Quietly Surviving Quotes

In everybody’s life there’s a point of no return. And in a very few cases, a point where you can’t go forward anymore. And when we reach that point, all we can do is quietly accept the fact. That’s how we survive.

The purpose of school should be to prepare kids for the rest of their lives, but too often what kids need to be prepared for is surviving the school day itself.

Stay low, stay quiet, keep it simple, don't expect too much, enjoy what you have.

i have survived far too much to go quietly let a meteor take me call the thunder for backup my death will be grand the land will crack the sun will eat itself - the day I leave

We are not defined by the things we do in order to survive. We do not apologize for them,” she says quietly, eyes never leaving mine. “Maybe they have broken you, but you are a sharper weapon because of it. And it is time to strike.

I call my accent Frenglian. A wee bit of French mixed with English and Sicilian." She emitted a small chuckle at her new made-up word.

She sucked in a shuddering breath, and he pulled back far enough for them to share breath. Her fingers shook as she brushed them against his mouth, and his control nearly shredded apart right there. 'What are you waiting for?' he said, the words near guttural. 'Bastard,' she murmured, and kissed him. Her mouth was soft and warm, and he bit back a groan. His body went still—his entire world went still—at that whisper of a kiss, the answer to a question he’d asked for centuries. He realized he was staring only when she withdrew slightly. His fingers tightened at her waist. 'Again,' he breathed. She slid out of his grip. 'If we live through tomorrow, you’ll get the rest.' He didn’t know whether to laugh or roar. 'Are you trying to bribe me into surviving?' She smiled at last. And damn if it didn’t kill him, the quiet joy in her face. They had walked out of darkness and pain and despair together. They were still walking out of it. So that smile … It struck him stupid every time he saw it and realized it was for him.

1. Organize before they rise! 2. They feel no fear, why should you? 3. Use your head: cut off theirs. 4. Blades don't need reloading. 5. Ideal protection = tight clothes, short hair. 6. Get up the staircase, then destroy it. 7. Get out of the car, get onto the bike. 8. Keep moving, keep low, keep quiet, keep alert! 9. No place is safe, only safer. 10. The zombie may be gone, but the threat lives on.

When you relate to thoughts obsessively, you are actually feeding them because thoughts need your attention to survive. Once you begin to pay attention to them and categorize them, then they become very powerful. You are feeding them energy because you are not seeing them as simple phenomena. If one tries to quiet them down, that is another way of feeding them.

Surviving is one thing," he said quietly, his voice suddenly calmer, "but you've got to have a reason to do it. There's no point in living if you don't have anything worth living for.

Keeping quiet is how I survived.

Kafka, in everybody's life there's a point of no return. And in a very few cases, a point where you can't go forward anymore. And when we reach that point, all we can do is quietly accept the fact. That's how we survive.

I hate crickets,” he said. “Yes,” she replied. “Crickets are like cilantro. You either love ‘em or hate ‘em." “Did you just say cilantro?” The look on his face suggested she had just lost her mind. 

I couldn't keep a fish alive," she said. "I kill plants just by looking at them." "I suspect I would have the same problem," Mark said, eyeing the fish. "It is too bad - I was going to name it Magnus, because it has sparkly scales." At that, Cristina giggled. Magnus Bane was the High Warlock of Brooklyn, and he had a penchant for glitter. "I suppose I had better let him go free," Mark said. Before anyone could say anything, he made his way to the railing of the pier and emptied the bag, fish and all, into the sea. "Does anyone want to tell him that goldfish are freshwater fish and can't survive in the ocean?" said Julian quietly. "Not really," said Cristina. "Did he just kill Magnus?" Emma asked, but before Julian could answer, Mark whirled around.

There was a pain that came with constant disapproval; a sense of having lost something unnamed, unknown. Elsa had survived it by being quiet, by not demanding or seeking attention, by accepting that she was loved, but unliked.

Kropp on the other hand is a thinker. He proposes that a declaration of war should be a kind of popular festival with entrance-tickets and bands, like a bull fight. Then in the arena the ministers and generals of the two countries, dressed in bathing-drawers and armed with clubs, can have it out on themselves. Whoever survives the country wins. That would be much simpler and more than just this arrangement, where the wrong people do the fighting

The clock holds me nowhere. Nowhere. Nowhere. There is nothing else but now and the shifting depth of the night. I sit at a table alone smoking cigarettes and drinking coffee and listening and surviving. I should not be here or anywhere. I should not be breathing or taking space. I should not have been given this moment or anything else. I should not have this opportunity again to live. I do not deserve it or deserve anything yet it is here and I am here and I Have it all of it still. I won't have it again. This moment or this chance they are the same and they are mine if I choose them and I do. I want them. Now and as long as I can have them they are both precious and fleeting and gone in the blink of an eye don't waste them. A moment and an opportunity and a life, all in the unseen tick of a clock holding me nowhere. My heart is beating. The walls are pale and quiet. I am surviving.

You see, I want a lot. Maybe I want it all: the darkness of each endless fall, the shimmering light of each ascent. So many are alive who don't seem to care. Casual, easy, they move in the world as though untouched. But you take pleasure in the faces of those who know they thirst. You cherish those who grip you for survival. You are not dead yet, it's not too late to open your depths by plunging into them and drink in the life that reveals itself quietly there.

Eating at a time like this was important, all the more so because it was the last thing anyone wanted

It’s not enough to survive what we do, Tam. We must also endure it.” “What’s the difference?” she asked. “One concerns the body, the other the mind. Every battle has a cost,” he said quietly. “Even the ones we win.

I’m not taking a chance. I feel like I can’t breathe without you. I’m just doing what I need to do to survive. It’s as simple as that.” “Then let me be your air,” he says quietly.

Slowly, Genya stood, and silence fell around her. "How old are you, Yuri ?" "Eighteen, moi soverenyi" "When i was a year older than you, the Darkling set his mosnters on me, creatures born of the power you venerate so much. They had a taste for human flesh. He had to force them to stop." "Then he was not so cruel-" Genya held up a hand, and Nikolai was glad to see Yuri shut is mouth. "The Darkling didn't want me to die. He wante me to live - like this." "More fool of him,"sais Nikolai quietly, "to let such soldier survive.

He leaned toward me. Suddenly the space between us shrank. "I will do everything in my power to ensure your survival, and should the need arise, I will put myself between danger and you." His voice was quiet and intimate. "Do not hesitate to use me as your shield." His voice sent tiny shivers through me. Wow.

You saved me,'" said Seneca softly. "You took a direct hit, and you survived because of your gift." Jake was slightly startled when she spoke. Seneca’s voice had changed. It was airy and light. Her spunky, deep voice was gone, as were her golden-blonde locks. Her hair was completely white, with silver streaks highlighting it throughout. He had noticed the beginnings of the change before they teleported. The transformation was now complete. Her eyes were a brilliant, majestic blue with flecks of silver that caught the light. She had approached quietly, and her presence made them all listen intently. Seneca was the Druid of the true prophecy. 

i have survived far too much to go quietly

But it's also a reminder that being quiet doesn't always signify weakness. Sometimes it takes great strength to find that silence. Sometimes it takes incredible strength to survive.

Maybe it's true that shared trauma brings people closer together-a common hardship, a battle to survive-because when times are quiet people relax and go their own separate ways. They're lulled into believing they've got everything under control and don't need what they did before.

Since that night a couple of weeks ago when Valerie had stayed with him, they had barely separated. The stories of Rabbit’s Revenge droned on and on talking of the impending doom of the planet and the international scientific community’s various attempts to determine a course of action to prevent it. For Jeremy, however, each passing day left him feeling more and more certain he was missing something. It was just a nagging little sensation that lingered like an itch on the back of his neck. With Valerie now firmly implanted in his life, it was a wonder he even thought about it at all, but during his quiet moments and when he awoke in the mornings or even during his more intense workouts, the sensation crept back up on him. It seemed to center around the experience of having his life pass before his eyes, but beyond that it was just nebulous. And annoying.

You're afraid of heights," I say. "How do you survive in the Dauntless compound?" "I ignore my fear," he says. "When I make decisions, I pretend it doesn't exist." I stare at him for a second. I can't help it. To me there's a difference between not being afraid and acting in spite of fear, as he does. I have been staring at him too long. "What?" he says quietly. "Nothing.

You don’t forget your first. You never forget the boy who taught you how to survive as a stranger in your own body.

I've been desperately unhappy in my life." Her voice was quiet. "Have you, Chief Inspector?" It wasn't a response he could have predicted. He nodded. "I thought so. I think people who have had that experience and survived have a responsibility to help others. We can't let someone drown where we were saved.

You're my home," I said quietly.

You would not believe half of what is happening in King’s Landing, sweetling. Cersei stumbles from one idiocy to the next, helped along by her council of the deaf, the dim, and the blind. I always anticipated that she would beggar the realm and destroy herself, but I never expected she would do it quite so fast. It is quite vexing. I had hoped to have four or five quiet years to plant some seeds and allow some fruits to ripen, but now . . . it is a good thing that I thrive on chaos. What little peace and order the five kings left us will not long survive the three queens, I fear.” -Littlefinger

Grieving is intense and it is non-stop intense. Even if things are quiet, and you're sitting there in your chair, kind of staring off into space, inside, the intensity is raging. - Lori Ennis

This moment and this chance, they are the same, and they are mine if I choose them,and I do. I want them. Now and as long as I can have them they are both precious and fleeting and gone in the blink of an eye, don't waste them. A moment and an opportunity and a life, all in the unseen tick of a clock holding me nowhere. My heart is beating. The walls are pale and quiet. I am surviving.

..I always recognize the foces that will shape my life. I let them do their work. Sometimes they tear through my life like a hurricane. Sometimes they simply shift the ground under me, so that I stand on different earth, and something or someone has been swallowed up. I steady myself, in the earthquate. I lie down, and let the hurricane pass over me. I never fight. Afterwards I look around me, and I say, 'Ah, so this at least is left for me. And that dear person has also survived.' I quietly inscribe on the stone tablet of my heart the name which has gone forever. Th inscription is a thing of agony. Then I start on my way again.

Each time I reach for food to silence hunger, to indulge taste, it remains quietly loyal granting life’s continuance at the cost of its own.

When people think of food stamps they don't envision someone like me, someone plain faced and white, someone like the girl they'd known in highschool, someone who'd been quiet but nice, someone like a neighbor, someone like them. Maybe that made them too nervous about their own situation. Maybe they saw in me the chance of their own fragile circumstances, that with one lost job, one divorce, they'd be in the same place as me.

I was trapped. The day would be hell. I would suffer. I felt I might not survive. I needed a dark, quiet room, my videos, my bed, my pills. I hadn't been this far from home in many months. I was frightened.

Because of you I've survived this long and gotten a chance to know my small part of the world. But it's not enough. It's not your fault. It's this impossible life. I'm not doing this just because of Olly. Or maybe I am. I don't know. I don't know how to explain it. It's Olly and it's not-Olly at the same time. It's like I can't look at the world in the old way anymore. I found this new part of myself when I met him and the new part doesn't know how to stay quiet and still and just observe.

Well, I'm glad you're so amused," I said, running my fingers across the railing. Maxon hopped up to sit on the railing, looking very relaxed. "You're always amusing. Get used to it." Hmm. He was almost being funny. "So...about what you said...," he started tentatively. "Which part? The part about me calling you names or fighting with my mom or saying food was my motivation?" I rolled my eyes. He laughed once. "The part about me being good..." "Oh. What about it?" Those few sentences suddenly seemed more embarrassing than anything else I'd said. I ducked my head down and twisted a piece of my dress. "I appreciate you making things look authentic, but you didn't need to go that far." My head snapped up. How could he think that? "Maxon, that wasn't for the sake of the show. If you had asked me a month ago what my honest opinion of you was, it would have been very different. But now I know you, and I know the truth, and you are everything I said you were. And more." He was quiet, but there was a small smile on his face. "Thank you," he finally said. "Anytime." Maxon cleared his throat. "He'll be lucky, too." He got down from his makeshift seat and walked to my side of the balcony. "Huh?" "Your boyfriend. When he comes to his senses and begs you to take him back," Maxon said matter-of-factly. I had to laugh. No such thing would happen in y world. "he's not my boyfriend anymore. And he made it pretty clear he was gone with me." Even I could hear the tiny bit of hope in my voice. "Not possible. He'll have seen you on TV by now and fallen for you all over again. Though, in my opinion, you're still much too good for the dog." Maxon spoke almost as if he was bored, like he'd seen this happen a million times. "Speaking of which!" he said a bit louder. "If you don't want me to be in love with you, you're going to have to stop looking so lovely. First thing tomorrow I'm having your maids sew some potato sacks together for you." I hit his arm. "Shut up, Maxon." "I'm not kidding. You're too beautiful for your own good. Once you leave, we'll have to send some of the guards with you. You'll never survive on your own, poor thing." He said all this with mock pity. "I can't help it." I sighed. "One can never help being born into perfection." I fanned my face as if being so pretty was exhausting. "No, I don't suppose you can help it.

I’m haunted. We all are, I guess. We’re parentless, friendless, unloved, abandoned. The spirits of our deceased emotional anchors and proofs of existence will follow and demean us until we too roam a quiet lifeless world alongside them — unable to speak — our histories written in beach sand.

So many are alive who don’t seem to care. Casual, easy, they move in the world as though untouched. But you take pleasure in the faces of those who know they thirst. You cherish those who grip you for survival. You are not dead yet, it’s not too late to open your depths by plunging into them and drink in the life that reveals itself quietly there.

Right-wing women have surveyed the world: they find it a dangerous place. They see that work subjects them to more danger from more men; it increases the risk of sexual exploitation. They see that creativity and originality in their kind are ridiculed; they see women thrown out of the circle of male civilization for having ideas, plans, visions, ambitions. They see that traditional marriage means selling to one man, not hundreds: the better deal. They see that the streets are cold, and that the women on them are tired, sick, and bruised. They see that the money they can earn will not make them independent of men and that they will still have to play the sex games of their kind: at home and at work too. They see no way to make their bodies authentically their own and to survive in the world of men. They know too that the Left has nothing better to offer: leftist men also want wives and whores; leftist men value whores too much and wives too little. Right-wing women are not wrong. They fear that the Left, in stressing impersonal sex and promiscuity as values, will make them more vulnerable to male sexual aggression, and that they will be despised for not liking it. They are not wrong. Right-wing women see that within the system in which they live they cannot make their bodies their own, but they can agree to privatized male ownership: keep it one-on-one, as it were. They know that they are valued for their sex— their sex organs and their reproductive capacity—and so they try to up their value: through cooperation, manipulation, conformity; through displays of affection or attempts at friendship; through submission and obedience; and especially through the use of euphemism—“femininity, ” “total woman, ” “good, ” “maternal instinct, ” “motherly love. ” Their desperation is quiet; they hide their bruises of body and heart; they dress carefully and have good manners; they suffer, they love God, they follow the rules. They see that intelligence displayed in a woman is a flaw, that intelligence realized in a woman is a crime. They see the world they live in and they are not wrong. They use sex and babies to stay valuable because they need a home, food, clothing. They use the traditional intelligence of the female—animal, not human: they do what they have to to survive.

More than anything, this place feels familiar. I bury my hands in the hot sand and think about the embodiment of memory or, more specifically, our natural ability to carry the past in our bodies and minds. Individually, every grain of sand brushing against my hands represents a story, an experience, and a block for me to build upon for the next generation. I quietly thank this ancestor of mine for surviving the trip so that I could one day return.

Anger is an assertion of rights and worth. It is communication, equality, and knowledge. It is intimacy, acceptance, fearlessness, embodiment, revolt, and reconciliation. Anger is memory and rage. It is rational thought and irrational pain. Anger is freedom, independence, expansiveness, and entitlement. It is justice, passion, clarity, and motivation. Anger is instrumental, thoughtful, complicated, and resolved. In anger, whether you like it or not, there is truth. Anger is the demand of accountability, It is evaluation, judgment, and refutation. It is reflective, visionary, and participatory. It's a speech act, a social statement, an intention, and a purpose. It's a risk and a threat. A confirmation and a wish. It is both powerlessness and power, palliative and a provocation. In anger, you will find both ferocity and comfort, vulnerability and hurt. Anger is the expression of hope. How much anger is too much? Certainly not the anger that, for many of us, is a remembering of a self we learned to hide and quiet. It is willful and disobedient. It is survival, liberation, creativity, urgency, and vibrancy. It is a statement of need. An insistence of acknowledgment. Anger is a boundary. Anger is boundless. An opportunity for contemplation and self-awareness. It is commitment. Empathy. Self-love. Social responsibility. If it is poison, it is also the antidote. The anger we have as women is an act of radical imagination. Angry women burn brighter than the sun. In the coming years, we will hear, again, that anger is a destructive force, to be controlled. Watch carefully, because not everyone is asked to do this in equal measure. Women, especially, will be told to set our anger aside in favor of a kinder, gentler approach to change. This is a false juxtaposition. Reenvisioned, anger can be the most feminine of virtues: compassionate, fierce, wise, and powerful. The women I admire most—those who have looked to themselves and the limitations and adversities that come with our bodies and the expectations that come with them—have all found ways to transform their anger into meaningful change. In them, anger has moved from debilitation to liberation. Your anger is a gift you give to yourself and the world that is yours. In anger, I have lived more fully, freely, intensely, sensitively, and politically. If ever there was a time not to silence yourself, to channel your anger into healthy places and choices, this is it.

You make me calm,” I said quietly, “or at least calmer. How do you know how to do that? The way you touch me, the way you look at me…I don’t know what it means.

Faith is a quiet certainty that there is both a higher purpose to life and a higher power that oversees that purpose. Faith is knowing that we do not have to go it alone during our darkest hours and, even when we feel utterly victimized and weak, there is still something brighter, purer, and more potent than anything we can imagine that cares enough to reach out and offer a shoulder for us to lean upon. The object of faith takes many forms and many names, but the universal truth is faith itself.

Bastard,” she murmured, and kissed him. Her mouth was soft and warm, and he bit back a groan. His body went still—his entire world went still—at that whisper of a kiss, the answer to a question he’d asked for centuries. He realized he was staring only when she withdrew slightly. His fingers tightened at her waist. “Again,” he breathed. She slid out of his grip. “If we live through tomorrow, you’ll get the rest.” He didn’t know whether to laugh or roar. “Are you trying to bribe me into surviving?” She smiled at last. And damn if it didn’t kill him, the quiet joy in her face.

No species has ever survived by trying to cling to what's gone. You can't exist if you're trying to get back to an environment or culture or climate that's changed. You have to adapt if you want to keep going.

I didn’t know yet how wanting to die could be a bloodsong in your body that lives with you your whole life. I didn’t know then how deeply my mother’s song had swum into my sister and into me. I didn’t know that something like wanting to die could take form in one daughter as the ability to quietly surrender, and in the other as the ability to drive into death head-on. I didn’t know we were our mother’s daughters after all.

The war didn’t spring on me all at once. Instead, like a cat, it stalked me quietly. There might have been a rustle of leaves, a glint of golden eye. But like a mouse, I didn’t believe it was there until it pounced.

You know Anne,' he said quietly, 'when I am with a Hmong or a French or an American person, I am always the one who laughs last at a joke. I am the chameleon animal. You can place me anyplace, and I will survive, but I will not belong. I must tell you that I do not really belong anywhere.

Downtime, whether it is a good night’s sleep, a nap, or simply a few quiet moments of relaxation in the middle of the day, is important for turning learning into long-term memories.

I sucked a huge breath of air into my collapsed lungs. Once I could breathe again, I examined Ren’s back. His white shirt was dirty and torn, and his skin was scratched and bleeding in several places. I took a wet shirt from the bag to clean his scratches, while removing little pieces of gravel embedded in his skin. When I was finished, I grabbed Ren around the waist in a fierce hug. He wrapped his arms around me and pulled me close. I whispered against his chest quietly but firmly, “Thank you. But don’t ever…ever…ever do that again!” He laughed. “If I get results like this, I surely will do it again.” “You will not!” Ren reluctantly let me go, and I began mumbling, complaining about tigers, men, and bugs. He seemed very pleased with himself for surviving a near-death experience. I could practically hear him chanting to himself: I overcame. I conquered. I’m a man, etc, etc. I smirked. men! No matter what century they’re from, they’re all the same.

In the rain forest, no niche lies unused. No emptiness goes unfilled. No gasp of sunlight goes untrapped. In a million vest pockets, a million life-forms quietly tick. No other place on earth feels so lush. Sometimes we picture it as an echo of the original Garden of Eden—a realm ancient, serene, and fertile, where pythons slither and jaguars lope. But it is mainly a world of cunning and savage trees. Truant plants will not survive. The meek inherit nothing. Light is a thick yellow vitamin they would kill for, and they do. One of the first truths one learns in the rain forest is that there is nothing fainthearted or wimpy about plants.

Before I dozed off, I did not forget to get on my knees and thank God for helping me to live through this day and to ask His help on D+1. I would live this war one day at a time, and I promised myself that if I survived, I would find a small farm somewhere in the Pennsylvania countryside and spend the remainder of my life in quiet and peace.

The rain forest was not a garden of easy abundance, but precisely the opposite. Its quiet, shaded halls of leafy opulence were not a sanctuary, but rather the greatest natural battlefield anywhere on the planet, hosting an unremitting and remorseless fight for survival that occupied every single one of its inhabitants, every minute of every day.

I know how you refuse to thank the Plague. It is understandable, admirable, even, how valiantly you despise the thing that made your survival so difficult. But I do thank the Plague. I whisper my gratitude for it when you are sound asleep in my arms, when your fingers flick the tip of my nose. In the quiet moments, I thank the Plague for you. If it weren't for the dividing of Ordinaries and Elites so many years ago, I would have never found my way to you. My coins are always at risk in your presence, but no saving of my life would have been necessary that day. No Silencers. No Purging Trials. No stolen moments under the willow. When I thank the Plague, it is not for the power it has gifted me, but for the privilege of you. Nothing makes me stronger than the weakness that is you, Paedyn Gray. And if, in the next lifetime, you choose to steal from me again, I would happily give you all my soul if it meant a place besides yours. But until then, I will watch you become another's reason to thank the Plague. You, Pae, are my inevitable. (I love you.)

Whether we know it or not, we transmit the presence of everyone we have ever known, as though by being in each other's presence we exchange our cells, pass on some of our life force, and then we go on carrying that other person in our body, not unlike springtime when certain plants in fields we walk through attach their seeds in the form of small burrs to our socks, our pants, our caps, as if to say, "Go on, take us with you, carry us to root in another place." This is how we survive long after we are dead. This is why it is important who we become, because we pass it on.

I do not know, really, how we will survive without places like the Inner Gorge of the Grand Canyon to visit. Once in a lifetime, even, is enough. To feel the stripping down, an ebb of the press of conventional time, a radical change of proportion, an unspoken respect for others that elicits keen emotional pleasure, a quick intimate pounding of the heart. The living of life, any life, involves great and private pain, much of which we share with no one. In such places as the Inner Gorge the pain trails away from us. It is not so quiet there or so removed that you can hear yourself think, that you would even wish to; that comes later. You can hear your heart beat. That comes first.

Here, on the borders of death, life follows an amazingly simply course, it is limited to what is most necessary, all else lies buried in gloomy sleep;—in that besides our primitiveness and our survival. Were we more subtly differentiated we must long since have gone mad, have deserted, or have fallen. As in a polar expedition, every expression of life must serve only the preservation of existence, and is absolutely focused on that. All else is banished because it would consume energies unnecessarily. That is the only way to save ourselves.

Our scars define us,” Maddis said quietly, the tip of her finger tracing the three slashed lines. “They tell a story of courage and survival. They tell of who we are at our deepest being, of the challenges we’ve faced and overcome.” Whispering now, she patted Kiva’s hand and finished, “Not all scars are as visible as this. I daresay you have many more on the inside. But never forget that every scar is beautiful. And you should never, ever, be ashamed of them.

Some people survive and talk about it. Some people survive and go silent. Some people survive and create. Everyone deals with unimaginable pain in their own way, and everyone is entitled to that, without judgment. So the next time you look at someone’s life covetously, remember…you may not want to endure what they are enduring right now, at this moment, whilst they sit so quietly before you, looking like a calm ocean on a sunny day. Remember how vast the ocean’s boundaries are. Whilst somewhere the water is calm, in another place in the very same ocean, there is a colossal storm.

It’s about the call of his conscience. “It’s about the survival of the planet,” he says. “Nobody is going to care who won or lost any election when the earth is uninhabitable.” If you’re a sensitive sort, then you may be in the habit of pretending to be more of a politician and less cautious or single-mindedly focused than you actually are. But in this chapter I’m asking you to rethink this view. Without people like you, we will, quite literally, drown.

Hemingway never said any of this. It's all AI-generated bullshit. The hardest lesson I’ve had to learn as an adult is the relentless need to keep going, no matter how shattered I feel inside." This truth is both raw and universal. Life doesn’t pause when our hearts are heavy, our minds are fractured, or our spirits feel like they’re unraveling. It keeps moving—unrelenting, unapologetic—demanding that we move with it. There’s no time to stop, no pause for repair, no moment of stillness where we can gently piece ourselves back together. The world doesn’t wait, even when we need it to. What makes this even harder is that no one really prepares us for it. As children, we grow up on a steady diet of stories filled with happy endings, tales of redemption and triumph where everything always falls into place. But adulthood strips away those comforting narratives. Instead, it reveals a harsh truth: survival isn’t glamorous or inspiring most of the time. It’s wearing a mask of strength when you’re falling apart inside. It’s showing up when all you want is to retreat. It’s choosing to move forward, step by painful step, when your heart begs for rest. And yet, we endure. That’s the miracle of being human—we endure. Somewhere in the depths of our pain, we find reserves of strength we didn’t know we possessed. We learn to hold space for ourselves, to be the comfort we crave, to whisper words of hope when no one else does. Over time, we realize that resilience isn’t loud or grandiose; it’s a quiet defiance, a refusal to let life’s weight crush us entirely. Yes, it’s messy. Yes, it’s exhausting. And yes, there are days when it feels almost impossible to take another step. But even then, we move forward. Each tiny step is proof of our resilience, a reminder that even in our darkest moments, we’re still fighting, still refusing to give up. That fight—that courage—is the quiet miracle of survival.

I said it so quiet the syllables never survived my mouth.

We buy things. We wear them or put them on our walls, or sit on them, but anyone who wants to can take them away from us. Or break them. ... Long after he's dead, someone else will own those stupid little boxes, and then someone after him, just as someone owned them before he did. But no one ever thinks of that: objects survive us and go on living. It's stupid to believe we own them. And it's sinful for them to be so important.

But I’ve come to realize that this continent is dying a slow death. Europe is receding quietly into history. It’s old and tired, and its young are so pessimistic about the prospects of the future they refuse to have enough children to ensure their own survival. They believe in nothing but their thirty-five-hour workweek and their August vacation.

I take a breath. Words seem suddenly trite and useless, so I step forward and grab Elias’s hands, remembering Pop. Touch heals, Laia. I hold fast to him, trying to put everything I feel into that touch. I hope your Tribe is all right. I hope they survive the Martials. I’m truly, truly sorry. It’s not enough. But it’s all I have. After a moment, Elias lets out a breath and leans his forehead against mine. “Tell me what you told me that night in my room at Blackcliff,” he murmurs. “What your Nan used to say to you.” “As long as there is life”—I can hear Nan’s warm voice as I say it—“there is hope.” Elias lifts his head and looks down at me, the coolness in his eyes replaced by that raw, unquenchable fire. I forget to breathe. “Don’t you forget it,” he says. “Ever.” I nod. The minutes pass, and neither of us pull away, instead finding solace in the coolness of the night and the quiet company of the stars.

The drüskelle gave their oath to Fjerda, but to their god as well. If they could be made to see miracles where once they’d seen abomination, what else might change? I have been made to protect you. His duty to his god, his duty to Nina. Maybe they were the same thing. What if Djel’s hand had raised the waters the night of the wrathful storm that wrecked the drüskelle ship and bound Matthias and Nina together? Matthias was running through the streets of a foreign city, into dangers he did not know, but for the first time since he’d looked into Nina’s eyes and seen his own humanity reflected back at him, the war inside him quieted. We’ll find a way to change their minds, she’d said. All of them. He would locate Nina. They would survive this night. They would free themselves of this damp, misbegotten city, and then … Well, then they’d change the world.

There are any number of reasons to want novels to survive. The way [Jonathan] Franzen thinks about it is that books can do things, socially useful things, that other media can't. He cites -- as one does -- the philosopher Soren Kierkegaard and his idea of busyness: that state of constant distraction that allows people to avoid difficult realities and maintain self-deceptions. With the help of cell phones, e-mail and handheld games, it's easier to stay busy, in the Kierkegaardian sense, than it's ever been. Reading, in its quietness and sustained concentration, is the opposite of busyness. "We are so distracted by and engulfed by the technologies we've created, and by the constant barrage of so-called information that comes our way, that more than ever to immerse yourself in an involving book seems socially useful," Franzen says. "The place of stillness that you have to go to to write, but also to read seriously, is the point where you can actually make responsible decisions, where you can actually engage productively with an otherwise scary and unmanageable world.

My delightful, my love, my life, I don’t understand anything: how can you not be with me? I’m so infinitely used to you that I now feel myself lost and empty: without you, my soul. You turn my life into something light, amazing, rainbowed—you put a glint of happiness on everything—always different: sometimes you can be smoky-pink, downy, sometimes dark, winged—and I don’t know when I love your eyes more—when they are open or shut. It’s eleven p.m. now: I’m trying with all the force of my soul to see you through space; my thoughts plead for a heavenly visa to Berlin via air . . . My sweet excitement . . . Today I can’t write about anything except my longing for you. I’m gloomy and fearful: silly thoughts are swarming—that you’ll stumble as you jump out of a carriage in the underground, or that someone will bump into you in the street . . . I don’t know how I’ll survive the week. My tenderness, my happiness, what words can I write for you? How strange that although my life’s work is moving a pen over paper, I don’t know how to tell you how I love, how I desire you. Such agitation—and such divine peace: melting clouds immersed in sunshine—mounds of happiness. And I am floating with you, in you, aflame and melting—and a whole life with you is like the movement of clouds, their airy, quiet falls, their lightness and smoothness, and the heavenly variety of outline and tint—my inexplicable love. I cannot express these cirrus-cumulus sensations. When you and I were at the cemetery last time, I felt it so piercingly and clearly: you know it all, you know what will happen after death—you know it absolutely simply and calmly—as a bird knows that, fluttering from a branch, it will fly and not fall down . . . And that’s why I am so happy with you, my lovely, my little one. And here’s more: you and I are so special; the miracles we know, no one knows, and no one loves the way we love. What are you doing now? For some reason I think you’re in the study: you’ve got up, walked to the door, you are pulling the door wings together and pausing for a moment—waiting to see if they’ll move apart again. I’m tired, I’m terribly tired, good night, my joy. Tomorrow I’ll write you about all kinds of everyday things. My love.

We were deluged together in the raw, unbalanced Stuff of the universe. Inevitable consequence: My own little reification. I was made flesh, and in the process taken from him. I was never supposed to be real. How terrifying to confide your every doubt to an imaginary companion, to bequeath to him every alternative, and then one day turn and see him standing before you. Gonzo must be feeling so hollow inside, with me spun out and separated from him. It must be quiet and empty in there. And that, of course, is how I survived being shot. Freshly minted, new, I wasn’t real enough to die.

As usual, Junko thought about Jack London's 'To Build a Fire.' It was the story of a man traveling alone through the snowy Alaskan interior and his attempts to light a fire. He would freeze to death unless he could make it catch. The sun was going down. Junko hadn't read much fiction, but that one short story she had read again and again, ever since her teacher had assigned it as an essay topic during summer vacation of her first year in high school. The scene of the story would always come vividly to mind as she read. She could feel the man's fear and hope and despair as if they were her own; she could sense the very pounding of his heart as he hovered on the brink of death. Most important of all, though, was the fact that the man was fundamentally longing for death. She knew that for sure. She couldn't explain how she knew, but she knew it from the start. Death was really what he wanted. He knew that it was the right ending for him. And yet he had to go on fighting with all his might. He had to fight against an overwhelming adversary in order to survive. What most shook Junko was this deep-rooted contradiction. The teacher ridiculed her view. 'Death is really what he wanted? That's a new one for me! And strange! Quite 'original,' I'd have to say.' He read her conclusion aloud before the class, and everybody laughed. But Junko knew. All of them were wrong. Otherwise how could the ending of the story be so quiet and beautiful?

The all-powerful Zahir seemed to be born with every human being and to gain full strength in childhood, imposing rules that would thereafter always be respected: People who are different are dangerous; they belong to another tribe; they want our lands and our women. We must marry, have children, reproduce the species. Love is only a small thing, enough for one person, and any suggestion that the heart might be larger than this may seem perverse. When we are married we are authorised to take possession of the other person, body and soul. We must do jobs we detest because we are part of an organised society, and if everyone did what they wanted to do, the world would come to a standstill. We must buy jewelry; it identifies us with our tribe. We must be amusing at all times and sneer at those who express their real feelings; it's dangerous for a tribe to allow its members to show their feelings. We must at all costs avoid saying no because people prefer those who always say yes, and this allows us to survive in hostile territory. What other people think is more important than what we feel. Never make a fuss--it might attract the attention of an enemy tribe. If you behave differently you will be expelled from the tribe because you could infect others and destroy something that was extremely difficult to organise in the first place. We must always consider the look of our new cave, and if we don't have a clear idea of our own, then we must call a decorator who will do his best to show others what good taste we have. We must eat three meals a day, even if we're not hungry, and when we fail to fit the current ideal of beauty we must fast, even if we're starving. We must dress according to the dictates of fashion, make love whether we feel like it or not, kill in the name of our country, wish time away so that retirement comes more quickly, elect politicians, complain about the cost of living, change our hair-style, criticise anyone who is different, go to a religious service on Sunday, Saturday or Friday, depending on our religion, and there beg forgiveness for our sins and puff ourselves up with pride because we know the truth and despise he other tribe, who worship false gods. Our children must follow in our footsteps; after all we are older and know more about the world. We must have a university degree even if we never get a job in the area of knowledge we were forced to study. We must never make our parents sad, even if this means giving up everything that makes us happy. We must play music quietly, talk quietly, weep in private, because I am the all-powerful Zahir, who lays down the rules and determines the meaning of success, the best way to love, the importance of rewards.

I survive on quiet, chaos is too destructive.

We survived shit most people can’t even imagine,” Devin says quietly. “We’ve seen the worst. I’m not … I don’t know anything, but I think the rest of it will just be echoes.

Before what?” Quiet Rain cut her off. Her old ears were as sharp as Thunder’s. “Who’s out there, planning my death?

Ever since I was a child my only thought or insight into apocalypse, disaster or war has been that I myself have no “survival instinct,” nor any strong desire to survive, especially if what lies on the other side of survival is just me. A book like The Road is as incomprehensible to me as a Norse myth cycle in the original language. Suicide would hold out its quiet hand to me on the first day—the first hour. And not the courageous suicide of self-slaughter, but simply the passive death that occurs if you stay under the bed as they march up the stairs, or lie down in the cornfield as the plane fitted with machine guns heads your way.

The Subarctic Survival Situation may sound like a harmless game played inside the ivory tower, but if you think of meetings you’ve attended, you can probably recall a time—plenty of times—when the opinion of the most dynamic or talkative person prevailed to the detriment of all.

It drove me crazy to think these people could potentially get away with silencing me for good. When someone on Twitter speculated that the FBI might kill me “to protect the ultrarich and well connected,” I felt the need to respond. If I died suddenly, I tweeted, no one should believe that it was an accident. “I am making it publicly known that in no way, shape, or form am I suicidal,” I typed hastily but resolutely (making several spelling and grammatical errors that I’ve corrected here). “I have made this known to my therapist and GP—If something happens to me—for the sake of my family, do not let this go away and help me to protect them. Too many evil people want to see me quieted.

It is through this practise of gratitude that I discovered something quite profound: shyness doesn’t survive when your cup is overflowing with gratitude. It doesn’t matter if you’re grateful for things that have happened or things that have yet to come to fruition, gratitude grows Quiet Confidence.

Miss Peyton,” Lillian Bowman asked, “what kind of man would be the ideal husband for you?” “Oh,” Annabelle said with irreverent lightness, “any peer will do.” “Any peer?” Lillian asked skeptically. “What about good looks?” Annabelle shrugged. “Welcome, but not necessary.” “What about passion?” Daisy inquired. “Decidedly unwelcome.” “Intelligence?” Evangeline suggested. Annabelle shrugged. “Negotiable.” “Charm?” Lillian asked. “Also negotiable.” “You don’t want much,” Lillian remarked dryly. “As for me, I would have to add a few conditions. My peer would have to be dark-haired and handsome, a wonderful dancer…and he would never ask permission before he kissed me.” “I want to marry a man who has read the entire collected works of Shakespeare,” Daisy said. “Someone quiet and romantic—better yet if he wears spectacles— and he should like poetry and nature, and I shouldn’t like him to be too experienced with women.” Her older sister lifted her eyes heavenward. “We won’t be competing for the same men, apparently.” Annabelle looked at Evangeline Jenner. “What kind of husband would suit you, Miss Jenner?” “Evie,” the girl murmured, her blush deepening until it clashed with her fiery hair. She struggled with her reply, extreme bashfulness warring with a strong instinct for privacy. “I suppose…I would like s-s-someone who was kind and…” Stopping, she shook her head with a self-deprecating smile. “I don’t know. Just someone who would l-love me. Really love me.” The words touched Annabelle, and filled her with sudden melancholy. Love was a luxury she had never allowed herself to hope for—a distinctly superfluous issue when her very survival was so much in question. However, she reached out and touched the girl’s gloved hand with her own. “I hope you find him,” she said sincerely. “Perhaps you won’t have to wait for long.

An estimated two thirds of the women who got criminal abortions were married. This means that up to two thirds of the botched abortions were done on married women; up to two thirds of the dead were married women; perhaps two thirds of the survivors are married women. This means that most of the women who risked death or maiming so as not to bear a child were married—perhaps one million married women each year. They were not shameless sluts, unless all women by definition are. They were not immoral in traditional terms—though, even then, they were thought of as promiscuous and single. Nevertheless, they were not women from the streets, but women from homes; they were not daughters in the homes of fathers, but wives in the homes of husbands. They were, quite simply, the good and respectable women of Amerika. The absolute equation of abortion with sexual promiscuity is a bizarre distortion of the real history of women and abortion—too distorted to be acceptable even in the United States, where historical memory reaches back one decade. Abortion has been legalized just under one decade. The facts should not be obliterated yet. Millions of respectable, God-fearing, married women have had illegal abortions. They thank their God that they survived; and they keep quiet.

Kafka, in everybody’s life there’s a point of no return. And in a very few cases, a point where you can’t go forward anymore. And when we reach that point, all we can do is quietly accept the fact. That’s how we survive.

Kafka, in everybody’s life there’s a point of no return. And in a very few cases, a point where you can’t go forward any more. And when we reach that point, all we can do is quietly accept the fact. That’s how we survive.

Kafka, in everybody’s life there’s a point of no return. And in a very few cases, a point where you can’t go forward any more. And when we reach that point, all we can do is quietly accept the fact. That’s how we survive.” We

He’d taken pride in making Ketterdam his. He’d laid the traps, set the fires, put his boot to the necks of all those who’d challenged him, and reaped the rewards of his boldness. Most of the opposition had fallen, easy pickings, the occasional challenge almost welcome for the excitement it brought. He’d broken the Barrel to his whim, written the rules of the game to his liking, rewritten them at will. The problem was that the creatures who had managed to survive the city he’d made were a new kind of misery entirely—Brekker, his Wraith queen, his rotten little court of thugs. A fearless breed, hard-eyed and feral, hungrier for vengeance than gold. Do you like life, Rollins? Yes, he did, very much indeed, and he intended to go on living for a good long time. Pekka would count his money. He would raise his son. He’d find himself a good woman or two or ten. And maybe, in the quiet hours, he’d raise a glass to men like him, to his fellow architects of misfortune who had helped raise Brekker and his crew. He’d drink to the whole sorry lot of them, but mostly to the poor fools who didn’t know what trouble was coming.

Cole, do you feel anything for me?" I don't know what made me ask this, except that Jack had asked him the night of the Tunnels. It obviously surprised him. He backed up. "What?" I inched forward, not quite sure I was going with this. "Do you feel...something for me?" He was quiet, still as a statue, so I moved even closer. "Don't, Nik." His gaze dropped to the ground. "If you feel anything, please leave me alone. I don't know why I survived. I don't have your answer. Shadowing me will get you nothing." Then he did something unexpected. He backed down, and as he turned around to his motorcycle, he shook his head and mumbled, "What have you done to me?" "I don't know," I said. "But you have ninety-nine years to figure it out." He kicked it on and revved the engine, and at the sound, he found his cocky smirk again. "That's a long time, Nik. Jack is gone, and I'm here. Let's see who gives up first.

If I died suddenly, I tweeted, no one should believe that it was an accident. “I am making it publicly known that in no way, shape, or form am I suicidal,” I typed hastily but resolutely (making several spelling and grammatical errors that I’ve corrected here). “I have made this known to my therapist and GP—If something happens to me—for the sake of my family, do not let this go away and help me to protect them. Too many evil people want to see me quieted.

imagine you are an astronaut alone in space. no planets in view. no spacecraft. no distant stars. no source of light. imagine the latent terror, the quiet of space, the strange sensation of floating, the unspeakable dark between wealth of stars.

Brave young women complete heroic acts everyday, with no one bearing witness. This was a chance to even the ledger, to share one small story the made the difference between starvation and survival for the families whose lives it changed. I wanted to pull the curtain back for readers on a place foreigners know more for its rocket attacks and roadside bombs than its countless quiet feats of courage. And to introduce them to the young women like Kamila Sidiqi who will go on. No matter what.

Help when you can; do everything then— but when you can no longer do anything, forget it! Turn away! Pull yourself together. Compassion is meant for quiet times. Not when life is at stake. Bury the dead and devour life! You’ll still need it. Mourning is one thing, facts are another. One doesn’t mourn less when one sees the facts and accepts them. That is how one survives.

The quiet regrowth of a forest, fertilized only by its own burnt flesh, is what I think of when I think of survival. When we are able to look death in the face and prosper because of it, and not just despite it, we prove that to live is to contradict.

I’m sorry,” you tell him. You are so sorry, all the time. You are sorry his wife is dead. You are sorry, truly so, about the injustices of the world, the way they’ve befallen him. You are sorry he’s stuck with you, such a needy woman, always hungry and thirsty and cold, and so nosy at that. Rule number two of staying alive in the shed: he’s always right, and you’re always sorry.

He had not perished. That might be his only significant accomplishment. He had survived. Yes, he’d been defeated, more than once. But fortune had refused to release him. And he was here now, whole, and quietly accepting of the fact though he honestly did not know why.

Hideous, aren’t they?” His voice startles me, and I realize I must have been quiet for a while. I notice how his jaw tightens. I shake my head. “Not to me.” I can’t stop myself from reaching up, sliding my fingers down the four jagged scars above his brow. Finally, the single one that mars his cheek. “Your scars aren’t flaws, Galloway. They’re not imperfections. They’re stories written on your skin.” “Stories?” It sounds like he thinks the idea is silly. “Aye,” I say. “They tell the tale of how you survived. There’s no shame in that.

In addition, certain actions are a balm for both body and soul. These include taking quiet alone time, associating with positive people, being in nature, immersing yourself in water to clear negative energy, meditating, exercising, and defining limits with energy vampires.

I am the last of the Kerluhm. The Ifayle, who heeded our first summons, are all but destroyed. Those few that remain cannot extricate themselves from the conflict. I myself did not expect to survive the attempt. Yet I have.' 'A horrific conflict indeed,' Lady Envy quietly observed. 'Where does it occur?' 'The continent of Assail. Our losses: twenty-nine thousand eight hundred and fourteen Kerluhm. Twenty-two thousand two hundred Ifayle. Eight months of battle. We have lost this war.' Lady Envy was silent for a long moment, then she said, 'It seems you've finally found a Jaghut Tyrant who is more than your match, Lanas Tog.' The T'lan Imass cocked her head. 'Not Jaghut. Human.

If you watch what the birds and wild animals do, you can survive pretty much anywhere, because they know things humans have forgotten, such as what’s poisonous and what’s not, and what it means when things suddenly get too quiet, and where to hide when what it means is danger.

Like Trush, Sheriff Gorunov is a born Alpha, a handsome, fire-breathing dragon of a man who smokes with an alarming vigor: cigarette clamped between his canines at the point where filter and tobacco meet, the act of inhaling fully integrated into breath and speech such that there is no discernible pause, only billowing smoke that seems to be a natural by-product of a voice that booms even in the confines of his quiet kitchen.

thought about how, for so much of my life, I’d survived by staying quiet, making myself small enough to fly under the radar. I decided then that I no longer wanted to be quiet. I wanted to be loud and colorful and every piece of myself at any one time. As I lay there, I began to dream of

Even memory though, can hardly be relied on. Can anyone say for certain what really happened to us back then? If we’re blessed though, a few words might remain by our side. They climb to the top of the hill during the night, crawl into small holes dug to fit the shape of their bodies, stay quite still, and let the stormy winds of time blow past. Dawn finally breaks, the wild wind subsides, and the surviving words quietly peek out from the surface. For the most part they have small voices—they are shy and only have ambiguous ways of expressing themselves. Even so, they are ready to serve as witnesses. As honest, fair witnesses. But in order to create those long enduring, long-suffering words, or else to find them and leave them behind, you must sacrifice, unconditionally, your own body, your very own heart. You have to lay down your neck on a cold stone pillow illuminated by the winter moon.

If your child prefers to work autonomously and socialize one-on-one, there’s nothing wrong with her; she just happens not to fit the prevailing model. The purpose of school should be to prepare kids for the rest of their lives, but too often what kids need to be prepared for is surviving the school day itself.

What courage it took for the starving and the poor to continue the mere act of existence, of survival, of endurance. Such quiet acts of heroism were not celebrated, and yet they made up the foundation of civilization, far more than all the honorable sentiments of the Ano sages and the pretty words of the nobles.

Royce eyed Hadrian with a skeptical expression. “He’ll never manage the climb.” “Climb?” Hadrian asked. “The treasure room is at the top of the Crown Tower,” Arcadius explained. Even Hadrian had heard of that. Even farmers in Hintindar knew of the Crown Tower. Supposedly it was the leftover corner of some ancient but legendary castle. “I’m in good shape. A few stairs aren’t going to kill me.” “The tower is heavily guarded in every way, except against a person climbing up the outside,” Royce replied, his eyes fixed on the long fang he continued to twirl. “Isn’t that because … well, I’ve heard it’s sort of tall.” “The tallest surviving structure built by man,” Arcadius said. “Should I bring a lunch?” “Considering we’ll begin after dusk and climb all night, I’d suggest a late dinner,” Royce replied. “I was joking.” “I wasn’t. But I only ask one thing.” “What’s that?” “When you fall to your death, do so quietly.

I am the story teller, charged with the secrets of this world and beyond. I am the calm in the storm, the quiet in the quake and the stillness in the dark. I am the old lady with the pot of water when you are dying of thirst. I am the sapling after the forest fire and the child who survives after pestilence. For those who will listen, hear you the first secret. Love is the sea in which all of nature exists and the greatest love of all is that which is spilled for another.

Cut me open bit by bit, then took the bones here and—” “I can see very well what happened, and know exactly how it’s done,” she said, stomach tightening. Not at the injury, but—Sam. Sam had been strapped to a table, cut open and broken by one of the most sadistic killers she’d ever known. “Was it you,” Rowan said quietly, but not gently, “or someone else?” “I was too late. He didn’t survive.” Again silence fell, and she cursed herself for a fool for telling him. But then she said hoarsely, “Thank you for saving me.

When you ask the question, “Who am I?”—if you have enough time and concentration—you may find some surprising answers. You may see that you are a continuation of your ancestors. Your parents and your ancestors are fully present in every cell of your body; you are their continuation. You don’t have a separate self. If you remove your ancestors and your parents from you, there’s no “you” left. You may see that you’re made of elements, like water for example. If you remove the water from you, there’s no “you” left. You’re made of earth. If you remove the element earth from you, there’s no “you” left. You’re made of air. You need air desperately; without air you cannot survive. So if you remove the element of air from you, there’s no “you” left. And there’s the fire element, the element of heat, the element of light, in you. You know that you are made of light. Without sunlight, nothing can grow on Earth. If you continue to look, you see that you are made of the sun, one of the biggest stars in the galaxy. And you know that the Earth, as well as yourself, is made of the stars. So you are the stars. On a clear night, look up, and you can see that you are the stars above. You’re not just the tiny body you normally may think of as “yourself.

Here, then, happiness is obviously a form of strength, a subversion even, a modus of survival, even if at times it appears superficial and misplaced. Besides, for all of boxing's brutality, there is lyricism in its rhythm, too, something that dreamy, romantic Filipinos perhaps recognize. It is almost too facile to ascribe too much significance in this metaphor, but this incongruous combination of lyrical violence is default in Manila, where beauty is scarce, and which flourishes side by side with the hideous. There is pride in that stubborn independence, I think, whether it is on the canvas of a boxing ring or history. How did that killer song end again? The record shows I took the blows and did it my way.

even though they say you don't rationalize, that all you must do is be quiet and apologize and only ever compromise and sacrifice, you continue to rise and survive.

The quiet stillness of the isle gave me the gift of sudden clarity. An understanding that the pain I'd feared for so long was the very thing that told me I had survived the loss.

i have survived far too much to go quietly let a meteor take me call the thunder for backup my death will be grand the land will crack the sun will eat itself -the day i leave

This is the story I tell myself. No one’s around to tell me it doesn’t make sense. It starts out as a tribute and ends in selfishness. It isn’t about her. Not really. It’s about me and the parts of my life that find me in the dark. It’s about me and my younger self and the way she looks at me, the way she keeps calling out to me, demanding answers I don’t have.

This man's music has become part of Souren's mornings, as essential as the sun rising over the rooftops of the city. The familiar melody offers him a moment of quiet grace, and this gives him strength for the day ahead. The pianist knows nothing of this, of course. He plays only for himself. Souren wonders how the arc of the man's own days is changed by creating such beauty each morning. He watches as the pianist makes his lonely way down the street. The man looks tired, defeated. He does not play for joy, thinks Souren. He plays for survival.

The Quiet Girls" Were we never wolves? No, we never were. We never let ourselves be lured into a lair. We never licked honey off an eyetooth just for the sweet. We never swallowed our own blood with the honey. We were neither animal nor stone. We were ephemeral, motes in light, breath in winter. Drifting was safe travel; we knew it then, and we were right. The earth slowed its spinning and we stayed on. Trenches yawned, and we skirted them. We survived the meteor shower—no fragments fell on us. Still we float like spores, always aloft and away.

But Love cannot understand this. He cannot comprehend another's infinity; he is conscious only of his own—flying sunbeam, falling rose, pebble that asks for one quiet plunge below the fretting interplay of space and time. He knows that he will survive at the end of things, and be gathered by Fate as a jewel from the slime, and be handed with admiration round the assembly of the gods.

Far from its outward appearance, the rain forest was not a garden of easy abundance, but precisely the opposite. Its quiet, shaded halls of leafy opulence were not a sanctuary but, rather, the greatest natural battlefield anywhere on the planet, hosting an unremitting and remorseless fight for survival that occupied every single one of its inhabitants, every minute of every day. Though

She leaned against the stone wall of the narrow landing, a hand on her thundering heart. It was the smart thing to do, the right thing to do. She had survived this long, and would only survive the road ahead if she continued to be unnoticed, reliable, quiet. But she did't want to be unnoticed—not with him, not forever. He made her want to laugh and sing and shake the world with her voice.

23 Emotions people feel, but can’t explain 1.    Sonder: The realization that each passerby has a life as vivid and complex as your own. 2.    Opia: The ambiguous intensity of Looking someone in the eye, which can feel simultaneously invasive and vulnerable. 3.    Monachopsis: The subtle but persistent feeling of being out of place. 4.    Énouement: The bittersweetness of having arrived in the future, seeing how things turn out, but not being able to tell your past self. 5.    Vellichor: The strange wistfulness of used bookshops. 6.    Rubatosis: The unsettling awareness of your own heartbeat. 7.    Kenopsia: The eerie, forlorn atmosphere of a place that is usually bustling with people but is now abandoned and quiet. 8.    Mauerbauertraurigkeit: The inexplicable urge to push people away, even close friends who you really like. 9.    Jouska: A hypothetical conversation that you compulsively play out in your head. 10.    Chrysalism: The amniotic tranquility of being indoors during a thunderstorm. 11.    Vemödalen: The frustration of photographic something amazing when thousands of identical photos already exist. 12.    Anecdoche: A conversation in which everyone is talking, but nobody is listening 13.    Ellipsism: A sadness that you’ll never be able to know how history will turn out. 14.    Kuebiko: A state of exhaustion inspired by acts of senseless violence. 15.    Lachesism: The desire to be struck by disaster – to survive a plane crash, or to lose everything in a fire. 16.    Exulansis: The tendency to give up trying to talk about an experience because people are unable to relate to it. 17.    Adronitis: Frustration with how long it takes to get to know someone. 18.    Rückkehrunruhe: The feeling of returning home after an immersive trip only to find it fading rapidly from your awareness. 19.    Nodus Tollens: The realization that the plot of your life doesn’t make sense to you anymore. 20.    Onism: The frustration of being stuck in just one body, that inhabits only one place at a time. 21.    Liberosis: The desire to care less about things. 22.    Altschmerz: Weariness with the same old issues that you’ve always had – the same boring flaws and anxieties that you’ve been gnawing on for years. 23.    Occhiolism: The awareness of the smallness of your perspective. John Koenig, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows (Simon & Schuster, November 16, 2021)

In the 1930s, America was infatuated with the pseudoscience of eugenics and its promise of strengthening the human race by culling the “unfit” from the genetic pool. Along with the “feebleminded,” insane, and criminal, those so classified included women who had sex out of wedlock (considered a mental illness), orphans, the disabled, the poor, the homeless, epileptics, masturbators, the blind and the deaf, alcoholics, and girls whose genitals exceeded certain measurements. Some eugenicists advocated euthanasia, and in mental hospitals, this was quietly carried out on scores of people through “lethal neglect” or outright murder.

When I couldn’t get that sensation in the real world, I would quietly let my memory of those feelings awaken inside me. In this way, memory became one of my most valued emotional tools, a means of survival, even.

Filth, filth, filth, from morning to night. I know they're poor but they could wash. Water is free and soap is cheap. Just look at that arm, nurse.' The nurse looked and clucked in horror. Francie stood there with the hot flamepoints of shame burning her face. The doctor was a Harvard man, interning at the neighborhood hospital. Once a week, he was obliged to put in a few hours at one of the free clinics. He was going into a smart practice in Boston when his internship was over. Adopting the phraseology of the neighborhood, he referred to his Brooklyn internship as going through Purgatory, when he wrote to his socially prominent fiancee in Boston. The nurse was as Williamsburg girl... The child of poor Polish immigrants, she had been ambitious, worked days in a sweatshop and gone to school at night. Somehow she had gotten her training... She didn't want anyone to know she had come from the slums. After the doctor's outburst, Francie stood hanging her head. She was a dirty girl. That's what the doctor meant. He was talking more quietly now asking the nurse how that kind of people could survive; that it would be a better world if they were all sterilized and couldn't breed anymore. Did that mean he wanted her to die? Would he do something to make her die because her hands and arms were dirty from the mud pies? She looked at the nurse... She thought the nurse might say something like: Maybe this little girl's mother works and didn't have time to wash her good this morning,' or, 'You know how it is, Doctor, children will play in the dirt.' But what the nurse actuallly said was, 'I know, Isn't it terrible? I sympathize with you, Doctor. There is no excuse for these people living in filth.' A person who pulls himself up from a low environment via the bootstrap route has two choices. Having risen above his environment, he can forget it; or, he can rise above it and never forget it and keep compassion and understanding in his heart for those he has left behind him in the cruel upclimb. The nurse had chosen the forgetting way. Yet, as she stood there, she knew that years later she would be haunted by the sorrow in the face of that starveling child and that she would wish bitterly that she had said a comforting word then and done something towards the saving of her immortal soul. She had the knowledge that she was small but she lacked the courage to be otherwise. When the needle jabbed, Francie never felt it. The waves of hurt started by the doctor's words were racking her body and drove out all other feeling. While the nurse was expertly tying a strip of gauze around her arm and the doctor was putting his instrument in the sterilizer and taking out a fresh needle, Francie spoke up. My brother is next. His arm is just as dirty as mine so don't be suprised. And you don't have to tell him. You told me.' They stared at this bit of humanity who had become so strangely articulate. Francie's voice went ragged with a sob. 'You don't have to tell him. Besides it won't do no godd. He's a boy and he don't care if he is dirty.'... As the door closed, she heard the doctor's suprised voice. I had no idea she'd understand what I was saying.' She heard the nurse say, 'Oh, well,' on a sighing note.

Some former POWs became almost feral with rage. For many men, seeing an Asian person or overhearing a snippet of Japanese left them shaking, weeping, enraged, or lost in flashbacks. One former POW, normally gentle and quiet, spat at every Asian person he saw. At Letterman General Hospital just after the war, four former POWs tried to attack a staffer who was of Japanese ancestry, not knowing that he was an American veteran. Troubled former POWs found nowhere to turn.

Wave after wave, Ralph followed the rise and fall until something of the remoteness of the sea numbed his brain. Then gradually the almost infinite size of this water forced itself oh his attention. This was the divider, the barrier. On the other side of the island, swathed at midday with mirage, defended by the shield of the quiet lagoon, one might dream of rescue; but here, faced by the brute obtuseness of the ocean, the miles of division, one was clamped down, one was helpless, one was condemned, one was-

Ritual abuse is highly organised and, obviously, secretive. It is often linked with other major crimes such as child pornography, child prostitution, the drugs industry, trafficking, and many other illegal and heinous activities. Ritual abuse is organised sexual, physical and psychological abuse, which can be systematic and sustained over a long period of time. It involves the use of rituals - things which the abusers 'need' to do, or 'need' to have in place - but it doesn't have to have a belief system. There doesn't have to be God or the Devil, or any other deity for it to be considered 'ritual'. It involves using patterns of learning and development to keep the abuse going and to make sure the child stays quiet. There has been, and still is a great deal of debate about whether or not such abuse exists anywhere in the world. There are many people who constantly deny that there is even such a thing as ritual abuse. All I can say is that I know there is. Not only have I been a victim of it myself, but I have been dealing with survivors of this type of abuse for almost 30 years. If there are survivors, there must be something that they have survived. The things is, most sexual abuse of children is ritualised in some way. Abusers use repetition, routine and ritual to forced children into the patterns of behaviour they require. Some abusers want their victims to wear certain clothing, to say certain things. They might bathe them or cut them, they might burn them or abuse them only on certain days of the week. They might do a hundred other things which are ritualistic, but aren't always called that - partly, I think because we have a terror of the word and of accepting just how premeditated abuse actually is. Abusers instill fear in their victims and ensure silence; they do all they can to avoid being caught. Sexual abuse of a child is rarely a random act. It involves thorough planning and preparation beforehand. They threaten the children with death, with being taken into care, with no one believing them, which physical violence or their favourite teddy being taken away. They are told that their mum will die, or their dad will hate them, the abusers say everyone will think it's their fault, that everyone already knows they are bad. Nothing is too big or small for an abuser to use as leverage. There is unmistakable proof that abusers do get together in order to share children, abuse more children, and even learn from each other. As more cases have come into the public eye in recent years, this has become increasingly obvious. More and more of this type of abuse is coming to light. I definitely think it is the word ritual which causes people to question, to feel uncomfortable, or even just disbelieve. It seems almost incredible that such things would happen, but too many of us know exactly how bad the lives of many children are. A great deal of child pornography shows children being abused in a ritualised setting, and many have now come forward to share their experiences, but there is a still tendency to say it just couldn't happen. p204-205

Bellusdeo laughed. It was, for a moment, the only sound in the quiet of the fief’s night, and it was warmer and deeper than the lingering night chill. When her laughter faded, she glanced at Kaylin. “I was not like this before. I thought that the Shadows had not touched me.” She lowered her head a moment. Kaylin understood this, as well. “It seems so unfair,” she finally said. “Life is unfair. Which part of it pains you?” “We suffer, and it breaks something. When we win free—by gaining our name, by crossing a bloody bridge—we still live in a cage of scars. If life were fair, we would never have suffered what we suffered at all; having suffered it and survived, we’re still reacting to things that don’t exist anymore.” “But they did.” “Yes. I hate that they still define me.” Voice lower, she said to Bellusdeo, “I want that to change. I don’t know how to change it. But I’m willing to spend the rest of my life trying.” Shaking her head, she forced herself to smile; it was surprisingly easy. There was something about Bellusdeo that she liked. “Home is a strange thing.” “What do you mean?” “We lose it, and we think it’s gone forever. That’s how I felt the first time I lost mine. It took me years to understand that I could find—and make—another. I couldn’t do it on my own, though; I don’t think—for me—home exists in isolation.

I think about lying down. No, that would not do. I crouch by the trunk, my finger stroking the bark, seeking a Braille code, a clue, a message on how to come back to life after my long undersnow dormancy. I have survived. I am here. Confused, screwed up, but here. So, how can I find my way? Is there a chain saw of the soul, an ax I can take to my memories or fears? I dig my fingers into the dirt and squeeze. A small, clean part of me waits to warm and burst through the surface. Some quiet Melindagirl I haven't seen in months. This is the seed I will care for.

—so much more opportunity now." Her voice trails off. "Hurrah for women's lib, eh?" "The lib?" Impatiently she leans forward and tugs the serape straight. "Oh, that's doomed." The apocalyptic word jars my attention. "What do you mean, doomed?" She glances at me as if I weren't hanging straight either and says vaguely, "Oh …" "Come on, why doomed? Didn't they get that equal rights bill?" Long hesitation. When she speaks again her voice is different. "Women have no rights, Don, except what men allow us. Men are more aggressive and powerful, and they run the world. When the next real crisis upsets them, our so-called rights will vanish like—like that smoke. We'll be back where we always were: property. And whatever has gone wrong will be blamed on our freedom, like the fall of Rome was. You'll see." Now all this is delivered in a gray tone of total conviction. The last time I heard that tone, the speaker was explaining why he had to keep his file drawers full of dead pigeons. "Oh, come on. You and your friends are the backbone of the system; if you quit, the country would come to a screeching halt before lunch." No answering smile. "That's fantasy." Her voice is still quiet. "Women don't work that way. We're a—a toothless world." She looks around as if she wanted to stop talking. "What women do is survive. We live by ones and twos in the chinks of your world-machine." "Sounds like a guerrilla operation." I'm not really joking, here in the 'gator den. In fact, I'm wondering if I spent too much thought on mahogany logs. "Guerrillas have something to hope for." Suddenly she switches on a jolly smile. "Think of us as opossums, Don. Did you know there are opossums living all over? Even in New York City." I smile back with my neck prickling. I thought I was the paranoid one. "Men and women aren't different species, Ruth. Women do everything men do." "Do they?" Our eyes meet, but she seems to be seeing ghosts between us in the rain. She mutters something that could be "My Lai" and looks away. "All the endless wars …" Her voice is a whisper. "All the huge authoritarian organizations for doing unreal things. Men live to struggle against each other; we're just part of the battlefield. It'll never change unless you change the whole world. I dream sometimes of—of going away—" She checks and abruptly changes voice. "Forgive me, Don, it's so stupid saying all this." "Men hate wars too, Ruth," I say as gently as I can. "I know." She shrugs and climbs to her feet. "But that's your problem, isn't it?" End of communication. Mrs. Ruth Parsons isn't even living in the same world with me.

We tend to forget that there’s nothing sacrosanct about learning in large group classrooms, and that we organize students this way not because it’s the best way to learn but because it’s cost-efficient, and what else would we do with our children while the grown-ups are at work? If your child prefers to work autonomously and socialize one-on-one, there’s nothing wrong with her; she just happens not to fit the prevailing model. The purpose of school should be to prepare kids for the rest of their lives, but too often what kids need to be prepared for is surviving the school day itself.

Oshima reaches out and lays a hand on my knee in a totally natural gesture. “Kafka, in everybody’s life there’s a point of no return. And in a very few cases, a point where you can’t go forward anymore. And when we reach that point, all we can do is quietly accept the fact. That’s how we survive.

It is just as much a matter of chance that I am still alive as that I might have been hit. In a bomb-proof dug-out I may be smashed to atoms and in the open may survive ten hours’ bombardment unscathed. No soldier outlives a thousand chances. But every soldier believes in Chance and trusts his luck.

Nico di Angelo wasn’t physically imposing like Sherman Yang. He didn’t have Reyna Ramírez-Arellano’s air of authority, or Hazel Levesque’s commanding presence when she charged into battle on horseback. But Nico wasn’t someone I would ever want as an enemy. He was deceptively quiet. He appeared anemic and frail. He kept himself on the periphery. But Will was right about how much Nico had been through. He had been born in Mussolini’s Italy. He had survived decades in the time-warp reality of the Lotus Casino. He’d emerged in modern times disoriented and culture-shocked, arrived at Camp Half-Blood, and promptly lost his sister Bianca to a dangerous quest. He had wandered the Labyrinth in self-imposed exile, being tortured and brainwashed by a malevolent ghost. He’d overcome everyone’s distrust and emerged from the Battle of Manhattan as a hero. He’d been captured by giants during the rise of Gaea. He’d wandered Tartarus alone and somehow managed to come out alive. And through it all, he’d struggled with his upbringing as a conservative Catholic Italian male from the 1930s and finally learned to accept himself as a young gay man. Anyone who could survive all that had more resilience than Stygian iron.

Katczinsky won’t budge from the opinion which as an old Front-hog, he rhymes: Give ’em all the same grub and all the same pay And the war would be over and done in a day. Kropp on the other hand is a thinker. He proposes that a declaration of war should be a kind of popular festival with entrance-tickets and bands, like a bull fight. Then in the arena the ministers and generals of the two countries, dressed in bathing-drawers and armed with clubs, can have it out among themselves. Whoever survives, his country wins. That would be much simpler and more just than this arrangement, where the wrong people do the fighting.

Tom’s sergeant was shot six times by an assailant, while a bystander was struck twice. As the sergeant lay on the ground, bleeding, he asked for a slip of paper and scribbled on it a message for Ranger headquarters: “I am shot all to pieces. Everything quiet.” Somehow, he survived his wounds, but the innocent bystander died.

All words are borrowed. The beauty of writing is how they flow through us and arrange themselves as something new but familiar. We can be unique and belong at the same time. In moments of confusion, anger, and sadness, words lend comfort, letting us know that someone else has navigated the same tempestuous tides and survived.

He surveyed what remained of his crew. Rotty still hovered by the wreckage of the longboat. Jesper sat with elbows on knees, head in hands, Wylan beside him wearing the face of a near-stranger; Matthias stood gazing across the water in the direction of Hellgate like a stone sentinel. If Kaz was their leader, then Inej had been their lodestone, pulling them together when they seemed most likely to drift apart. Nina had disguised Kaz’s crow-and-cup tattoo before they’d entered the Ice Court, but he hadn’t let her near the R on his bicep. Now he touched his gloved fingers to where the sleeve of his coat covered that mark. Without meaning to, he’d let Kaz Rietveld return. He didn’t know if it had begun with Inej’s injury or that hideous ride in the prison wagon, but somehow he’d let it happen and it had cost him dearly. That didn’t mean he was going to let himself be bested by some thieving merch. Kaz looked south toward Ketterdam’s harbors. The beginnings of an idea scratched at the back of his skull, an itch, the barest inkling. It wasn’t a plan, but it might be the start of one. He could see the shape it would take—impossible, absurd, and requiring a serious chunk of cash. “Scheming face,” murmured Jesper. “Definitely,” agreed Wylan. Matthias folded his arms. “Digging in your bag of tricks, demjin?” Kaz flexed his fingers in his gloves. How did you survive the Barrel? When they took everything from you, you found a way to make something from nothing. “I’m going to invent a new trick,” Kaz said. “One Van Eck will never forget.” He turned to the others. If he could have gone after Inej alone, he would have, but not even he could pull that off. “I’ll need the right crew.” Wylan got to his feet. “For the Wraith.” Jesper followed, still not meeting Kaz’s eyes. “For Inej,” he said quietly. Matthias gave a single sharp nod. Inej had wanted Kaz to become someone else, a better person, a gentler thief. But that boy had no place here. That boy ended up starving in an alley. He ended up dead. That boy couldn’t get her back. I’m going to get my money, Kaz vowed. And I’m going to get my girl. Inej could never be his, not really, but he would find a way to give her the freedom he’d promised her so long ago. Dirtyhands had come to see the rough work done.

Cyrus is quiet for a momenr. "But-" he beginds, then falls silent. It's the first crack I've seen in his composure. "But," he tries again, "she's special. To me." His words make me feel light, like ash floating away from a fire. Johann begins to laugh, bitterly, mirthlessly. "Don't tell me you love her," he spits. "You don't even know her. That's the most irrational thing I've ever heard. And no love can survive immortality." The room is quiet, filled only with the crackling of the fire, and suddenly I don't want to hear Cyrus's answer. What if he doesn't love me? What am I without him by my side? Some strange creature that no one believes exists, some freak of nature, some threat to the reassuring rhythms of normal life. Finally, Cyrus speaks. "All I know is that I'm drawn to her. You always told me there's no such thing as destiny, and I believed you. I still do. But she makes me wonder. I fI could love anyone forever, it would be her. When I'm with her, I feel complete.

Bleary-eyed, they find places to pull off the road and rest. In Walmart parking lots. On quiet suburban streets. At truck stops, amid the lullaby of idling engines. Then in the early morning hours—before anyone notices—they’re back on the highway. Driving on, they’re secure in this knowledge: The last free place in America is a parking spot.

Your mother gives birth to you only once and only once do you die,' the witcher said calmly. 'An appropriate philosophy for a louse, don't you agree? And your longevity? I pity you, Filavandrel.' The elf raised his eyebrows. 'Why?' 'You're pathetic, with your little stolen sacks of seeds on pack horses, with your handful of grain, that tiny crumb thanks to which you plan to survive. And with that mission of yours which is supposed to turn your thoughts from imminent annihilation. Because you know this is the end. Nothing will sprout or yield crops on the plateaux, nothing will save you now. But you live long, and you will live very long in arrogant isolation, fewer and fewer of you, growing weaker and weaker, more and more bitter. And you know what'll happen then, Filavandrel. You know that desperate young men with the eyes of hundred-year-old men and withered, barren and sick girls like Toruviel will lead those who can still hold a sword and bow in their hands, down into the valleys. You'll come down into the blossoming valleys to meet death, wanting to die honourably, in battle, and not in sick beds of misery, where anaemia, tuberculosis and scurvy will send you. Then, long-living Aen Seidhe, you'll remember me. You'll remember that I pitied you. And you'll understand that I was right.' 'Time will tell who was right,' said the elf quietly. 'And herein lies the advantage of longevity. I've got a chance of finding out, if only because of that stolen handful of grain. You won't have a chance like that. You'll die shortly.

When I look at him, I don’t see the cowardly young man who sold me out to Jeanine Matthews, and I don’t hear the excuses he gave afterward. When I look at him, I see the boy who held my hand in the hospital when our mother broke her wrist and told me it would be all right. I see the brother who told me to make my own choices, the night before the Choosing Ceremony. I think of all the remarkable things he is--smart and enthusiastic and observant, quiet and earnest and kind. He is a part of me, always will be, and I am a part of him, too. I don’t belong to Abnegation, or Dauntless, or even the Divergent. I don’t belong to the Bureau or the experiment or the fringe. I belong to the people I love, and they belong to me--they, and the love and loyalty I give them, form my identity far more than any word or group ever could. I love my brother. I love him, and he is quaking with terror at the thought of death. I love him and all I can think, all I can hear in my mind, are the words I said to him a few days ago: I would never deliver you to your own execution. “Caleb,” I say. “Give me the backpack.” “What?” he says. I slip my hand under the back of my shirt and grab my gun. I point it at him. “Give me the backpack.” “Tris, no.” He shakes his head. “No, I won’t let you do that.” “Put down your weapon!” the guard screams at the end of the hallway. “Put down your weapon or we will fire!” “I might survive the death serum,” I say. “I’m good at fighting off serums. There’s a chance I’ll survive. There’s no chance you would survive. Give me the backpack or I’ll shoot you in the leg and take it from you.” Then I raise my voice so the guards can hear me. “He’s my hostage! Come any closer and I’ll kill him!” In that moment he reminds me of our father. His eyes are tired and sad. There’s a shadow of a beard on his chin. His hands shake as he pulls the backpack to the front of his body and offers it to me. I take it and swing it over my shoulder. I keep my gun pointed at him and shift so he’s blocking my view of the soldiers at the end of the hallway. “Caleb,” I say, “I love you.” His eyes gleam with tears as he says, “I love you, too, Beatrice.” “Get down on the floor!” I yell, for the benefit of the guards. Caleb sinks to his knees. “If I don’t survive,” I say, “tell Tobias I didn’t want to leave him.

At the sound of the first droning of the shells we rush back, in one part of our being, a thousand years. By the animal instinct that is awakened in us we are led and protected. It is not conscious; it is far quicker, much more sure, less fallible, than consciousness. One cannot explain it. A man is walking along without thought or heed; - suddenly he throws himself down on the ground and a storm of fragments fly harmlessly over him; - yet he cannot remember either to have heard the shell coming or to have thought of flinging himself down. But had he not abandoned himself to the impulse he would now be a heap of mangled flesh. It is this other, this second sight in us, that has thrown us to the ground and saved us, without our knowledge how. If it were not so, there would not be one man alive . . .

The classical tradition in philosophy is the last surviving child of two very diverse parents: the Greek belief in reason, and the mediæval belief in the tidiness of the universe. To the schoolmen, who lived amid wars, massacres, and pestilences, nothing appeared so delightful as safety and order. In their idealising dreams, it was safety and order that they sought: the universe of Thomas Aquinas or Dante is as small and neat as a Dutch interior. To us, to whom safety has become monotony, to whom the primeval savageries of nature are so remote as to become a mere pleasing condiment to our ordered routine, the world of dreams is very different from what it was amid the wars of Guelf and Ghibelline. Hence William James's protest against what he calls the “block universe” of the classical tradition; hence Nietzsche's worship of force; hence the verbal bloodthirstiness of many quiet literary men. The barbaric substratum of human nature, unsatisfied in action, finds an outlet in imagination. In philosophy, as elsewhere, this tendency is visible; and it is this, rather than formal argument, that has thrust aside the classical tradition for a philosophy which fancies itself more virile and more vital. B.

I understand, finally. So in my heart I let them go. Nothing should have to struggle so much. If the animals have died it will not have been quietly. It will not have been without a desperate fight. If they’ve died, all of them, it’s because we made the world impossible for them. So—for my own sanity—I release the Arctic terns from the burden of surviving what they shouldn’t have to, and I bid them goodbye.

After the doctor’s outburst, Francie stood hanging her head. She was a dirty girl. That’s what the doctor meant. He was talking more quietly now asking the nurse how that kind of people could survive; that it would be a better world if they were all sterilized and couldn’t breed anymore. Did that mean he wanted her to die? Would he do something to make her die because her hands and arms were dirty from the mud pies? She

In any event, the emotions that surged when this happened came to serve as a kind of gauge I used to measure the intensity of my yearning. When I couldn’t get that sensation in the real world, I would quietly let my memory of those feelings awaken inside me. In this way, memory became one of my most valued emotional tools, a means of survival, even. Like a warm kitten, softly curled inside an oversized coat pocket, fast asleep.

Good, evil, these are human concepts, ways people have for understanding what it means to be alive,” Nick said. “Before people came along, this planet was teeming with life, fighting to survive, to live long enough to reproduce, completing the circle of life.” “I’m with you so far,” Elphaba said. “The circle of life is an essential Wiccan principle, in spite of The Lion King.” Nick ignored Elphaba’s bit of humor as his mood became more serious. “Precisely so. And in this circle of life, you have predators and prey. The predators must kill to eat. If they don’t, they starve. Are the predators evil?” “No, of course not. They’re simply acting on their nature.” “What is human nature, then? Are we a species that builds societies of trust and cooperation, or are we a species that seeks power over our fellow man, even if that means fighting wars or otherwise killing him?” Elphaba frowned, carefully considering her answer. “I’d like to think we are a species of trust and cooperation.” “Our entire history is a story of war, of murder and mayhem, of blood running in the streets,” Nick said quietly. “Yes, yes it is.” Elphaba leaned back, grimacing. “We are both,” Nick said. “A species of cooperation, and a species of strife. We fight wars, and we also establish the rule of law to mete out justice to the criminals in our midst. Humans are both good and evil.

I hope you find acceptance. The kind that rings through your bones, the kind that quiets the voice inside of you that tells you that you are not good enough or that you are falling behind. I hope you forgive yourself for the mistakes you have made, for the past you keep alive inside of you. I hope you learn to let go—of the things you had to do in order to heal or to grow or to survive. You are doing your best. You are human. Please don’t ever forget that.

You were in the city," Rice explained, "High concentraition of Floraes, hardly any post-aps. In other areas, where there was less population density, children were the ones more likely to survive. Adults probably kept them concealed, took extra measures to protect them. And of course children are good at hiding. Once their instinctual survival skills kick in, they know how to be quiet." "They believed in monsters before the monsters showed up," I wispered.

the default self. This self, one of many that makes up who you are, is focused on how you are distinct from others, independent, in control, and oriented toward competitive advantage. It has been amplified by the rise of individualism and materialism, and no doubt was less prominent during other time periods (e.g., in Indigenous cultures thousands of years ago). Today, this default self keeps you on track in achieving your goals and urges you to rise in the ranks in the world, all essential to your survival and thriving. When our default self reigns too strongly, though, and we are too focused on ourselves, anxiety, rumination, depression, and self-criticism can overtake us. An overactive default self can undermine the collaborative efforts and goodwill of our communities. Many of today’s social ills arise out of an overactive default self, augmented by self-obsessed digital technologies. Awe, it would seem, quiets this urgent voice of the default self.

He had made a vow, a private promise to the world in the long dark watches of the night, that if he did survive then in the great afterward he would always try to be kind, to live a good quiet life. Like Candide, he would cultivate his garden. Quietly. And that would be his redemption. Even if he could add only a feather to the balance it would be some kind of repayment for being spared. When it was all over and the reckoning fell due, it may be that he would be in need of that feather.

To have come through it: to have joyfully survived even the happiness-quietly, completely. First the testings were mute, then verbal. Who could look back unamazed? No one has been able, since life lasts because no one could. -But the infiniteness of the attempts! The new greenness of birch trees is not so new as that which befalls us. A wood dove coos. And again what you suffered seems, ah, as if yet unlived-through. The bird keeps calling. You are in the middle of the call. Awake and weakened.

Almighty God, Your Word tells me that You will fight for me; I need only to be still. Lord, You know how weary I am. I’ve been struggling just to keep my head above water, and my strength is running low. I need to stop trying so hard—and just let You fight for me. This is very difficult for me to do because my feelings tell me I must keep striving in order to survive. But I know You’re working on my behalf, and You are calling me to rest in You. So please help me to be still and know that You are God. Trying to calm my mind is even more challenging than quieting my body. In my battle to feel secure, I have relied too heavily on my own thinking. As I’ve struggled to feel in control, I’ve unwittingly elevated my mind to a position of self-reliance. Forgive me, Lord! I desperately need Your Spirit to work within me—controlling my mind more and more, soothing me from the inside out. While I spend time resting in the shadow of Your Almighty Presence, I’ll rejoice that You are fighting for me. In

Suffering is partial, shortsighted, and self-absorbed. We shouldn't have a politics that expects different. Oppression is not a prep school. Demanding as the constructive approach may be, the deferential approach is far more so, and in a far more unfair way. As philosophy Agnes Callard rightly notes, trauma (and even the righteous, well-deserved anger that often accompanies it) can corrupt as readily as it can ennoble. Perhaps more so. When it comes down to it, the thing I believe most deeply about deference politics is that it asks something of trauma that it cannot give. It asks the traumatized to shoulder burdens alone that we ought to share collectively, lifting them up onto a pedestal in order to hide below them. When I think about my trauma, I don't think about life lessons. I think about the quiet nobility of survival. The very fact that those chapters weren't the final ones of my story is powerful enough all on its own. It is enough to ask of those experiences that I am still here to remember them.

Darwin is associated, in the popular imagination, with bloody zero-sum competition, with Tennyson’s “nature, red in tooth and claw”—with the motto “survival of the fittest.” But this wasn’t actually his phrase. It was coined by a philosopher and sociologist named Herbert Spencer and his fellow “social Darwinists,” who were promoters of white and upper-class supremacy. For Darwin, says Keltner, “survival of the kindest” would have been a better moniker. Darwin was a gentle and melancholic soul, a doting husband and adoring father of ten, deeply in love with nature from earliest childhood. His father had wanted him to be a doctor, but when at age sixteen he witnessed his first surgery, performed in those days without anesthesia, he was so horrified that for the rest of his life he couldn’t stand the sight of blood. He retreated to the woodlands and studied beetles instead. Later, he described his encounter with a Brazilian forest as “a chaos of delight, out of which a world of future & more quiet pleasure will arise.

I know how you refuse to thank the Plague. It is understandable, admirable, even, how valiantly you despise the thing that made your survival so difficult. But I do thank the Plague. I whisper my gratitude for it when you are sound asleep in my arms, when your fingers flick the tip of my nose. In the quiet moments, I thank the Plague for you. If it weren’t for the dividing of Ordinaries and Elites so many years ago, I would have never found my way to you. My coins are always at risk in your presence, but no saving of my life would have been necessary that day. No Silencers. No Purging Trials. No stolen moments under the willow. When I thank the Plague, it is not for the power it has gifted me, but for the privilege of you. Nothing makes me stronger than the weakness that is you, Paedyn Gray. And if, in the next lifetime, you choose to steal from me again, I would happily give you my soul if it meant a place beside yours. But until then, I will watch you become another’s reason to thank the Plague. You, Pae, are my inevitable. (I love you.)

You might even say there is a tree for every mood and every moment. When you have something precious to give to the universe, a song or a poem, you should first share it with a golden oak before anyone else. If you are feeling discouraged and defenceless, look for a Mediterranean cypress or a flowering horse chestnut. Both are strikingly resilient, and they will tell you about all the fires they have survived. And if you want to emerge stronger and kinder from your trials, find an aspen to learn from – a tree so tenacious it can fend off even the flames that aim to destroy it. If you are hurting and have no one willing to listen to you, it might do you good to spend time beside a sugar maple. If, on the other hand, you are suffering from excessive self-esteem, do pay a visit to a cherry tree and observe its blossoms, which, though undoubtedly pretty, are no less ephemeral than vainglory. By the time you leave, you might feel a bit more humble, more grounded. To reminisce about the past, seek out a holly to sit under; to dream about the future, choose a magnolia instead. And if it is friends and friendships on your mind, the most suitable companion would be a spruce or a ginkgo. When you arrive at a crossroads and don’t know which path to take, contemplating quietly by a sycamore might help. If you are an artist in need of inspiration, a blue jacaranda or a sweetly scented mimosa could stir your imagination. If it is renewal you are after, seek a wych elm, and if you have too many regrets, a weeping willow will offer solace. When you are in trouble or at your lowest point, and have no one in whom to confide, a hawthorn would be the right choice. There is a reason why hawthorns are home to fairies and known to protect pots of treasure. For wisdom, try a beech; for intelligence, a pine; for bravery, a rowan; for generosity, a hazel; for joy, a juniper; and for when you need to learn to let go of what you cannot control, a birch with its white-silver bark, peeling and shedding layers like old skins. Then again, if it’s love you’re after, or love you have lost, come to the fig, always the fig.

In the years since the disaster, I often think of my friend Arturo Nogueira, and the conversations we had in the mountains about God. Many of my fellow survivors say they felt the personal presence of God in the mountains. He mercifully allowed us to survive, they believe, in answer to our prayers, and they are certain it was His hand that led us home. I deeply respect the faith of my friends, but, to be honest, as hard as I prayed for a miracle in the Andes, I never felt the personal presence of God. At least, I did not feel God as most people see Him. I did feel something larger than myself, something in the mountains and the glaciers and the glowing sky that, in rare moments, reassured me, and made me feel that the world was orderly and loving and good. If this was God, it was not God as a being or a spirit or some omnipotent, superhuman mind. It was not a God who would choose to save us or abandon us, or change in any way. It was simply a silence, a wholeness, an awe-inspiring simplicity. It seemed to reach me through my own feelings of love, and I have often thought that when we feel what we call love, we are really feeling our connection to this awesome presence. I feel this presence still when my mind quiets and I really pay attention. I don’t pretend to understand what it is or what it wants from me. I don’t want to understand these things. I have no interest in any God who can be understood, who speaks to us in one holy book or another, and who tinkers with our lives according to some divine plan, as if we were characters in a play. How can I make sense of a God who sets one religion above the rest, who answers one prayer and ignores another, who sends sixteen young men home and leaves twenty-nine others dead on a mountain? There was a time when I wanted to know that god, but I realize now that what I really wanted was the comfort of certainty, the knowledge that my God was the true God, and that in the end He would reward me for my faithfulness. Now I understand that to be certain–-about God, about anything–-is impossible. I have lost my need to know. In those unforgettable conversations I had with Arturo as he lay dying, he told me the best way to find faith was by having the courage to doubt. I remember those words every day, and I doubt, and I hope, and in this crude way I try to grope my way toward truth. I still pray the prayers I learned as a child–-Hail Marys, Our Fathers–-but I don’t imagine a wise, heavenly father listening patiently on the other end of the line. Instead, I imagine love, an ocean of love, the very source of love, and I imagine myself merging with it. I open myself to it, I try to direct that tide of love toward the people who are close to me, hoping to protect them and bind them to me forever and connect us all to whatever there is in the world that is eternal. …When I pray this way, I feel as if I am connected to something good and whole and powerful. In the mountains, it was love that kept me connected to the world of the living. Courage or cleverness wouldn’t have saved me. I had no expertise to draw on, so I relied upon the trust I felt in my love for my father and my future, and that trust led me home. Since then, it has led me to a deeper understanding of who I am and what it means to be human. Now I am convinced that if there is something divine in the universe, the only way I will find it is through the love I feel for my family and my friends, and through the simple wonder of being alive. I don’t need any other wisdom or philosophy than this: My duty is to fill my time on earth with as much life as possible, to become a little more human every day, and to understand that we only become human when we love. …For me, this is enough.

The front is a cage, and you have to wait nervously in it for whatever happens to you. Here we lie under a criss-cross of shell trajectories, and we live in the tension of uncertainty. Chance is hovering over us. If there is a shot, all I can do is duck; I don’t know for sure and I can’t influence where it is going to come down. It’s awareness of chances that makes us so indifferent. A few months ago, I was playing cards in a dugout; after a bit I got up and went out to go talk to some men I knew in another dugout. When I got back, there was nothing left of the first one, a direct hit from a heavy shell had flattened it. I went back to the other dugout and got there just in time to help dig the men out. While I was away it had been buried. It is simply a matter of chance whether I am hit or whether I go on living. I can be squashed flat in a bomb-proof dugout, and I can survive ten hours in the open under heavy barrage without a scratch. Every soldier owes the fact that he is still alive to a thousand lucky chances and nothing else. And every soldier believes in and trust to chance.

Kevin wouldn't really go back," Neil said, disbelieving. "Not after what Riko did." Wymack gave him a pitying look. "Tetsuji never former adopted Kevin. Do you know why? Moriyamas don't believe in outsiders or equals. Tetsuji took Kevin in and took over his training, but he also gave Kevin to Riko - literally. Kevin isn't human to them. He's a project. He's a pet, and it's Riko's name on his leash. The fact he ran away is a miracle. If Tetsuji called tomorrow and told him to come home, Kevin would. He knows what Tetsuji would do to him if he refused. He'd be too afraid to say no." Neil thought he'd be sick. He didn't want to hear anymore of this, he'd already heard to much. He wanted to run until it all started making sense in his head, or at least until the ice left his veins. [...] "What if Coach Moriyama told him to stop playing?" Wymack was quiet for an endless minute, then said, "Kevin only had the strength to leave because Riko destroyed his hand. That was finally one injustice too many. Because of that I'd like to think Kevin would defy Tetsuji, but it's just as likely we'd never see him with a racquet again. But the day Kevin stops playing forever is the day he dies. He has nothing else. He wasn't raised to have anything else. Do you understand? We cannot lose to the Ravens this year. Kevin won't survive it." "We can't win against them," Neil said. "We're the worst team in the nation." "Then it's time to stop being the worst," Wymack said. "It's time to fly." "You don't really think we can," Neil said. "If you didn't think you could, what are you doing here? You wouldn't have signed the contract if you'd already given up on yourself.

Nights with David the Physicist are upsetting,” she said. “And unconnected.” She sighed, took a drag, exhaled. “There is talking, about a thousand things. Laughter. Even some kissing. And then nothing. Nothing inspires him, if you see what I mean.” “I’m not sure I do.” She shrugged. “Nothing impacts him, I don’t think. His head, maybe his heart, these things are involved in the moment. I believe they are. But then the moment is over and he never thinks of it again. Or chooses not to care.” I slumped back in my seat. “He cares,” I said. “I mean, I’ve seen him. When he looks at you, it’s like no one else exists.” “And when he looks away,” Cristina said quietly, “it is as if I don’t exist.” She toyed with her cigarette. “I don’t think he means to be cruel. I think he might think he is being kind instead.” She smiled. “After all, he cannot control what I feel. What the things he does make me feel. Or the things he does not do.” “I greatly dislike him,” I said. “I wish I did.” Cristina sighed. “But what would be the point? He is like a storm. You don’t like or dislike something of nature, you just try to survive it and hope for the best. Right?” “I don’t think he’s a force of nature,” I countered. “I think he’s just a coward. There’s no way he likes anyone more than he likes you.” “Maybe not,” Cristina agreed. “But that doesn’t mean that everything automatically leads to a happy ending. I don’t think there will be any happy ending with David the Physicist, Alex. I think there will maybe be one or two other nights I will have to survive, and then he will disappear because he’s a coward or because he just will, and I will cry some more and smoke some more and never know why.

Such things are real problems, they are serious matters to us, they cannot be otherwise. Here, on the borders of death, life follows an amazingly simply course, it is limited to what is most necessary, all else lies buried in gloomy sleep;—in that besides our primitiveness and our survival. Were we more subtly differentiated we must long since have gone mad, have deserted, or have fallen. As in a polar expedition, every expression of life must serve only the preservation of existence, and is absolutely focused on that. All else is banished because it would consume

These feelings don't just go away. They linger. Hover. They are with me always. Even at my most functioning...they are there, watching me. These emotions are my roommates now, bunking up beside me at night. They do not pay any rent...they are determinded to ruin me, and yet I can never fully evict them from my brain. I have tried -- really tried -- to chip away at my grief...But lately, I've just given up. I'm finally giving it permission to breathe and exist... Most days now, they lie dormant in me. Sometimes it gets so quiet in my brain I think they've finally packed up and left. But every year as the calendar rounds the corner to March and the anniversary of her death approaches, anger bubbles again...I rage over the smallest of things, screaming behind the steering wheel of my car when another driver forgets to use their blinker. At first I'm perplexed, and then I remember: it's here again. And I am still mad. So mad. I can starve it, avoid it, rationalize it, manage it, talk about it in therapy, and eat it up in neat little points value. No matter how much weight I lose, I will never lose this one simple truth: I want my mom. I am so f***ing mad that she's gone. And that feeling will never, ever die.

if they label you soft, feather weight and white-livered, if the locker room tosses back its sweaty head, and laughs at how quiet your hands stay, if they come to trample the dandelions roaring in your throat, you tell them that you were forged inside of a woman who had to survive fifteen different species of disaster to bring you here, and you didn’t come to piss on trees. you ain’t nobody’s thick-necked pitbull boy, don’t need to prove yourself worthy of this inheritance of street-corner logic, this blood legend, this index of catcalls, “three hundred ways to turn a woman into a three course meal”, this legacy of shame, and man, and pillage, and man, and rape, and man. you boy. you won’t be some girl’s slit wrists dazzling the bathtub, won’t be some girl’s, “i didn’t ask for it but he gave it to me anyway”, the torn skirt panting behind the bedroom door, some father’s excuse to polish his gun. if they say, “take what you want”, you tell them you already have everything you need; you come from scabbed knuckles and women who never stopped swinging, you come men who drank away their life savings, and men who raised daughters alone. you come from love you gotta put your back into, elbow-grease loving like slow-dancing on dirty linoleum, you come from that house of worship. boy, i dare you to hold something like that. love whatever feels most like your grandmother’s cooking. love whatever music looks best on your feet. whatever woman beckons your blood to the boiling point, you treat her like she is the god of your pulse, you treat her like you would want your father to treat me: i dare you to be that much man one day. that you would give up your seat on the train to the invisible women, juggling babies and groceries. that you would hold doors, and say thank-you, and understand that women know they are beautiful without you having to yell it at them from across the street. the day i hear you call a woman a “bitch” is the day i dig my own grave. see how you feel writing that eulogy. and if you are ever left with your love’s skin trembling under your nails, if there is ever a powder-blue heart left for dead on your doorstep, and too many places in this city that remind you of her tears, be gentle when you drape the remains of your lives in burial cloth. don’t think yourself mighty enough to turn her into a poem, or a song, or some other sweetness to soften the blow, boy, i dare you to break like that. you look too much like your mother not t

It is time for you to go. Lan and I must be on our way to the Stone. There can be no waiting, now.” “No.” He said it quietly, but when Moiraine opened her mouth, he raised his voice. “No! I will not leave her!” The Aes Sedai took a deep breath. “Very well, Perrin.” Her voice was ice; calm, smooth, cold. “Remain if you wish. Perhaps you will survive this night. Lan!” She and the Warder strode down the hall to their rooms. In moments they returned, Lan wearing his color-changing cloak, and vanished down the stairs without another word to him. He stared through the open door at Faile. I have to do something. If it is like the wolf dreams. . . . “Perrin,” came Loial’s deep rumble, “what is this about Faile?” The Ogier came striding down the hall in his shirtsleeves, ink on his fingers and a pen in his hand. “Lan told me I had to go, and then he said something about Faile, in a trap. What did he mean?” Distractedly, Perrin told him what Moiraine had said. It might work. It might. It has to! He was surprised when Loial growled. “No! Perrin, it is not right! Faile was so free. It is not right to trap her!” Perrin peered up at Loial’s face, and suddenly remembered the old stories that claimed Ogier were implacable enemies. Loial’s ears had laid back along the sides of his head, and his broad face was as hard as an anvil. “Loial, I am going to try to help Faile. But I will be helpless myself while I do. Will you guard my back?” Loial raised those huge hands that held books so carefully, and his thick fingers curled as if to crush stone. “None will pass me while I live, Perrin. Not Myrddraal or the Dark One himself.” He said it like a simple statement of fact. Perrin nodded, and looked through the door again. It has to work. I don’t care if Min warned me against her or not! With a snarl he leaped toward Faile, stretching out his hand. He thought he touched her ankle before he was gone.

Higher education is, after all, in the business of producing professionals (or wives of professionals), and there are a limited variety of dies from which they can be cut. As in any other factory, the jobs are specialized and standardized for efficient production: write the paper this way, type the letter that, dispense funds this way, grade the student that. … Academia brooks only token deviance from its norms, just enough to demonstrate its democratic principles or its ‘innovative’ atmosphere. It offers survival and acceptance (graduation, a job, prestige) to those who will quietly take their place on the assembly line or who are themselves willing to be mutilated into professionals.

It takes some getting used to,' Mr. Forkle said. 'But what you're seeing is a visual representation of each other's moods.' 'So that means if I do this...' Keefe tickled Sophie's neck. 'GAH--everything just went supersonic!' Fitz said. Sophie snatched Keefe's wrist as he reached to tickle her again. 'Don't. You. Dare.' 'Whoa, now everything's red and ripply,' Fitz said. 'Is that because she's angry?' 'Precisely, Mr. Vacker. Every time her emotions shift, the patterns and colors will change. And with practice, you'll learn to interpret what you see.' 'Okay, but...can't they just say, "Hey, I'm feeling this?"' Keefe asked. 'People aren't always honest about their feelings--even with themselves,' Mr. Forkle told him. 'Plus, many telepathic missions involve stealth and secrecy. So for this exercise I'm going to need both of you to forget everything around you. Let the world drop away, leaving only you two.' Keefe sighed. 'Just tell them to stare into each other's eyes and they'll be good.' 'None of that, Mr. Sencen. From this moment on, you have one job and one job only: to judge their translations of the various emotions I'll be triggering.' 'Triggering how?' Sophie asked. 'You'll see soon enough. And you'll go first, Miss Foster. For this to work, Mr. Vacker, it's crucial that you not react externally. No yelling or thrashing or screaming or--' 'Uhhh, what are you going to do to me?' Fitz asked. 'Nothing you won't survive. Consider it an exercise in self-control. And try not to listen to his thoughts, Miss Foster. Study only the changes in his emotional center and make your deduction. We begin now.' Sophie closed her eyes and focus on the colors weaving around Fitz's mind. She was about to ask if she was missing something when the pattern exploded into a swirl of pale blue tendrils. The color felt to bright to be sad, but also too wild to be peaceful. 'Tension?' she guessed. 'Kinda close,' Keefe told her. The laughter in his voice made her wonder what had happened to poor Fitz. She tried to think of other emotions as his mind turned electric blue. 'Shock?' she guessed. 'That counts,' Keefe said. 'Though the best answer would've been "surprise."' 'Is that an emotion?' she asked. 'Indeed it is,' Mr. Forkle said. 'One of the most common emotions you'll experience as you navigate someone's mind--hence why I chose it as our starting point.' 'Can I talk now?' Fitz asked. 'Because that was seriously disgusting!' Sophie opened her eyes and tried not to laugh when she saw red fruit smashed all over Fitz's face. He wiped his cheeks on his sleeves, but that only smeared the pulp. 'I think I'm going to like this assignment,' Keefe said. 'What else can we fling at Fitz?' 'Nothing for the moment,' Mr. Forkle told him. 'It's his turn to interpret. Everyone close your eyes. And remember, no cues of any kind, Miss Foster.' Sophie counted the seconds, bracing for the worst--and when nothing chaned, she opened her eyes and found Mr. Forkle with his finger over his lips in a 'shhh' sign. 'Um...confusion,' Fitz guessed. 'That works,' Keefe said. 'It started as anticipation, but then it shifted.' 'Very good,' Mr. Forkle said. 'And well done, Mr. Sencen. I wasn't sure you'd recognize confusion. It's one of the more challenging emotions for Empaths.' 'Maybe on other people,' Keefe said. 'But on Foster it's easy. Why are her emotions so much stronger?' 'Honestly, I'm not sure,' Mr. Forkle admitted. 'I suspect it stems from the combination of her inflicting ability and her human upbringing. But it was one of the surprises of her development. Much like her teleporting. Okay, Miss Foster, it's your turn to guess again.' She closed her eyes and watched as the lines of color in Fitz's mind blossomed to a snowflake of purple. 'Pride?' she guessed. Keefe laughed. 'Wow, add more fail points to Sophitz.' 'Quiet,' Mr. Forkle told him.

Nature vs. nurture is part of this—and then there is what I think of as anti-nurturing—the ways we in a western/US context are socialized to work against respecting the emergent processes of the world and each other: We learn to disrespect Indigenous and direct ties to land. We learn to be quiet, polite, indirect, and submissive, not to disturb the status quo. We learn facts out of context of application in school. How will this history, science, math show up in our lives, in the work of growing community and home? We learn that tests and deadlines are the reasons to take action. This puts those with good short-term memories and a positive response to pressure in leadership positions, leading to urgency-based thinking, regardless of the circumstance. We learn to compete with each other in a scarcity-based economy that denies and destroys the abundant world we actually live in. We learn to deny our longings and our skills, and to do work that occupies our hours without inspiring our greatness. We learn to manipulate each other and sell things to each other, rather than learning to collaborate and evolve together. We learn that the natural world is to be manicured, controlled, or pillaged to support our consumerist lives. Even the natural lives of our bodies get medicated, pathologized, shaved or improved upon with cosmetic adjustments. We learn that factors beyond our control determine the quality of our lives—something as random as which skin, gender, sexuality, ability, nation, or belief system we are born into sets a path for survival and quality of life. In the United States specifically, though I see this most places I travel, we learn that we only have value if we can produce—only then do we earn food, home, health care, education. Similarly, we learn our organizations are only as successful as our fundraising results, whether the community impact is powerful or not. We learn as children to swallow our tears and any other inconvenient emotions, and as adults that translates into working through red flags, value differences, pain, and exhaustion. We learn to bond through gossip, venting, and destroying, rather than cultivating solutions together. Perhaps the most egregious thing we are taught is that we should just be really good at what’s already possible, to leave the impossible alone.

She later described a fear so complete that it replaced every feeling in her body. Like an animal hiding inside her, it opened to its full size and stood up using the muscles in her legs. “I had nothing to do with it,” she explained. “I was a passenger moving down that hallway.” What she experienced was real fear, not like when we are startled, not like the fear we feel at a movie, or the fear of public speaking. This fear is the powerful ally that says, “Do what I tell you to do.” Sometimes, it tells a person to play dead, or to stop breathing, or to run or scream or fight, but to Kelly it said, “Just be quiet and don’t doubt me and I’ll get you out of here.” Kelly told me she felt new confidence in herself, knowing she had acted on that signal, knowing she had saved her own life.

If we’re blessed, though, a few words might remain by our side. They climb to the top of the hill during the night, crawl into small holes dug to fit the shape of their bodies, stay quite still, and let the stormy winds of time blow past. The dawn finally breaks, the wild wind subsides, and the surviving words quietly peek out from the surface. For the most part they have small voices—they are shy and only have ambiguous ways of expressing themselves. Even so, they are ready to serve as witnesses. As honest, fair witnesses. But in order to create those enduring, long-suffering words, or else to find them and leave them behind, you must sacrifice, unconditionally, your own body, your very own heart. You have to lay down your neck on a cold stone pillow illuminated by the winter moon.

By October of 1958, most roads leading to the Oriente Province had become impassable. Bridges were cut and dropped by the rebels, making travel to the eastern part of Cuba extremely difficult. The elections in November were seen as an obvious sham and everyone knew that the only way to survive was to keep quiet and wait for changes to take place. Most of Batista’s supporters were still in denial and carried out their atrocities with abandon. Tension among the people in Havana had grown and as Christmas approached, it became obvious that this year things would be different. People that had been harassed, or worse, were in no mood to celebrate the holidays. With the country engaged in a civil war that affected everyone, Christmas was not celebrated in the usual manner during the winter of 1958.

There is, in Peanuts, an underlying and profound sadness which reflects not only Schulz's own struggles with depression but his sensitivity to the quiet terrors of human loneliness. "The most terrifying loneliness is not experienced by everyone and can be understood by only a few," Schulz said. "I compare the panic in this kind of loneliness to the dog we see running frantically down the road pursuing the family car. He is not really being left behind, for the family knows it is to return, but for that moment in his limited understanding, he is being left alone forever, and he has to run and run to survive." It is this heart-stopping poignancy which gives indisputable credibility to Schulz's work. The great artists, wrote the poet Edward Thomas, have seen what they have imagined. Surely this is true of Schulz.

Imagine us saying to children: "In the last fifty or so years, the human race has become aware of a great deal of information about its mechanisms; how it behaves, how it must behave under certain circumstances. If this is to be useful, you must learn to contemplate these rules calmly, dispassionately, disinterestedly, without emotion. It is information that will set people free from blind loyalties, obedience to slogans, rhetoric, leaders, group emotions." Well, there it is. ...It is interesting to speculate: what country, what nation, when, and where, would have undertaken a programme to teach its children to be people to resist rhetoric, to examine the mechanisms that govern them? I can think of only one - America in that heady period of the Gettysburg Address. And that time could not have survived the Civil War, for when war starts, countries cannot afford disinterested examination of their behaviour. When a war starts, nations go mad - and have to go mad, in order to survive. ...I am not talking of the aptitudes for killing, for destruction, which soldiers are taught as part of their training, but a kind of atmosphere, the invisible poison, which spreads everywhere. And then people everywhere begin behaving as they never could in peace-time. Afterwards we look back, amazed. Did I really do that? Believe that? Fall for that bit of propaganda? Think that all our enemies were evil? That all our own nation's acts were good? How could I have tolerated that state of mind, day after day, month after month - perpetually stimulated, perpetually whipped up into emotions that my mind was meanwhile quietly and desperately protesting against?

I turned to Kitty Sue and surprised myself by answering honestly, "I'm fine. Lee's fine. Lee's more fine than me. I'm having troubles adjusting. Lee seems pretty sure of himself. Lee seems pretty sure of everything." This, I realized, was true about Lee always. I'd never met someone as confident in my life. Well, maybe Hank, but Hank's confidence was quiet and assured. And there was Lee's best friend, Eddie, of course. But Eddie was like Lee's twin, separated at birth, cut from the same cloth. Lee's confidence, and Eddie's, wasn't like Hank's. It was cocky and assertive. "And you aren't sure?" Kitty Sue asked. I looked at her and thought maybe I should have lied. It was too late now. "Nope. He scares me," I admitted. She nodded. "Yep, he's pretty dang scary." I stared. My God, the woman was talking about her son. "You agree?" She looked at Lee then back at me. "Honey, that boy drives me to distraction. It's like he's not of my loins. I don't even know where he came from. If Ally hadn't been the exact replica of Lee, personality-wise, except female I would have wondered if there was a mix up at the hospital." I kept staring. Kitty Sue kept talking. "Hank's just like his Dad. Smart, cautious, controlled, taking only calculated risks. I'm sure Lee calculates his risks, but I think he allows for a much larger margin for error and counts on ... I don't know what he counts on to get him out of whatever scrapes he gets into." I couldn't stop staring. She kept talking, and everything that came out of her mouth was like a verbal car accident. If she was trying to convince me to stick with her son, she should have tried a different tact. "He does ... you know?" Kitty Sue said. I realized she was asking me a question, so I shook my head that no, I didn't know. She explained, "He gets out of every scrape. Always did and always did it on his own. Though it'll take some kind of woman to live a life like that, knowing what he's like, knowing the risks he takes." Her hand went to my knee and she squeezed it before she went on. "Not anyone here would think less of you if you aren't that woman. I'm telling you because it's true. We all love you both and we'll always love you both, no matter what happens between you." She stopped, sighed and continued, "Anyway, I don't even know if that kind of woman exists. I'm his mother. I've lived with him surviving scrapes that would make your hair stand on end and I worry about him every day. He scares the hell out of me.

What remained was sorrow, the immense sorrow, the sorrow of having survived. The sorrow of war. But for Hoa and countless other loved comrades, nameless ordinary soldiers, those who sacrificed for others and for their Vietnam, raising the name of Vietnam high and proud, creating a spiritual beauty in the horrors of conflict, the war would have been another brutal, sadistic exercise. Kien himself would have been dead long ago if it had not been for the sacrifice of others; he might even have killed himself to escape the psychological burden of killing others. He had not done that, choosing instead to live the life of an antlike soldier, carrying the burden of every underling. After 1975, all that had quieted. The wind of war had stopped. The branches of conflict had stopped rustling. As we had won, Kien thought, then that meant justice had won; that had been some consolation. Or had it? Think carefully; look at your own existence. Look carefully now at the peace we have, painful, bitter, and sad. And look at who won the war. To win, martyrs had sacrificed their lives in order that others might survive. Not a new phenomenon, true. But for those still living to know that the kindest, most worthy people have all fallen away, or even been tortured, humiliated before being killed, or buried and wiped away by the machinery of war, then this beautiful landscape of calm and peace is an appalling paradox. Justice may have won, but cruelty, death, and inhuman violence have also won. Just look and think: it is the truth. Losses can be made good, damage can be repaired, and wounds will heal in time. But the psychological scars of the war will remain forever.

The real loser in the eastern forests has been the songbird. One of the most striking losses was the Carolina parakeet, a lovely, innocuous bird whose numbers in the wild were possibly exceeded only by the unbelievably numerous passenger pigeon. (When the first pilgrims came to America there were an estimated nine billion passenger pigeons—more than twice the number of all birds found in America today.) Both were hunted out of existence—the passenger pigeon for pig feed and the simple joy of blasting volumes of birds from the sky with blind ease, the Carolina parakeet because it ate farmers’ fruit and had a striking plumage that made a lovely ladies’ hat. In 1914, the last surviving members of each species died within weeks of each other in captivity. A similar unhappy fate awaited the delightful Bachman’s warbler. Always rare, it was said to have one of the loveliest songs of all birds. For years it escaped detection, but in 1939, two birders, operating independently in different places, coincidentally saw a Bachman’s warbler within two days of each other. Both shot the birds (nice work, boys!), and that, it appears, was that for the Bachman’s warbler. But there are almost certainly others that disappeared before anyone much noticed. John James Audubon painted three species of bird—the small-headed flycatcher, the carbonated warbler, and the Blue Mountain warbler—that have not been seen by anyone since. The same is true of Townsend’s bunting, of which there is one stuffed specimen in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. Between the 1940s and 1980s, the populations of migratory songbirds fell by 50 percent in the eastern United States (in large part because of loss of breeding sites and other vital wintering habitats in Latin America) and by some estimates are continuing to fall by 3 percent or so a year. Seventy percent of all eastern bird species have seen population declines since the 1960s. These days, the woods are a pretty quiet place.

The ocean made space for me, pressing against the blackness of my assumed skin, buoying me and counter-acting the heaviness of the lead fastened around my waist. I kicked and continued my initial dive, feeling the pressures sliding back against my belly and legs, the quiet acceptance of the seas. Space and oceans have much in common, both are alien to us, not our element, both contain mysteries, dangers, sudden beauties of their own and beyond our land-bound experience. But space is a container of nothingness, a vacuum, a void of immeasurable loneliness and occasional transcendence. Water is a repository of life, and the life asserts itself as you move through the ocean; creatures large and small, beautiful or stunningle grotesque according to their custom, aquatic forests and microscopic landscapes, beings caught between the layers of life, rocks made of living creatures and living creatures made of stone, vegetable animals and animated plants and sudden deep, heart-breaking, lovely jewels that flick their trailing rainbows and dart away from you between the fronds of weeds, leaving shimmering mysteries that can be pursued, but never truly caught and comprehended. Space does not care whether you are there or not, and the struggle to survive between worlds is a fight to avoid being sucked into a vacuum, into an ultimate nil. Implacable in its indifference, it kills you simply because it is, and crushes you with the weight of your knowledge of its indifference. But the ocean is not indifferent. It reacts and shapes itself to your presence or absence, presents its laws as implacable realities, but an instant later displays the very non-exemplar of that rule swimming calmly through the depths. Accept the strangeness and the ocean opens to you, gives you freedom and beauty, a hook into otherness. But wonder approached in fear is cancelled, disappears into threathening shiverings of distant plants, into terrifying movements of bulky darkness through the rocks.

Jack took two steps towards the couch and then heard his daughter’s distressed wails, wincing. “Oh, right. The munchkin.” He instead turned and headed for the stairs, yawning and scratching his messy brown hair, calling out, “Hang on, chubby monkey, Daddy’s coming.” Jack reached the top of the stairs. And stopped dead. There was a dragon standing in the darkened hallway. At first, Jack swore he was still asleep. He had to be. He couldn’t possibly be seeing correctly. And yet the icy fear slipping down his spine said differently. The dragon stood at roughly five feet tall once its head rose upon sighting Jack at the other end of the hallway. It was lean and had dirty brown scales with an off-white belly. Its black, hooked claws kneaded the carpet as its yellow eyes stared out at Jack, its pupils dilating to drink him in from head to toe. Its wings rustled along its back on either side of the sharp spines protruding down its body to the thin, whip-like tail. A single horn glinted sharp and deadly under the small, motion-activated hallway light. The only thing more noticeable than that were the many long, jagged scars scored across the creature’s stomach, limbs, and neck. It had been hunted recently. Judging from the depth and extent of the scars, it had certainly killed a hunter or two to have survived with so many marks. “Okay,” Jack whispered hoarsely. “Five bucks says you’re not the Easter Bunny.” The dragon’s nostrils flared. It adjusted its body, feet apart, lips sliding away from sharp, gleaming white teeth in a warning hiss. Mercifully, Naila had quieted and no longer drew the creature’s attention. Jack swallowed hard and held out one hand, bending slightly so his six-foot-two-inch frame was less threatening. “Look at me, buddy. Just keep looking at me. It’s alright. I’m not going to hurt you. Why don’t you just come this way, huh?” He took a single step down and the creature crept forward towards him, hissing louder. “That’s right. This way. Come on.” Jack eased backwards one stair at a time. The dragon let out a warning bark and followed him, its saliva leaving damp patches on the cream-colored carpet. Along the way, Jack had slipped his phone out of his pocket and dialed 9-1-1, hoping he had just enough seconds left in the reptile’s waning patience. “9-1-1, what’s your emergency?” “Listen to me carefully,” Jack said, not letting his eyes stray from the dragon as he fumbled behind him for the handle to the sliding glass door. He then quickly gave her his address before continuing. “There is an Appalachian forest dragon in my house. Get someone over here as fast as you can.” “We’re contacting a retrieval team now, sir. Please stay calm and try not to make any loud noises or sudden movements–“ Jack had one barefoot on the cool stone of his patio when his daughter Naila cried for him again. The dragon’s head turned towards the direction of upstairs. Jack dropped his cell phone, grabbed a patio chair, and slammed it down on top of the dragon’s head as hard as he could.

It isn’t the height that scares me—the height makes me feel alive with energy, every organ and vessel and muscle in my body singing at the same pitch. Then I realize what it is. It’s him. Something about him makes me feel like I am about to fall. Or turn to liquid. Or burst into flames. My hand almost misses the next rung. “Now tell me…,” he says through a bursting breath, “what do you think learning strategy has to do with…bravery?” The question reminds me that he is my instructor, and I am supposed to learn something from this. A cloud passes over the moon, and the light shifts across my hands. “It…it prepares you to act,” I say finally. “You learn strategy so you can use it.” I hear him breathing behind me, loud and fast. “Are you all right, Four?” “Are you human, Tris? Being up this high…” He gulps for air. “It doesn’t scare you at all?” I look over my shoulder at the ground. If I fall now, I will die. But I don’t think I will fall. A gust of air presses against my left side, throwing my body weight to the right. I gasp and cling to the rungs, my balance shifting. Four’s cold hand clamps around one of my hips, one of his fingers finding a strip of bare skin just under the hem of my T-shirt. He squeezes, steadying me and pushing me gently to the left, restoring my balance. Now I can’t breathe. I pause, staring at my hands, my mouth dry. I feel the ghost of where his hand was, his fingers long and narrow. “You okay?” he asks quietly. “Yes,” I say, my voice strained. I keep climbing, silently, until I reach the platform. Judging by the blunted ends of metal rods, it used to have railings, but it doesn’t anymore. I sit down and scoot to the end of it so Four has somewhere to sit. Without thinking, I put my legs over the side. Four, however, crouches and presses his back to the metal support, breathing heavily. “You’re afraid of heights,” I say. “How do you survive in the Dauntless compound?” “I ignore my fear,” he says. “When I make decisions, I pretend it doesn’t exist.” I stare at him for a second. I can’t help it. To me there’s a

Pointsman is the only one here maintaining his calm. He appears unruffled and strong. His lab coats have even begun lately to take on a Savile Row serenity, suppressed waist, flaring vents, finer material, rather rakishly notched lapels. In this parched and fallow time, he gushes affluence. After the baying has quieted down at last, he speaks, soothing: “There’s no danger.” “No danger?” screams Aaron Throwster, and the lot of them are off again muttering and growling. “Slothrop’s knocked out Dodson-Truck and the girl in one day!” “The whole thing’s falling apart, Pointsman!” “Since Sir Stephen came back, Fitzmaurice House has dropped out of our scheme, and there’ve been embarrassing inquires down from Duncan Sandys—“ “That’s the P.M.’s son-in-law, Pointsman, not good, not good!” “We’ve already begun to run into a deficit—“ “Funding,” IF you can keep your head, “is available, and will be coming in before long… certainly before we run into any serious trouble. Sir Stephen, far from being ‘knocked out,’ is quite happily at work at Fitzmaurice House, and is At Home there should any of you wish to confirm. Miss Borgesius is still active in the program, and Mr. Duncan Sandys is having all his questions answered. But best of all, we are budgeted well into fiscal ’46 before anything like a deficit begins to rear its head.” “Your Interested Parties again?” sez Rollo Groast. “Ah, I noticed Clive Mossmoon from Imperial Chemicals closeted with you day before yesterday,” Edwin Treacle mentions now. “Clive Mossmoon and I took an organic chemistry course or two together back at Manchester. Is ICI one of our, ah, sponsors, Pointsman?” “No,” smoothly, “Mossmoon, actually, is working out of Malet Street these days. I’m afraid we were up to nothing more sinister than a bit of routine coordination over the Schwarzkommando business.” “The hell you were. I happen to know Clive’s at ICI, managing some sort of polymer research.” They stare at each other. One is lying, or bluffing, or both are, or all of the above. But whatever it is Pointsman has a slight advantage. By facing squarely the extinction of his program, he has gained a great of bit of Wisdom: that if there is a life force operating in Nature, still there is nothing so analogous in a bureaucracy. Nothing so mystical. It all comes down, as it must, to the desires of men. Oh, and women too of course, bless their empty little heads. But survival depends on having strong enough desires—on knowing the System better than the other chap, and how to use it. It’s work, that’s all it is, and there’s no room for any extrahuman anxieties—they only weaken, effeminize the will: a man either indulges them, or fights to win, und so weiter. “I do wish ICI would finance part of this,” Pointsman smiles. “Lame, lame,” mutters the younger Dr. Groast. “What’s it matter?” cries Aaron Throwster. “If the old man gets moody at the wrong time this whole show can prang.” “Brigadier Pudding will not go back on any of his commitments,” Pointsman very steady, calm, “we have made arrangements with him. The details aren’t important.” They never are, in these meetings of his.

Studentdom, he felt, must pass its own Examinations and define its own Commencement--a slow, most painful process, made the more anguishing by bloody intelligences like the Bonifacists of Siegfrieder College. Yet however it seemed at times that men got nowhere, but only repeated class by class the mistakes of their predecessors, two crucial facts about them were at once their hope and the limitation of their possibility, so he believed. One was their historicity: the campus was young, the student race even younger, and by contrast with the whole of past time, the great collegiate cultures had been born only yesterday. The other had to do with comparative cyclology, a field of systematic speculation he could not review for me just then, but whose present relevance lay in the correspondency he held to obtain between the life-history of individuals and the history of studentdom in general. As the embryologists maintained that ontogeny repeats phylogeny, so, Max claimed, the race itself--and on a smaller scale, West-Campus culture--followed demonstrably--in capital letters, as it were, or slow motion--the life-pattern of its least new freshman. This was the basis of Spielman's Law--ontogeny repeats cosmogeny--and there was much more to it and to the science of cyclology whereof it was first principle. The important thing for now was that, by his calculations, West-Campus as a whole was in mid-adolescence... 'Look how we been acting,' he invited me, referring to intercollegiate political squabbles; 'the colleges are spoilt kids, and the whole University a mindless baby, ja? Okay: so weren't we all once, Enos Enoch too? And we got to admit that the University's a precocious kid. If the history of life on campus hadn't been so childish, we couldn't hope it'll reach maturity.' Studentdom had passed already, he asserted, from a disorganized, pre-literate infancy (of which Croaker was a modern representative, nothing ever being entirely lost) through a rather brilliant early childhood ('...ancient Lykeion, Remus, T'ang...') which formed its basic and somewhat contradictory character; it had undergone a period of naive general faith in parental authority (by which he meant early Founderism) and survived critical spells of disillusionment, skepticism, rationalism, willfulness, self-criticism, violence, disorientation, despair, and the like--all characteristic of pre-adolescence and adolescence, at least in their West-Campus form. I even recognized some of those stages in my own recent past; indeed, Max's description of the present state of West-Campus studentdom reminded me uncomfortably of my behavior in the Lady-Creamhair period: capricious, at odds with itself, perverse, hard to live with. Its schisms, as manifested in the Quiet Riot, had been aggravated and rendered dangerous by the access of unwonted power--as when, in the space of a few semesters, a boy finds himself suddenly muscular, deep-voiced, aware of his failings, proud of his strengths, capable of truly potent love and hatred--and on his own. What hope there was that such an adolescent would reach maturity (not to say Commencement) without destroying himself was precisely the hope of the University.

Rhys looked them each in the eye, even my sisters, his hand brushing the back of my own. 'Do you want the inspiring talk or the bleak one?' he asked. 'We want the real one,' Amren said. Rhys pushed his shoulders back, elegantly folding his wings behind him. 'I believe everything happens for a reason. Whether it is decided by the Mother, of the Cauldron, or some sort of tapestry of Fate, I don't know. I don't really care. But I am grateful for it, whatever it is. Grateful that it brought you all into my life. If it hadn't... I might have become as awful as the price we're going to face today. If I had not met an Illyrian warrior-in-training,' he said to Cassian, 'I would not have known the true depth of strength, of resilience, of honour and loyalty.' Cassian's eyes gleamed bright. Rhys said to Azriel, 'If I had not met a shadowsinger, I would not have known that it is the family you make not the one you are born into, that matters. I would not have known what it is to truly hope, even when the world tells you to despair.' Azriel bowed his head in thanks. Mor was already crying when Rhys spoke to her. 'If I had not met my cousin, I would never have learned that light can be found in even the darkest of hells. That kindness can thrive even amongst cruelty.' She wiped away her tears as she nodded. I waited for Amren to offer a retort. But she was only waiting. Rhys bowed his head to her. 'If I had not met a tiny monster who hoards jewels more fiercely than a firedrake...' A quiet laugh from all of us at that. Rhys smiled softly. 'My own power would have consumed me long ago.' Rhys squeezed my hand as he looked to me at last. 'And if I had not met my mate...' His words failed him as silver lined his eyes. He said down the bond, I would have waited five hundred more years for you. A thousand years. And if this was all the time we were allowed to have... The wait was worth it. He wiped away the tears sliding down my face. 'I believe that everything happened, exactly the way it had to... so I could find you.' He kissed another tear away. And then he said to my sisters, 'We have not known each other for long. But I have to believe that you were brought here, into our family, for a reason, too. And maybe today we'll find out why.' He surveyed them all again- and held out his hand to Cassian. Cassian took it, and held out his other for Mor. Then Mor extended her other to Azriel. Azriel to Amren. Amren to Nesta. Nesta to Elain. And Elain to me. Until we were all linked, all bound together. Rhys said, 'We will walk out onto that field and only accept Death when it comes to haul us away to the Otherworld. We will fight for life, for survival, for our futures. But if it is decided by that tapestry of Fate or the Cauldron or the Mother that we do not walk off that field today...' His chin lifted. 'The great joy and honour of my life has been to know you. To call you my family. And I am grateful- more than I can possibly say- that I was given this time with you all.' 'We are grateful, Rhysand,' Amren said quietly. 'More than you know.' Rhys gave her a small smile as the others murmured their agreement. He squeezed my hand again as he said, 'Then let's go make Hybern very ungrateful to have known us, too.

Under the Fugitive Persons Act, those who escape from service are to be captured and returned, anywhere they are found in the United States, slave state or free. All law enforcement agencies are obliged to assist in these operations when called upon (as, indeed, “all good citizens” are so obliged), but it is the US Marshals Service that is specifically charged with the job. This law was passed in the ancient year of 1793 under its old name, but it’s been updated repeatedly: strengthened in 1850, reinforced in 1861, revised and strengthened a half dozen times since. When, in 1875, Congress at last ended slavery in the nation’s capital, the slaveholding powers were appeased by the raising of fees for obstruction. When President Roosevelt, in 1935, proposed the creation of a “comprehensive regulatory framework” for the plantations (and the Bureau of Labor Practices to enforce it), he quieted howling southern senators with a sweeping immunity bill, shielding US marshals from zealous northern prosecutors. Tit for tat. Give and take. Negotiation and conciliation. Compromise. It’s how the Union survives. People

Only by listening attentively to every command issuing from his heart can the warrior hope to gain the advantage over power. There is no other way in which to survive the unrelenting attacks staged by power against the warrior striving to gain command over it. The warrior must never, not even for one instant, lose sight of the fact that power is not the sole property of any individual to be used for selfish gain - power may only be used for the benefit of all life, since the individual unit is but a fragment of the greater whole. If the warrior holds his intent unwaveringly upon this knowledge throughout his battle, then there comes a moment when he slips into a second state of serenity and, in that new quietness of life, grasps the purpose of the eagle. It is then that the warrior's command becomes the command of the eagle, and from this moment on the warrior is free of the horrendous temptations posed by power. Finally the battle is over, and the power which the warrior has been struggling to control now quietly submits to his will. This is that true command of power which makes the warrior who walks the path of freedom an utterly invincible being.

At 10:50 A.M., the radio flared into life. It was Mick’s voice. He sounded weak and distant. “Bear. This is Mick. Do you copy?” The message then crackled with intermittent static. All I could make out was something about oxygen. I knew it was bad news. “Mick, say that again. What about your oxygen, over?” There was a short pause. “I’ve run out. I haven’t got any.” The words hung in the quiet of the tent at camp two. Through eyes squeezed shut, all I could think was that my best friend would soon be dying some six thousand feet above me--and I was powerless to help. “Keep talking to me, Mick. Don’t stop,” I said firmly. “Who is with you?” I knew if Mick stopped talking and didn’t find help, he would never survive. First he would lose the strength to stand, and with it the ability to stave off the cold. Immobile, hypothermic, and oxygen-starved, he would soon lose consciousness. Death would inevitably follow. “Alan’s here.” He paused. “He’s got no oxygen either. It’s…it’s not good, Bear.” I knew that we had to contact Neil, and fast. Their survival depended on there being someone else above them. Mick came back on the net: “Bear, I reckon Alan only has ten minutes to live. I don’t know what to do.” I tried to get him back on the radio but no reply came.

At noontime in midsummer, when the sun is at its highest and everything is in a state of embroiled repose, flashes may be seen in the southern sky. Into the radiance of daylight come bursts of light even more radiant. Exactly half a year later, when the fjord is frozen over and the land buried in snow, the very same spirit taunts creation. At night cracks in the ice race from one end of the fjord to the other, resounding like gunshots or like the roaring of a mad demon. The peasants dig tunnels from their door through the drifts over to the cow shed. Where are the trolls and the elves now, and where are the sounds of nature? Even the Beast may well be dead and forgotten. Life itself hangs in suspension - existence has shrunk to nothingness. Now it is only a question of survival. The fox thrashes around in a blizzard in the oak thicket and fights his way out, mortally terrified. It is a time of stillness. Hoarfrost lies in a timeless shroud over the fjord. All day long a strange, sighing sound is heard from out on the ice. It is a fisherman, standing alone at his hole and spearing eel. One night it snows again. The air is sheer snow and the wind a frigid blast. No living creature is stirring. Then a rider comes to the crossing at Hvalpsund. There is no difficulty in getting over­ - he does not even slacken his speed, but rides at a brisk trot from the shore out onto the ice. The hoofbeats thunder beneath him and the ice roars for miles around. He reaches the other side and rides up onto the land. The horse — a mighty steed not afraid to shake its shanks - cleaves the storm with neck outstretched. The blizzard blows the rider's ashen cape back and he sits naked, with his bare bones sticking out and the snow whistling about his ribs. It is Death that is out riding. His crown sits on three hairs and his scythe points triumphantly backward. Death has his whims. He takes it into his head to dis­mount when he sees a light in the winter night. He gives his horse a slap on the haunch and it leaps into the air and is gone. For the rest of the way Death walks like a carefree man, sauntering absentmindedly along. In the snow-streaked night a crow is sitting on a wayside branch. Its head is much too large for its body. Its beady eyes sparkle when it sees the wanderer's familiar face, and its cawing turns into silent laughter as it throws its beak wide open, with its spear-like tongue sticking far out. It seems almost ready to fall off the branch with its laughter, but it keeps on looking at Death with consuming merriment. Death moves on. Suddenly he finds himself beside a man. He raps the man on the back with his fingers and leaves him lying there. There is a light. Death keeps his eye on the light and walks toward it. He moves into the shaft of light and labors his way over a frozen field. But when he comes close enough to make out the house a strange fervor grips him. He has finally come home - yes, this has been his true home from the beginning. Thank goodness he has now found it again after so much difficulty. He goes in, and a solitary old couple make him welcome. They cannot know that he is anything more than a traveling tradesman, spent and sick. He lies down quickly on the bed without a word. They can see that he is really far gone. He lies on his back while they move about the room with the candle and chat. He forgets them. For a long time he lies there, quiet but awake. Finally there are a few low moans, faltering and tentative. He begins to cry, and then quickly stops. But now the moans continue, becoming louder, and then going over to tearless sobs. His body arches up, resting only on head and heels. He stares in anguish at the ceiling and screams, screams like a woman in labor. Finally he collapses, and his cries begin to subside. Little by little he falls silent and lies quiet.

Who are you, Merripen?” he asked softly. The big Rom went back to work. “No one.” “You were part of a tribe once. You must have had family.” “I don’t remember any father. My mother died when I was born.” “So did mine. I was raised by my grandmother.” The brush halted in midstroke. Neither of them moved. The stable became deadly quiet, except for the snuffling and shifting of horses. “I was raised by my uncle. To be one of the asharibe.” “Ah.” Cam kept any hint of pity from his expression, but privately he thought, You poor bastard. No wonder Merripen fought so well. Some Gypsy tribes took their strongest boys and turned them into bare-knuckle fighters, pitting them against each other at fairs and pubs and gatherings, for onlookers to make bets on. Some of the boys were disfigured or even killed. And the ones who survived were hardened fighters down to the bootstraps, and designated as warriors of the tribe. “Well, that explains your sweet temperament,” Cam said. “Was that why you chose to stay with the Hathaways after they took you in? Because you no longer wanted to live as an asharibe?” “Yes.” “You’re lying, phral,” Cam said, watching him closely. “You stayed for another reason.” And Cam knew from the Rom’s visible flush that he’d hit upon the truth. Quietly, Cam added, “You stayed for her.

When I talk of my assault, I find myself avoiding the brutal facts. (...) why can't I say, 'when I was sexually assaulted' or 'when I was sexually abused' or the most dreaded of all: 'when I was raped'? (...) The real words hit me in the stomach, open me up as I try to say them more often in all the truth that they are. Th words, the truth of what happened, sometimes become more muddied than the acts themselves, slick with the shame and guilt society has taught us to feel as survivors of sexual violence. You worry it'll make you seem dramatic or 'crazy', that it'll make you seem too loud or too controversial. You worry that it'll make the person you're talking to uncomfortable, and you know it'll make you uncomfortable. But aren't we already uncomfortable? The silencing of the truth, the avoidance of reality, perpetuates the stigma that already falls so hard on survivors. This use of language is not a fault of us survivors - really, it's a strength; a way of protecting ourselves from the harshness of what the world thinks of us. We have to protect ourselves and we do so with euphemisms and brevities. We make things just that bit easier for ourselves by not having to voice the terrors of our pasts. We make the words lighter because we think it will stop them feeling so heavy. We shouldn't have to use these devices to protect ourselves - we should already feel safe in speaking our truths. We should be supported by those around us in our society to speak our realities, and we should be allowed to use whichever words feel right in expressing ourselves. With the risk of being predictable here, let's compare the use of language of rape culture to the usual honesty used with other crimes: 'when I was beaten up', 'when my house was broken into'. For these crimes we don't use timid, cotton-wooled language. The crimes, though obviously very different in nature, still consist of some person taking something from another; they all consist of a victim who was not to blame; they all are a form of violence. The language used when talking of sexual assault and rape extends the shame and guilt that survivors suffer. The hiding, the quietness of it all, makes us wonder: was it my fault? If I can't say it out loud, if I can't put it in the right words, maybe it wan't that bad? If it just makes people feel awkward, perhaps I shouldn't bring it up, maybe I shouldn't speak of it at all? (...) Personally I'm going to start trying to reclaim the words of the terrible things people did to me to try and clear out the tough stains of shame and guilt. I am trying to say it more. So, I will write it: I was sexually assaulted, I was sexually abused, I was raped.

Old Hubert must have had a premonition of his squalid demise. In October he said to me, ‘Forty-two years I’ve had this place. I’d really like to go back home, but I ain’t got the energy since my old girl died. And I can’t sell it the way it is now. But anyway before I hang my hat up I’d be curious to know what’s in that third cellar of mine.’ The third cellar has been walled up by order of the civil defence authorities after the floods of 1910. A double barrier of cemented bricks prevents the rising waters from invading the upper floors when flooding occurs. In the event of storms or blocked drains, the cellar acts as a regulatory overflow. The weather was fine: no risk of drowning or any sudden emergency. There were five of us: Hubert, Gerard the painter, two regulars and myself. Old Marteau, the local builder, was upstairs with his gear, ready to repair the damage. We made a hole. Our exploration took us sixty metres down a laboriously-faced vaulted corridor (it must have been an old thoroughfare). We were wading through a disgusting sludge. At the far end, an impassable barrier of iron bars. The corridor continued beyond it, plunging downwards. In short, it was a kind of drain-trap. That’s all. Nothing else. Disappointed, we retraced our steps. Old Hubert scanned the walls with his electric torch. Look! An opening. No, an alcove, with some wooden object that looks like a black statuette. I pick the thing up: it’s easily removable. I stick it under my arm. I told Hubert, ‘It’s of no interest. . .’ and kept this treasure for myself. I gazed at it for hours on end, in private. So my deductions, my hunches were not mistaken: the Bièvre-Seine confluence was once the site where sorcerers and satanists must surely have gathered. And this kind of primitive magic, which the blacks of Central Africa practise today, was known here several centuries ago. The statuette had miraculously survived the onslaught of time: the well-known virtues of the waters of the Bièvre, so rich in tannin, had protected the wood from rotting, actually hardened, almost fossilized it. The object answered a purpose that was anything but aesthetic. Crudely carved, probably from heart of oak. The legs were slightly set apart, the arms detached from the body. No indication of gender. Four nails set in a triangle were planted in its chest. Two of them, corroded with rust, broke off at the wood’s surface all on their own. There was a spike sunk in each eye. The skull, like a salt cellar, had twenty-four holes in which little tufts of brown hair had been planted, fixed in place with wax, of which there were still some vestiges. I’ve kept quiet about my find. I’m biding my time.

Meanwhile, Captain Crozier took to his Private Cabin yesterday and is terribly sick. I can hear his stifled moans since the late Peddie’s compartment borders the captain’s here on the starboard stern side of the ship. I think Captain Crozier is biting down on something hard—perhaps a Strip of Leather—to keep those moans from being heard. But I have always been Blessed (or Cursed) with good hearing. The Captain turned over the handling of the Ship’s and Expedition’s affairs to Lieutenant Little yesterday—thus quietly but Firmly giving Command to Little rather than to Captain Fitzjames—and explained to me that he, Captain Crozier, was battling a recurrence of Malaria. This is a lie. It is not just the symptoms of Malaria which I hear Captain Crozier suffering—and almost certainly will continue to hear through the walls until I head back to Erebus on Friday morning. Because of my uncle’s and my father’s weaknesses, I know the Demons the Captain is battling tonight. Captain Crozier is a man addicted to Hard Spirits, and either those Spirits on board have been used up or he has decided to go off them of his own Volition during this Crisis. Either way, he is suffering the Torments of Hell and shall continue to do so for many days more. His sanity may not survive. In the meantime, this ship and this Expedition are without their True Leader. His stifled moans, in a ship descending into Sickness and Despair, are Pitiable to the extreme.

I couldn’t wait to follow through. I couldn’t wait to end this. “Your revenge?” Matthias laughed. “You’re revenge? What could you possibly do that would make any difference to me?” I looked up at Kane and he looked down at me. I smiled at him sweetly and he smiled back. I leaned in and he mirrored me. I tilted my face up to kiss him and he gladly reciprocated. Then I pulled back and swiveled my gaze to Matthias. “I will take your family away. Just like you took mine. I will pluck them from you one by one and make them suffer until they beg for death. Or, I will simply rescue them and give them a better life than you ever could.” Matthias barked out a louder laugh. “That’s sweet. It sounds like you’ve put thought into all that, but you can’t. It’s just not possible. “Sure it is,” I told him. “I’ve already gotten two of your children. Tyler isn’t here.” I gestured at Tyler. “Tyler will never be here. Unless you count that. Which being a self-respecting person, I wouldn’t. But who knows about you. And Miller isn’t here either. Miller is worse than Tyler. Look! You got Tyler to come to breakfast, but I seem to have forgotten Miller’s excuse. Could you remind me?” He stayed quiet. Which was a miracle in itself. So I continued, “I’m waiting for the right opportunity for Linley. I’ve been waiting for it for a while now. I’ve been watching her and watching her and just waiting. I cannot wait until I get her alone. I cannot wait until it’s just the two of us. It will be so fun. It’s what helps get me through these long days. Just thoughts of Linley. Just thoughts of what I will do to her and how slowly I will make those last painful moments last. And Kane? I could take him in a second. I could rip him out of your hands so fast you would blink and he would be gone. He might deny that if you ask him. But I know better. I hear everything else he says. I feel everything else he means. Kane is mine. You’re a smart man, Matthias, so don’t think for a second he isn’t. Right?” I turned to Kane. He leaned down again and kissed me. Point proved. I relaxed into Kane and let my threats soothe my soul and settle over the man I wanted to watch burn in hell. His reply was an arrogant smirk and hard eyes. “Little girl, you just asked for trouble, I’m-” “Do it,” I hissed. “Do whatever it is you want to do and see if I’m bluffing. Try me! Hurt someone I love. Hurt me. Take something away from me and see how painfully and how permanently I take something away from you.” I stood up and pushed aggressively away from the table. I stared him down the entire time. Kane let me go without even an attempt to restrain me. I was beyond that. I was beyond all of this. I was leaving. Today. Because without a doubt I would follow through with every single one of my threats. I stomped from the warehouse. I could feel Kane behind me, but he still didn’t try to slow me down. And I knew he wouldn’t. He really was mine. Matthias, Hendrix, nobody could take him from me. And he would do whatever I wanted as long as he thought we could survive. I hoped both of us could survive what I was about to ask him to do.

DEAR YOUNG DEMIGOD, Your destiny awaits. Now that you have discovered your true parentage, you must prepare yourself for a difficult future—fighting monsters, adventuring across the world, and dealing with temperamental Greek and Roman gods. I don’t envy you. I hope this volume will help you on your journeys. I had to think long and hard before publishing these stories, as they were given to me in the strictest confidence. However, your survival comes first, and this book will give you an inside look at the world of demigods—information that may help keep you alive. We’ll begin with “The Diary of Luke Castellan.” Over the years, many readers and campers at Camp Half-Blood have asked me to tell the story of Luke’s early days, adventuring with Thalia and Annabeth before they arrived at camp. I have been reluctant to do this, as neither Annabeth nor Thalia likes to talk about those times. The only information I have is recorded in Luke’s own handwriting, in his original diary given to me by Chiron. I think it’s time, though, to share a little of Luke’s story. It may help us understand what went wrong for such a promising young demigod. In this excerpt you will find out how Thalia and Luke arrived in Richmond, Virginia, chasing a magic goat, how they were almost destroyed in a house of horrors, and how they met a young girl named Annabeth. I have also included a map of Halcyon Green’s house in Richmond. Despite the damage described in the story, the house has been rebuilt, which is very troubling. If you go there, be careful. It may still contain treasures. But it most assuredly contains monsters and traps as well. Our second story will definitely get me in trouble with Hermes. “Percy Jackson and the Staff of Hermes” describes an embarrassing incident for the god of travelers, which he hoped to solve quietly with

The journey up to battle camp started badly. “If you can’t even load a bloody truck with all your kit properly, then you’ve got no bloody chance of passing what’s ahead of you, I can assure you of that!” Taff, our squadron DS, barked at us in the barracks before leaving. I, for one, was more on edge than I had ever felt so far on Selection. I was carsick on the journey north, and I hadn’t felt that since I’d been a kid heading back to school. It was nerves. We also quizzed Taff for advice on what to expect and how to survive the “capture-initiation” phase. His advice to Trucker and me was simple: “You two toffs just keep your mouths shut--23 DS tend to hate recruits who’ve been to private school.” The 23 SAS were running the battle camp (it generally alternated between 21 and 23 SAS), and 23 were always regarded as tough, straight-talking, hard-drinking, fit-as-hell soldiers. We had last been with them at Test Week all those months earlier, and rumor was that “the 23 DS are going to make sure that any 21 recruits get it the worst.” Trucker and I hoped simply to try and stay “gray men” and not be noticed. To put our heads down and get on and quietly do the work. This didn’t exactly go according to plan. “Where are the lads who speak like Prince Charles?” The 23 DS shouted on the first parade when we arrived. “Would you both like newspapers with your morning tea, gents?” the DS sarcastically enquired. Part of me was tempted to answer how nice that would be, but I resisted. The DS continued: “I’ve got my eye on you two. Do I want to have to put my life one day in your posh, soft hands? Like fuck I do. If you are going to pass this course you are going to have to earn it and prove yourself the hard way. You both better be damned good.” Oh, great, I thought. I could tell the next fortnight was going to be a ball-buster.

Since I did Selection all those years ago, not much has really changed. The MOD (Ministry of Defence) website still states that 21 SAS soldiers need the following character traits: “Physically and mentally robust. Self-confident. Self-disciplined. Able to work alone. Able to assimilate information and new skills.” It makes me smile now to read those words. As Selection had progressed, those traits had been stamped into my being, and then during the three years I served with my squadron they became molded into my psyche. They are the same qualities I still value today. The details of the jobs I did once I passed Selection aren’t for sharing publicly, but they included some of the most extraordinary training that any man can be lucky enough to receive. I went on to be trained in demolitions, air and maritime insertions, foreign weapons, jungle survival, trauma medicine, Arabic, signals, high-speed and evasive driving, winter warfare, as well as “escape and evasion” survival for behind enemy lines. I went through an even more in-depth capture initiation program as part of becoming a combat-survival instructor, which was much longer and more intense than the hell we endured on Selection. We became proficient in covert night parachuting and unarmed combat, among many other skills--and along the way we had a whole host of misadventures. But what do I remember and value most? For me, it is the camaraderie, and the friendships--and of course Trucker, who is still one of my best friends on the planet. Some bonds are unbreakable. I will never forget the long yomps, the specialist training, and of course a particular mountain in the Brecon Beacons. But above all, I feel a quiet pride that for the rest of my days I can look myself in the mirror and know that once upon a time I was good enough. Good enough to call myself a member of the SAS. Some things don’t have a price tag.

The doctor gave him a look of sympathy. “We won’t have a choice. If left untreated, both mother and child could die. The only cure for eclampsia is delivery of the baby. We’re doing tests to determine the lung maturity of the baby. At thirty-four weeks’ gestation, the child has a very good chance of survival without complications.” Ryan dug a hand into his hair and closed his eyes. He’d done this to her. She should have been cherished and pampered during her entire pregnancy. She should have been waited on hand and foot. Instead she’d been forced to work a physically demanding job under unimaginable stress. And once he’d brought her back, she’d been subjected to scorn and hostility and endless emotional distress. Was it any wonder she wanted to wash her hands of him and his family? “Will…will Kelly be all right? Will she recover from this?” He didn’t realize he held his breath until his chest began to burn. He let it out slowly and forced himself to relax his hands. “She’s gravely ill. Her blood pressure is extremely high. She could seize again or suffer a stroke. Neither is good for her or the baby. We’re doing everything we can to bring her blood pressure down and we’re monitoring the baby for signs of stress. We’re prepared to take the baby if the condition of either mother or child deteriorates. It’s important she remain calm and not be stressed in any way. Even if we’re able to bring down her blood pressure and put off the delivery until closer to her due date, she’ll be on strict bed rest for the remainder of her pregnancy.” “I understand,” Ryan said quietly. “Can I see her now?” “You can go in but she must remain calm. Don’t do or say anything to upset her.” Ryan nodded and turned to walk the few steps to Kelly’s room. He paused at the door, afraid to go in. What if his mere presence upset her? His hand rested on the handle and he leaned forward, pressing his forehead to the surface. He closed his eyes as grief and regret—so much regret—swamped him.

Earlier today—at the loft,” he said, pulling back to meet my eyes. Unflinching. Open. “I didn’t mean to insult her.” “I’m sorry I snapped at you.” He lifted a dark brow. “Why in hell would you be? I insulted your sister; you defended her. You had every right to kick my ass for it.” “I didn’t mean to … undermine you.” Shadows flickered in his eyes. “Ah.” He twisted toward the Sidra, and I followed suit. The water meandered past, its dark surface rippling with golden faelights from the streetlamps and the bright jewels of the Rainbow. “That was why it was … strange between us this afternoon.” He cringed and faced me fully. “Mother above, Feyre.” My cheeks heated and I interrupted before he could continue. “I get why, though. A solid, unified front is important.” I scratched at the smooth wood of the rail with a finger. “Especially for us.” “Not amongst our family.” Warmth spread through me at the words—our family. He took my hand, interlacing our fingers. “We can make whatever rules we want. You have every right to question me, push me—both in private and in public.” A snort. “Of course, if you decide to truly kick my ass, I might request that it’s done behind closed doors so I don’t have to suffer centuries of teasing, but—” “I won’t undermine you in public. And you won’t undermine me.” He remained quiet, letting me think, speak. “We can question each other through the bond if we’re around people other than our friends,” I said. “But for now, for these initial years, I’d like to show the world a unified front … That is, if we survive.” “We’ll survive.” Uncompromising will in those words, that face. “But I want you to feel comfortable pushing me, calling me out—” “When have I ever not done that?” He smiled. But I added, “I want you to do the same—for me.” “Deal. But amongst our family … call me on my bullshit all you want. I insist, actually.” “Why?” “Because it’s fun.” I nudged him with an elbow. “Because you’re my equal,” he said. “And as much as that means having each other’s backs in public, it also means that we grant each other the gift of honesty. Of truth.

Any parent would be dismayed to think that this was their child’s experience of learning, of socializing, and of herself. Maya is an introvert; she is out of her element in a noisy and overstimulating classroom where lessons are taught in large groups. Her teacher told me that she’d do much better in a school with a calm atmosphere where she could work with other kids who are “equally hardworking and attentive to detail,” and where a larger portion of the day would involve independent work. Maya needs to learn to assert herself in groups, of course, but will experiences like the one I witnessed teach her this skill? The truth is that many schools are designed for extroverts. Introverts need different kinds of instruction from extroverts, write College of William and Mary education scholars Jill Burruss and Lisa Kaenzig. And too often, “very little is made available to that learner except constant advice on becoming more social and gregarious.” We tend to forget that there’s nothing sacrosanct about learning in large group classrooms, and that we organize students this way not because it’s the best way to learn but because it’s cost-efficient, and what else would we do with our children while the grown-ups are at work? If your child prefers to work autonomously and socialize one-on-one, there’s nothing wrong with her; she just happens not to fit the prevailing model. The purpose of school should be to prepare kids for the rest of their lives, but too often what kids need to be prepared for is surviving the school day itself. The school environment can be highly unnatural, especially from the perspective of an introverted child who loves to work intensely on projects he cares about, and hang out with one or two friends at a time. In the morning, the door to the bus opens and discharges its occupants in a noisy, jostling mass. Academic classes are dominated by group discussions in which a teacher prods him to speak up. He eats lunch in the cacophonous din of the cafeteria, where he has to jockey for a place at a crowded table. Worst of all, there’s little time to think or create. The structure of the day is almost guaranteed to sap his energy rather than stimulate it. Why do we accept this one-size-fits-all situation as a given when we know perfectly well that adults don’t organize themselves this way? We often marvel at how introverted, geeky kids “blossom” into secure and happy adults. We liken it to a metamorphosis. However, maybe it’s not the children who change but their environments. As adults, they get to select the careers, spouses, and social circles that suit them. They don’t have to live in whatever culture they’re plunked into. Research from a field known as “person-environment fit” shows that people flourish when, in the words of psychologist Brian Little, they’re “engaged in occupations, roles or settings that are concordant with their personalities.” The inverse is also true: kids stop learning when they feel emotionally threatened.

Don’t provoke Cheat,” Arin said as they stepped out of the carriage and onto the dusky path that led to the governor’s palace, which looked eerie to Kestrel because its impressive façade was the same as the night before, but the lights burning in the windows were now few. “Kestrel, do you hear me? You can’t toy with him.” “He started it.” “That’s not the point.” Gravel crunched under Arin’s heavy boots as he stalked up the path. “Don’t you understand that he wants you dead? He’d leap at the chance,” Arin said, hands in pockets, head down, almost talking to himself. He strode ahead, his long legs quicker than hers. “I can’t--Kestrel, you must understand that I would never claim you. Calling you a prize--my prize--it was only words. But it worked. Cheat won’t harm you, I swear that he won’t, but you must…hide yourself a little. Help a little. Just tell us how much time we have before the battle. Give him a reason to decide you’re not better off dead. Swallow your pride.” “Maybe that’s not as easy for me as it is for you.” He wheeled on her. “It’s not easy for me,” he said through his teeth. “You know that it’s not. What do you think I have had to swallow, these past ten years? What do you think I have had to do to survive?” They stood before the palace door. “Truly,” she said, “I haven’t the faintest interest. You may tell your sad story to someone else.” He flinched as if slapped. His voice came low: “You can make people feel so small.” Kestrel went hot with shame--then was ashamed of her own shame. Who was he, that she should apologize? He had used her. He had lied. Nothing he said meant anything. If she was to feel shame, it should be for having been so easily fooled. He ran fingers through his cropped hair, but slowly, anger gone, replaced by something heavier. He didn’t look at her. His breath smoked the chill air. “Do what you want to me. Say anything. But it frightens me how you refuse to see the danger you risk with others. Maybe now you’ll see.” He opened the door to the governor’s home. The smell struck her first. Blood and decaying flesh. It pushed at Kestrel’s gut. She fought not to gag. Bodies were piled in the reception hall. Lady Neril was lying facedown, almost in the same place where she had stood the night of the ball, greeting guests. Kestrel recognized her by the scarf in her fist, fabric bright in the guttering torchlight. There were hundreds of dead. She saw Captain Wensan, Lady Faris, Senator Nicon’s whole family, Benix… Kestrel knelt next to him. His large hand felt like cold clay. She could hear her tears drip to his clothes. They beaded on his skin. Quietly, Arin said, “He’ll be buried today, with the others.” “He should be burned. We burn our dead.” She couldn’t look at Benix anymore, but neither could she get to her feet. Arin helped her, his touch gentle. “I’ll make certain it’s done right.” Kestrel forced her legs to move, to walk past bodies heaped like rubble. She thought that she must have fallen asleep after all, and that this was an evil dream. She paused at the sight of Irex. His mouth was the stained purple of the poisoned, but he had sticky gashes in his side, and one final cut to the neck. Even poisoned, he had fought. Tears came again. Arin’s hold tightened. He pushed her past Irex. “Don’t you dare weep for him. If he weren’t dead, I would kill him myself.

I’m first up, love,” Arion says as he starts invading my space again. “I thought the only thing holding you back was your fear. Clearly the fear is absent if you’re willing to turn yourself over to the very darkest part of me. It’s amazing you’re in one piece, so clearly you played submissive very well, Violet. It’s because you were ready for me to save you and overcame your fear of me. Now we can be together.” When I say nothing and simply stare at him like he’s forever losing his mind more and more when we speak, he frowns like he’s genuinely perplexed. “Arion, no matter what you did, I couldn’t have endured another second of those cries. And you were at Abby’s mercy while in that state. You ripped my throat out and told me to put on some healing potion so you could sit down and watch the fight.” Apparently, I guess right, because his pupils widen marginally. “I held your hand when you finished,” he says like he’s defending himself. “So you could watch the fight.” “Vance was focused. It’s been ages since he focused. Thing of beauty while it happens,” he says as if that’s important information. I gesture between us. “That’s sort of the problem. I feel like the conduit for your feelings for them because you have heterosexual body parts with a homosexual mentality. I’m not sure I’m okay with simply being a conduit,” I carefully explain, causing his eyes to widen a little more, as several muffled sounds of amusement spring from somewhere else in the room. “I’m sorry, love, but you’ve really lost me,” Arion says very seriously, brow crinkling. “You want this to be a thing between you and me, even though Idun is returning, because you want them back. It looks like you’re getting that without me, so we can be friends,” I suggest, completely rambling. I don’t think I’m explaining this very well, since they’re all muffling laughter down the hall. Even Vance makes a choked sound of amusement. Or they’re just really immature about these things… That’s definitely possible. Arion scrubs a hand over his face, as someone struggles to cover a surprise laugh with a cough. “I’m so sorry. I shouldn’t be having this conversation right now. It’s inappropriate to do with an audience,” I babble. “But you’re really intense. And I’ve just survived an apocalyptic wolf storm with your mostly naked beta, whose threads are still in my bra because one set of clothes ended up being enough.” The look of frustrated confusion on his face doubles. “I could use a small break before we discuss curses, some really confusing relationship statuses, and the somewhat terrifying woman you’ve all loved rising very soon. And those wolves stole my oranges, so I need to go back and get all of them.” “I’ve already returned them to your cellar,” Emit says from somewhere behind Arion. “Then I need to go start using them while they’re useable,” I say as I quickly disentangle myself from Arion and attempt to escape. “I’ll return the shirt.” “Keep it,” he says quietly from behind me, as I finally take in the other three all standing somewhat close together, smirking at me. “I’ll drive you home,” Damien says with a slow grin. “I’m not talking to you, and if you’re a smart man, you’ll figure out why,” I state firmly. “Only when you figure it out will we discuss it.” “I’ll take you—” “I don’t want to talk to you right now, because I need to get my cool back,” I tell Emit, whose eyes immediately flick away, as his jaw tics. He’s had multiple opportunities to explain to me why he told Damien I was a monster, and yet didn’t even bother telling me what I was. All this time, I’ve been patiently waiting, refusing to get too angry. Now…I’m getting sort of freaking angry, because he still hasn’t said one word about it. “Guess that just leaves me,” Vance says as he puts his hand at the small of my back and starts guiding me out.