Presence Movie Quotes

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If your heart takes more pleasure in reading novels, or watching TV, or going to the movies, or talking to friends, rather than just sitting alone with God and embracing Him, sharing His cares and His burdens, weeping and rejoicing with Him, then how are you going to handle forever and ever in His presence...? You'd be bored to tears in heaven, if you're not ecstatic about God now!
Keith Green
Radicalism usually prospers in the gap between rising expectations and declining opportunities. This is especially true where the population is young, idle, and bored; where the art is impoverished; where entertainment—movies, theater, music—is policed or absent altogether; and where young men are set apart from the consoling and socializing presence of women.
Lawrence Wright (The Looming Tower)
You cannot intimidate people with real bullets, but you can intimidate them with fake gun.
Amit Kalantri
I was just reaching for my towel when I heard a muffled thump from my bedroom. My fingers froze and the hair on the back of my neck prickled. In scary movies, this was always the part where the naked girl called out, "Hello?" or "Who's there?" or something equally stupid. But this naked girl wasn't announcing her presence to anyone.
Rachel Hawkins (Demonglass (Hex Hall, #2))
(Golden Globe acceptance speech in the style of Jane Austen's letters): "Four A.M. Having just returned from an evening at the Golden Spheres, which despite the inconveniences of heat, noise and overcrowding, was not without its pleasures. Thankfully, there were no dogs and no children. The gowns were middling. There was a good deal of shouting and behavior verging on the profligate, however, people were very free with their compliments and I made several new acquaintances. Miss Lindsay Doran, of Mirage, wherever that might be, who is largely responsible for my presence here, an enchanting companion about whom too much good cannot be said. Mr. Ang Lee, of foreign extraction, who most unexpectedly apppeared to understand me better than I undersand myself. Mr. James Schamus, a copiously erudite gentleman, and Miss Kate Winslet, beautiful in both countenance and spirit. Mr. Pat Doyle, a composer and a Scot, who displayed the kind of wild behavior one has lernt to expect from that race. Mr. Mark Canton, an energetic person with a ready smile who, as I understand it, owes me a vast deal of money. Miss Lisa Henson -- a lovely girl, and Mr. Gareth Wigan -- a lovely boy. I attempted to converse with Mr. Sydney Pollack, but his charms and wisdom are so generally pleasing that it proved impossible to get within ten feet of him. The room was full of interesting activitiy until eleven P.M. when it emptied rather suddenly. The lateness of the hour is due therefore not to the dance, but to the waiting, in a long line for horseless vehicles of unconscionable size. The modern world has clearly done nothing for transport. P.S. Managed to avoid the hoyden Emily Tomkins who has purloined my creation and added things of her own. Nefarious creature." "With gratitude and apologies to Miss Austen, thank you.
Emma Thompson (The Sense and Sensibility Screenplay and Diaries: Bringing Jane Austen's Novel to Film)
The fancy things I like are sheets. Pots and pans. And the things I really like aren't fancy at all: old aprons and hankies. Butter wrappers from one pound blocks. Peony bushes, hardback books of poetry. And I like things less than that; the sticky remains at the bottom of the apple crisp dish. The way cats sometimes run sideways. The presence of a rainbow in a puddle of oil. Mayonaise jars. Pussy willows. Wash on a line. The tick-tock of clocks, the blue of the neon sign at the local movie house. The fact that there is a local movie house.
Elizabeth Berg
Any story dealing, however seriously, with homosexual love is taken to be a story about homosexuality while stories dealing with heterosexual love are seen as stories about the individual people they portray. This is as much a problem today for American filmmakers who cannot conceive of the presence of gay characters in a film unless the specific subject of the film is homosexuality. Lesbians and gay men are thereby classified as purely sexual creatures, people defined solely by their sexual urges.
Vito Russo (The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies)
I believed suddenly not merely in evil as a necessary antagonist in movies and books—bad guys and boogeymen—not merely in evil as the consequence of parental rejection or parental indulgence or social injustice, but in Evil as a presence alive in the world.
Dean Koontz (Life Expectancy)
The city was a real city, shifty and sexual. I was lightly jostled by small herds of flushed young sailors looking for action on Forty-Second Street, with it rows of x-rated movie houses, brassy women, glittering souvenir shops, and hot-dog vendors. I wandered through Kino parlors and peered through the windows of the magnificent sprawling Grant’s Raw Bar filled with men in black coats scooping up piles of fresh oysters. The skyscrapers were beautiful. They did not seem like mere corporate shells. They were monuments to the arrogant yet philanthropic spirit of America. The character of each quadrant was invigorating and one felt the flux of its history. The old world and the emerging one served up in the brick and mortar of the artisan and the architects. I walked for hours from park to park. In Washington Square, one could still feel the characters of Henry James and the presence of the author himself … This open atmosphere was something I had not experienced, simple freedom that did not seem oppressive to anyone.
Patti Smith (Just Kids)
I think it is cruel to expect the constant presence of any one family member (to tend to the ill). Just as we have to breathe in and breathe out, people have to "recharge their batteries" outside the sickroom at times, live a normal life from time to time; we cannot function efficiently in the constant awareness of illness. I have heard many relatives complain that members of the family went on pleasure trips over weekends or continued to go to the theater or movie. They blamed them for enjoying things while someone at home was terminally ill. I think it is more meaningful for the patient and his family to see that the illness does not totally disrupt a household or completely deprive all members of any pleasurable activities; rather, the illness may allow for a gradual adjustment and change toward the kind of home it is going to be when the patient is no longer around...The family too has a need to deny or avoid the sad realities at times in order to face them better when their presence is really needed.
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (On Death and Dying: What the Dying Have to Teach Doctors, Nurses, Clergy and Their Own Families)
In this world we like to follow the plot, to think we know what is happening, what is coming next. But these great quantum movies are like spiritual experiences. They start to dismantle the world as we know it, and we find ourselves knowing less and less about what is happening. We do not have to know; there is a Presence behind all this that knows what It is doing. Instead of feeling nervous when things start to dismantle and fall apart, we can accept that we personally do not know, and see it as a good thing.
David Hoffmeister (Quantum Forgiveness: Physics, Meet Jesus)
They experienced the world, I supposed, as I experienced going to the movies: that flash of amazement petitioned, in part, from feeling small in the presence of bigness.
Durga Chew-Bose (Too Much and Not the Mood: Essays)
Jessica Stone. The Jessica Stone. My costar. As in, indie film poster child, beloved by the internet for being sexy and cute and funny, sure to snag an Oscar one day Jessica Stone. I think I saw her last movie in theaters fifteen times, and not just because it was based on a graphic novel. Don’t fanboy, I order myself. Don’t fanboy. Gail looks at me, surprised. “But Dare, we were—” I cough. Twice. Gail looks between Jessica Stone and me, widens her eyes, and finally gets it. Her ears go even redder. “Oh. Oh.” She grabs her backpack and makes a hasty retreat. “I…um. I’ll be around if you need me, Dare.” After the door closes, Jessica Stone turns her eyes—which are super, freakishly, ice-water blue—to me. “I didn’t mean to intrude.” My tongue ties into ten hundred knots. She can intrude as much as she wants. I mean, not intrude—like, let me politely be in her presence for the rest of my life—but intruding works too. Into my life. As much as she wants. Is that weird? It’s probably weird. But it’s Jessica Stone. Damn it, man, don’t fanboy.
Ashley Poston (Geekerella (Once Upon a Con, #1))
She is not given to fawning over celebrities, no more than most people, but can't help being drawn to the aura of fame—and more than fame, actual immortality— implied by the presence of a movie star in a trailer.
Michael Cunningham (The Hours)
The two of them had easily slipped back into the rhythms of their friendship, and they saw each other several times a week for movies, meals, games. He felt fortified in her presence. His arguments and observations were sharper.
Gabrielle Zevin (Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow)
We can learn not to keep situations or events alive in our minds, but to return our attention continuously to the pristine, timeless present moment rather than be caught up in mental movie-making. Our very Presence then becomes our identity, rather than our thoughts and emotions.
Eckhart Tolle (A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose)
For me, the phone remains miraculous in a way that electronic communication just isn’t. A phone brings the voice of a friend. It’s live. Email is a movie—once you get it, nothing you do will change it. A call is theater—surprising and unpredictable. What’s more, your presence is essential.
Will Schwalbe (We Should Not Be Friends: The Story of a Friendship)
Have we as a society become radically desensitized to the violence and depravity that is flooding from movie and television studios? It is not that we have become more broad-minded and intellectual; it is that we have adapted to the demonic and have become comfortable in the presence of evil.
John Hagee (The Three Heavens: Angels, Demons and What Lies Ahead)
The Bechdel-Wallace test is a similarly simple device, created by the cartoonist Alison Bechdel and her friend Liz Wallace, for evaluating whether movies and television shows perpetuate gender inequity. Does a film have at least two named women in it, talking to each other, about something other than a man? A depressingly large number of films and shows fail the test. But it does more than scold. It suggests an alternate reality—an achievable one—in which women have an equal presence in mass popular culture, and the screen represents more than just the gaze of a (non-feminist) man.
Eric Liu (You're More Powerful than You Think: A Citizen's Guide to Making Change Happen)
Does aperson need to be thevessel in which aminion of Lucifer resides, or can a structure such as a house or perhaps even something as day to day as say an automobile (you have all seen that particular movie right?) serve as the residence from which a demonic presence reaches into this plane of existence, using
Daniel Klaes (Hinsdale House an America Haunting)
How do people leave these cycles when they don’t have the resources I had or the support from their friends and family? How do they possibly stay strong enough every second of the day? I feel like all it takes is one weak, insecure moment in the presence of your ex to convince yourself you made the wrong decision. Anyone who has ever left a manipulative, abusive spouse and somehow stayed that course deserves a medal. A statue. A freaking superhero movie. Society has obviously been worshipping the wrong heroes this whole time because I’m convinced it takes less strength to pick up a building than it does to permanently leave an abusive situation.
Colleen Hoover (It Starts with Us (It Ends with Us, #2))
There are two ways to turn devils into angels: First, acknowledge things about them that you genuinely appreciate. Uncle Morty took you to the beach when you were a kid. Your mom still sends you money on your birthday. Your ex-wife is a good mother to your children. There must be something you sincerely appreciate about this person. Shift your attention from the mean and nasty things they have said or done to the kind and helpful things they have said or done—even if there are just a few or even only one. You have defined this person by their iniquities. You can just as easily—actually, more easily—define them by their redeeming qualities. It’s your movie. Change the script. Perhaps you are still arguing that the person who has hurt you has no redeeming qualities whatsoever. She is evil incarnate, Rosemary’s baby conceived with Satan himself, poster child for the dark side of the Force, destined to wreak havoc and horror in the lives of everyone she touches. A nastier bitch never walked the earth. Got it. Let’s say all of this is true—the person who troubles you is a no-good, cheating, lying SOB. Now here’s the second devil-transformer. Consider: How has this person helped you to grow? What spiritual muscles have you developed that you would not have built if this person had been nicer to you? Have you learned to hold your power and self-esteem in the presence of attempted insult? Do you now speak your truth more quickly and directly? Are you now asking for what you want instead of passively deferring? Are you setting healthier boundaries? Have you deepened in patience and compassion? Do you make more self-honoring choices? There are many benefits you might have gained, or still might gain, from someone who challenges you.
Alan Cohen (A Course in Miracles Made Easy: Mastering the Journey from Fear to Love)
presence. Once in Italy, needing two hours of not talking to each other, we went to the movies, not realizing there wouldn’t be subtitles. We stayed and enjoyed the cinematography. On the walk home, we pitched each other ridiculous ideas to fill the gaps in the plot we hadn’t understood. Those weren’t dates, though. Dates hold intention. They’re not just occasions—they’re declarations. I’m interested
Emily Wibberley (The Roughest Draft)
Those who are not psychologically sophisticated, do not realise the extent to which the average person is unconsciously motivated by jealousy and envy. People who are not happy, confident, and fulfilled will generally resent those who are happier, more confident, and more fulfilled than them. Admiration and envy seem to be received in equal proportion as one develops and succeeds. Many famous people are admired with a passion and also hated with a vengeance. Powerful political leaders are respected and also ruthlessly criticised. Famous movie stars are adored and also grossly invaded and scrutinised. Nevertheless, we learn to think not 'what the world is doing to us' but 'what we are doing for the world.' Our attention is not on how the world is hurting us, but on how our presence is helping to heal the world. This outward and upward focus is our protection and our guide.
Donna Goddard (The Love of Being Loving (Love and Devotion, #1))
Clevinger was one of those people with lots of intelligence and no brains, and everyone knew it except those who soon found it out. In short, he was a dope. He often looked to Yossarian like one of those people hanging around modern museums with both eyes together on one side of a face. It was an illusion, of course, generated by Clevinger’s predilection for staring fixedly at one side of a question and never seeing the other side at all. Politically, he was a humanitarian who did know right from left and was trapped uncomfortably between the two. He was constantly defending his Communist friends to his right-wing enemies and his right-wing friends to his Communist enemies, and he was thoroughly detested by both groups, who never defended him to anyone because they thought he was a dope. He was a very serious, very earnest and very conscientious dope. It was impossible to go to a movie with him without getting involved afterwards in a discussion on empathy, Aristotle, universals, messages and the obligations of the cinema as an art form in a materialistic society. Girls he took to the theater had to wait until the first intermission to find out from him whether or not they were seeing a good or a bad play, and then found out at once. He was a militant idealist who crusaded against racial bigotry by growing faint in its presence. He knew everything about literature except how to enjoy it.
Joseph Heller (Catch-22)
What movie are you guys gonna see anyway?” “I don’t...know,” I answered when Rider remained quiet. An idea formed. “Do you want to come?” Jayden blinked as if he was surprised. “Aw, that’s sweet of you, but I’m not good sittin’ in a theater.” My brows furrowed. “Why?” “Because he’d talk through it,” Paige answered from the couch. “He would literally talk through the entire movie.” “True dat,” one of the other guys responded. I grinned. “It’s true. You know, I like to add commentary every once in a while,” Jayden explained. “But for some reason people be all upset over that.” “I can imagine,” Rider replied drily. “I like to think what I’m addin’ actually enlightens the experience,” Jayden said. Paige snorted. “I don’t think enlighten is the right word.” “My entire presence is enlightening,” he replied. Hector looked over his shoulder, eyebrows raised. “I can come up with a few words that describe your presence. Enlightening is not one of them.
Jennifer L. Armentrout (The Problem with Forever)
I hate computers. My hatred is entrenched, and I nourish it daily. I’m comfortable with it, and no community outreach program will change my mind. I hate computers for getting their own section in the New York Times and for lengthening commercials with the mention of a Web site address. Who really wants to find out more about Procter & Gamble? Just buy the toothpaste or laundry detergent, and get on with it. I hate them for creating the word org and I hate them for e-mail, which isn’t real mail but a variation of the pointless notes people used to pass in class. I hate computers for replacing the card catalog in the New York Public Library and I hate the way they’ve invaded the movies. I’m not talking about their contribution to the world of special effects. I have nothing against a well-defined mutant or full-scale alien invasion — that’s good technology. I’m talking about their actual presence in any given movie. They’ve become like horses in a western — they may not be the main focus, but everybody seems to have one.
David Sedaris (Me Talk Pretty One Day)
When you experience a great need for human affection, you have to ask yourself whether the circumstances surrounding you and the people you are with are truly where God wants you to be. Whatever you are doing—watching a movie, writing a book, giving a presentation, eating, or sleeping—you have to stay in God’s presence. If you feel a great loneliness and a deep longing for human contact, you have to be extremely discerning. Ask yourself whether this situation is truly God-given. Because where God wants you to be, God holds you safe and gives you peace, even when there is pain.
Henri J.M. Nouwen (The Inner Voice of Love: A Journey Through Anguish to Freedom)
Now you know that all the acting you did your whole life was really for nothing because nobody perceives you the way you want to be perceived. You can see that all the drama that happens in your movie isn’t really noticed by anybody around you. It’s obvious that everybody’s attention is focused on their own movie. They don’t even notice when you’re sitting right beside them in their theater! The actors have all their attention on their story, and that is the only reality they live in. Their attention is so hooked by their own creation that they don’t even notice their own presence—the one who is observing their movie.
Miguel Ruiz (The Fifth Agreement: A Practical Guide to Self-Mastery (A Toltec Wisdom Book))
Carey recalled Tillman turning to him and tapping him on the shoulder. "Look who's coming up the road!" he said incredulously. In a scene straight from a movie, General Douglas MacArthur confidently walked straight up the center of the road, "bullets flying around him." Carey was dumbfounded. As MacArthur walked up to his position, Carey pulled him behind the building. "The general fell over" and stared at the lieutenant, quickly snapping, "What the hell do you think you're doing, Lieutenant?" "I'm just trying to keep you from getting killed," Carey snapped back. MacArthur glared at Carey with icy presence and said, "There isn't a bullet made that can kill me.
Patrick O'Donnell (Give Me Tomorrow: The Korean War's Greatest Untold Story--The Epic Stand of the Marines of George Company)
As a nonwhite person, the General, like myself, knew he must be patient with white people, who were easily scared by the nonwhite. Even with liberal white people, one could go only so far, and with average white people one could barely go anywhere. The General was deeply familiar with the nature, nuances, and internal differences of white people, as was every nonwhite person who had lived here a good number of years. We ate their food, we watched their movies, we observed their lives and psyche via television and in everyday contact, we learned their language, we absorbed their subtle cues, we laughed at their jokes, even when made at our expense, we humbly accepted their condescension, we eavesdropped on their conversations in supermarkets and the dentist’s office, and we protected them by not speaking our own language in their presence, which unnerved them. We were the greatest anthropologists ever of the American people, which the American people never knew because our field notes were written in our own language in letters and postcards dispatched to our countries of origin, where our relatives read our reports with hilarity, confusion, and awe. Although the Congressman was joking, we probably did know white people better than they knew themselves, and we certainly knew white people better than they ever knew us.
Viet Thanh Nguyen (The Sympathizer (The Sympathizer, #1))
Actors such as Cagney, Robinson and Bogart seem to gather within themselves the qualities of the genres they appear in, so that the violence, suffering and angst of the films is restated in their faces, physical presence, movement and speech. By the curious alchemy of the cinema, each successive appearance in a given genre further solidifies the actor's screen persona until they no longer play a role but assimilate it to the collecive entity made up of their own body, personality and past screen roles. For instance, the beat-up face. tired eyes and rasping voice by which we identify Humphrey Bogart are, in part, selections we have made from his roles as Sam Spade, Philip Marlowe and others.
Colin McArthur (Underworld USA)
In short, Clevinger was one of those people with lots of intelligence and no brains, and everyone knew it except those who soon found it out. In short, he was a dope. He often looked to Yossarian like one of those people hanging around modern museums with both eyes together on one side of a face. It was an illusion, of course, generated by Clevinger’s predilection for staring fixedly at one side of a question and never seeing the other side at all. Politically, he was a humanitarian who did know right from left and was trapped uncomfortably between the two. He was constantly defending his Communist friends to his right-wing enemies and his right-wing friends to his Communist enemies, and he was thoroughly detested by both groups, who never defended him to anyone because they thought he was a dope. He was a very serious, very earnest and very conscientious dope. It was impossible to go to a movie with him without getting involved afterward in a discussion on empathy, Aristotle, universals, messages and the obligations of the cinema as an art form in a materialistic society. Girls he took to the theater had to wait until the first intermission to find out from him whether or not they were seeing a good or a bad play, and then found out at once. He was a militant idealist who crusaded against racial bigotry by growing faint in its presence. He knew everything about literature except how to enjoy it. Yossarian
Joseph Heller (Catch-22)
To my children three. Life is like a movie, it starts and it ends.If you are reading this probably i'm gone. but my presence is always with you. All wanted to say how much I loved you. and I wanted to share my life journey with all of you. When I Conceived each of you, I can feel the butterflies in my tummy and I already fail in love with you. When each of you were born, tears dropped of my eye, I know it that was a happy tears. When you said dada, I was excited and happy to hear you saying it over and over. I see you growing like a flower and flying like a bird in front of my eye, in front of the pales a colorful garden who always stay blooming. Slowly you gew wing and all you flew away from the nest. All i'm left with good memories an album full of beautiful of pictures.from you baby showers, 1st word, 1st birthdays,1st trip to Disney or Universal Studios, each of you got to meet your favored TV characters. Your smiley faces was telling me I was doing ok as a parent, although I been told I'm the worst mom. But I know you did not mean that, you meant to say I love you mom. and I love you to my children, It was a nice journey. If I have to go back on time to change the way I raised you, I won't change a thing, beside some of your friends, but you were old enough and free to make your own choices. You have to make your mistakes and i'm pretty sure you learned from them. But at the end I never worry about you, because I'm pretty sure I give 200% as a parent. I know I taught, I armed and I shield you with everything including knowledge you need to survive in world. Remember don't matter how old are you, you always will be my babies. and I always be your Angel ! "Toko - Lock " te ka nana sho. Love Mom & Grandma!
Zybejta (Beta) Metani' Marashi
I knew from experience that before you went swimming off a dock for the first time each summer, you needed to check the sides and the ladder carefully for bryozoan, colonies of slimy green critters that grew on hard surfaces underwater (think coral, but gelatinous-shudder). They wouldn’t hurt you, they were part of a healthy freshwater ecosystem, their presence meant the water was pristine and unpolluted, blah blah blah-but none of this was any consolation if you accidentally touched them. Poking around with a water ski and finding nothing, I spent the rest of the afternoon watching for Sean from the water. And getting out occasionally when he sped by in the boat, in order to woo him like Halle Berry coming out of the ocean in a James Bond movie (which I had seen with the boys about a hundred times. Bikini scene, seven hundred times). Only I seemed to have misplaced my dagger.
Jennifer Echols (Endless Summer (The Boys Next Door, #1-2))
In attunement, it is the infant who leads and the mother who follows. “Where their roles differ is in the timing of their responses,” writes John Bowlby, one of the century’s great psychiatric researchers. The infant initiates the interaction or withdraws from it according to his own rhythms, Bowlby found, while the “mother regulates her behaviour so that it meshes with his... Thus she lets him call the tune and by a skillful interweaving of her own responses with his creates a dialogue.” The tense or depressed mothering adult will not be able to accompany the infant into relaxed, happy spaces. He may also not fully pick up signs of the infant’s emotional distress, or may not be able to respond to them as effectively as he would wish. The ADD child’s difficulty reading social cues likely originates from her relationship cues not being read by the nurturing adult, who was distracted by stress. In the attunement interaction, not only does the mother follow the child, but she also permits the child to temporarily interrupt contact. When the interaction reaches a certain stage of intensity for the infant, he will look away to avoid an uncomfortably high level of arousal. Another interaction will then begin. A mother who is anxious may react with alarm when the infant breaks off contact, may try to stimulate him, to draw him back into the interaction. Then the infant’s nervous system is not allowed to “cool down,” and the attunement relationship is hampered. Infants whose caregivers were too stressed, for whatever reason, to give them the necessary attunement contact will grow up with a chronic tendency to feel alone with their emotions, to have a sense — rightly or wrongly — that no one can share how they feel, that no one can “understand.” Attunement is the quintessential component of a larger process, called attachment. Attachment is simply our need to be close to somebody. It represents the absolute need of the utterly and helplessly vulnerable human infant for secure closeness with at least one nourishing, protective and constantly available parenting figure. Essential for survival, the drive for attachment is part of the very nature of warm-blooded animals in infancy, especially. of mammals. In human beings, attachment is a driving force of behavior for longer than in any other animal. For most of us it is present throughout our lives, although we may transfer our attachment need from one person — our parent — to another — say, a spouse or even a child. We may also attempt to satisfy the lack of the human contact we crave by various other means, such as addictions, for example, or perhaps fanatical religiosity or the virtual reality of the Internet. Much of popular culture, from novels to movies to rock or country music, expresses nothing but the joys or the sorrows flowing from satisfactions or disappointments in our attachment relationships. Most parents extend to their children some mixture of loving and hurtful behavior, of wise parenting and unskillful, clumsy parenting. The proportions vary from family to family, from parent to parent. Those ADD children whose needs for warm parental contact are most frustrated grow up to be adults with the most severe cases of ADD. Already at only a few months of age, an infant will register by facial expression his dejection at the mother’s unconscious emotional withdrawal, despite the mother’s continued physical presence. “(The infant) takes delight in Mommy’s attention,” writes Stanley Greenspan, “and knows when that source of delight is missing. If Mom becomes preoccupied or distracted while playing with the baby, sadness or dismay settles in on the little face.
Gabor Maté (Scattered: How Attention Deficit Disorder Originates and What You Can Do About It)
A splash of light snuck beneath the a dressing room door. He heard a groan. A shuffle. A bump. A heavy sigh. "Uh, too tight." He walked toward the back, stopping outside the dressing room. The door was cracked a fraction. He rested a shoulder against the wall, and glanced inside. Grace as Catwoman blew his mind. A feline fantasy. The three-way mirror tripled his pleasure. He viewed her from every angle. Hot, sleek, fierce. The lady could fight Batman in her skintight black leather catsuit and come out the winner. After a moment she scrunched her nose, slapped her palms against her thighs. Stuck out her tongue at her reflection in the mirrors. He saw what had her so frustrated. Sympathized with her disappointment. Her costume didn't fit. The front zipper hadn't fully cleared her cleavage, which was deep and visible. She wore no bra. She gave a little hop, and her breasts bounced. Full and plump. He felt a tug at his groin. Superhero lust. He cleared his throat and made his presence known. She caught his image in the corner of the glass, and reached for the fitting room chair, positioning it between them. Like that would keep him from her. He should've looked away, but couldn't. He sensed her embarrassment. Her panic. Flight? She had nowhere to go. He blocked the door. He wasn't leaving until they'd talked. "Archibald's going to love your costume," he initiated. She didn't find him funny. Her gaze narrowed behind the molded cat-eye mask with attached ears. Her fingers clenched in her elbow-length gloves. Inspired by the movie The Dark Knight, she'd added a whip and a gun holster. Her thigh-high stiletto boots were killer, adding five inches to her height. Her image would stick with him forever. She backed against the center mirror, and nervously fingered the open flaps over her breasts. A yank on the zipper broke the tab. The metal teeth parted, and the gap widened, revealing the round inner curves of her breasts. A hint of her nipples. Dusky pink. All the way down to the dent of her navel.
Kate Angell (The Cottage on Pumpkin and Vine)
Racism was a constant presence and absence in the Obama White House. We didn’t talk about it much. We didn’t need to—it was always there, everywhere, like white noise. It was there when Obama said that it was stupid for a black professor to be arrested in his own home and got criticized for days while the white police officer was turned into a victim. It was there when a white Southern member of Congress yelled “You lie!” at Obama while he addressed a joint session of Congress. It was there when a New York reality show star built an entire political brand on the idea that Obama wasn’t born in the United States, an idea that was covered as national news for months and is still believed by a majority of Republicans. It was there in the way Obama was talked about in the right-wing media, which spent eight years insisting that he hated America, disparaging his every move, inventing scandals where there were none, attacking him for any time that he took off from work. It was there in the social media messages I got that called him a Kenyan monkey, a boy, a Muslim. And it was there in the refusal of Republicans in Congress to work with him for eight full years, something that Obama was also blamed for no matter what he did. One time, Obama invited congressional Republicans to attend a screening of Lincoln in the White House movie theater—a Steven Spielberg film about how Abraham Lincoln worked with Congress to pass the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery. Not one of them came. Obama didn’t talk about it much. Every now and then, he’d show flashes of dark humor in practicing the answer he could give on a particular topic. What do you think it will take for these protests to stop? “Cops need to stop shooting unarmed black folks.” Why do you think you have failed to bring the country together? “Because my being president appears to have literally driven some white people insane.” Do you think some of the opposition you face is about race? “Yes! Of course! Next question.” But he was guarded in public. When he was asked if racism informed the strident opposition to his presidency, he’d carefully ascribe it to other factors.
Ben Rhodes (The World As It Is: A Memoir of the Obama White House)
I see an actress smoking a cigarette in an old Fred McMurray movie. She’s clever and beautiful and manipulative. I feel envy. I suddenly wish I smoked cigarettes and was as clever and beautiful and manipulative as she. I want to be that way at the restaurants I visit, as I’m walking to my car, with certain friends who might understand. The actress has played her part well; she’s made me want to emulate her base desires if only for a while. Does that make me impressionable, a fool, or someone who will recognize the deepest secrets of her heart? I fight hard to stay young—to keep the lines from further etching my face and hands and breasts, presumably to trick the world into believing I am young. I’m an actress playing a part. I’m afraid to tell the truth. I fear losing those younger or becoming those older. In the presence of youth, a sort of unseen age-osmosis occurs within me. The years drop away and I don’t want to leave. It’s utterly selfish but I don’t care. After all, I’m no older than they—I’ve just been so longer. I was nineteen only yesterday and they don’t retire nineteen-year-old actresses.
Chila Woychik (On Being a Rat and Other Observations)
In the meantime, Marlboro Man was working his fingers to the bone. To prepare for our three-week honeymoon to Australia, he’d rearranged the schedule of many goings-on at the ranch, compressing a normally much longer shipping season into a two-week window. I could sense a difference in his work; his phone calls to me were fewer and farther between, and he was getting up much earlier than he normally did. And at night, when he did call to whisper a sweet “good night” to me before his head hit the pillow, his voice was scratchy, more weary than normal. He was working like a dog. In the midst of all of this, the deadline for our collage assignment loomed. It was Monday evening before our Tuesday get-together with Father Johnson, and I knew neither Marlboro Man nor I had gotten around to our respective collages. There was just too much going on--too many cows, too many wedding decisions, too many cozy movies on Marlboro Man’s tufted leather couch. We had way too much romance to take care of when we were together, and besides that, Father Johnson had explicitly told us we couldn’t work on the collages in each other’s presence. This was fine with me: sitting upright at a table and cutting our magazine photos was the last thing I wanted to do with such a fine specimen of a human. It would have been a criminal misuse of our time together.
Ree Drummond (The Pioneer Woman: Black Heels to Tractor Wheels)
We can all be "sad" or "blue" at times in our lives. We have all seen movies about the madman and his crime spree, with the underlying cause of mental illness. We sometimes even make jokes about people being crazy or nuts, even though we know that we shouldn't. We have all had some exposure to mental illness, but do we really understand it or know what it is? Many of our preconceptions are incorrect. A mental illness can be defined as a health condition that changes a person's thinking, feelings, or behavior (or all three) and that causes the person distress and difficulty in functioning. As with many diseases, mental illness is severe in some cases and mild in others. Individuals who have a mental illness don't necessarily look like they are sick, especially if their illness is mild. Other individuals may show more explicit symptoms such as confusion, agitation, or withdrawal. There are many different mental illnesses, including depression, schizophrenia, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), autism, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. Each illness alters a person's thoughts, feelings, and/or behaviors in distinct ways. But in all this struggles, Consummo Plus has proven to be the most effective herbal way of treating mental illness no matter the root cause. The treatment will be in three stages. First is activating detoxification, which includes flushing any insoluble toxins from the body. The medicine and the supplement then proceed to activate all cells in the body, it receives signals from the brain and goes to repair very damaged cells, tissues, or organs of the body wherever such is found. The second treatment comes in liquid form, tackles the psychological aspect including hallucination, paranoia, hearing voices, depression, fear, persecutory delusion, or religious delusion. The supplement also tackles the Behavioral, Mood, and Cognitive aspects including aggression or anger, thought disorder, self-harm, or lack of restraint, anxiety, apathy, fatigue, feeling detached, false belief of superiority or inferiority, and amnesia. The third treatment is called mental restorer, and this consists of the spiritual brain restorer, a system of healing which “assumes the presence of a supernatural power to restore the natural brain order. With this approach, you will get back your loving boyfriend and he will live a better and fulfilled life, like realize his full potential, work productively, make a meaningful contribution to his community, and handle all the stress that comes with life. It will give him a new lease of life, a new strength, and new vigor. The Healing & Recovery process is Gradual, Comprehensive, Holistic, and very Effective. www . curetoschizophrenia . blogspot . com E-mail: rodwenhill@gmail. com
Justin Rodwen Hill
But then a peculiar thing happened. I became extraordinarily affected by the summer afternoons in the laboratory. The August sunlight came streaming in the great dusty fanlights and lay in yellow bars across the room. The old building ticked and creaked in the heat. Outside we could hear the cries of summer students playing touch football. In the course of an afternoon the yellow sunlight moved across old group pictures of the biology faculty. I became bewitched by the presence of the building; for minutes at a stretch I sat on the floor and watched the motes rise and fall in the sunlight. I called Harry’s attention to the presence but he shrugged and went on with his work. He was absolutely unaffected by the singularities of time and place. His abode was anywhere. It was all the same to him whether he catheterized a pig at four o’clock in the afternoon in New Orleans or at midnight in Transylvania. He was actually like one of those scientists in the movies who don’t care about anything but the problem in their heads - now here is a fellow who does have a “flair for research” and will be heard from. Yet I do not envy him. I would not change places with him if he discovered the cause and cure of cancer. For he is no more aware of the mystery which surrounds him than a fish is aware of the water it swims in. He could do research for a thousand years and never have an inkling of it.
Walker Percy
Clevinger was one of those people with lots of intelligence and no brains, and everyone knew it except those who soon found it out. In short, he was a dope. He often looked to Yossarian like one of those people hanging around modern museums with both eyes together on one side of a face. It was an illusion, of course, generated by Clevinger’s predilection for staring fixedly at one side of a question and never seeing the other side at all. Politically, he was a humanitarian who did know right from left and was trapped uncomfortably between the two. He was constantly defending his Communist friends to his right-wing enemies and his right-wing friends to his Communist enemies, and he was thoroughly detested by both groups, who never defended him to anyone because they thought he was a dope. He was a very serious, very earnest and very conscientious dope. It was impossible to go to a movie with him without getting involved afterwards in a discussion on empathy, Aristotle, universals, messages and the obligations of the cinema as an art form in a materialistic society. Girls he took to the theater had to wait until the first intermission to find out from him whether or not they were seeing a good or a bad play, and then found out at once. He was a militant idealist who crusaded against racial bigotry by growing faint in its presence. He knew everything about literature except how to enjoy it. Yossarian tried to help him. ‘Don’t be a dope,’ he had counseled Clevinger when they were both at cadet school in Santa Ana, California.
Joseph Heller (Catch-22)
When someone goes to the doctor and says, “I hear a voice in my head,” he or she will most likely be sent to a psychiatrist. The fact is that, in a very similar way, virtually everyone hears a voice, or several voices, in their head all the time: the involuntary thought processes that you don’t realize you have the power to stop. Continuous monologues or dialogues. You have probably come across “mad” people in the street incessantly talking or muttering to themselves. Well, that’s not much different from what you and all other “normal” people do, except that you don’t do it out loud. The voice comments, speculates, judges, compares, complains, likes, dislikes, and so on. The voice isn’t necessarily relevant to the situation you find yourself in at the time; it may be reviving the recent or distant past or rehearsing or imagining possible future situations. Here it often imagines things going wrong and negative outcomes; this is called worry. Sometimes this soundtrack is accompanied by visual images or “mental movies.” Even if the voice is relevant to the situation at hand, it will interpret it in terms of the past. This is because the voice belongs to your conditioned mind, which is the result of all your past history as well as of the collective cultural mind-set you inherited. So you see and judge the present through the eyes of the past and get a totally distorted view of it. It is not uncommon for the voice to be a person’s own worst enemy. Many people live with a tormentor in their head that continuously attacks and punishes them and drains them of vital energy. It is the cause of untold misery and unhappiness, as well as of disease. The good news is that you can free yourself from your mind. This is the only true liberation. You can take the first step right now. Start listening to the voice in your head as often as you can. Pay particular attention to any repetitive thought patterns, those old gramophone records that have been playing in your head perhaps for many years. This is what I mean by “watching the thinker,” which is another way of saying: listen to the voice in your head, be there as the witnessing presence. When you listen to that voice, listen to it impartially. That is to say, do not judge. Do not judge or condemn what you hear, for doing so would mean that the same voice has come in again through the back door. You’ll soon realize: there is the voice, and here I am listening to it, watching it. This I am realization, this sense of your own presence, is not a thought. It arises from beyond the mind.
Eckhart Tolle (The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment)
FREEING YOURSELF FROM YOUR MIND What exactly do you mean by “watching the thinker”? When someone goes to the doctor and says, “I hear a voice in my head,” he or she will most likely be sent to a psychiatrist. The fact is that, in a very similar way, virtually everyone hears a voice, or several voices, in their head all the time: the involuntary thought processes that you don’t realize you have the power to stop. Continuous monologues or dialogues. You have probably come across “mad” people in the street incessantly talking or muttering to themselves. Well, that’s not much different from what you and all other “normal” people do, except that you don’t do it out loud. The voice comments, speculates, judges, compares, complains, likes, dislikes, and so on. The voice isn’t necessarily relevant to the situation you find yourself in at the time; it may be reviving the recent or distant past or rehearsing or imagining possible future situations. Here it often imagines things going wrong and negative outcomes; this is called worry. Sometimes this soundtrack is accompanied by visual images or “mental movies.” Even if the voice is relevant to the situation at hand, it will interpret it in terms of the past. This is because the voice belongs to your conditioned mind, which is the result of all your past history as well as of the collective cultural mind-set you inherited. So you see and judge the present through the eyes of the past and get a totally distorted view of it. It is not uncommon for the voice to be a person’s own worst enemy. Many people live with a tormentor in their head that continuously attacks and punishes them and drains them of vital energy. It is the cause of untold misery and unhappiness, as well as of disease. The good news is that you can free yourself from your mind. This is the only true liberation. You can take the first step right now. Start listening to the voice in your head as often as you can. Pay particular attention to any repetitive thought patterns, those old gramophone records that have been playing in your head perhaps for many years. This is what I mean by “watching the thinker,” which is another way of saying: listen to the voice in your head, be there as the witnessing presence. When you listen to that voice, listen to it impartially. That is to say, do not judge. Do not judge or condemn what you hear, for doing so would mean that the same voice has come in again through the back door. You’ll soon realize: there is the voice, and here I am listening to it, watching it. This I am realization, this sense of your own presence, is not a thought. It arises from beyond the mind.
Eckhart Tolle (The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment)
Tho was Buffalo Bill Cody? Most people know, at the very least, that he was a hero of the Old West, like Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, and Kit Carson-one of those larger-than-life figures from which legends are made. Cody himself provided such a linkage to his heroic predecessors in 1888 when he published a book with biographies of Boone, Crockett, Carson-and one of his own autobiographies: Story of the Wild West and Campfire Chats, by Buffalo Bill (Hon. W.F. Cody), a Full and Complete History of the Renowned Pioneer Quartette, Boone, Crockett, Carson and Buffalo Bill. In this context, Cody was often called "the last of the great scouts." Some are also aware that he was an enormously popular showman, creator and star of Buffalo Bill's Wild West, a spectacular entertainment of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It has been estimated that more than a billion words were written by or about William Frederick Cody during his own lifetime, and biographies of him have appeared at irregular intervals ever since. A search of "Buffalo Bill Cody" on amazon.com reveals twenty-seven items. Most of these, however, are children's books, and it is likely that many of them play up the more melodramatic and questionable aspects of his life story; a notable exception is Ingri and Edgar Parin d'Aulaire's Buffalo Bill, which is solidly based on fact. Cody has also shown up in movies and television shows, though not in recent years, for whatever else he was, he was never cool or cynical. As his latest biographer, I believe his life has a valuable contribution to make in this new millennium-it provides a sense of who we once were and who we might be again. He was a commanding presence in our American history, a man who helped shape the way we look at that history. It was he, in fact, who created the Wild West, in all its adventure, violence, and romance. Buffalo Bill is important to me as the symbol of the growth of our nation, for his life spanned the settlement of the Great Plains, the Indian Wars, the Gold Rush, the Pony Express, the building of the transcontinental railroad, and the enduring romance of the American frontier-especially the Great Plains. Consider what he witnessed in his lifetime: the invention of the telephone, the transatlantic cable, the automobile, the airplane, and the introduction of modem warfare, with great armies massed against each other, with tanks, armored cars, flame-throwers, and poison gas-a far cry from the days when Cody and the troopers of the Fifth Cavalry rode hell-for-leather across the prairie in pursuit of hostile Indians. Nor, though it is not usually considered
Robert A. Carter (Buffalo Bill Cody: The Man Behind the Legend)
In a movie, the dream sequence makes the present cloudy and brings into focus a different time or imagination. In life, time travel clouds the present. I am not fully experiencing what I can be when I am future tripping or past journeying. I am not really hearing my wife, I’m not really experiencing a situation, or I’m not truly living if I am not living in the now.
Karl Forehand (The Tea Shop)
How do people leave these cycles when they don’t have the resources I had or the support from their friends and family? How do they possibly stay strong enough every second of the day? I feel like all it takes is one weak, insecure moment in the presence of your ex to convince yourself you made the wrong decision. Anyone who has ever left a manipulative, abusive spouse and somehow stayed that course deserves a medal. A statue. A freaking superhero movie. Society has obviously been worshipping the wrong heroes this whole time because I’m convinced it takes less strength to pick up a building than it does to permanently leave an abusive situation.
Colleen Hoover (It Starts with Us (It Ends with Us, #2))
Idealism is materialism upside down. It proposes that all that exists is pure consciousness. Everything in the physical world, all matter and energy, are emergent properties of consciousness. In its more radical form, it asserts that the entire physical world is a mind-generated illusion, somewhat like the virtual world in the movie The Matrix. Idealism runs into a miracle if it proposes that out of ephemeral nonphysical consciousness there emerges a hard, physical world. How does that happen? Once emerged, is it still connected to mind or does it go on its merry way? On the other hand, if it proposes that everything is an imaginary projection of consciousness, then the miracle is that everyone other than me is also a part of my imagination. Does that mean I still have to pay taxes? Panpsychism is the fourth main worldview. It acknowledges that mind and matter are quite real, but it also proposes that these elements of reality are inseparable and go all the way down to elementary particles and “below,” and also all the way up to the universe and beyond. The idea of a complementary relationship, where something is “both/and” rather than “either/or,” is a core concept within quantum theory. Light, for example, behaves both as a wave and as a particle, depending on how you look at it. The advantage of panpsychism is that no miracles are required to account for how matter can be sentient, or how mind can have physical consequences. It is both/and. But all is not completely rosy. The trouble with panpsychism is called the binding problem. This means that if all matter is already sentient, then every atom of your body, your cells, and your organs should also be sentient. Why then is your sense of self a unity and not a multitude? What binds it all together so that the “I” within you experiences just one self rather than trillions of tiny selves? Dealing with the New Story One of the more interesting takes on the developing new story of reality has been proposed by Rice University’s Jeffrey Kripal, who, as a scholar of comparative religion, has explored the core themes of his discipline—the sacred, the paranormal, the supernormal, the mystical, and the spiritual—in a direction that few academics have dared to tred.80 He views the intense popular interest in the paranormal as more than a mere fascination with fictional miracles, but rather as a sign of the original meaning of fascination—a bewitching accompanied simultaneously by awe and terror. He defines “psychic phenomena” as “the sacred in transit from a traditional religious register into a modern scientific one,” and the sacred as what the German theologian and historian of religions Rudolf Otto meant, that is, a particular structure of human consciousness that corresponds to a palpable presence, energy, or power encountered in the environment.
Dean Radin (Supernormal: Science, Yoga and the Evidence for Extraordinary Psychic Abilities)
Playdates are tense because I am desperate for him to connect and play and have fun with other kids. But he usually asks to leave as soon as we get there or doesn't engage whatsoever, and I drive home in tears, demoralized. In the car after one such afternoon I ask him what he wants to be when he grows up and he replies: "A stranger. A stranger who sits alone in a movie theater eating popcorn and no one talks to them.
Casey Wilson (The Wreckage of My Presence)
I'd gone to see every single one of Celia's movies, even though I was loath to admit it. So i had seen her. But no medium can capture what it is to be in someone's presence, certainly not someone like her. Someone who makes you feel important simply because she's choosing to look at you. There was something stately about her, at the age of twenty-eight. She was mature and dignified. She looked like the kind of person who knew exactly who she was.
Taylor Jenkins Reid, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo
Eric Liddell, the Olympic runner who was portrayed in the movie Chariots of Fire, famously said, "I feel like God made me for a purpose, but he also made me fast! And when I run I feel His pleasure." I started thinking that my ability to hike was a gift and a divine responsibility. The farther I walked, the weaker I felt, the more I relied on my faith, and the more I felt God's presence.
Jennifer Pharr Davis (The Pursuit of Endurance: Harnessing the Record-Breaking Power of Strength and Resilience)
you begin to pray, still and quiet yourself. Give thanks for some of the specific gifts God has given you today. Then ask the Holy Spirit to guide and direct your thoughts as you prayerfully review your day. Let the details play out like a short movie. Pay attention both to the things that gave you life and to the things that drained you. Notice where the Spirit invites you to linger and ponder. These are some questions you can adapt and use in the examen: When were you aware of God’s presence today? When did you sense God’s absence? When did you respond to God with love, faith, and obedience? When did you resist or avoid God?
Sharon Garlough Brown (Sensible Shoes (Sensible Shoes #1))
This can only be done by making these cultural assumptions explicit, by exposing them for the intellectual frauds they actually are, and by being vigilant in keeping them before one’s mind and spotting their presence in the ordinary reception of input each day from newspapers, magazines, office conversation, television, movies and so on.
J.P. Moreland (In Search of a Confident Faith: Overcoming Barriers to Trusting in God)
Until then, my teenage soul--suspicious of cheerfulness, though still reflexively respectful of authority--would feel increasingly uncomfortable in the presence of the official soul. The official soul, as transmitted through church and Christian paraphernalia, was upbeat, incurious, happy with its lot. It did not have any heroes other than the ones who appeared in the Bible, and it was content to hear the same stories about these people over and over again. It described pain and suffering in such a way that a person might think alcoholism or the loss of a child were no more inconvenient than a tussle with the flu: after it passed, you could stand in front of the congregation on Sunday and testify that it was all better, and God was good. As far as I could tell, that was the only story told by the official soul, and the real and true sadnesses had be excised for a more mellifluous account. Which made it seem as if there were things you couldn't talk about in church, or with people from church--what made you laugh, why you cried at a movie, what made you angry, or what books you read that hadn't been written by C.S. Lewis, A.W. Tozer, or D.L. Moody. Church was supposed to be the most important thing in life, but so much of life was left out, because so much of its trouble was assumed to be conquered. My pastor mentioned Kierkegaard in a sermon only once, and it would be a long time before I discovered that there was a storied Christian who suffered from, and so in some way sanctioned, depression, rage, sarcasm, and despair--the diseases that took hold in adolescence, for which church offered no cure.
Carlene Bauer (Not That Kind of Girl: A Memoir)
We do not purchase an automobile, for example, merely to own some machinery. Indeed, it is not machinery we are buying at all, but what we can have by way of it: a means of rapidly carrying us from one location to another, an object of envy for others, protection from the weather. Similarly, a radio must cease to exist as equipment and become sound. A perfect radio will draw attention to itself, will make it seem we are in the very presence of the source of its sound. Neither do we watch a movie screen, nor look at television. We look at what is on television, or in the movie, and become annoyed when the equipment intrudes-when the film is unfocused or the picture tube malfunctions.
James P. Carse (Finite and Infinite Games: A Vision of Life as Play and Possibility)
In 2 Corinthians 4:6-7, Paul wrote, “For it is the God who commanded light to shine out of darkness, who has shone in our hearts to give the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Jesus Christ. But we have this treasure in earthen vessels, that the excellence of the power may be of God and not of us.” And that brings us full circle to where we started in this chapter: at the end of the day there is no human explanation for the growth of the church. The world thinks we’re odd and bizarre. We’re the losers. We’re the privy pots. And yet, through the mouths of Paul and other misfits across the centuries, the church inexplicably moves in the history of the world with immense power beyond anything else. The gospel alone turns sinners into saints by transplanting men and women from the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of God’s dear Son—from eternal death to everlasting life. That is power to create new beings fit for God’s presence and glory. If we brought a bus load of movie stars, corporate titans, or Ivy League professors into our church (assuming they’d condescend to get on a bus), they’d look at us and laugh: “These people can’t change the world!” No, we can’t. But for those who remain faithful to the whole truth of Christianity, God is changing the world through us. He’s been doing it through all history.
John F. MacArthur Jr. (Hard to Believe: The High Cost and Infinite Value of Following Jesus)
Next, comparing children to arrows in the hands of a warrior, Psalm 127:4-5 talks about how parents are to handle their offspring. Wise and skillful parents are to know their children, understand them, and carefully point them in the right direction before shooting them into the world. And, as you may have learned in an archery class, shooting an arrow straight and hitting a target is a lot harder in real life than it looks like in the movies or on TV. Likewise, godly and skillful parenting isn’t easy. The last section of today’s selection teaches the importance of the Lord’s presence in the home. • The Lord blesses a home that follows His ways (Psalm 128:1-2). • A wife who knows the Lord will be a source of beauty and life in the home (Psalm 128:3a). • With the Lord’s blessing, children will flourish like olive trees, which generously provide food, oil, and shelter (Psalm 128:3b). Ask yourself, What can I do to make the Lord’s presence more recognizable in our home? Or a more pointed question, What kind of steward am I being in my home? God has entrusted to you some very special people—your children. You will be held accountable for how you take care of them. But you’re not in it alone. God offers to walk with you today and always. He provides you with guidelines like those we looked at today, plus His wisdom and His love, to help you do the job and do it well.9 Prayer: Father God, forgive me for the ways I shortchange my children. Help me know how to slow down the pace of life. Help me stay very aware that my children will be with me for just a short time, and that how I treat them will affect them and their children’s lives too. Continue to teach me how to be the parent You want me to be. Amen.   Action: Give your child/children the gift of time—today and every day.   Today’s Wisdom: The Christian home is the Master’s workshop where the processes of character-molding are silently, lovingly, faithfully, and successfully carried on. —RICHARD M. MILNES
Emilie Barnes (Walk with Me Today, Lord: Inspiring Devotions for Women)
Soon, I found myself criss-crossing the country with Steve, in what we called our “dog and pony show,” trying to drum up interest in our initial public offering. As we traveled from one investment house to another, Steve (in a costume he rarely wore: suit and tie) pushed to secure early commitments, while I added a professorial presence by donning, at Steve’s insistence, a tweed jacket with elbow patches. I was supposed to embody the image of what a “technical genius” looks like—though, frankly, I don’t know anyone in computer science who dresses that way. Steve, as pitch man, was on fire. Pixar was a movie studio the likes of which no one had ever seen, he said, built on a foundation of cutting-edge technology and original storytelling. We would go public one week after Toy Story opened, when no one would question that Pixar was for real. Steve turned out to be right. As our first movie broke records at the box office and as all our dreams seemed to be coming true, our initial public offering raised nearly $140 million for the company—the biggest IPO of 1995. And a few months later, as if on cue, Eisner called, saying that he wanted to renegotiate the deal and keep us as a partner. He accepted Steve’s offer of a 50/50 split. I was amazed; Steve had called this exactly right. His clarity and execution were stunning. For me, this moment was the culmination of such a lengthy series of pursuits, it was almost impossible to take in. I had spent twenty years inventing new technological tools, helping to found a company, and working hard to make all the facets of this company communicate and work well together. All of this had been in the service of a single goal: making a computer-animated feature film. And now, we’d not only done it; thanks to Steve, we were on steadier financial ground than we’d ever been before. For the first time since our founding, our jobs were safe. I
Ed Catmull (Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration)
How do people leave these cycles when they don't have the resources I had or the support from their friends and family? How do they possibly stay strong enough every second of the day? I feel like all it takes is one weak, insecure moment in the presence of your ex to convince yourself you made the wrong decision. Anyone who has ever left a manipulative, abusive spouse and somehow stayed that course deserves a medal. A statue. A freaking SUPERHERO movie. Society has obviously been worshipping the wrong heroes this whole time because I'm convinced it takes less strength to pick up a building than it does to permanently leave an abusive situation.
Colleen Hoover (It Starts with Us (It Ends with Us, #2))
Many of my Anglophone Indian friends, even if they grew up on a steady diet of masala movies, have imbibed the attitude of Shakespeare Wallah. They involuntarily cringe when I talk about how I find the cheap flash of Hindi film Shakespearean. ‘Gilji,’ they say, ‘random item numbers, idiotic dances by lovers around trees, unoriginal stories: surely all this is a world away from the lofty accomplishment of Shakespeare! You of all people should know that!’ These friends are nonplussed when I tell them that Shakespeare’s plays—at least as performed 400 years ago to mixed audiences of literate and illiterate, noble and poor—also routinely featured naach-gaana (song-and-dance numbers), often celebrated sanams (lovers) in the presence of trees (just ask Rosalind and Orsino in As You Like It), and plundered their kahaaniyan (stories) from everywhere. Watching Lagaan was, for me, a moment of awakening to masala possibilities in Shakespeare and his drama that I had until then largely overlooked. Conversely, it was an awakening to how there is something Shakespearean about the masala movie even if it is not an adaptation of Shakespeare.
Jonathan Gil Harris (Masala Shakespeare: How a Firangi Writer Became Indian)
A decent signal an industry is vulnerable is the presence of pseudo innovation—the addition of features that add no real value to the product; membership clubs that don’t deliver any real savings or convenience; movie theaters whose online ordering is more of a hassle than buying the ticket at the venue; colleges investing in luxury accommodations instead of educational resources. Those are the home remedies of a management team that knows the patient requires surgery but doesn’t want to endure real cost and pain.
Scott Galloway (Post Corona: From Crisis to Opportunity)
Evie’s presence in the movie elevated it into something watchable, despite the racist and sexist humor pervading nearly every scene.
Kirthana Ramisetti (Advika and the Hollywood Wives)
I went with him to Pretty In Pink four times so he could wallow in Molly's presence. The fourth time he turned to me at the end of the movie, grabbed my hand and told me he wanted to be just like Molly. Except I would have gone with Duckie, he told me. (Loaded)
Christios Tsiolkas
It is an easy thing to overlook true love. Our eyes are searching for event and objects Found in movies, Novels, And journals bursting with dreams. We glance above the murky reality. Our hearts do not notice the consistent presence Of loyalty, Friendship, And dishes again scrubbed clean
Cheryl Seely Savage (Give Me a Fragment: Glimpses into Motherhood, Depression, and Hope)
How do people leave these cycles when they don't have the resources I had or the support from their friends and family? How do they possibly stay strong enough every second of the day? I feel like all it takes is one weak, insecure moment in the presence of your ex to convince yourself you made the wrong decision. Anyone who has ever left a manipulative, abusive spouse and somehow stayed that course deserves a medal. A statue. A freaking superhero movie. Society has obviously been worshipping the wrong heroes this whole time because I'm convinced it takes less strength to pick up a building than it does to permanently leave an abusive situation.
Colleen Hoover (It Starts with Us, It Ends with Us Collection (It Ends with Us, #1-2))
feel like all it takes is one weak, insecure moment in the presence of your ex to convince yourself you made the wrong decision. Anyone who has ever left a manipulative, abusive spouse and somehow stayed that course deserves a medal. A statue. A freaking superhero movie.
Colleen Hoover (It Starts with Us (It Ends with Us, #2))
Ali pulled one of the few unoccupied chairs into what appeared to be neutral territory. Settling into it, she opened her computer. While she waited for her AirCard to connect, she listened to the talk buzzing around her. Sister Anselm was right. It was as though the presence of the computer rendered her invisible. The kids may have been there because of James, but they weren’t talking about him. They were more concerned with other issues—who had flunked which class and was having to go to summer school; who had dropped out and was going to get a GED; who had gotten tossed out of a local movie theater for fighting; and whose parents had kicked someone out of the house when they had figured out at the last minute that he wasn’t going to graduate.
J.A. Jance (Trial By Fire (Ali Reynolds, #5))
We’re more proficient than women at arm wrestling, fresco-painting, ice hockey and particle physics. We make better cabinets, sun decks and booster rockets. We know how to read a map. In the movies, most Westerns and martial arts films would be poorer without our presence. ...So let’s renew our male mission and wear our antlers high on our heads. Let’s stand up straight, aim well, and exercise our prerogative to leave the seat up. After all, we’re MEN, and we hold a proud heritage in our hands.
Rick Bayan
You grow predictable, your quirks no longer interesting but expected. Like a board game that you've played too many times to truly enjoy, a favorite movie that you don't feel compelled to watch all the way though anymore. You're comforted by your spouse's presence; yes, you still love them; but you are no longer thrilled by them, not in the way you once were. You are no longer surprised.
Janelle Brown (Watch Me Disappear)
I knew from experience that my sensitivity to what scripture calls "powers and principalities" was stronger some days than others. As I biked through downtown (Cochabamba, Bolivia), I saw groups of young men loitering on the street corners waiting for the next movie to start. I stopped and walked through a bookstore stacked with magazines depicting violence, sex, and gossip, endless forms of provocative advertisement and unnecessary articles imported from other parts of the world. I had the dark feeling of being surrounded by powers much greater than myself and felt the seductive allure of sin all around me. I got a glimpse of the evil behind all the horrendous realities that plague our world-extreme hunger, nuclear weapons, torture, exploitation, rape, child abuse, and various forms of oppression-and how they all have their small and sometimes unnoticed beginnings in the human heart. The demon is patient in the way it seeks to devour and destroy the work of God. I felt intensely the darkness of the world around me. After a period of aimless wandering, I biked to a small Carmelite convent close to the house of my hosts. A very friendly Carmelite sister spoke to me and invited me into the chapel to pray. She radiated joy, peace, and yes, light. She told me about the light that shines into the darkness without saying a word about it. As I looked around, I saw the images of Teresa of Avila and Therese of Liseaux, two sisters who taught in their own times that God speaks in subtle ways and that peace and certainty follow when we hear well. Suddenly, it seemed to me that these two saints were talking to me about another world, another life, another love. As I knelt down in the small and simple chapel, I knew that this place was filled with God's presence. Because of the prayers offered there day and night, the chapel was filled with light, and the spirit of darkness had not gotten a foothold there. My visit to the Carmelite convent helped me realize again that where evil seems to hold sway, God is not far away, and where God shows his presence, evil may not remain absent for very long. There always remains a choice to be made between the creative power of love and life and the destructive power of hatred and death. I, too, must make that choice myself, again and again. Nobody else, not even God, will make that choice for me.
Henri J.M. Nouwen
While we teach knowledge, we are losing that teaching which is the most important one for human development: the teaching which can only be given by the simple presence of a mature, loving person. In previous epochs of our own culture, or in China and India, the man most highly valued was the person with outstanding spiritual qualities. Even the teacher was not only, or even primarily, a source of information, but his function was to convey certain human attitudes. In contemporary capitalistic society -and the same holds true for Russian Communism- the men suggested for admiration and emulation are everything but bearers of significant spiritual qualities. Those are essentially in the public eye who give the average man a sense of vicarious satisfaction. Movie stars, radio entertainers, columnists, important business or government figures -these are the models for emulation. Their main qualification for this function is often that they have succeeded in making the news. Yet, the situation does not seem to be altogether hopeless. If one considers the fact that a man like Albert Schweitzer could become famous in the United States, if one visualizes the many possibilities to make our youth familiar with living and historical personalities who show what human beings can achieve as human beings, and not as entertainers (in the broad sense of the word), if one thinks of the great works of literature and art of all ages, there seems to be a chance of creating a vision of good human functioning, and hence of sensitivity to malfunctioning. If we should not succeed in keeping alive a vision of mature life, then indeed we are confronted with the probability that our whole cultural tradition will break down. This tradition is not primarily based on the transmission of certain kinds of knowledge, but of certain kinds of human traits. If the coming generations will not see these traits any more, a five-thousand-year-old culture will break down, even if its knowledge is transmitted and further developed.
Erich Fromm (The Art of Loving)
The mask lacks a presence or essence that is only there when I put it over my head, which is part of its genius. The mask is both vessel and void, and it drudges a vital aspect of the wearer, that it lays bear upon its surface.
Paul Tremblay (Horror Movie)
Srinagar is a city of bunkers. Of the world’s cities, it has the highest military presence. But Srinagar is also a city of absences. It has lost its nights to a decade and a half of curfews, and de facto curfews. It has lost its theatres. Regal, Shiraz, Neelam, Broadway — magical names I longed for throughout my childhood. They were closed before I had grown up enough to walk to a ticket counter on my own, to watch a bad Hindi movie. Srinagar has also lost its multi- religious character, with the migration of the Kashmiri Pandits in the early nineties.
Basharat Peer (Curfewed Night)
But I was even more surprised when he stuck around with me and smiled a full, toothy, letter-D-shaped movie star grin. The magazines said he was only twenty-eight, which was young for an executive chef but felt old to me. He looked like a man. Even when Elliott turned twenty-eight, I doubted he would look as manly as Pascal. Somehow, in the supermarket lighting, Pascal seemed hotter- more capable and more real. In restaurants, he blended in with the scenery of the meal. But here, holding his basket just like everyone else, looking at the discounted produce, getting lost in the aisles, his presence became even more magical, as if I were seeing a beautiful, powerful animal in the wild instead of at the zoo.
Jessica Tom (Food Whore)
The casting had been more difficult. Macdonnell and Meston both wanted William Conrad for the lead, but CBS objected. Conrad was known as a heavy from his movie roles (Body and Soul; Sorry, Wrong Number; The Killers). He was also a busy radio actor (Escape, Suspense, The Adventures of Sam Spade, many others) with a distinctive air presence. As Conrad told Hickman: “I think when they started casting for it, somebody said, ‘Good Christ, let’s not get Bill Conrad, we’re up to you-know-where with Bill Conrad.’ So they auditioned everybody, and as a last resort they called me. And I went in and read about two lines … and the next day they called me and said, ‘Okay, you have the job.
John Dunning (On the Air: The Encyclopedia of Old-Time Radio)
Just as I thought,” she said in English. He gathered his thoughts with difficulty and managed to say, “Um . . . what?” “You don’t know any Italian.” “Um, well . . .” He couldn’t stop staring at her. His mind was blank. He felt like one of those zombies in the horror movies that he loved to watch late at night: unable to move or speak of his own volition, an empty shell, powerless in the presence of a force much greater than himself. “Only a little bit. I mean, I know words like zucchini and fettucine and linguine.” This was terrible. This was awful. This was why zombies weren’t allowed to speak. “Basically, you know, I can say any ini word,” he said, trying to finish with a display of wit. He had heard somewhere that girls liked it if you could make them laugh. But Silvia did not laugh. In fact, the look she leveled at him was scorching. It was clear that, when it came to witty conversation, he had fallen far short of the mark.
Suzanne Harper (The Juliet Club)
She was so focused on the movie that she didn’t even notice the front door swing open and wasn’t aware of Dante’s presence until he spoke. “What are you watching?” he asked from almost directly behind her, and she nearly jumped out of her skin. “Crap,” she squeaked, lifting a hand to her chest. “You scared the stuffing out of me.” “Stuffing?” He raised an eyebrow at her language, and she wrinkled her nose. “I read somewhere that the baby can hear my voice. I don’t want him to pick up any bad language before he’s even born.” “He can hear us?” Dante looked completely disconcerted by that bit of news, and after shrugging out of his jacket and neatly placing it on the chair, he sat down on the couch next to her. “Seriously?” “Yep. Shocked the shi—sherbet out of me too.” He grinned, the expression so infectious she found herself grinning back. “How long do you think you’ll be able to keep that up?” he asked, his voice wobbling with laughter. “I don’t know, but I’m going to try my damnedest not to . . .” She paused, frowned, and then her shoulders sank as she grasped what she’d said. “Shit.” “Yeah, that’s what I thought,” he chuckled, toeing off his shiny shoes and propping his feet up on the table next to hers.
Natasha Anders (A Ruthless Proposition)
Miss Knight.” She paused, her hand on the doorknob. She didn’t turn to face him, merely waited for him to say whatever was left to say. “I would prefer someone older. Someone less like you.” Now what the hell did that mean? Someone less like her? “You know,” he said lamely when she turned to face him quizzically. To his credit he looked as confused as she felt. “Nope. Don’t have a clue.” Her voice was so icy that her words practically froze as they left her lips. “Someone with more experience. With less personality.” “What?” “You talk too much,” he said pointedly. “Your attitude is too familiar and too sarcastic.” She opened her mouth to say something, and he held up a finger to stop her. “And that was before everything that happened in Tokyo. You’re completely irreverent and have a bizarre sense of humor. I also have no wish to hear about reality television shows, pop music, manicures, Brangelina, Star Trek, or anything that’s trending on Twitter—not even secondhand through whispered telephone conversations when my assistant thinks I’m not paying attention.” Well, he’d certainly been a lot more attentive during those half hours in the mornings than she’d given him credit for. But one thing struck her as odd. “Star Trek?” she repeated. She loved the new movies but hardly ever publicly discussed them. “You’re constantly talking about how sick you are of the Cardassians,” he elaborated uncomfortably. Her eyes widened and she stifled a laugh. “Different kind of Kardashian,” she corrected. It would be hopeless to explain it to a man who clearly had no interest in pop culture—even while every model or actress he was publicly photographed with inserted him into the very scene he was so scornful of. Quite frankly, she was impressed that he even knew about the Cardassians in Star Trek, which attested to a level of geekdom that she would never have suspected of him. “So you’re looking for the anti-me?” “It shouldn’t be so hard to find the complete opposite of you. You are quite . . .” His brow lowered as he tried to find the correct word. “Singular.” “Thank you,” she said, ridiculously flattered until a closer glance at his straight face told her that it hadn’t been a compliment. Her fledgling smile died, and she once again—as she often did in his presence—fought the urge to roll her eyes. “Okay, so you’re looking for an old, boring, and competent assistant,” she itemized, and his lips thinned but he said nothing. “I’ll get on that right away, sir.
Natasha Anders (A Ruthless Proposition)
The General furrowed his brow just a bit to show his concern and understanding. As a nonwhite person, the General, like myself, knew he must be patient with white people, who were easily scared by the nonwhite. Even with liberal white people, one could go only so far, and with average white people one could barely go anywhere. The General was deeply familiar with the nature, nuances, and internal differences of white people, as was every nonwhite person who had lived here a good number of years. We ate their food, we watched their movies, we observed their lives and psyche via television and in everyday contact, we learned their language, we absorbed their subtle cues, we laughed at their jokes, even when made at our expense, we humbly accepted their condescension, we eavesdropped on their conversations in supermarkets and the dentist’s office, and we protected them by not speaking our own language in their presence, which unnerved them. We were the greatest anthropologists ever of the American people, which the American people never knew because our field notes were written in our own language in letters and postcards dispatched to our countries of origin, where our relatives read our reports with hilarity, confusion, and awe.
Viet Thanh Nguyen (The Sympathizer)
Racism was a constant presence and absence in the Obama White House. We didn’t talk about it much. We didn’t need to—it was always there, everywhere, like white noise. It was there when Obama said that it was stupid for a black professor to be arrested in his own home and got criticized for days while the white police officer was turned into a victim. It was there when a white Southern member of Congress yelled “You lie!” at Obama while he addressed a joint session of Congress. It was there when a New York reality show star built an entire political brand on the idea that Obama wasn’t born in the United States, an idea that was covered as national news for months and is still believed by a majority of Republicans. It was there in the way Obama was talked about in the right-wing media, which spent eight years insisting that he hated America, disparaging his every move, inventing scandals where there were none, attacking him for any time that he took off from work. It was there in the social media messages I got that called him a Kenyan monkey, a boy, a Muslim. And it was there in the refusal of Republicans in Congress to work with him for eight full years, something that Obama was also blamed for no matter what he did. One time, Obama invited congressional Republicans to attend a screening of Lincoln in the White House movie theater—a Steven Spielberg film about how Abraham Lincoln worked with Congress to pass the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery. Not one of them came.
Ben Rhodes (The World As It Is: Inside the Obama White House)
As a nonwhite person, the General, like myself, knew he must be patient with white people, who were easily scared by the nonwhite. Even with liberal white people, one could go only so far, and with average white people one could barely go anywhere. The General was deeply familiar with the nature, nuances and internal differences of white people, as was every nonwhite person who had lived here a good number of years. We ate their food, we watched their movies, we observed their lives and psyche via television and in everyday contact, we learned their language, we absorbed their subtle cues, we laughed at their jokes, even when made at our expense, we humbly accepted their condescension, we eavesdropped on their conversations in supermarkets and the dentist’s office, and we protected them by not speaking our own language in their presence, which unnerved them. We were the greatest anthropologists ever of the American people, which the American people never knew because our field notes were written in our own language in letters and postcards dispatched to our countries of origin, where our relatives read our reports with hilarity, confusion, and awe. Although the Congressman was joking, we probably did know white people better than they knew themselves, and we certainly knew white people better than they ever knew us.
Viet Thanh Nguyen (The Sympathizer (The Sympathizer, #1))
And years later too, when Martín would return to Buenos Aires from that remote region in the South and come to see him, out of that eager desire (Bruno thought) that causes men to cling to the last remaining traces of a person whom they have loved a great deal, those last traces of body and soul that the beloved has left behind in the world: in the vague, fragmentary immortality of photographs, of words spoken to others at one time or another, of a certain expression that someone remembers, or says he remembers, and even of those small objects that take on an inordinate symbolic value (a little box of matches, a ticket to a movie theater); objects or words that then bring about the miracle of giving that spirit a fleeting, intangible, though despairingly real presence, just as a fond memory is brought back by a breath of perfume or a snatch of music, a fragment that need not be important or profound and may indeed even be an unpretentious and even banal melody that made us laugh in those magic days because it was so vulgar, but that now, ennobled by death and eternal separation, seems moving and profound to us.
Ernesto Sabato (Sobre héroes y tumbas)
I wished there was a place you could go, and sit in a room like a movie theater and look through a catalogue of a zillion names and then you could press a button and a face would appear on the screen to tell you about the life that had been. It would be a living memorial to the generations who had gone on before, and you could hear their voices though those voices had been stilled for a hundred years. It seemed to me, as I walked in the presence of all those stilled voices that would never be heard again, that we were a wasteful breed. We had thrown away the past, and our future was impoverished for it.
Robert McCammon (The Southern Novels: Boy's Life, Mystery Walk, Gone South, and Usher's Passing)
Instead of a relaxing bubble bath, I had a front-row seat to an impromptu striptease. By my ridiculously gorgeous fucking hot fake boyfriend. The polite thing to do would be to close my eyes. Or yell out to announce my presence. Probably both. But I wasn't feeling very polite right now, so instead, I resurfaced and craned my neck to get a better look. Should have said something the minute he walked into the bathroom. I'd just wait this out--- it would be over in a few minutes. Then he slipped out of those snug boxers, and my heart nearly stopped. With his back facing me, he stepped into the shower, still oblivious that I was hidden in the corner bathtub, unable to take my eyes off him. Turning the faucet on, he drenched himself under the stream of hot water, before picking up my shampoo bottle, sniffing it, then squeezing out a generous amount. His hands worked methodically, kneading and massaging the shampoo all over his hair. Next, he pumped out blobs of my soap onto his hands, rubbing them together before lathering it all over his body. First on his neck, then on his arms, then on his back, followed by his chest. This wasn't just your normal, everyday, run-of-the-mill striptease. It was a real-life porn movie, and I was enjoying it too much to tear my gaze away. He stretched his neck, trying to get water onto his left side, and turned around, giving me a full-length, uncensored, breathtaking view of a gloriously naked Alec. So. Very. Naked. His hands kept working, rubbing the soap on his stomach, then down his thighs, all around his legs and backside, making showering look so sexy like it was nobody's business. That was when my mouth decided to betray my brain, producing a low, breathy sigh I'd never, ever heard before in my whole life, alerting him to my presence. Startled, he looked up and locked eyes with mine. Wet, naked Alec Mackenzie caught me watching him rub soap all over his body.
Cynthia Timoti (Salty, Spiced, and a Little Bit Nice)
In addition to connecting all things, ancient traditions suggest that the Field provides us with a reflection, an outer mirror of our inner experiences. As a pulsating, shimmering, living substance, the Field serves as a feedback mechanism of sorts. Through it, creation reflects our innermost feelings and thoughts in the form of our relationships, careers, and health. In the mirror, we can see our true beliefs—not just what we like to think we believe! To help visualize how this mirror works, I’m sometimes reminded of the “living” water in the science-fiction movie The Abyss. Set in the dark and uncharted depths of the ocean floor, a mysterious life-form makes itself known to the marooned crew of a deep-sea exploration vessel. (I’ll be brief and general here because I don’t want to spoil the story if you haven’t already seen it.) The nonphysical energy of the alien-like presence must express itself through something physical, and so uses the most abundant medium available at the bottom of the ocean: seawater. As an intelligent and seemingly endless tube of seawater, it finds its way into the disabled vessel, and then snakes its way through the corridors and doorways until it finds the crew huddled together in one room to conserve power. This is where the mirror comes in. As the watery life-form rises up from the floor and one end of the tube looks directly into the faces of the crew at eye level, a remarkable thing begins to happen. Every time one of the crew looks at the end of the tube, it mirrors that person’s face exactly as it appears in the moment. As the human face smiles, the water-tube smiles. When the human face laughs, that laugh is mirrored in the water. The tube has no judgment of what it’s being shown, and it doesn’t try to enhance or change what’s there in any way. It just reflects to the person in front of it what that person is in the moment.
Gregg Braden (Secrets of the Lost Mode of Prayer: The Hidden Power of Beauty, Blessing, Wisdom, and Hurt)
I was instantly lightheaded as I tried to process his presence, the power of Wes-in-the-flesh overwhelming after two years of watered-down, diluted memories.
Lynn Painter (Nothing Like the Movies (Better Than the Movies #2))
Your correspondents elect here to submit an opinion. Dark’s and Black’s movies are not for men who want to be aroused and maybe masturbate. They are for men who have problems with women and want to see them humiliated. Whether Bizarro-Sleaze might conceivably help armchair misogynists “work out” some of their anger at females is irrelevant. Catharsis is not these films’ intent. Their intent is to capitalize on a market-demand that quite clearly exists — these directors’ products, like Max Hardcore’s, are near-constant presences in Adult Video News’s Top Sellers and Renters lists. Dark’s and Black’s movies are vile. They are meant to be. And the truth is that inyour-face vileness is part of the schizoid direction porn’s been moving in all decade. For just as adult entertainment has become more “mainstream” — meaning more widely available, more acceptable, more lucrative, more chic: Boogie Nights — it has become also more “extreme,” and not just on the Bizarro margins. In nearly all hetero porn now there is a new emphasis on anal sex, painful penetrations, degrading tableaux, and the (at least) psychological abuse of women. In certain respects, this extremism may simply be porn’s tracing Hollywood entertainment’s own arc: It’s hardly news that TV and legit film have also gotten more violent and explicit and raw in the last decade. So maybe. And yet there’s something else.
David Foster Wallace (Consider the Lobster and Other Essays)
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Ali
Download@~ 120A Railway Colony (․2025․) FullMovie Free Online On English The address 120A Railway Colony represents far more than just a location. Like many railway colonies across India, it carries decades of history, quiet charm, and the legacy of one of the country’s largest and oldest institutions — the Indian Railways. For thousands of families, homes like the one at 120A Railway Colony are symbols of stability, community living, and a lifestyle shaped by the rhythms of railway service. CLICK HERE TO WATCH CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD --- A Living Piece of Railway Heritage Railway colonies were originally built to provide housing for railway employees, and over time, they developed into self-sustained micro-townships. A residence like 120A typically sits within a spacious, tree-lined neighborhood featuring vintage British-era architecture mixed with modern extensions. Many such colonies still retain old brick quarters, wide internal roads, and open grounds that preserve the legacy of the pre-independence railway system. --- Community and Culture What makes a railway colony unique is its strong sense of community. At 120A Railway Colony, one would often find neighbors who have lived there for generations, forming deep bonds that go well beyond casual greetings. Children grow up playing in common open spaces, festivals are celebrated collectively, and the presence of railway officers, staff, and retirees creates a socially vibrant environment. These colonies are also known for their safety, greenery, and peaceful surroundings — a contrast to the fast-paced urban environments outside their gates. --- Daily Life and Surroundings Life in a house like 120A Railway Colony usually revolves around a calm, routine-based atmosphere. The proximity to railway workshops, stations, or administrative offices makes commuting convenient for employees. Markets, schools, and recreational areas are often located within walking distance, giving the colony the feel of a close-knit township. Mornings are marked by the distant sound of trains, echoing whistles, and the quiet activity of employees heading to duty. Evenings bring with them a comforting calm as families gather outside or children play in the colony yards. --- Why Railway Colony Addresses Remain Special In today’s real estate landscape dominated by apartments and gated societies, railway colonies offer something uniquely nostalgic — wide spaces, strong community ties, and a connection to a national institution. Many residents describe their time in colonies like the one at 120A as some of the best years of their lives. Whether it is old trees providing shade, the simplicity of the quarters, or the disciplined yet friendly environment, these colonies remain living stories of India’s railway heritage. --- Final Thoughts A home at 120A Railway Colony is not just an address — it is part of a cultural and historical fabric. It embodies tradition, community values, and a slower, more grounded lifestyle. For former and current railway families, such addresses hold emotional weight, memories, and a sense of belonging that continues long after they move away.
Ali
Watch!! 120A Railway Colony (2025) FullMovie Free Download 1080p HD The address 120A Railway Colony represents far more than just a location. Like many railway colonies across India, it carries decades of history, quiet charm, and the legacy of one of the country’s largest and oldest institutions — the Indian Railways. For thousands of families, homes like the one at 120A Railway Colony are symbols of stability, community living, and a lifestyle shaped by the rhythms of railway service. CLICK HERE TO WATCH CLICK HERE TO DOWNLOAD --- A Living Piece of Railway Heritage Railway colonies were originally built to provide housing for railway employees, and over time, they developed into self-sustained micro-townships. A residence like 120A typically sits within a spacious, tree-lined neighborhood featuring vintage British-era architecture mixed with modern extensions. Many such colonies still retain old brick quarters, wide internal roads, and open grounds that preserve the legacy of the pre-independence railway system. --- Community and Culture What makes a railway colony unique is its strong sense of community. At 120A Railway Colony, one would often find neighbors who have lived there for generations, forming deep bonds that go well beyond casual greetings. Children grow up playing in common open spaces, festivals are celebrated collectively, and the presence of railway officers, staff, and retirees creates a socially vibrant environment. These colonies are also known for their safety, greenery, and peaceful surroundings — a contrast to the fast-paced urban environments outside their gates. --- Daily Life and Surroundings Life in a house like 120A Railway Colony usually revolves around a calm, routine-based atmosphere. The proximity to railway workshops, stations, or administrative offices makes commuting convenient for employees. Markets, schools, and recreational areas are often located within walking distance, giving the colony the feel of a close-knit township. Mornings are marked by the distant sound of trains, echoing whistles, and the quiet activity of employees heading to duty. Evenings bring with them a comforting calm as families gather outside or children play in the colony yards. --- Why Railway Colony Addresses Remain Special In today’s real estate landscape dominated by apartments and gated societies, railway colonies offer something uniquely nostalgic — wide spaces, strong community ties, and a connection to a national institution. Many residents describe their time in colonies like the one at 120A as some of the best years of their lives. Whether it is old trees providing shade, the simplicity of the quarters, or the disciplined yet friendly environment, these colonies remain living stories of India’s railway heritage. --- Final Thoughts A home at 120A Railway Colony is not just an address — it is part of a cultural and historical fabric. It embodies tradition, community values, and a slower, more grounded lifestyle. For former and current railway families, such addresses hold emotional weight, memories, and a sense of belonging that continues long after they move away.
Ali
There are days when I wish I were numb, when I’m desperate to feel nothing. I want to be simple and cold and totally without feeling. Empathy has a large presence in my life, and it can cast a very long shadow. I can be watching a television drama or a movie, listening to a song or looking at a photograph, listening to someone’s story or writing my own, and my heart and mood will sink. Like a punctum they pierce me without context, a feeling I am very used to now and tired of.
Baek Se-hee (I Want to Die But I Want to Eat Tteokpokki)