Misplaced Love Quotes

The day misspent, the love misplaced, has inside it the seed of redemption. Nothing is exempt from resurrection.

[I]t doesn’t matter whom you love or where you move from or to, you always take yourself with you. If you don’t know who you are, or if you’ve forgotten or misplaced her, then you’ll always feel as if you don’t belong. Anywhere. (xiii)

Olive,” Dr. Aslan interrupted her with a stern tone. “What do I always tell you?” “Um . . . ‘Don’t misplace the multichannel pipette’?” “The other thing.” She sighed. “ ‘Carry yourself with the confidence of a mediocre white man.’ 

As naturally as the ruled always took the morality imposed upon them more seriously than did the rulers themselves, the deceived masses are today captivated by the myth of success even more than the successful are. Immovably, they insist on the very ideology which enslaves them. The misplaced love of the common people for the wrong which is done to them is a greater force than the cunning of the authorities.

And to think, it all started with a little bit of faith. Misplaced trust. Missing pixie dust. And a villain who just needed to steal a little love.

Not even waste/is inviolate./The day misspent,/the love misplaced,/has inside it/the seed of redemption./Nothing is exempt from resurrection.

We are living in a generation where people ‘in love’ are free to touch each other’s private parts but are not allowed to touch each other’s phones because they are private.

Shaunee was digging in her purse like she'd misplaced a tube of one of MAC's seasonal lipsticks that you buy and fall in love with AND THEN THEY DISCONTINUE IT BECAUSE THEY REALLY HATE US AND WANT US TO BE CRAZY.

It’s well to have such a comfortable assurance regarding the worth of those we love. I only wish you may not find your confidence misplaced.

In Dante’s philosophy, lust is a misplaced love, but a kind of love nonetheless. For this reason, it is the least evil of the seven deadly sins.

She taught me all about real sacrifice. That it should be done from love, not misplace disgust for another person's genetics.

you owe it to yourself to give yourself the love that you've misplaced in other

Loyalty is important, one of the most important character traits we can have. But loyal love does not mean infinite and/or misplaced responsibility for another's life, nor does it mean that one forever puts up with mistreatment out of inappropriate loyalty.

Because who can describe the look that triggers the memory of loved ones? Who can anticipate the frown, the smile, or the misplaced lock of hair that sends a swift, undeniable signal from the past? Who can ever estimate the power of association, which is always strongest in moments of love and in memories of death?

Anti-Americanism is not some bitter mental disorder inflamed by conspiracy theories and misplaced furies and envy. It is a broken heart, a defensive crouch, a hundred-year-old relationship, bewilderment that an enormous force controls your life but does not know or love you.

You can do everything right and still feel out of place.

There are two things to be aware of if the fight against evil inclinations is to have any chance of success. First, our efforts will never be sufficient on their own. Only the grace of Christ can win us the victory. Therefore our chief weapons are prayer, patience, and hope. Second, one passion can only be cured by another - a misplaced love by a greater love, wrong behavior by right behavior that makes provisions for the desire underlying the wrongdoing, recognizes the conscious or unconscious needs that seek fulfillment and either offers them legitimate satisfaction or transfers them to something compatible with the person's calling.

I wonder, in his arms, how something as intangible as hope is lost. It cannot be misplaced. It cannot be thrown aside. That means, it must be forgotten. Forgetting is an essential part of grief.

My mother wasn't a fool," I say. "She just understood something you didn't. That it's not sacrifice if it's someone else's life you're giving away, it's just evil." I back up another step and say, "She taught me all about real sacrifice. That it should be done from love, not misplaced disgust for another person's genetics. That it should be done from necessity, not without exhausting all other options. That it should be done for people who need your strength because they don't have enough of their own. ...

I did leave something behind with you: my heart. Of course, you didn't know it at the time. Maybe I didn't either. What have you done with my heart, Leo? Have you taken good care of it? Have you misplaced it?

This misplaced nationalism was another kind of corrupted love, and it was just as unpalatable.

Then I celebrated my Wall of Books. I counted the volumes on my twenty-foot-long modernist bookshelf to make sure none had been misplaced or used as kindling by my subtenant. “You’re my sacred ones,” I told the books. “No one but me still cares about you. But I’m going to keep you with me forever. And one day I’ll make you important again.” I thought about that terrible calumny of the new generation: that books smell.

To deny equality to one is to deny equality for all. We won’t find joy by misplacing our unhappiness onto others. Love cannot be defined, assigned or mitigated.It’s not something to be controlled or dictated. Love is uncontrollable and limitless.

Lately, though, I find myself thinking about the war and my past, about the people I lost. Lost. It makes it sound as if I misplaced my loved ones; perhaps I left them where they don't belong and turned away, too confused to retrace my steps. They are not lost. Nor are they in a better place. They are gone. As I approach the end of my years, I know that grief, like regret, settles into our DNA and remains forever a part of us.

Olive,” Dr. Aslan interrupted her with a stern tone. “What do I always tell you?” “Um . . . ‘Don’t misplace the multichannel pipette’?” “The other thing.” She sighed. “ ‘Carry yourself with the confidence of a mediocre white man.’ ” “More than that, if possible. Since there is absolutely nothing mediocre about you.

The 10 ever greatest misplacements in life: 1. Leadership without character. 2. Followership without servant-being. 3. Brotherhood without integrity. 4. Affluence without wisdom. 5. Authority without conscience. 6. Relationship without faithfullness. 7. Festivals without peace. 8. Repeated failure without change. 9. Good wealth without good health. 10. Love without a lover.

I don't know why, when it comes to death, we say we lost someone. They're not missing or misplaced. They're whisked away from the tightest embrace.

Sometimes, love is misplaced.

The desperation in his voice was misplaced and as his eyes danced over my face I knew he was just as broken as I was. That kiss, those caresses—the feeling of his skin against mine had shattered our perfect friendship. There was no turning back now; having him was the only thing that would make me whole.

That was the day Alice Mary Love went to the gym and carelessly misplaced a decade of her life.

...I know I misplace my glasses - the one's I don't need - you roll your eyes - but I don't misplace my love ...

I've misplaced it all, but I can't seem to lose my brother. It's a priceless gift--to have his love at a time when I've done nothing to earn it.

Somewhere between work and hunger we have misplaced ourselves from living our lives.

The dragon bracelet that Humongous created, out of misplaced love and gratitude, in the hellish nightmare of the Lava-Lout Jail-Forges is exquisitely made, for he was a far better goldsmith than he was a singer. It curls around my arm, its shining wings folded back, as if about to unfurl and take off, and now that its ruby eyes are set into the gold, you cannot see their tear shape, so they seem to be laughing rather than crying. It is a constant reminder to me of the human ability to create something beautiful even when things are at their darkest.

The words that she whispered became the words that I whispered. I wore them uncomfortably, like a dress that fits in theory but still feels off. Does memory decay? Does it shrivel and dry up and collapse? Is it a cricket in the pocket of the goddess, alive only through the force of misplaced love? If I held on to my mother’s memory, did that mean that she was still with me?

Maybe to be in a garden and feel awe, or wonder, in the presence of an astonishing mystery, is nothing more than a recovery of a misplaced perspective, perhaps the child’s-eye view; maybe we regain it by means of a neurochemical change that disables the filters (of convention, of ego) that prevent us in ordinary hours from seeing what is, like those lovely leaves, staring us in the face.

Love is having someone to lean on when the amnesia’s caused you to misplace your walker.

If someone takes it upon themself to compliment you, don’t explain to them why the compliment is misplaced or undeserving, say “thank you” and smile; that was the purpose.

you deserve so much more than what you’ve been given you owe it to yourself to give yourself the love that you’ve misplaced in others

She’s a summer soul trapped inside a winter’s freeze. Misplaced Warmth — B

If a man walk in the woods for love of them half of each day, he is in danger of being regarded as a loafer; but if he spends his whole as a speculator, shearing off those woods and making earth bald before her time, he is esteemed an industrious and enterprising citizen.

Imagine a very long time passing - and I find my way out, following someone who already knows how to leave Hell. And God says to me on Earth for the first time, "Xas!" in a tone of discovery, as if I'm a misplaced pair of spectacles or a stray dog. And he puts it to me that he wants me in Heaven. But Lucifer has doubled back - it was him I followed - to find me, where I am, in a forest, smitten, because the Lord has noticed me, and I'm overcome, as hopeless as your dog Josie whom you got rid of because she loved me.' Xas glared at Sobran. Then he drew a breath - all had been said on only three. He went on: 'Lucifer says to God the He can't have me. And at this I sit up and tell Lucifer that I didn't even think he knew my name, then say to God no thank you - very insolent this - and that Hell is endurable so long as the books keep appearing.

Hadrian snorted at his misplaced humor. "Not giving up yet, Hauk. Besides, you know how much I love to live dangerously. Why else would I share a domicile with Jayne? Risking her wrath is what I do for fun." "You need to find a new hobby, my friend." -Hadrian & Fain

Writing for the sake of writing, writing that draws its credibility from its very existence, is a foreign idea to most Americans. As a culture, we want cash on the barrel head. We want writing to earn dollars and sense so that it makes sense to us. We have a conviction—which is naive and misplaced—that being published has to do with being “good” while not being published has to do with being “amateur.” ... “Did you write today?” “Yes.” “Then you’re a writer today.” It would be lovely if being a writer were a permanent state that we could attain to. It’s not, or if it is, the permanence comes posthumously. A page at a time, a day at a time, is the way we must live our writing lives. Credibility lies in the act of writing. That is where the dignity is. That is where the final “credit” must come from.

I was misplaced air that cradled all around you, held to cobalt skies to shelter your fledgling wings.

Nothing will lead a man to more suffering than misplaced love.

To her, love was impure. I, on the other hand, have had so little love that it seems to me like a delicate jewel, and I’m terrified of losing it. My fear is not just that I’ll misplace it, like an earring on a night of sex or sweaty dancing, it’s that it will evaporate and vanish like alcohol. I

I'm slowly seeing that God really does love me, although I still sometimes try to earn his love and depend on my talents, achievements, or traits for self-worth. So many times, I choose destructive patterns and misplaced dependencies over his love. I'm weary from my lists of dos and don'ts and tired of trying to figure it out, yet I struggle to simply receive the love and life God wants to give.

for men who a short time before had been shooting at him and doing all in their power to wreck his cause, I remembered what my father had said about the South bearing within itself the seeds of defeat, the Confederacy being conceived already moribund. We were sick from an old malady, he said: incurable romanticism and misplaced chivalry, too much Walter Scott and Dumas read too seriously. We were in love with the past, he said; in love with death.

Lost. It makes it sound as if I misplaced my loved ones; perhaps I left them where they don’t belong and then turned away, too confused to retrace my steps. They are not lost. Nor are they in a better place. They are gone. As I approach the end of my years, I know that grief, like regret, settles into our DNA and remains forever a part of us.

Pillover Plumleigh-Teignmott’s biggest problem was that he met the love of his life when he was twelve years of age and then spent the rest of that life misplacing her. Or more to the point, she kept intentionally misplacing herself.

The only love story I know, is the one I happen to live inside everyday. Your path towards certainty, if that's even what you're after, will look different from mine. Just as your conception of home and who belongs there with you, will always be unique to you. Only slowly do most of us figure out what we need in intimate relationships and what we're able to give to them. We practice, we learn, we mess up. We sometimes acquire tools that don't actually serve us. ...we obsess, overthink and misplace our energy...we retreat when hurt, we armor up when scared, we might attack when provoked, or yield when ashamed.

She needed a confessor! Would she find it there, in the world of the artists? All over the world they had their meeting places, their affiliations, their rules of membership, their kingdoms, their chiefs, their secret channels of communication. They established common beliefs in certain painters, certain musicians, certain writers. They were the misplaced persons too, unwanted at home usually, or repudiated by their families. But they established new families, their own religions, their own doctors, their own communities.

To my amazement and great, bittersweet joy, I can hear in him every reason I feell in love with his father—everything, like a second sonata to a first. All the lovely unspoiled good of N, bubbling forth from his son, unlooked for, oozing up from a well of genealogy and fate. I can manage to misplace my husabnd, but this flesh is chained to mine. I will always be reminded of the marital loss, but I have the benefits of the entire play, the witness of the evolution, the new art. I see the magic every day; I live with the sorcerer in yellow pants. N gets pieces and stems of A, random and marred by guilty.

How many people in the world missed great chunks of time with people they loved, time they could never get back, through a comment taken the wrong way or a misplaced reaction, which pride or fear of rejection exacerbated, spreading like ivy, covering all the paths back, all the avenues of apology, until the only way forward was alone?

one passion can only be cured by another—a misplaced love by a greater love, wrong behavior by right behavior that makes provisions for the desire underlying the wrongdoing, recognizes the conscious or unconscious needs that seek fulfillment and either offers them legitimate satisfaction or transfers them to something compatible with the person’s calling.

When love shows up, the only choice you have is to pay attention.

And to think, it all started with a little bit of faith. Misplaced trust. Missing pixie dust. And a villain who just needed to steal a little love.

She knew what mattered. She knew, at a deeper level each time, that what mattered was love. But love was what she had misread, mistaken, and misplaced in this life.

Holiness is what makes real love possible. Without it, love is purely sentimental, easily misplaced, and unconditionally conditional.

All that time, my fears—about identity and family and love—were misplaced. It isn't acceptance that extinguishes us, instead, it awakens us.

I am nobody, nobody is me, I hold nothing, nothing holds me. I belong to no one, no one belongs to.

Tired with all these, for restful death I cry, As to behold desert a beggar born, And needy nothing trimm'd in jollity, And purest faith unhappily forsworn, And gilded honour shamefully misplac'd, And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted, And right perfection wrongfully disgrac'd, And strength by limping sway disabled And art made tongue-tied by authority, And folly—doctor-like—controlling skill, And simple truth miscall'd simplicity, And captive good attending captain ill: Tir'd with all these, from these would I be gone, Save that, to die, I leave my love alone.

His was cancer of the left lung; she had lost two breasts. Her grey eyes narrowed but did not tear when she said brightly, 'I'm not forgetful, they're not misplaced boobs, you understand. They're gone.

with you, the sense i have lost my place in a book or simply lost — misplaced the memory which isn't in the last place where I looked. a thought that the clouds don't move — that it is we who thunder past — there it is! an old vacation, a train ride — sense of immobility. as sky and forest scroll past in relation, we are not moved, pretend to love the view, resort at length to scripted conversation by a poet-turned-screenwriter who didn't want this job, career gone grossly wrong and now drafts action film scripts wholly two- dimensional unless you choose to don the 3d glasses that do not stay on —

Maybe the travel goes quicker on account of Lucy feeling a sorrow kin to love. Because though these dry yellow hills yielded nothing but pain and sweat and misplaced hope—she knows them. A part of her is buried in them, a part of her lost in them, a part of her found and born in them—so many parts belong to this land. An ache in her chest like the tug of a dowsing rod. Across the ocean the people will look like them, but they won’t know the shapes of these hills, or the soughing of grass, or the taste of muddy water—all these things that shape Lucy within as her eyes and nose shape her without. Maybe the travel goes quicker on account of Lucy mourning, already, the loss of this land.

The wild is an integral part of who we are as children. Without pausing to consider what or where or how, we gather herbs and flowers, old apples and rose hips, shiny pebbles and dead spiders, poems, tears and raindrops, putting each treasured thing into the cauldron of our souls. We stir our bucket of mud as if it were, every one, a bucket of chocolate cake to be mixed for the baking. Little witches, hag children, we dance our wildness, not afraid of not knowing. But there comes a time when the kiss of acceptance is delayed until the mud is washed from our knees, the chocolate from our faces. Putting down our wooden spoon with a new uncertainty, setting aside our magical wand, we learn another system of values based on familiarity, on avoiding threat and rejection. We are told it is all in the nature of growing up. But it isn't so. Walking forward and facing the shadows, stumbling on fears like litter in the alleyways of our minds, we can find the confidence again. We can let go of the clutter of our creative stagnation, abandoning the chaos of misplaced and outdated assumptions that have been our protection. Then beyond the half light and shadows, we can slip into the dark and find ourselves in a world where horizons stretch forever. Once more we can acknowledge a reality that is unlimited finding our true self, a wild spirit, free and eager to explore the extent of our potential, free to dance like fireflies, free to be the drum, free to love absolutely with every cell of our being, or lie in the grass watching stars and bats and dreams wander by. We can live inspired, stirring the darkness of the cauldron within our souls, the source, the womb temple of our true creativity, brilliant, untamed

But you won't say no." She hated that his confidence was not misplaced, hated that she could refuse him nothing when he held her in his arms. But she loved the crackling awareness that washed over her - a strange sense that for the first time in her life, she understood her own body.

But I must remind you, it was before you that I lost my self-respect, and gained a boundless sense of guilt. (Recollecting this boundlessness I once wrote of someone, ‘He feared the shame that would outlive him.’)  I couldn’t suddenly change when I was with other people; indeed with other people I felt even more guilty because of your attitude towards them – I felt implicated in this and I had to atone for your words.  And you always spoke badly of people that I had dealings with – sometimes openly, sometimes secretly – and I had to atone for that as well.  In business and in the family you tried to instil a mistrust of people in my mind (when I admired someone, you buried him with criticism).  And you could do this without it weighing you down (you were strong enough for that) though your attitude might just have been a lordly affectation.  But your mistrust was misplaced, with my childish eyes I couldn’t see what you  saw: for everywhere there were extraordinary, unmatchable people – so instead I gained a mistrust of myself, and an abiding fear of everyone.  So in this respect your influence on me was absolute.  And you didn’t see that; possibly because you had not experienced my sort of dealings with people, and so you were doubtful and jealous (but do I deny that you loved me?) and you thought that I had found some sort of compensation elsewhere, for you couldn’t imagine that I lived in the outside world as I did in your presence. Yet as child I found some comfort in my mistrust of my judgement: I doubted my insight, I said to myself, ‘Like all children you exaggerate, you feel little things too much and believe they have great weight.’  But this comfort dwindled as I grew up and has almost vanished. Equally

Through patterns of my past, I’ve learned that I’m drawn to dysfunction, and more so to the men who provide the questions. I’m determined not to repeat my mistakes. I have a misplaced theory that if you’re not suffering, you’re not loving hard enough, deep enough, and that’s just not healthy.

What strikes me now as the most wonderful proof of my fitness, or unfitness, for the times is the fact that nothing people were writing or talking about had any real interest for me. Only the object haunted me, the separate, detached, insignificant thing. It might be a part of the human body or a staircase in a vaudeville house; it might be a smokestack or a button I had found in the gutter. Whatever it was it enabled me to open up, to surrender, to attach my signature. To the life about me, to the people who made up the world I knew, I could not attach my signature. I was as definitely outside their world as a cannibal is outside the bounds of civilized society. I was filled with a perverse love of the thing-in-itself - not a philosophic attachment, but a passionate, desperately passionate hunger, as if in this discarded, worthless thing which everyone ignored there was contained the secret of my own regeneration.

As I’ve grown surer in love, I’ve discovered when it comes to the Bible; there isn’t hard stuff in its pages—only a lack of understanding, compounded by our often cruel and punishing certainties regarding God’s nature and heart toward humanity. The more I awaken to reconciling love, the more I realize the hard stuff is what we bring to the Book. It’s our limited thoughts, our missing the mark, our punishing belief systems, and our experiences with abandonment, shame, loss, and abuse. It’s our conviction that God participates in the knowledge of good and evil and our misplaced faith in the idolatry of separation.

The clock had been Sylvie's, and her mother's before that. It had gone to Ursula on Sylvie's death and Ursula had left it to Teddy, and so it had zigzagged its way down the family tree... ...The clock was a good one, made by Frodsham and worth quite a bit, but Teddy knew if he gave it to Viola she would sell it or misplace it or break it and it seemed important to him that it stayed in the family. An heirloom. ('Lovely word,' Bertie said.) He liked to think that the little golden key that wound it, a key that would almost certainly be lost by Viola, would continue to be turned by the hand of someone who was part of the family, part of his blood. The red thread.

It is important to recognize that the narcissist constructs a false, dark alternate reality in which he hands over his pathology to you. You will be labeled the crazy, oversensitive person throughout the relationship even while enduring mind-blowing verbal and emotional attacks from your abuser. The abuser enjoys employing gaslighting and projection techniques to essentially rewrite the history of abuse in the relationship and misplace all blame onto you. Since you are prone to cognitive dissonance, you will often start to blame yourself for the abuse and seek to deny or minimize the severity of the trauma you’re experiencing in an effort to survive and cope with the fact that the person you love and care for is a pathological abuser.

So many feelings misplaced, so many pieces lost. You have been misled into a broken maze with your own well. Excuses like the walls were everything you needed, and stupidity because you knew it was a dead end. Write about roads interwining and being off track you are sugarcoating a road accident by a drunk man. Spend time, energy, and sanity like it was worth it, get lost and bleed emotions like it's the price you pay to get out You disappointed your own self and it's hard to forget, your brain unattended and your heart took the hit, got knocked out and woke up on the wrong side of the bed, on the Wrong side of my head. Now you are left with a scar and a mind full of words said, a voice i can't forget and a smile that hurts me still.

How dare you belittle me this way?' 'What the hell are you talking about?' 'I have never, not even once in my life, given my love to another man. And you throw it back in my face like a trifle.' 'You misunderstand me. It is because I value your love so highly that I do not accept it.' 'You don't accept it because you don't want to accept it. You're mired in misplaced guilt and self-pity.

Ah, mighty uncertainty!" said the doctor. "Have you thought of all the doors that have shut at night and opened again? Of women who have looked about with lamps, like you, and who have scurried on fast feet? Like a thousand mice they go this way and that, now fast, now slow, some halting behind doors, some trying to find the stairs, all approaching or leaving their misplaced mouse-meat that lies in some cranny, on some couch, down on some floor, behind some cupboard; and all the windows, great and small, from which love and fear have peered, shining and in tears. Put those windows end to end and it would be a casement that would reach around the world; and put those thousand eyes into one eye and you would have the night combed with the great blind searchlight of the heart.

As much as God loves his children, it is misplaced faith that asks him to prevent all pain in this life, especially the pain we created for ourselves. When we ask God to remove the natural consequences of our own behavior, we set ourselves up for disappointment and frustration. As a wise friend once said, "It is foolish to think you can sow your wild oats on Saturday and pray for crop failure on Sunday.

I have seen love that, through its willingness to sacrifice everything, brought hope to the world. I have seen love that tried to overcome pride and a lust for power, but failed. The world is darker for its failure, but it is only as a cloud dims the sun. The sun—the love, still remains. Finally I have seen love lost in darkness. Love misplaced, misunderstood, because the lover did not know his—or her—own heart.

Lately, though, I find myself thinking about the war and my past, about the people I lost. Lost. It makes it sound as if I misplaced my loved ones; perhaps I left them where they don’t belong and then turned away, too confused to retrace my steps. They are not lost. Nor are they in a better place. They are gone. As I approach the end of my years, I know that grief, like regret, settles into our DNA and remains forever a part of us.

We are small, inconsequential beings. It is only our place in the hearts of others that fills us up, that gives us our purpose, our pride, and our sense of self. We need our parents to love us without condition, without logic, and beyond reason. We need them to see us through lenses warped by this love and to tell us in every way that just having us walk this earth fills them with joy. Yes, we will come to learn that our clay giraffes were not masterly. But when we pull them out of our attics, they should make us cry, knowing that when our parents saw these ugly pieces of plaster, they felt ridiculously misplaced pride, and they wanted to hug us until our bones hurt. This is what we need from our parents, more than the truth about how small we are. We will have more than enough people to remind us of that, to give us dispassionate evaluations of our mediocrity.

Our choices are us. Envisioning choices as sea blue circles places a marker on our decisions: every word, each coffee, every button, and choices in between. The blue circles upon our daily choices are reflection points and moments of consideration. This is a choice is the breath before you look fully at loved ones or strangers and the breath before you change and reframe a pattern so as to not misplace a moment. The breath before you say I love you to you. Again and again. This is a choice.

We will destroy the tyranny of the dull. But we can't destroy it with guns. Or whips. Violence is the dullard's Breakfast of Champions, and the logical end product of his or her misplaced pride. Violence fertilizes that which we would starve. But Debbie, we can't love the dull away either. We only pollute our own waters when we try to extend our true affection to those who don't know how to accept love or to give it. Love is very powerful, but it has limits and it's a costly mistake to spread it too thin.

He reached for Aiden’s hand, which was swinging by the side of Aiden’s chair in a convenient location for Harvard to grab in case Harvard might want to. Harvard not only laced their fingers together, but also brought Aiden’s hand to his lips and kissed the back. Then he let their joined hands rest on the lapel of his uniform blazer, against the golden crown over crossed swords of his captain’s pin… and his heart. Harvard did it all absentmindedly, as though he didn’t have to think about his actions because it came so naturally. Aiden lifted a coffee cup to his lips purely in order to make a Can you believe this? face behind it. There went Harvard again, raising the ideal boyfriend bar to the sky. Could the man not be stopped? “Aw, are you having faith in me, sweetheart?” Aiden murmured. “That’s so nice. And so misplaced.” Harvard murmured, a lovely little sound, patently unconvinced. This is the last time, Aiden thought, and held on. The others ignored Aiden and Harvard’s romantic moment in order to focus on crime.

Chatham, go and find a bed.” She had that frowning concern on her face again. It was bloody annoying. He wanted to kiss her until the concern disappeared. Then reach his hand beneath her skirts and demonstrate how misplaced was her pity. “Perhaps we should find a bed together, love.” “Would you kindly cease your nonsense? Just … go lie down. We can discuss the house when you are feeling better.” And, with that final dismissal, she turned her back and left the entrance hall through a cased opening that had once held double doors. Good God, she was aggravating.

To have that sense of one’s intrinsic worth which constitutes self-respect is potentially to have everything: the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent. To lack it is to be locked within oneself, paradoxically incapable of either love or indifference. If we do not respect ourselves, we are the one hand forced to despise those who have so few resources as to consort with us, so little perception as to remain blind to our fatal weaknesses. On the other, we are peculiarly in thrall to everyone we see, curiously determined to live out – since our self-image is untenable – their false notion of us. We flatter ourselves by thinking this compulsion to please others an attractive trait: a gist for imaginative empathy, evidence of our willingness to give. Of course I will play Francesca to your Paolo, Helen Keller to anyone’s Annie Sullivan; no expectation is too misplaced, no role too ludicrous. At the mercy of those we cannot but hold in contempt, we play roles doomed to failure before they are begun, each defeat generating fresh despair at the urgency of divining and meeting the next demand made upon us.

lure of reinvention. Lately, though, I find myself thinking about the war and my past, about the people I lost. Lost. It makes it sound as if I misplaced my loved ones; perhaps I left them where they don’t belong and then turned away, too confused to retrace my steps. They are not lost. Nor are they in a better place. They are gone. As I approach the end of my years, I know that grief, like regret, settles into our DNA and remains forever a part of us. I have aged in the months since my husband’s death and my diagnosis. My skin has the crinkled appearance of wax paper that someone has tried to flatten and reuse. My eyes fail me often—in the darkness, when headlights flash, when rain falls. It is unnerving, this new unreliability in my vision. Perhaps that’s why I find myself looking backward. The past has a clarity I can no longer see in the present. I want to imagine there will be peace when I am gone, that I will see all of the people I have loved and lost. At least that I will be forgiven. I know better, though, don’t I? *   *   * My house, named The Peaks by the lumber baron who built it more than a hundred years ago, is for sale, and I am preparing to move because my son thinks I should. He is trying to take care of

Catti-brie had to believe that now, recalling the scene in light of the drow's words. She had to believe that her love for Wulfgar had been real, very real, and not misplaced, that he was all she had thought him to be. Now she could. For the first time since Wulfgar's death, Cattie-brie could remember him without pangs of guilt, without the fears that, had he lived, she would not have married him. Because Drizzt was right; Wulfgar would have admitted the error despite his pride, and he would have grown, as he always had before. That was the finest quality of the man, an almost childlike quality, that viewed the world and his own life as getting better, as moving toward a better way in a better place. What followed was the most sincere smile on Cattie-brie's face in many, many months. She felt suddenly free, suddenly complete with her past, reconciled and able to move forward with her life. She looked at the drow, wide-eyed, with a curiosity that seemed to surprise Drizzt. She could go on, but what exactly did that mean? Slowly, Cattie-brie began shaking her head, and Drizzt came to understand that the movement had something to do with him. He lifted a slender hand and brushed some stray hair back from her cheek, his ebony skin contrasting starkly with her light skin, even in the quiet light of night. "I do love you," the drow admitted. The blunt statement did not catch Catti-brie by surprise, not at all. "As you love me," Drizzt went on, easily, confident that his words were on the mark. "And I, too, must look ahead now, must find my place among my friends, beside you, without Wulfgar." "Perhaps in the future," Catti-brie said, her voice barely a whisper. "Perhaps," Drizzt agreed. "But for now..." "Friends," Catti-brie finished. Drizzt moved his hand back from her cheek, held it in the air before her face, and she reached up and clasped it firmly. Friends

Central Park It’s hard to describe how that day in the park was altered when I stopped to read an official sign I came across near the great carousel, my lips moving silently like the lips of Saint Ambrose. As the carousel turned in the background, all pinions and mirrors and the heads of horses rising to the steam-blown notes of a calliope, I was learning how the huge thing was first designed to be powered by a blind mule, as it turned out, strapped to the oar of a wheel in an earthen room directly below the merry turning of the carousel. The sky did not darken with this news nor did a general silence fall on the strollers or the ball players on the green fields. No one even paused to look my way, though I must have looked terrible as I stood there filling with sympathy not so much for the harnessed beast tediously making its rounds, but instead for the blind mule within me always circling in the dark— the mule who makes me turn when my name is called or causes me to nod with a wooden gaze or sit doing nothing on a bench in the shape of a swan. Somewhere, there must still be a door to that underground room, the lock rusted shut, the iron key misplaced, last year’s leaves piled up against the sill, and inside, a trace of straw on the floor, a whiff of manure, and maybe a forgotten bit or a bridle hanging from a hook in the dark. Poor blind beast, I sang softly as I left the park, poor blind me, poor blind earth turning blindly on its side.

I now reckon upon a speedy dissolution. I have suffered very little pain from my disorder; and what is more strange have, notwithstanding the great decline of my person, never suffered a moment's abatement of spirits; insomuch that were I to name the period of my life which I should most choose to pass over again, I might be tempted to point to this later period. I possess the same ardour as ever in study, and the same gaiety in company; I consider, besides, that a man of sixty-five, by dying, cuts off only a few years of infirmities; and though I see many symptoms of my literary reputation's breaking out at last with additional lustre, I know that I could have but few years to enjoy it. It is difficult to be more detached from life than I am at present. "To conclude historically with my own character, I am, or rather was (for that is the style I must now use in speaking of myself); I was, I say, a man of mild dispositions, of command of temper, of an open, social, and cheerful humour, capable of attachment, but little susceptible of enmity, and of great moderation in all my passions. Even my love of literary fame, my ruling passion, never soured my temper, notwithstanding my frequent disappointments. My company was not unacceptable to the young and careless, as well as to the studious and literary; and as I took a particular pleasure in the company of modest women, I had no reason to be displeased with the reception I met with from them. In a word, though most men any wise eminent, have found reason to complain of calumny, I never was touched or even attacked by her baleful tooth; and though I wantonly exposed myself to the rage of both civil and religious factions, they seemed to be disarmed in my behalf of their wonted fury. My friends never had occasion to vindicate any one circumstance of my character and conduct; not but that the zealots, we may well suppose, would have been glad to invent and propagate any story to my disadvantage, but they could never find any which they thought would wear the face of probability. I cannot say there is no vanity in making this funeral oration of myself, but I hope it is not a misplaced one; and this is a matter of fact which is easily cleared and ascertained.

In Dr. Hornicker's opinion, Lux's promiscuity was a commonplace reaction to emotional need. "Adolescents tend to seek love where they can find it," he wrote in one of the many articles he hoped to publish. "Lux confused the sexual act with love. For her, sex became a substitute for the comfort she needed as a result of her sister's suicide." ... Years later, Trip Fontaine was irritated by our suggestion that Lux's passion might have come from a misplaced need. "What are you saying, that I was just a vehicle? You can't fake that, man. It was real." We even managed to bring up the subject with Mrs. Lisbon during our single interview with her in a bus station cafeteria, but she grew rigid. "None of my daughters lacked for any love. We had plenty of love in our house.

My heart, which I thought had been dead, stopped. Of course. I had been betrayed. My ex boyfriend had reneged on his promise to love me, and this odious event had a name: betrayal. Somehow, knowing this calmed me down. And I began to contemplate betrayal. My conclusion? It is the most difficult of all woundings. Betrayal comes in many forms. It's not just about being cheated on or left for another. It's about any promise, overt or implied, that has been broken without your participation in the decision, or even knowing that a decision was on the table. It's about believing something that you later find out is untrue. It's no wonder that the first response to betrayal is likely to be denial. It's an enormous shock to find out that a solid reality is not so solid after all. It can feel like the most deviant form of attack. When betrayal is at the root of your pain, something horrible is unleashed. Different and perhaps more horrible than the pain of disappointment, grief, or anger. With other causes of suffering, you can at least pretend you have some measure of control. You can blame the other person for disappointing you, you can read books that outline and predict the course of grief, and when you're angry you can always fall back on self-righteousness. But when you're betrayed, you have been blindsided and your vulnerability is confirmed. You lose a misplaced innocence that you really can never regain. Your ability to trust is basically obliterated. And not just your trust in your own perceptions and your trust in the person you loved. Once you lose trust in one person, your trust in all beings is undermined, making the future seem like a giant landmine.

What makes a successful marriage is not love. What makes a successful marriage is knowing your place in this divine covenant. A man is meant to love and a woman is meant to submit. When you misplace your place there is bound to be errors and chaos. Imagine a woman loving a man? She will be heartbroken cause the man is loving another. But when a woman is submissive to a man, the man is subjected by divine ordinance to love her, cause submissiveness propel and activate love no matter how you put it. Now, let's imagine a man submitting to a woman. Well, I have no explanation to that. It is appalling and not something anyone wants to hear. Love is shown by gifts (items, good treatment, kindness etc) but submissiveness is shown by obeying, listening and servanthood. Psychologically, a servant who is diligent has more respect than a son of the house who is arrogant. So, let's go back to the drawing board and make our marriages work - Victor Vote

Motionless, she looked up, one eye open, searching. It was too dark to see him. She seemed so small, a misplaced doll, as she swayed, squinting. “Little Dog,” she said in a whisper-shout. “You up there, Little Dog?” She craned her neck, then looked away, at the freeway in the distance. “Your mom. She not normal okay? She pain. She hurt. But she want you, she need us.” She stirred in place. The leaves crackled. “She love you, Little Dog. But she sick. Sick like me. In the brains.” She examined her hand, as if to make sure it still existed, then dropped it. The boy, hearing this, pressed his lips to the cold bark to keep from crying. She pain, the boy thought, mulling over her words. How can anyone be a feeling? The boy said nothing. “You don’t need to be scared, Little Dog. You smarter than me.” Something crinkled. In her arms, held like a baby, was a bag of Cool Ranch Doritos. In her other hand was a Poland Spring water bottle filled with warm jasmine tea. She kept muttering to herself, “You don’t need to be scared. No need.

And so she felt antagonized by a man who did nothing to antagonize her, and by Bela, who did not even know the meaning of the word. But her worst nemesis resided within her. She was not only ashamed of her feelings but also frightened that the final task Udayan had left her with, the long task of raising Bela, was not bringing meaning to her life. In the beginning she’d told herself that it was like a thing misplaced: a favorite pen that would turn up a few weeks later, wedged between the sofa cushions, or discreetly sitting behind a sheaf of papers. Once found, it would never be lost sight of again. To look for such a misplaced item only made it worse. If she waited long enough, she told herself, there it would be. But it was not turning up; after five years, in spite of all the time, all the hours she and Bela spent together, the love she’d once felt for Udayan refused to reconstitute itself. Instead there was a growing numbness that inhibited her, that impaired her. She was failing at something every other woman on earth did without trying. That should not have proved a struggle. Even her own mother, who had not fully raised her, had loved her; of that there had been no doubt. But Gauri feared she had already descended to a place where it was no longer possible to swim up to Bela, to hold on to her.

Lies flee in the presence of truth. And the Devil turns powerless when our minds turn to our all-powerful God. Here’s where I become quite fascinated. Jesus had access to thousands of scriptures from the Old Testament. He knew them. He could have used any of them. But He chose three specific ones. I’ve decided I want these three to be at the top of my mind. I Want a Promise for My Problem of Feeling Empty Man does not live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of the LORD. (Deuteronomy 8:3) My soul was hand designed to be richly satisfied in deep places by the Word of God. When I go without the nourishment of truth, I will crave filling my spiritual hunger with temporary physical pleasures, thinking they will somehow treat the loneliness inside. These physical pleasures can’t fill me, but they can numb me. Numb souls are never growing souls. They wake up one day feeling so very distant from God and wondering how in the world they got there. Since Satan’s goal is to separate us from the Lord, this is exactly where he wants us to stay. But the minute we turn to His Word is the minute the gap between us and God is closed. He is always near. His Word is full and fully able to reach those deep places inside us desperate for truth. I Want a Promise for My Problem of Feeling Deprived “Fear the LORD your God, serve him only and take your oaths in his name” (Deuteronomy 6:13). Another version of this verse says, “Worship Him, your True God, and serve Him.” (THE VOICE) When we worship God, we reverence Him above all else. A great question to ask: Is my attention being held by something sacred or something secret? What is holding my attention the most is what I’m truly worshipping. Sacred worship is all about God. Is my attention being held by something sacred or something secret? Secret worship is all about something in this world that seems so attractive on the outside but will devour you on the inside. Pornography, sex outside of marriage, trading your character to claw your way to a position of power, fueling your sense of worth with your child’s successes, and spending outside of your means to constantly dress your life in the next new thing—all things we do to counteract feelings of being left out of and not invited to the good things God has given others—these are just some of the ways lust sneaks in and wreaks havoc. Two words that characterize misplaced worship or lust are secret excess. God says if we will direct our worship to Him, He will give us strength to turn from the mistakes of yesterday and provide portions for our needs of today. Whom have I in heaven but you? And earth has nothing I desire besides you. My flesh and my heart may fail, but God is the strength of my heart and my portion forever. (PSALM 73:25–26) And I Certainly Want a Promise for My Problem of Feeling Rejected Do not put the LORD your God to the test. (Deuteronomy 6:16)

Consider a world in which cause and effect are erratic. Sometimes the first precedes the second, sometimes the second the first. Or perhaps cause lies forever in the past while effect in the future, but future and past are entwined. On the terrace of the Bundesterrasse is a striking view: the river Aare below and the Bernese Alps above. A man stands there just now, absently emptying his pockets and weeping. Without reason, his friends have abandoned him. No one calls any more, no one meets him for supper or beer at the tavern, no one invites him to their home. For twenty years he has been the ideal friend to his friends, generous, interested, soft-spoken, affectionate. What could have happened? A week from this moment on the terrace, the same man begins acting the goat, insulting everyone, wearing smelly clothes, stingy with money, allowing no one to come to his apartment on Laupenstrasse. Which was cause and which effect, which future and which past? In Zürich, strict laws have recently been approved by the Council. Pistols may not be sold to the public. Banks and trading houses must be audited. All visitors, whether entering Zürich by boat on the river Limmat or by rail on the Selnau line, must be searched for contraband. The civil military is doubled. One month after the crackdown, Zürich is ripped by the worst crimes in its history. In daylight, people are murdered in the Weinplatz, paintings are stolen from the Kunsthaus, liquor is drunk in the pews of the Münsterhof. Are these criminal acts not misplaced in time? Or perhaps the new laws were action rather than reaction? A young woman sits near a fountain in the Botanischer Garten. She comes here every Sunday to smell the white double violets, the musk rose, the matted pink gillyflowers. Suddenly, her heart soars, she blushes, she paces anxiously, she becomes happy for no reason. Days later, she meets a young man and is smitten with love. Are the two events not connected? But by what bizarre connection, by what twist in time, by what reversed logic? In this acausal world, scientists are helpless. Their predictions become postdictions. Their equations become justifications, their logic, illogic. Scientists turn reckless and mutter like gamblers who cannot stop betting. Scientists are buffoons, not because they are rational but because the cosmos is irrational. Or perhaps it is not because the cosmos is irrational but because they are rational. Who can say which, in an acausal world? In this world, artists are joyous. Unpredictability is the life of their paintings, their music, their novels. They delight in events not forecasted, happenings without explanation, retrospective. Most people have learned how to live in the moment. The argument goes that if the past has uncertain effect on the present, there is no need to dwell on the past. And if the present has little effect on the future, present actions need not be weighed for their consequence. Rather, each act is an island in time, to be judged on its own. Families comfort a dying uncle not because of a likely inheritance, but because he is loved at that moment. Employees are hired not because of their résumés, but because of their good sense in interviews. Clerks trampled by their bosses fight back at each insult, with no fear for their future. It is a world of impulse. It is a world of sincerity. It is a world in which every word spoken speaks just to that moment, every glance given has only one meaning, each touch has no past or no future, each kiss is a kiss of immediacy.

I didn’t think we were being quiet, particularly. High heels may have looked dainty, but they didn’t sound that way on a tile floor. Maybe it was just that my dad was so absorbed in the convo on his cell phone. For whatever reason, when we emerged from the kitchen into the den, he started, and he stuffed the phone down by his side in the cushions. I was sorry I’d startled him, but it really was comical to see this big blond manly man jump three feet off the sofa when he saw two teenage girls. I mean, it would have been funny if it weren’t so sad. Dad was a ferocious lawyer in court. Out of court, he was one of those Big Man on Campus types who shook hands with everybody from the mayor to the alleged ax murderer. A lot like Sean, actually. There were only two things Dad was afraid of. First, he wigged out when anything in the house was misplaced. I won’t even go into all the arguments we’d had about my room being a mess. They’d ended when I told him it was my room, and if he didn’t stop bugging me about it, I would put kitchen utensils in the wrong drawers, maybe even hide some (cue horror movie music). No spoons for you! Second, he was easily startled, and very pissed off afterward. “Damn it, Lori!” he hollered. “It’s great to see you too, loving father. Lo, I have brought my friend Tammy to witness out domestic bliss. She’s on the tennis team with me.” Actually, I was on the tennis team with her. “Hello, Tammy. It’s nice to meet you,” Dad said without getting up or shaking her hand or anything else he would normally do. While the two of them recited a few more snippets of polite nonsense, I watched my dad. From the angle of his body, I could tell he was protecting that cell phone behind the cushions. I nodded toward the hiding place. “Hot date?” I was totally kidding. I didn’t expect him to say, “When?” So I said, “Ever.” And then I realized I’d brought up a subject that I didn’t want to bring up, especially not while I was busy being self-absorbed. I clapped my hands. “Okay, then! Tammy and I are going upstairs very loudly, and after a few minutes we will come back down, ringing a cowbell. Please continue with your top secret phone convo.” I turned and headed for the stairs. Tammy followed me. I thought Dad might order me back, send Tammy out, and give me one of those lectures about my attitude (who, me?). But obviously he was chatting with Pamela Anderson and couldn’t wait for me to leave the room. Behind us, I heard him say, “I’m so sorry. I’m still here. Lori came in. Oh, yeah? I’d like to see you try.” “He seems jumpy,” Tammy whispered on the stairs. “Always,” I said. “Do you have a lot of explosions around your house?” I glanced at my watch. “Not this early.

28 When I Must Rethink My Expectations My soul, wait silently for God alone, for my expectation is from Him. PSALM 62:5 WE WIVES TOO OFTEN come into our marriage with great expectations of what our mate is going to be like and who he will become. We see things we want to see, and we don’t always see the things we should. Because our expectations are so high, when our husband doesn’t live up to them we can’t hide our disappointment. It comes out in moodiness, discontent, disrespect, disdain, critical words, and the ever-popular silent treatment. A wife can become the victim of her own misplaced expectations, and her husband pays for it. King David had it right when he told his soul to wait quietly for the Lord and put his expectations in Him. We must do the same. Your husband can only be who he is. You cannot put expectations on him to fulfill you in ways that only God can do. Your husband simply can’t be everything to you—nor is he supposed to be—but God can be. And He wants to be. Has your husband fulfilled every expectation you have had of him? If not, tell God about it and ask Him to fulfill those needs instead. Of course, there are certain expectations you should have of your husband, such as fidelity, love, kindness, financial support, protection, and decency. If he cannot, or won’t, provide those things for you, he is not living up to what God expects of him either. But beyond that, if you are constantly disappointed in your husband, ask God to show you whether you should be looking to your Lord and Savior, instead of your husband, for everything you need. My Prayer to God LORD, show me any expectations I have of my husband that are unfair, and for which I should be looking to You to provide instead. I know he cannot meet my every emotional need—and I should not expect him to—but You can. I look to You for my comfort, fulfillment, and peace. I thank You for all the good things my husband provides for me, and I ask You to keep me from being critical of him for not being perfect. Lord, help me to wait quietly for You to provide what I need, for I put all my expectations in You. For everything I have expected from my husband and have been disappointed because he couldn’t provide, I now look to You. If I have damaged my husband’s self-respect in any way because I have made him feel that I am disappointed in him, I confess that to You as sin. Help me to apologize and make that up to him. Bring restoration, and heal any and all wounds. Where there are certain things I should expect of him as a husband and he has failed to provide, help me to forgive him. I release him into Your hands to become who You made him to be and not what I want him to be. Help me to keep my expectations focused on You so I can live free of expectations I have no right to put on him. In Jesus’ name I pray.

You break her heart, and you’ll have to deal with me and her three brothers, and if you survive that, Her Grace will ensure your social ruin unto the nineteenth generation. I remind you, all of my boys are crack shots and more than competent with a sword.” “It is not my intention to break her heart.” “Oh, it’s never our intention.” His Grace’s brows drew down in thought, and he was once again the affable paterfamilias. “Maggie is different. I hope that’s from being the oldest daughter, but her unfortunate origins are too obvious a factor to be dismissed. She’s in want of… dreams, I think. My other girls have dreams. Sophie dreamed of her own family, Jenny loves to paint, Louisa has her literary scribbling, and Evie must racket about the property as her brothers used to, but Maggie has never been a dreamer. Not about her first pony nor her first waltz nor her first… beau.” Nor her first lover. The words hung unspoken in the air while the fire crackled and hissed and a log fell amid a shower of sparks. It wasn’t what Ben would have expected any papa to say of his daughter, but then, marrying into a family meant details like this would be shared—Esther Windham misplaced her everyday jewels, and Percy thought his daughters should be entitled to dream. In a different way, it felt as if Ben were still lurking in doorways and climbing through windows, but this window was called marriage, and Maggie was trying to lock it shut with Ben on the outside. “I’m not sure Maggie wants to marry me.” It was as close as he’d come to touching on the circumstances of the betrothal. His Grace regarded him for a long moment. “I’m her papa, but I was a young man once, Hazelton. Maggie is only a bit younger than Devlin and a few months older than Bart would have been. When I married, I had no idea either of my two oldest progeny existed. I’d no sooner started filling my nursery when—before my heir was out of dresses—both women came forward, hurling accusations and threats. If my marriage can survive that onslaught, surely you can overcome a little stubbornness in my daughter?” It was, again, an insight into the Windham family Ben gained only because he was engaged to marry Maggie. Such confidences prompted a rare inclination toward direct speech. “I think Maggie’s dream is to be left alone. If she jilts me, she’ll have one more excuse to retire from life, to hide and tell herself she’s content.” “Content.” His Grace spat the word. “Bother content. Content is milk toast and pap when life is supposed to be a banquet. Make Maggie’s dreams come true, young Hazelton, and show her contentment is shoddy goods compared to happiness.” “You make it sound simple.” “We’re speaking of women and that particular subspecies of the genre referred to as wives. It is simple—devote yourself to her happiness, and you will be rewarded tenfold. I do not, however, say the undertaking will ever be easy.