.
Ada Calhoun (Wedding Toasts I'll Never Give)
I suppose we all see colors outside our usual spectrum in certain people. And the saddest part of life is having known what it looks like and saying goodbye while a quiet part of you hopelessly searches for it forever in shades of blue, red, and yellow. Perhaps all my writing is just a telling to others of the color I saw.
Kristian Ventura (Cardiac Ablation)
Every emotion in the human spectrum is actually a teacher that is here to show us the degree in which we are either resisting life or flowing with life.
Alaric Hutchinson (Living Peace: Essential Teachings For Enriching Life)
Love, like everything else, exists in a spectrum. Love of another, love of the world, love of God, all these loves are really one love in different degrees of light and density.
Roger Housden (Ten Poems to Open Your Heart)
We who were not so pathologically far out on the spectrum of self-involvement, we dwellers of the visible spectrum who could imagine how it felt to go beyond violet but were not ourselves beyond it, could see that David was wrong not to believe in his lovability and could imagine the pain of not believing in it. How easy and natural love is if you are well! And how gruesomely difficult--what a philosophically daunting contraption of self-interest and self-delusion love appears to be--if you are not! And yet ... the difference between well and not well is in more respects a difference of degree than of kind. Even though David laughed at my much milder addictions and liked to tell me that I couldn't even conceive of how moderate I was, I can still extrapolate from these addictions, and from the secretiveness and solipsism and radical isolation and raw animal craving that accompany them, to the extremity of his. I can imagine the sick mental pathways by which suicide comes to seem like the one consciousness-quenching substance that nobody can take away from you.
Jonathan Franzen
Please, dear God of happiness, show the radiance of your spectrum to our world, which here means to forget everything.
Sorin Cerin (Wisdom Collection: The Book of Wisdom)
Boys who cry can work for Google. Boys who trash computers cannot. I once was at a science conference, and I saw a NASA scientist who had just found out that his project was canceled—a project he’d worked on for years. He was maybe sixty-five years old, and you know what? He was crying. And I thought, Good for him. That’s why he was able to reach retirement age working in a job he loved.
Temple Grandin (The Autistic Brain: Thinking Across the Spectrum)
If you were to look at human skin under an electron microscope, you would not be able to tell where the human being begins and ends. There is no fine barrier between the person and the universe. There is just a flow from one thing to the next and the only reason we perceive separateness is because of the limitations of our senses. Human beings can only see .0001 % of the spectrum of light and we can only hear .0001 % of the spectrum of sound. If we could see infrared, and if we could see ultraviolet and x-rays, and energy, and hear the whole spectrum of sounds, the universe would appear very differently, there would be no empty space. It would be so full we would just see this sea of energy and there would only be oneness. There is no separate you. No separateness. There's a deep interconnectedness. There's only oneness.
Todd Perelmuter (Spiritual Words to Live by : 81 Daily Wisdoms and Meditations to Transform Your Life)
The spectrum of possibilities is vast and our souls long to incorporate as many as they can... We are in a constant process of learning how to think, behave, or act understanding the manifestations of Tao, the manifestation of Qi within us.
Nataša Pantović (A-Ma Alchemy of Love (AoL Mindfulness, #1))
... The continuation of her life was more than another day of breathing, but was the gift of another day of engagement with her beloved across the spectrum of all things.
Dan Simmons (Olympos (Ilium, #2))
Life can be seen through several spectrums of light, but it’s the person who is doing the soul searching that defines what they may see.
Nadège Richards
My little sister is on the spectrum. So, while everyone’s unique, and I’m no expert, I love someone who’s autistic. And I hope you know I’m a safe place for you to be you.
Chloe Liese (Always Only You (Bergman Brothers, #2))
Love is not black and white. It's not even gray. Love is every shade of color in the spectrum, changing with every ray of light given and stolen. Sometimes you forget how much you love someone, until you realize their smile is like a spotlight shined on your heart.
Cassia Leo (Bring Me Home (Shattered Hearts, #4))
Do you want to be in your own story or on the outside writing about it? Everyone battles fear and uncertainty every day. However, the only failure in life is believing that your value relies on other people's approval or resources. The reality is this: When you are living your authentic self and not how people want you to act, then you are free to use the full spectrum of your creativity and gifts. People don't need resources to get out of any life situation. They need creativity to create resources. When you realize that, becoming stuck is impossible.
Shannon L. Alder
Well, my dear sisters, the gospel is the good news that can free us from guilt. We know that Jesus experienced the totality of mortal existence in Gethsemane. It's our faith that he experienced everything- absolutely everything. Sometimes we don't think through the implications of that belief. We talk in great generalities about the sins of all humankind, about the suffering of the entire human family. But we don't experience pain in generalities. We experience it individually. That means he knows what it felt like when your mother died of cancer- how it was for your mother, how it still is for you. He knows what it felt like to lose the student body election. He knows that moment when the brakes locked and the car started to skid. He experienced the slave ship sailing from Ghana toward Virginia. He experienced the gas chambers at Dachau. He experienced Napalm in Vietnam. He knows about drug addiction and alcoholism. Let me go further. There is nothing you have experienced as a woman that he does not also know and recognize. On a profound level, he understands the hunger to hold your baby that sustains you through pregnancy. He understands both the physical pain of giving birth and the immense joy. He knows about PMS and cramps and menopause. He understands about rape and infertility and abortion. His last recorded words to his disciples were, "And, lo, I am with you always, even unto the end of the world." (Matthew 28:20) He understands your mother-pain when your five-year-old leaves for kindergarten, when a bully picks on your fifth-grader, when your daughter calls to say that the new baby has Down syndrome. He knows your mother-rage when a trusted babysitter sexually abuses your two-year-old, when someone gives your thirteen-year-old drugs, when someone seduces your seventeen-year-old. He knows the pain you live with when you come home to a quiet apartment where the only children are visitors, when you hear that your former husband and his new wife were sealed in the temple last week, when your fiftieth wedding anniversary rolls around and your husband has been dead for two years. He knows all that. He's been there. He's been lower than all that. He's not waiting for us to be perfect. Perfect people don't need a Savior. He came to save his people in their imperfections. He is the Lord of the living, and the living make mistakes. He's not embarrassed by us, angry at us, or shocked. He wants us in our brokenness, in our unhappiness, in our guilt and our grief. You know that people who live above a certain latitude and experience very long winter nights can become depressed and even suicidal, because something in our bodies requires whole spectrum light for a certain number of hours a day. Our spiritual requirement for light is just as desperate and as deep as our physical need for light. Jesus is the light of the world. We know that this world is a dark place sometimes, but we need not walk in darkness. The people who sit in darkness have seen a great light, and the people who walk in darkness can have a bright companion. We need him, and He is ready to come to us, if we'll open the door and let him.
Chieko N. Okazaki
Of course, even before Flaubert, people knew stupidity existed, but they understood it somewhat differently: it was considered a simple absence of knowledge, a defect correctable by education. In Flaubert's novels, stupidity is an inseparable dimension of human existence. It accompanies poor Emma throughout her days, to her bed of love and to her deathbed, over which two deadly agélastes, Homais and Bournisien, go on endlessly trading their inanities like a kind of funeral oration. But the most shocking, the most scandalous thing about Flaubert's vision of stupidity is this: Stupidity does not give way to science, technology, modernity, progress; on the contrary, it progresses right along with progress!
Milan Kundera (The Art of the Novel)
I want queer authors to write anything and everything they need to write. I have no interest in gatekeeping; I want the full spectrum. I want the coming out books. I want the books about queer suffering. I want on-page catharsis and exploration of trauma. I want the happy books, too: queer joy books, cute romantic comedies, first crush books, fantasies about queer royals and revolutionaries and spaceship captains. (...) We need all types of queer stories because all types of queer people exist. I want the market to be so saturated with queer books that anyone who needs to see themselves in a story—anyone who hasn’t yet seen themselves, hasn’t yet gotten to be the hero—can walk into any bookstore and find a book (or six) about someone who experiences the world like they do. I want every queer author to get the chance to tell their story. To tell people, We exist everywhere. We suffer, we survive, we love. We can be magic, too.
Nina Varela
Remind yourself: You have a right to your disappointment. If you share your needs and feelings and it actually drives the person away, then you can’t be happy in the relationship. The solution isn’t to slide down the spectrum and become Echo. Recognize self-blame for what it is: a powerful fear that you’ll lose love if you ask for what you want. It keeps you stuck in the wrong relationship, with someone who needs you to bury your needs.
Craig Malkin (Rethinking Narcissism: The Secret to Recognizing and Coping with Narcissists)
You have a consistent character yourself and you wish all the facts of life to be consistent, but they never are. For instance you despise public service because you want work always to correspond to its aims, and that never happens. You also want the activity of each separate man to have an aim, and love and family life always to coincide––and that doesn't happen either. All the variety, charm and beauty of life are made up of light and shade.
Leo Tolstoy (Anna Karenina)
The Tomorrow Man theory. It’s pretty basic. Today, right here, you are who you are. Tomorrow, you will be who you will be. Each and every night, we lie down to die, and each morning we arise, reborn. Now, those who are in good spirits, with strong mental health, they look out for their Tomorrow Man. They eat right today, they drink right today, they go to sleep early today–all so that Tomorrow Man, when he awakes in his bed reborn as Today Man, thanks Yesterday Man. He looks upon him fondly as a child might a good parent. He knows that someone–himself–was looking out for him. He feels cared for, and respected. Loved, in a word. And now he has a legacy to pass on to his subsequent selves…. But those who are in a bad way, with poor mental health, they constantly leave these messes for Tomorrow Man to clean up. They eat whatever the hell they want, drink like the night will never end, and then fall asleep to forget. They don’t respect Tomorrow Man because they don’t think through the fact that Tomorrow Man will be them. So then they wake up, new Today Man, groaning at the disrespect Yesterday Man showed them. Wondering why does that guy–myself–keep punishing me? But they never learn and instead come to settle for that behavior, eventually learning to ask and expect nothing of themselves. They pass along these same bad habits tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow, and it becomes psychologically genetic, like a curse. Looking at you now, Maven, I can see exactly where you fall on this spectrum. You are a man constantly trying to fix today what Yesterday Man did to you. You make up your bed, you clean those dirty dishes from the night before, and pledge not to start drinking until six, thinking that’s the way to keep an even keel. But in reality you’re always playing catch-up. I know this because I’ve been there. The thing is–you can’t fix the mistakes of Yesterday. Yesterday Man is dead, he’s gone forever, and blame and atonement aren’t worth a damn. What you can do is help yourself today. Eat a vegetable. Read a book. Cut that hair of yours. Leave Tomorrow Man something more than a headache and a jam-packed colon. Do for Tomorrow Man what you would have wanted Yesterday Man to do for you.
Chuck Hogan
Real me only leaks out when the rote-learning system I have devised has insufficient data to maintain the facade. Real me is also allowed out in times of complete comfort and acceptance (it takes a rare soul to love and accept without judgement...)
Sarah Hendrickx (Women and Girls with Autism Spectrum Disorder)
Its complicated, on one level. On another, its the same old stupid story - we aren't enlightened. We disagree, fall in love, and hate eachother, the whole spectrum of human experience. We have differences of opinion, and sometimes, we can't resolve those differences peacefully. If a disagreement goes for long enough, and is important enough, people start to take sides. Once people start to take sides, conflict is inevitable.
Zachary Rawlins (The Academy (The Central, #1))
It came to him then, permeated his disjointed thoughts. Billie was teaching him—him—how to make love. With a jolt of surprise at the crashing irony, Adrian realized he hadn’t known how until now. He, the consummate lover, so renown for his sexual skill, so proficient and controlled and practiced, had only played at making love, where Billie…God. Clearly, it was all she knew. Pretense just wasn’t in her spectrum of capabilities.
Shelby Reed (The Fifth Favor)
Two spectrums generate our thoughts … one comes from fear and the other from love. Every emotion in between starts at one of those two places.
Toni Sorenson
In my NDE state, I realized that the entire universe is composed of unconditional love, and I’m an expression of this. Every atom, molecule, quark, and tetraquark, is made of love. I can be nothing else, because this is my essence and the nature of the entire universe. Even things that seem negative are all part of the infinite, unconditional spectrum of love.
Anita Moorjani (Dying To Be Me: My Journey from Cancer, to Near Death, to True Healing)
Empathy seems to have been replaced with judgement in today's world. NO ONE has arrived. I repeat, NO ONE has arrived. We all experience joy, happiness, sadness, anger, disappointment, fear, etc... Some of the most successful people have said things in interviews that give you a peek into their vulnerable areas. The differences are found in how we manage our own issues so if you are beating yourself up, comparing yourself or on the other end of the spectrum looking down on others...please stop! We are all searching for significance in one way or another...some have found it within while it takes others a little more time searching the outside. Be true to yourself and allow others to do the same. Remember, no one has it all together all the time. NO ONE HAS ARRIVED...WE ARE ALL BE-COMING. HUMANS BE-ING. So let folks BE.
Sanjo Jendayi
There are a million shades of gray between good and evil, love. Am I on the darker end of the spectrum? Yes. Am I a bad man who does good things or a good man who does bad things? Both. But you made this monster your slave. All of what I am, good and bad, light and dark, belongs to you.
J.T. Geissinger (Liars Like Us (Morally Gray, #1))
The entire spectrum of emotion is woven throughout this story, from love to loss, from happiness to bitterness, from arrogance to humiliation, and everything in between. At its core, this is a love story
Nicholas Tanek (The Coolest Way to Kill Yourself)
Jesus does not divide the world into the moral “good guys” and the immoral “bad guys.” He shows us that everyone is dedicated to a project of self-salvation, to using God and others in order to get power and control for themselves. We are just going about it in different ways. Even though both sons are wrong, however, the father cares for them and invites them both back into his love and feast. This means that Jesus’s message, which is “the gospel,” is a completely different spirituality. The gospel of Jesus is not religion or irreligion, morality or immorality, moralism or relativism, conservatism or liberalism. Nor is it something halfway along a spectrum between two poles—it is something else altogether.
Timothy J. Keller (The Prodigal God: Recovering the Heart of the Christian Faith)
Love is the most complex of all human phenomena. It exists on a spectrum from tolerance and kindness to romantic love and self-sacrifice, reaching its pinnacle in altruism, a love that needs nothing in return.
Gudjon Bergmann (Experifaith: At the Heart of Every Religion; An Experiential Approach to Individual Spirituality and Improved Interfaith Relations)
Love transcends all barriers. Age, Gender, Caste et al are the diktats of society to thwart love, promote strait jacketed family life . . ." "If love could transcend all barriers why not that of gender as well?
Jayant Swamy (Colours in the Spectrum)
i believe in living. i believe in the spectrum of Beta days and Gamma people. i believe in sunshine. In windmills and waterfalls, tricycles and rocking chairs; And i believe that seeds grow into sprouts. And sprouts grow into trees. i believe in the magic of the hands. And in the wisdom of the eyes. i believe in rain and tears. And in the blood of infinity. i believe in life. And i have seen the death parade march through the torso of the earth, sculpting mud bodies in its path i have seen the destruction of the daylight and seen bloodthirsty maggots prayed to and saluted i have seen the kind become the blind and the blind become the bind in one easy lesson. i have walked on cut grass. i have eaten crow and blunder bread and breathed the stench of indifference i have been locked by the lawless. Handcuffed by the haters. Gagged by the greedy. And, if i know anything at all, it's that a wall is just a wall and nothing more at all. It can be broken down. i believe in living i believe in birth. i believe in the sweat of love and in the fire of truth. And i believe that a lost ship, steered by tired, seasick sailors, can still be guided home to port.
Assata Shakur (Assata: An Autobiography)
My thoughts fill the canvas in the sky with a spectrum of emotions. The landscape is painted through my vision. My heart warms the environment with love. The beauty lies in the depths of my soul. I am one with nature.
Jason Micheal Ratliff
move from an earthly mindset that makes us bristle at the thought of submission to a joyful expectation of good, we must focus on the One who is leading. We must look at the full spectrum of His love, grace, and wisdom.
Amy Layne Litzelman
I am not light nor the absence of it. I am the broad spectrum. Everything that makes you think, want to touch, or taste. Don't box me into that life that you so desperately need to be black and white because that's not me; I won't fit. I am bold, brilliant, and beautiful, I will sparkle and shimmer every hue. Ever changing. Undefinable. So do not give me limits or make me try to fit. There is no containing subtle softness careening into the harsh and dominant, every faucet creating a reaction which will cause you to feel and know you are alive." - Kendal Waller
Kendal Waller
We need to become more open minded to the idea that many of us exist on a spectrum - a continuum - of gender. That for some of us the choice isn't just one or the other - completely male or completely female - but often a combination of both. In fact, it seems there are three different lines on the sexuality spectrum: how you self identify, who you're attracted to, and what you look like. And it seems the dial can be at any place on any of those three lines.
Eddie Izzard (Believe Me: A Memoir of Love, Death, and Jazz Chickens)
A hug is a display of love that begins on the physical end of the spectrum but bleeds into the emotional end of the spectrum if you let it, if you give into it. It’s the most innocent, pure form of physical human connection there is. It only takes two willing people, who don’t even have to know each other, to participate. Two willing people who want that exchange. It’s so easy, but there are people who never get them. People who never get them,” she repeats softly, it’s a confession.
Kim Holden (So Much More)
Largely, it’s what we usually refer to as sympathy or compassion—feeling delighted or afraid or concerned or thrilled for someone, doing what we can to alleviate any suffering, and securing them in love. That’s emotional empathy. And that we’ve got in spades.
Jennifer O'Toole (Autism in Heels: The Untold Story of a Female Life on the Spectrum)
Girls and women, in their new, particular unfolding, will only in passing imitate men's behavior and misbehavior and follow in male professions. Once the uncertainty of such transitions is over it will emerge that women have only passed through the spectrum and the variety of those (often laughable) disguises in order to purify their truest natures from the distorting influences of the other sex. Women, in whom life abides and dwells more immediately, more fruitfully and more trustingly, are bound to have ripened more thoroughly, become more human human beings, than a man, who is all too light and has not been pulled down beneath the surface of life by the weight of a bodily fruit and who, in his arrogance and impatience, undervalues what he thinks he loves. This humanity which inhabits woman, brought to term in pain and humiliation, will, once she has shrugged off the conventions of mere femininity through the transformations of her outward status, come clearly to light, and men, who today do not yet feel it approaching, will be taken by surprise and struck down by it. One day (there are already reliable signs which speak for it and which begin to spread their light, especially in the northern countries), one day there will be girls and women whose name will no longer just signify the opposite of the male but something in their own right, something which does not make one think of any supplement or limit but only of life and existence: the female human being. This step forward (at first right against the will of the men who are left behind) will transform the experience of love, which is now full of error, alter its root and branch, reshape it into a relation between two human beings and no longer between man and woman. And this more human form of love (which will be performed in infinitely gentle and considerate fashion, true and clear in its creating of bonds and dissolving of them) will resemble the one we are struggling and toiling to prepare the way for, the love that consists in two solitudes protecting, defining and welcoming one another.
Rainer Maria Rilke (Letters to a Young Poet)
Conscience is a sense of obligation ultimately based in an emotional attachment to another living creature (often but not always a human being), or to a group of human beings, or even in some cases to humanity as a whole. Conscience does not exist without an emotional bond to someone or something, and in this way conscience is closely allied with the spectrum of emotions we call "love." This alliance is what gives true conscience its resilience and its astonishing authority over those who have it. It can drive us in compelling ways because its fuel is none other than our strongest affections. And witnessing or hearing about an act of.conscience, even an ordinary one, pleases us, because any conscience-bound choice reminds us of the sweet ties that bind us. A story about conscience is a story about the connectedness of living things, and in unconscious recognition, we smile at the true nature of the tale.
Martha Stout (The Sociopath Next Door)
Lives aren’t completed. They’re concluded. You are, and forever will be, unfinished. This is nature. Cycles and spectrums. Moments and seasons. Do you ask when the weather will be complete? The spring finished? Your life won’t have one point or purpose. You’re lovelier than that.
Jarod K. Anderson (Love Notes From The Hollow Tree)
She opened herself to him, and, in that moment, she opened herself to the world. Let it hurt her. Let it burn her veins, boil her blood and scorch her heart. For where there could be pain, there could be pleasure and love. She would be cold no longer. She would melt the hearts of others, and in turn, they would melt hers. She would feel the full spectrum of emotions and cry. She would be human. And she would be happy.
Dmytry Karpov (Kiss Me in Paris (Kiss Me, #1))
It is easy to mourn the lives we aren’t living. Easy to wish we’d developed other talents, said yes to different offers. Easy to wish we’d worked harder, loved better, handled our finances more astutely, been more popular, stayed in the band, gone to Australia, said yes to the coffee or done more bloody yoga. It takes no effort to miss the friends we didn’t make and the work we didn’t do and the people we didn’t marry and the children we didn’t have. It is not difficult to see yourself through the lens of other people, and to wish you were all the different kaleidoscopic versions of you they wanted you to be. It is easy to regret, and keep regretting, ad infinitum, until our time runs out. But it is not the lives we regret not living that are the real problem. It is the regret itself. It’s the regret that makes us shrivel and wither and feel like our own and other people’s worst enemy. We can’t tell if any of those other versions would have been better or worse. Those lives are happening, it is true, but you are happening as well, and that is the happening we have to focus on. Of course, we can’t visit every place or meet every person or do every job, yet most of what we’d feel in any life is still available. We don’t have to play every game to know what winning feels like. We don’t have to hear every piece of music in the world to understand music. We don’t have to have tried every variety of grape from every vineyard to know the pleasure of wine. Love and laughter and fear and pain are universal currencies. We just have to close our eyes and savour the taste of the drink in front of us and listen to the song as it plays. We are as completely and utterly alive as we are in any other life and have access to the same emotional spectrum. We only need to be one person. We only need to feel one existence. We don’t have to do everything in order to be everything, because we are already infinite. While we are alive we always contain a future of multifarious possibility. So let’s be kind to the people in our own existence. Let’s occasionally look up from the spot in which we are because, wherever we happen to be standing, the sky above goes on for ever. Yesterday I knew I had no future, and that it was impossible for me to accept my life as it is now. And yet today, that same messy life seems full of hope. Potential. The impossible, I suppose, happens via living. Will my life be miraculously free from pain, despair, grief, heartbreak, hardship, loneliness, depression? No. But do I want to live? Yes. Yes. A thousand times, yes.
Matt Haig (The Midnight Library)
Observe the nature of today’s alleged peace movements. Professing love and concern for the survival of mankind, they keep screaming that the nuclear-weapons race should be stopped, that armed force should be abolished as a means of settling disputes among nations, and that war should be outlawed in the name of humanity. Yet these same peace movements do not oppose dictatorships; the political views of their members range through all shades of the statist spectrum, from welfare statism to socialism to fascism tocommunism. This means that they are opposed to the use of coercion by one nation against another, but not by the government of a nation against its own citizens; it means that they are opposed to the use of force against armed adversaries, but not against the disarmed. Consider the plunder, the destruction, the starvation, the brutality, the slave-labor camps, the torture chambers, the wholesale slaughter perpetrated by dictatorships. Yet this is what today’s alleged peace-lovers are willing to advocate or tolerate—in the name of love for humanity.
Ayn Rand (Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal)
I like grit, I like love and death, I’m tired of irony. … A lot of good fiction is sentimental. … The novelist who refuses sentiment refuses the full spectrum of human behavior, and then he just dries up. … I would rather give full vent to all human loves and disappointments, and take a chance on being corny, than die a smartass.
Jim Harrison
It is true that Jeremy could see "naked girls dancing" in strip clubs in San Diego, but parents reading this will appreciate that, since our loved ones on the spectrum tend to have obsessive tendencies, I was not about to tell Jeremy that. Obsessions with French fries I can deal with. Let him think he has to travel to Las Vegas to see naked girls dancing.
Chantal Sicile-Kira (A Full Life with Autism: From Learning to Forming Relationships to Achieving Independence)
where we fall on the introvert-extrovert spectrum. Our place on this continuum influences our choice of friends and mates, and how we make conversation, resolve differences, and show love. It affects the careers we choose and whether or not we succeed at them. It governs how likely we are to exercise, commit adultery, function well without sleep, learn from our mistakes, place big bets in the stock market, delay gratification, be a good leader,
Susan Cain (Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking)
[S]ocial order displays not the absolute presence or absence of intolerance to difference but a spectrum of intolerance. Each of us bears responsibility to some degree for maintaining these protocols of intolerance, which could not be kept in place if every single one of us did not play our part. From bringing up children ‘appropriately’, to lovingly correcting or punishing their inappropriate behaviour, to making sure we never breach the protocols ourselves, to staring or sniggering at people who look different, to coercive psychiatric and medical intervention, to emotional blackmail, to physical violence-it’s a range of slippages all the way that we seldom recognize.
Nivedita Menon (Seeing Like a Feminist)
When Calvin, Meg, and Mr. Murray make their desperate tesser from Camazotz to Ixchel, Mr. Murray tries to explain to Meg and Calvin the nature of the Dark Thing and IT. His thesis has an eerie resonance today, positing that a planet can become dark because of totalitarianism (and specific dictators are named on both sides of the political spectrum). But a planet can also become dark because of "too strong a desire for security... the greatest evil there is." Meg resists her father's analysis. What's wrong with wanting to be safe? Mr. Murray insists that "lust for security" forces false choices and a panicked search for safety and conformity. This reminded me that my grandmother would get very annoyed anyone would talk about "the power of live." Love, she insisted, is not power, which she considered always coercive. To love is to be vulnerable; and it is only in vulnerability and risk- not safety and security- that we overcome darkness.
Charlotte Jones Voiklis
Ultimately, society cannot function if we’re not using our gifts for the good of the whole. There’s a reason we are all these different hues of this spectrum. We’re all a part of the same light, but we each serve a different purpose. We’re all interconnected and linked to each other. We balance each other. We need each other. There is no right way to be. Not everyone can be The Reformer; not everyone can be The Helper; we are all complementing one another to make a better world.
Zachary Levi (Radical Love: Learning to Accept Yourself and Others)
Sometimes you will need to leap from one end of this paradoxical spectrum to the other in a matter of minutes, and then back again. As I write this book, for instance, I approach each sentence as if the future of humanity depends upon my getting that sentence just right. I care, because I want it to be lovely. Therefore, anything less than a full commitment to that sentence is lazy and dishonorable. But as I edit my sentence—sometimes immediately after writing it—I have to be willing to throw it to the dogs and never look back. (Unless, of course, I decide that I need that sentence again after all, in which case I must dig up its bones, bring it back to life, and once again regard it as sacred.) It matters./It doesn’t matter.
Elizabeth Gilbert (Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear)
Once twin flames begin to spiritually vibrate on the same wavelength, they will find their calling in this life will have a ripple effect on everyone here on earth. Many twin flame couples feel called to philanthropic, spiritual, religious, or other work where they will be guiding other souls toward enlightenment. Getting on the same wavelength, however, is not always easy. As mentioned before, twin flames experience an overload of sensations and emotions that are outside of the spectrum of human senses.
Abigail Konstantine (Twin Flames and Soulmates Exposed: The Journey to Unconditional Love, Fulfilling Your Soul’s Purpose, and Reuniting with Your Spiritual Partner (Twin Flame Union))
You have some lovely books," she said. "I like the one with the pictures of polar bears." "The books with words too tricky?" She released a strangled laugh. "Would you care to explain the system?" Turner stared at the shelves. Matty moved in front of him and pointed. "They're sorted by color." "Ah." Dear God. "And by size." "Mmm." Turner felt his mouth start to twitch. "It didn't occur to you to shelve them alphabetically by author name or even title?" "Well, yes, but no." "The thing is, you have so many. I organized one boxful only to find the next box wrecked what I'd done so I thought they'd look nicer if all the same color spines sat together. I tried to follow the colors of the spectrum. Look, the books go up and down in waves." He'd noticed. It made him feel seasick.
Barbara Elsborg (The Small Print)
Love is not black and white. It’s not even gray. Love is every shade of color in the spectrum, changing with every ray of light given and stolen. Sometimes you forget how much you love someone, until you realize their smile is like a spotlight shined on your heart.
Cassia Leo (Bring Me Home (Shattered Hearts, #4))
She lives inside the book. She loves English literature to the point that her bedroom looks like it came out of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. She is in love with the words, the characters, the paper, the pens … even the smell of the pages. – Uncle of avid reader
Tania Marshall (I Am Aspienwoman: The Unique Characteristics and Gifts of Adult Females on the Autism Spectrum)
I find that most people serve practical needs. They have an understanding of the difference between meaning and relevance. And at some level my mind is more interested in meaning than in relevance. That is similar to the mind of an artist. The arts are not life. They are not serving life. The arts are the cuckoo child of life. Because the meaning of life is to eat. You know, life is evolution and evolution is about eating. It's pretty gross if you think about it. Evolution is about getting eaten by monsters. Don't go into the desert and perish there, because it's going to be a waste. If you're lucky the monsters that eat you are your own children. And eventually the search for evolution will, if evolution reaches its global optimum, it will be the perfect devourer. The thing that is able to digest anything and turn it into structure to sustain and perpetuate itself, for long as the local puddle of negentropy is available. And in a way we are yeast. Everything we do, all the complexity that we create, all the structures we build, is to erect some surfaces on which to out compete other kinds of yeast. And if you realize this you can try to get behind this and I think the solution to this is fascism. Fascism is a mode of organization of society in which the individual is a cell in the superorganism and the value of the individual is exactly the contribution to the superorganism. And when the contribution is negative then the superorganism kills it in order to be fitter in the competition against other superorganisms. And it's totally brutal. I don't like fascism because it's going to kill a lot of minds I like. And the arts is slightly different. It's a mutation that is arguably not completely adaptive. It's one where people fall in love with the loss function. Where you think that your mental representation is the intrinsically important thing. That you try to capture a conscious state for its own sake, because you think that matters. The true artist in my view is somebody who captures conscious states and that's the only reason why they eat. So you eat to make art. And another person makes art to eat. And these are of course the ends of a spectrum and the truth is often somewhere in the middle, but in a way there is this fundamental distinction. And there are in some sense the true scientists which are trying to figure out something about the universe. They are trying to reflect it. And it's an artistic process in a way. It's an attempt to be a reflection to this universe. You see there is this amazing vast darkness which is the universe. There's all these iterations of patterns, but mostly there is nothing interesting happening in these patterns. It's a giant fractal and most of it is just boring. And at a brief moment in the evolution of the universe there are planetary surfaces and negentropy gradients that allow for the creation of structure and then there are some brief flashes of consciousness in all this vast darkness. And these brief flashes of consciousness can reflect the universe and maybe even figure out what it is. It's the only chance that we have. Right? This is amazing. Why not do this? Life is short. This is the thing we can do.
Joscha Bach
Being on the spectrum does not, in any way, mean that a woman or a girl is destined to be in an abusive relationship. Not at all. On the contrary, being aware that she is different and of the ways that she is different is the cornerstone to knowing how to empower her. What to teach her to watch for. What to teach her to cherish. To know, above all, that yes, like everyone in the world, there are things she can do and ways she must grow to be the best friend and partner she can be. And before she looks outward, she needs to know herself. Needs to know that without exception, she is believed. That even when her perspective is limited or her reactions feel extreme to others, they are entirely authentic and real for her. That we will honor and love her for them, not in spite of them. More than a promise, that’s a responsibility.
Jennifer O'Toole (Autism in Heels: The Untold Story of a Female Life on the Spectrum)
Emily Zanotti is a Republican political strategist and author. She is a regular contributor to The American Spectator and a featured opinion columnist with The Wall Street Journal. Her work has appeared across the political spectrum, in National Review, The Daily Caller, Slate, and elsewhere.
Joanne Bamberger (Love Her, Love Her Not: The Hillary Paradox)
What was it that made this human love so much more desirable to me than the love of my own kind? Was it because it was exclusive and capricious? The souls offered love and acceptance to all. Did I crave a greater challenge?...Or was it simply better somehow? Because these humans hate with so much fury, was the other end of the spectrum that they could love with more heart and zeal and fire? I didn't know why I had yearned after it so desperately. All I knew was that, now that I had it, it was worth every ounce of risk and agony it had cost. It was better than I imagined. It was everything.
Stephenie Meyer
Our lives are shaped as profoundly by personality as by gender or race. And the single most important aspect of personality—the “north and south of temperament,” as one scientist puts it—is where we fall on the introvert-extrovert spectrum. Our place on this continuum influences our choice of friends and mates, and how we make conversation, resolve differences, and show love. It affects the careers we choose and whether or not we succeed at them. It governs how likely we are to exercise, commit adultery, function well without sleep, learn from our mistakes, place big bets in the stock market, delay gratification, be a good leader, and ask “what if.”* It’s reflected in our brain pathways, neurotransmitters, and remote corners of our nervous systems. Today introversion and extroversion are two of the most exhaustively researched subjects in personality psychology, arousing the curiosity of hundreds of scientists.
Susan Cain (Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking)
The devil never rejoices more,” said Francis of Assisi, “than when he robs a servant of God of his peace of heart.” Peace and joy go a-begging when the heart of a Christian pants for one sign after another of God’s merciful love. Nothing is taken for granted, and nothing is received with gratitude. The troubled eyes and furrowed brow of the anxious believer are the symptoms of a heart where trust has not found a home. The Lord himself must pass through all the shades of the emotional spectrum with us—from rage to tears to amusement. But the poignant truth remains: we do not trust Him. We do not have the mind of Christ. —Gentle Revolutionaries
Brennan Manning (Dear Abba: Morning and Evening Prayer)
Chris used to say that he would spend a lot of time in the woodshed when he got to heaven, but believe me, if St. Peter takes him back there at all, it will be for the briefest of moments. The good far, far outweighed whatever bad there was. We’re all human, of course, and none of us are perfect, but Chris was far above the average part of the spectrum.
Taya Kyle (American Wife: Love, War, Faith, and Renewal)
CONSENSUS PROPOSED CRITERIA FOR DEVELOPMENTAL TRAUMA DISORDER A. Exposure. The child or adolescent has experienced or witnessed multiple or prolonged adverse events over a period of at least one year beginning in childhood or early adolescence, including: A. 1. Direct experience or witnessing of repeated and severe episodes of interpersonal violence; and A. 2. Significant disruptions of protective caregiving as the result of repeated changes in primary caregiver; repeated separation from the primary caregiver; or exposure to severe and persistent emotional abuse B. Affective and Physiological Dysregulation. The child exhibits impaired normative developmental competencies related to arousal regulation, including at least two of the following: B. 1. Inability to modulate, tolerate, or recover from extreme affect states (e.g., fear, anger, shame), including prolonged and extreme tantrums, or immobilization B. 2. Disturbances in regulation in bodily functions (e.g. persistent disturbances in sleeping, eating, and elimination; over-reactivity or under-reactivity to touch and sounds; disorganization during routine transitions) B. 3. Diminished awareness/dissociation of sensations, emotions and bodily states B. 4. Impaired capacity to describe emotions or bodily states C. Attentional and Behavioral Dysregulation: The child exhibits impaired normative developmental competencies related to sustained attention, learning, or coping with stress, including at least three of the following: C. 1. Preoccupation with threat, or impaired capacity to perceive threat, including misreading of safety and danger cues C. 2. Impaired capacity for self-protection, including extreme risk-taking or thrill-seeking C. 3. Maladaptive attempts at self-soothing (e.g., rocking and other rhythmical movements, compulsive masturbation) C. 4. Habitual (intentional or automatic) or reactive self-harm C. 5. Inability to initiate or sustain goal-directed behavior D. Self and Relational Dysregulation. The child exhibits impaired normative developmental competencies in their sense of personal identity and involvement in relationships, including at least three of the following: D. 1. Intense preoccupation with safety of the caregiver or other loved ones (including precocious caregiving) or difficulty tolerating reunion with them after separation D. 2. Persistent negative sense of self, including self-loathing, helplessness, worthlessness, ineffectiveness, or defectiveness D. 3. Extreme and persistent distrust, defiance or lack of reciprocal behavior in close relationships with adults or peers D. 4. Reactive physical or verbal aggression toward peers, caregivers, or other adults D. 5. Inappropriate (excessive or promiscuous) attempts to get intimate contact (including but not limited to sexual or physical intimacy) or excessive reliance on peers or adults for safety and reassurance D. 6. Impaired capacity to regulate empathic arousal as evidenced by lack of empathy for, or intolerance of, expressions of distress of others, or excessive responsiveness to the distress of others E. Posttraumatic Spectrum Symptoms. The child exhibits at least one symptom in at least two of the three PTSD symptom clusters B, C, & D. F. Duration of disturbance (symptoms in DTD Criteria B, C, D, and E) at least 6 months. G. Functional Impairment. The disturbance causes clinically significant distress or impairment in at least two of the following areas of functioning: Scholastic Familial Peer Group Legal Health Vocational (for youth involved in, seeking or referred for employment, volunteer work or job training)
Bessel van der Kolk (The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma)
I love… I love black women.” My first reaction was to laugh and then smile. “You see I love that when you smile. I love your lips and your cheekbones. I love the fullness and that everlasting youth. I love the colour and how it comes in so many shades but none grey. The spectrum of heavenly chocolate to golden honey is irresistible. I love the variety of your beauty.
Ella December
I think most people are wired to be monogamous for short periods at a time. The partner who is right for me at age twenty is not the partner who is necessarily right for me at age thirty, and so on. I think from my experiences, that about 20 percent of people are truly monogamous. By that I mean, when they're in love, they truly don't want or need anybody else. For them, monogamy is not a strain at all. Twenty percent of people are polyamorous or swinger types. They'll never be monogamous and don't want to be. The remain 60% of the population are stuck somewhere on a spectrum between happy monogamy and nonhappy monogamy. Some of because thats the vow they took and they're basically okay with it, and they don't want to be liars or cheaters. Some are actively angry about it and pick fights. Some are unhappy with it and, while they don't cheat, they do withdraw emotionally from their partners, giving themselves the worst of both worlds. Some are actively cheating but won't leave the marriage. Some people would be happy at home if they could get a little "strange" a few times a year and not have it be a big deal. They don't want o lose all they've built with their mates but just want a taste of something different.
Nina Hartley
I really identify with being a bookworm. I love reading, learning and books. I mean, I have 1000 books, all catalogued, already in my specially made library my dad made me. Books are my friends. I live in sweat pants and workout gear or t-shirt and jeans. I dress more for comfort than for fashion. I dress up if I have to go out but I can’t wait to come home and take off the makeup, heels and scratchy clothing.
Tania Marshall (I Am Aspienwoman: The Unique Characteristics and Gifts of Adult Females on the Autism Spectrum)
There is an ancient prophecy within the Book of Oa called the Blackest Night. It warns of the dangers of allowing others to harness the power of the emotional spectrum -- the coalescence of emotions given off by all sentient beings and transformed into power. Cosmic Revelations, verse 6 reads-- "The light of the emotional spectrum will rise! The red throes of Rage, the orange light of Avarice, the yellow fire of Fear, the blue rays of Hope, the indigo glow of Compassion and the violet aura of Love-- and in the center of it all, the green might of Willpower. And as the light rises, so shall an unknown darkness! A darkness with no satiation. A darkness with no life." I know what the coming darkness is. I speak to it. I worship it. I do as it tells me to do. Today, it demands that I open the Book of the Black. And take part in the birth of the first Black Lantern.
Scar, Geoff Johns (Blackest Night)
For as long as I can remember, I have been on a quest for self-understanding and self-improvement. I am driven to figure myself and other people out. I have analysed myself as far back as I can remember, reanalysed myself, been to many psychologists, psychiatrists, doctors and psychics. I love self-help books, courses, anything to improve myself. My special interest is self-improvement, quantum physics, medicine, anything to do with bettering oneself and self-help.
Tania Marshall (I Am Aspienwoman: The Unique Characteristics and Gifts of Adult Females on the Autism Spectrum)
This is always true of those men who have surrendered themselves to an overruling purpose. It does not so much impel them from without, nor even operate as a motive power within, but grows incorporate with all that they think and feel, and finally converts them into little else save that one principle. When such begins to be the predicament, it is not cowardice, but wisdom, to avoid these victims. They have no heart, no sympathy, no reason, no conscience. They will keep no friend, unless he make himself the mirror of their purpose; they will smite and slay you, and trample your dead corpse under foot, all the more readily, if you take the first step with them, and cannot take the second, and the third, and every other step of their terribly strait path. They have an idol to which they consecrate themselves high-priest, and deem it holy work to offer sacrifices of whatever is most precious; and never once seem to suspect—so cunning has the Devil been with them—that this false deity, in whose iron features, immitigable to all the rest of mankind, they see only benignity and love, is but a spectrum of the very priest himself, projected upon the surrounding darkness. And the higher and purer the original object, and the more unselfishly it may have been taken up, the slighter is the probability that they can be led to recognize the process by which godlike benevolence has been debased into all-devouring egotism.
Nathaniel Hawthorne (The Blithedale Romance [with Biographical Introduction])
Mona was nice.” Liv choked, the latté sloshing over the edge and onto her fingers. “You set that up to be mean,” she said, putting the cup back on the table. Xander smirked. “I didn't actually. She's a cool chick.” “Then why don't you date her?” Xander's grin widened. “I did, dearest. That's why I know.” “But I'm not gay!” “But you might be bi,” Xander said. “You never actually said.” He waved away her protesting gasp. “I just thought you should check Mona out. Sexuality is a spectrum, Liv. Never know until you try.
Danika Stone (All the Feels)
generally speaking, there are two simplified categories that parenting falls into: intrusive or neglectful caretaking. Parents were either overinvolved—telling us what to do, think, and feel—or they were underinvolved—physically or emotionally absent. These challenges are across the spectrum from subtle to severe. As a response, we become anxious and self-absorbed, losing our capacity for empathy. We become the walking wounded in a battlefield of injured soldiers. For the child who experienced intrusive parents, in later years, she becomes an isolator, a person who unconsciously pushes others away. She keeps people at a distance because she needs to have “a lot of space” around her; she wants the freedom to come and go as she pleases; she thinks independently, speaks freely, processes her emotions internally, and proudly dons her self-reliant attitude. All the while underneath this cool exterior is a two-year-old girl who was not allowed to satisfy her natural need for independence. When she marries, her need to be a distinct “self” will be on the top of her hidden agenda.
Harville Hendrix (Getting the Love You Want: A Guide for Couples)
Psychology (and psychiatry), philosophy and education has always been my passion and has been ever since I was really young. I have always been intrigued by human behaviour and what makes people tick. Where do we come from? Why are we here? Where are we going? Why do people do what they do? From very young she has asked us the BIG questions and we didn’t know the answers. So she read and studied and read and studied. She does find it difficult at times because she wants the answers to life in very black-and-white ways. She loves the rules and when things don’t make sense, she can get frustrated. – Stepmother of curious psychology student
Tania Marshall (I Am Aspienwoman: The Unique Characteristics and Gifts of Adult Females on the Autism Spectrum)
...what goes on inside believers is mysterious. So far as it can be guessed at - if for some reason you wanted to guess at it - it appears to be a kind of anxious pretending, a kind of continual, nervous resistance to reality. It looks as if, to a believer, things can never be allowed just to be what they are. They always have to be translated, moralised - given an unnecessary and rather sentimental extra meaning. A sunset can't just be part of the mixed magnificence and cruelty and indifference of the world; it has to be a blessing. A meal has to be a present you're grateful for, even if it came from Tesco and the ingredients cost you £7.38. Sex can't be the spectrum of experiences you get used to as an adult, from occasional earthquake through to mild companionable buzz; it has to be, oh dear oh dear, a special thing that happens when mummies and daddies love each other very much... Our fingers must be in our ears all the time - lalala, I can't hear you - just to keep out the plain sound of the real world. The funny thing is that to me it's exactly the other way around. In my experience, it's belief that involves the most uncompromising attention to the nature of things of which you are capable. It's belief which demands that you dispense with illusion after illusion, while contemporary common sense requires continual, fluffy pretending. Pretending that might as well be systematic, it's so thoroughly incentivised by our culture.
Francis Spufford
I guess it may not make any sense to anyone else, but I felt this strange mixture of feelings, all across the spectrum. I was so mad at him for leaving the kids and me on our own. I wanted him home but I was mad, too. I was coming off months of anxiety for his safety and frustration that he chose to keep going back. I wanted to count on him, but I couldn’t. His Team could, and total strangers who happened to be in the military could, but the kids and I certainly could not. It wasn’t his fault. He would have been in two places at once if he could have been, but he couldn’t. But when he had to choose, he didn’t choose us. All the while, I loved him and I tried to support him and show him love in every way possible. I felt five hundred emotions, all at the same time.
Chris Kyle (American Sniper: The Autobiography of the Most Lethal Sniper in U.S. Military History)
A Conversation with the Author What was your inspiration for The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle? Inspiration is a flash-of-lightning kind of word. What happens to me is more like sediment building. I love time travel, Agatha Christie, and the eighties classic Quantum Leap, and over time a book emerged from that beautiful quagmire. Truthfully, having the idea was the easy part, keeping track of all the moving parts was the difficulty. Which character was the most interesting to write, and in which host do you feel Aiden truly flourishes? Lord Cecil Ravencourt, by miles. He occupies the section of the book where the character has to grapple with the time travel elements, the body swapping elements, and the murder itself. I wanted my most intelligent character for that task, but I thought it would be great to hamper him in some way, as well. Interestingly, I wanted to make him really loathsome—which is why he’s a banker. And yet, for some reason, I ended up quite liking him, and feeding a few laudable qualities into his personality. I think Derby ended up getting a double dose of loathsome instead. Other than that, it’s just really nice seeing the evolution of his relationship with Cunningham. Is there a moral lesson to Aiden’s story or any conclusion you hope the reader walks away with as they turn the final page? Don’t be a dick! Kind, funny, intelligent, and generous people are behind every good thing that’s ever happened to me. Everybody else you just have to put up with. Like dandruff. Or sunburn. Don’t be sunburn, people. In one hundred years, do you believe there will be something similar to Blackheath, and would you support such a system? Yes, and not exactly. Our prison system is barbaric, but some people deserve it. That’s the tricky part of pinning your flag to the left or right of the moral spectrum. I think the current system is unsustainable, and I think personality adjustment and mental prisons are dangerous, achievable technology somebody will abuse. They could also solve a lot of problems. Would you trust your government with it? I suppose that’s the question. The book is so contained, and we don’t get to see the place that Aiden is escaping to! Did you map that out, and is there anything you can share about the society beyond Blackheath’s walls? It’s autocratic, technologically advanced, but they still haven’t overcome our human weaknesses. You can get everywhere in an hour, but television’s still overrun with reality shows, basically. Imagine the society that could create something as hateful as Annabelle Caulker.
Stuart Turton (The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle)