React Escape Quotes

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To escape responsibility for violence we imagine it is enough to pledge never to be the first to do violence. But no one ever sees himself as casting the first stone. Even the most violent persons believe that they are always reacting to a violence committed in the first instance by someone else.
René Girard (The One by Whom Scandal Comes)
He said that how people treat you is only 10 percent about you and 90 percent about them, so you need to be careful how you react and how you judge. You never know someone's story.
Katherine Reay (The Austen Escape)
He placed his hands against the Jeep on either side of my head and leaned forward, forcing me to press back against the door. He leaned in even closer, his face inches from mine. I had no room to escape. "Now," he breathed, and just his smell disturbed my thought processes, "what exactly are you worrying about?" "Well, um, hitting a tree -" I gulped "- and dying. And then getting sick." He fought back a smile. Then he bent his head down and touched his cold lips softly to the hollow at the base of my throat. "Are you still worried now?" he murmured against my skin. "Yes." I struggled to concentrate. "About hitting trees and getting sick." His nose drew a line up the skin of my throat to the point of my chin. His cold breath tickled my skin. "And now?" His lips whispered against my jaw. "Trees," I gasped. "Motion sickness." He lifted his face to kiss my eyelids. "Bella, you don't really think I would hit a tree, do you?" "No, but I might." There was no confidence in my voice. He smelled an easy victory. He kissed slowly down my cheek, stopping just at the corner of my mouth. "Would I let a tree hurt you?" His lips barely brushed against my trembling lower lip. "No," I breathed. I knew there was a second part to my brillant defense, but I couldn't quite call it back. "You see," he said, his lips moving against mine. "There's nothing to be afraid of, is there?" "No," I sighed, giving up. Then he took my face in his hands almost roughly, and kissed me in earnest, his unyielding lips moving against mine. There was really no excuse for my behavior. Obviously I knew better by now. And yet I couldn't seem to stop from reacting exactly as I had the first time. Instead of keeping safely motionless, my arms reached up to twine tightly around his neck, and I was suddenly welded to his stone figure. I sighed, and his lips parted.
Stephenie Meyer (Twilight (The Twilight Saga, #1))
Isn’t there? I wonder how my uncle is going to react when he finds out that you killed Govart and helped me to escape.’ And then, in the same dreamy voice, ‘Do you think he’ll hurt your family?’ Guion’s hands were fists, like he still had them wrapped around bars. ‘I didn’t help you escape.’ ‘Didn’t you? I don’t know how these rumours get started.’ Laurent
C.S. Pacat (Kings Rising (Captive Prince, #3))
as if he were trying to escape the smell of her words as if the air from her talking came into his mouth and filled it puffed it up with poison so the brain was put to sleep and he could do nothing with it only react in his flesh.
Michael Ondaatje (Coming Through Slaughter)
That was one other time when my whole body reacted to the fear and went out of my own control. My nerves came apart completely, and I started vomiting and vomiting. I couldn't stop. It had been such a narrow escape. I kept telling myself that I could take all of the pressure; but there were those times that my body seemed almost to shut itself down, to scream that what was happening was just too much.
Diet Eman (Things We Couldn't Say)
This has been the point of much of this book. The human brain is a machine designed by natural selection to respond in pretty reflexive fashion to the sensory input impinging on it. It is designed, in a certain sense, to be controlled by that input. And a key cog in the machinery of control is the feelings that arise in response to the input. If you interact with those feelings via tanha—via the natural, reflexive thirst for the pleasant feelings and the natural, reflexive aversion to the unpleasant feelings—you will continue to be controlled by the world around you. But if you observe those feelings mindfully rather than just reacting to them, you can in some measure escape the control; the causes that ordinarily shape your behavior can be defied, and you can get closer to the unconditioned.
Robert Wright (Why Buddhism is True: The Science and Philosophy of Meditation and Enlightenment)
At its most elemental level the human organism, like crawling life, has a mouth, digestive tract, and anus, a skin to keep it intact, and appendages with which to acquire food. Existence, for all organismic life, is a constant struggle to feed-a struggle to incorporate whatever other organisms they can fit into their mouths and press down their gullets without choking. Seen in these stark terms, life on this planet is a gory spectacle, a science-fiction nightmare in which digestive tracts fitted with teeth at one end are tearing away at whatever flesh they can reach, and at the other end are piling up the fuming waste excrement as they move along in search of more flesh. I think this is why the epoch of the dinosaurs exerts such a strange fascination on us: it is an epic food orgy with king-size actors who convey unmistakably what organisms are dedicated to. Sensitive souls have reacted with shock to the elemental drama of life on this planet, and one of the reasons that Darwin so shocked his time-and still bothers ours-is that he showed this bone crushing, blood-drinking drama in all its elementality and necessity: Life cannot go on without the mutual devouring of organisms. If at the end of each person’s life he were to be presented with the living spectacle of all that he had organismically incorporated in order to stay alive, he might well feel horrified by the living energy he had ingested. The horizon of a gourmet, or even the average person, would be taken up with hundreds of chickens, flocks of lambs and sheep, a small herd of steers, sties full of pigs, and rivers of fish. The din alone would be deafening. To paraphrase Elias Canetti, each organism raises its head over a field of corpses, smiles into the sun, and declares life good.
Ernest Becker (Escape from Evil)
Make up your minds, therefore, to pay them back in their own coin, and do not make it look as though you who escape their machinations are less quick to react than they who started them.
Thucydides
Political calculation and local suffering do not entirely explain the participation in these pogroms. Violence against Jews served to bring the Germans and elements of the local non-Jewish populations closer together. Anger was directed, as the Germans wished, toward the Jews, rather than against collaborators with the Soviet regime as such. People who reacted to the Germans' urging knew that they were pleasing their new masters, whether or not they believed that the Jews were responsible for their own woes. By their actions they were confirming the Nazi worldview. The act of killing Jews as revenge for NKVD executions confirmed the Nazi understanding of the Soviet Union as a Jewish state. Violence against Jews also allowed local Estonians, Latvian, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, Belarusians, and Poles who had themselves cooperated with the Soviet regime to escape any such taint. The idea that only Jews served communists was convenient not just for the occupiers but for some of the occupied as well. Yet this psychic nazification would have been much more difficult without the palpable evidence of Soviet atrocities. The pogroms took place where the Soviets had recently arrived and where Soviet power was recently installed, where for the previous months Soviet organs of coercion had organized arrests, executions, and deportations. They were a joint production, a Nazi edition of a Soviet text. P. 196
Timothy Snyder (Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin)
Everything about these interviews was orchestrated. I wanted to face the door and have him face the wall. There were two reasons for this. I didn’t want him distracted, and since I didn’t yet know him well, I wasn’t sure how he’d react, so I wanted a clear view of the window and the guard behind it. The type of offender I interview often determines my seating decisions. When I interview assassins, for instance, I usually have to have them facing the window or door because they tend to be paranoid and will be distracted if they can’t psychologically escape when stressed by the interview.
John E. Douglas (The Killer Across the Table)
Tamper with my memory?" I asked nervously. "Something like that." He was watching me intently, carefully, but there was humor deep in his eyes. He placed his hands against the Jeep on either side of my head and leaned forward, forcing me to press back against the door. He leaned in even closer, his face inches from mine. I had no room to escape. "Now," he breathed, and just his smell disturbed my thought processes, "what exactly are you worrying about?" "Well, um, hitting a tree —" I gulped "— and dying. And then getting sick." He fought back a smile. Then he bent his head down and touched his cold lips softly to the hollow at the base of my throat. "Are you still worried now?" he murmured against my skin. "Yes." I struggled to concentrate. "About hitting trees and getting sick." His nose drew a line up the skin of my throat to the point of my chin. His cold breath tickled my skin. "And now?" His lips whispered against my jaw. "Trees," I gasped. "Motion sickness." He lifted his face to kiss my eyelids. "Bella, you don't really think I would hit a tree, do you?" "No, but I might." There was no confidence in my voice. He smelled an easy victory. He kissed slowly down my cheek, stopping just at the corner of my mouth. "Would I let a tree hurt you?" His lips barely brushed against my trembling lower lip. "No," I breathed. I knew there was a second part to my brilliant defense, but I couldn't quite call it back. "You see," he said, his lips moving against mine. "There's nothing to be afraid of, is there?" "No," I sighed, giving up. Then he took my face in his hands almost roughly, and kissed me in earnest, his unyielding lips moving against mine. There really was no excuse for my behavior. Obviously I knew better by now. And yet I couldn't seem to stop from reacting exactly as I had the first time. Instead of keeping safely motionless, my arms reached up to twine tightly around his neck, and I was suddenly welded to his stone figure. I sighed, and my lips parted. He staggered back, breaking my grip effortlessly. "Damn it, Bella!" he broke off, gasping. "You'll be the death of me, I swear you will." I leaned over, bracing my hands against my knees for support. "You're indestructible," I mumbled, trying to catch my breath. "I might have believed that before I met you.
Stephenie Meyer (Twilight (The Twilight Saga, #1))
neither of my boys were convinced, and they spent that spring either running after or running from an imaginary threat. If they collected eggs, they dropped them, or couldn’t resist throwing one at a tree. They couldn’t reach the feeders or carry the waterers. When I told them, “We are getting a new batch of baby chicks!” they barely reacted. On the other hand, Cecelia seemed to have benefited wildly from the chickens. After we moved them to the coop, she got a brand new floor in her bedroom, the nicest in our house. The chickens were raised in her baby-room while I was pregnant. They kept escaping from the brooder and no amount of scrubbing could clean her carpet. “Chicken” was her third word.
Alison E. Buehler (Growing the Good Life: Lessons in Parenting, Gardening, Health, and Meaningful Living)
Alice saw that Victoria was coming back. I took you out of town merely as a precaution — there was never a chance that she would have gotten anywhere close to you. Emmett and Jasper very nearly had her, but Victoria seems to have some instinct for evasion. She escaped right down the Quileute boundary line as if she were reading it from a map. It didn’t help that Alice’s abilities were nullified by the Quileutes’ involvement. To be fair, the Quileutes might have had her, too, if we hadn’t gotten in the way. The big gray one thought Emmett was over the line, and he got defensive. Of course Rosalie reacted to that, and everyone left the chase to protect their companions. Carlisle and Jasper got things calmed down before it got out of hand. But by then, Victoria had slipped away. That’s everything.
Stephenie Meyer (Eclipse (Twilight, #3))
When I started school myself I begged to be allowed to go to Sunday School, like everyone else; I wanted to find out, also I wanted to be less conspicuous. My father didn’t approve, he reacted as though I’d asked to go to a pool hall: Christianity was something he’d escaped from, he wished to protect us from its distortions. But after a couple of years he decided I was old enough, I could see for myself, reason would defend me.
Margaret Atwood (Surfacing)
There is only attachment; there is no such thing as detachment. The mind invents detachment as a reaction to the pain of attachment. When you react to attachment by becoming “detached,” you are attached to something else. So that whole process is one of attachment. You are attached to your wife or your husband, to your children, to ideas, to tradition, to authority, and so on; and your reaction to that attachment is detachment. The cultivation of detachment is the outcome of sorrow, pain. You want to escape from the pain of attachment, and your escape is to find something to which you think you can be attached. So there is only attachment, and it is a stupid mind that cultivates detachment. All the books say, “Be detached,” but what is the truth of the matter? If you observe your own mind, you will see an extraordinary thing—that through cultivating detachment, your mind is becoming attached to something else.
J. Krishnamurti (The Book of Life: Daily Meditations with Krishnamurti)
Darius, please. You’re hurting me.” He opened his eyes at once. “Nicole?” She lay draped across his chest, her face angled up to his, her dark braid curling beneath her chin. A ragged breath escaped him. She was the most beautiful sight he’d ever beheld. Until she winced, and he realized he was holding her tight enough to crack her ribs. He released her immediately. She wiggled against him as she struggled to sit up, finally bracing a hand upon his chest to lever herself upward. His pulse reacted to her touch, and he had to close his eyes to keep from clutching her to himself again. The haze of sleep was clearing, but his control hadn’t yet been fully restored. A small groan vibrated in his throat. Cool fingers stroked his brow, his face, his hair. “Darius, it’s all right. It was just a dream. I’m here, now. Safe. We’re both safe.” He opened his eyes and turned his face toward her voice. She had slid from atop him but knelt by the side of the sofa near his head. His gaze roamed her face, her shoulders, the area around her ribs. “Did I hurt you?” She shook her head, and he expelled a heavy breath in relief.
Karen Witemeyer (Full Steam Ahead)
They remind me of it everywhere I go. Every time I step in an elevator and a white woman bunches up in the corner like she thinks I wanna rape her, I’m forced to think about it. Every time I walk into stores, the suspicious looks in white shopkeepers’ eyes make me think about it. Every time I walk past whites sitting in their cars, I hear the door locks clicking and I think about it. I can’t get away from it, man. I stay so mad all the time because I’m forced to spend so much time and energy reacting to race. I hate it. It wearies me. But there’s no escape, man. No escape.
Nathan McCall (Makes Me Wanna Holler: A Young Black Man in America)
Maybe the problem was that we hadn’t actually been in a beginning, not starting a chain reaction but still riding out an old one. I was still trying to escape my feelings for Alexei, my guilt about Oliver, hoping Redwood would turn out to be the key that freed me. Maybe he was hoping I was something equally improbable. We think each new romantic prospect, each new lover, is a fresh start, but really we’re just tacking into the wind, each new trajectory determined by the last, plotting a jagged yet unbroken line of reactions through our lives. That was part of the problem: I was always just reacting, always just getting buffeted along, never setting a destination.
Maggie Shipstead (Great Circle)
Our intelligence is based on the animals’ intelligences. So what is animal intelligence based on? How smart do animals have to be?” “Smart enough to identify threat or prey in time to act.” “Yes, exactly!” I say. “But how long is that time? How long does an animal have to react? How long will the threat or prey take to kill the animal or escape? I think it’s based on gravity.” “Gravity, question?” He sets the device down entirely. I’ve got his undivided attention. “Yeah! Think about it. Gravity is what determines how fast an animal can run. Higher gravity, more time spent in contact with the ground. Faster movement. I think animal intelligence, ultimately, has to be faster than gravity.
Andy Weir (Project Hail Mary)
The central figure of Buddhism is not a god but a human being, Siddhartha Gautama. According to Buddhist tradition, Gautama was heir to a small Himalayan kingdom, sometime around 500 BC. The young prince was deeply affected by the suffering evident all around him. He saw that men and women, children and old people, all suffer not just from occasional calamities such as war and plague, but also from anxiety, frustration and discontent, all of which seem to be an inseparable part of the human condition. People pursue wealth and power, acquire knowledge and possessions, beget sons and daughters, and build houses and palaces. Yet no matter what they achieve, they are never content. Those who live in poverty dream of riches. Those who have a million want two million. Those who have two million want 10 million. Even the rich and famous are rarely satisfied. They too are haunted by ceaseless cares and worries, until sickness, old age and death put a bitter end to them. Everything that one has accumulated vanishes like smoke. Life is a pointless rat race. But how to escape it? At the age of twenty-nine Gautama slipped away from his palace in the middle of the night, leaving behind his family and possessions. He travelled as a homeless vagabond throughout northern India, searching for a way out of suffering. He visited ashrams and sat at the feet of gurus but nothing liberated him entirely – some dissatisfaction always remained. He did not despair. He resolved to investigate suffering on his own until he found a method for complete liberation. He spent six years meditating on the essence, causes and cures for human anguish. In the end he came to the realisation that suffering is not caused by ill fortune, by social injustice, or by divine whims. Rather, suffering is caused by the behaviour patterns of one’s own mind. Gautama’s insight was that no matter what the mind experiences, it usually reacts with craving, and craving always involves dissatisfaction. When the mind experiences something distasteful it craves to be rid of the irritation. When the mind experiences something pleasant, it craves that the pleasure will remain and will intensify. Therefore, the mind is always dissatisfied and restless. This is very clear when we experience unpleasant things, such as pain. As long as the pain continues, we are dissatisfied and do all we can to avoid it. Yet even when we experience pleasant things we are never content. We either fear that the pleasure might disappear, or we hope that it will intensify. People dream for years about finding love but are rarely satisfied when they find it. Some become anxious that their partner will leave; others feel that they have settled cheaply, and could have found someone better. And we all know people who manage to do both.
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
Close friendships, Gandhi says, are dangerous, because “friends react on one another” and through loyalty to a friend one can be led into wrong-doing. This is unquestionably true. Moreover, if one is to love God, or to love humanity as a whole, one cannot give one's preference to any individual person. This again is true, and it marks the point at which the humanistic and the religious attitude cease to be reconcilable. To an ordinary human being, love means nothing if it does not mean loving some people more than others. The autobiography leaves it uncertain whether Gandhi behaved in an inconsiderate way to his wife and children, but at any rate it makes clear that on three occasions he was willing to let his wife or a child die rather than administer the animal food prescribed by the doctor. It is true that the threatened death never actually occurred, and also that Gandhi — with, one gathers, a good deal of moral pressure in the opposite direction — always gave the patient the choice of staying alive at the price of committing a sin: still, if the decision had been solely his own, he would have forbidden the animal food, whatever the risks might be. There must, he says, be some limit to what we will do in order to remain alive, and the limit is well on this side of chicken broth. This attitude is perhaps a noble one, but, in the sense which — I think — most people would give to the word, it is inhuman. The essence of being human is that one does not seek perfection, that one is sometimes willing to commit sins for the sake of loyalty, that one does not push asceticism to the point where it makes friendly intercourse impossible, and that one is prepared in the end to be defeated and broken up by life, which is the inevitable price of fastening one's love upon other human individuals. No doubt alcohol, tobacco, and so forth, are things that a saint must avoid, but sainthood is also a thing that human beings must avoid. There is an obvious retort to this, but one should be wary about making it. In this yogi-ridden age, it is too readily assumed that “non-attachment” is not only better than a full acceptance of earthly life, but that the ordinary man only rejects it because it is too difficult: in other words, that the average human being is a failed saint. It is doubtful whether this is true. Many people genuinely do not wish to be saints, and it is probable that some who achieve or aspire to sainthood have never felt much temptation to be human beings. If one could follow it to its psychological roots, one would, I believe, find that the main motive for “non-attachment” is a desire to escape from the pain of living, and above all from love, which, sexual or non-sexual, is hard work. But it is not necessary here to argue whether the other-worldly or the humanistic ideal is “higher”. The point is that they are incompatible. One must choose between God and Man, and all “radicals” and “progressives”, from the mildest Liberal to the most extreme Anarchist, have in effect chosen Man.
George Orwell
Lady Eliza.” As the voice washed over her, recognition set in and fury descended. “Who is that man?” Ben asked as he peered around her leg. “Why is he smiling at you?” “He’s an arrogant gentleman who is mistaken to think I welcome his smiles,” Eliza managed to get out. Ben suddenly tugged free from her hand and ran toward the man as fast as his short legs could carry him. Before Eliza had the presence of mind to react, Ben opened his mouth and clamped his teeth firmly onto the leg of Lawrence Moore, the Earl of Wrathshire. A howl of outrage escaped Lawrence’s lips. “Umm, Eliza, don’t you think it might be prudent to fetch Benjamin from that gentleman’s leg?” Agatha asked in alarm. “Give him another moment,” Eliza said even as she strode forward, her temper burning hot when she realized Lawrence was trying to shake Ben off his leg. “Don’t hurt him,” she snarled as she reached them and carefully pried Ben away from Lawrence. “He’s only a baby.” “With teeth like a shark,” Lawrence grouched, leaning down to rub his leg.
Jen Turano (A Change of Fortune (Ladies of Distinction, #1))
Even with his eyes concealed, I sensed Amar’s gaze. “What world do you belong to? Theirs?” I pointed at an Otherworldly being sharpening his horns. “No. My kingdom is neither among humans nor Otherworldly beings. It is between.” “Why did you come to Bharata?” I asked. “The invitation to my swayamvara was issued only to the nations we’re at war with.” “Everyone is at war with my nation,” he said with a smile. “How did you even know about me?” “Akaran has its eyes and ears.” He could have been lying. Nothing escaped me from the rafters where I had spied for years. But my father had other meetings…and he was not always in Bharata. I hesitated. “How can I trust someone who won’t even reveal their face?” “It’s far too easy to be recognized here.” He drew the cloak closer and the gesture was so final, so closed off and unwelcoming, that I stepped back, chastened. Amar removed the wedding garland from around his neck. From the sleeves of his jacket, he withdrew a small knife. Before I could react, he swiped the knife across his palm. Small beads of blood welled to the surface. He held his palm out to me like a perverse offering. “I make this bond to you in blood, not flowers,” he said. “Come with me and you shall be an empress with the moon for your throne and constellations to wear in your hair. Come with me and I promise you that we will always be equals.” My mouth went dry. A blood oath was no trifling undertaking. Vassals swore it to lords, priests to the gods. But husbands to wives? Unthinkable.
Roshani Chokshi (The Star-Touched Queen (The Star-Touched Queen, #1))
And then in a swift, calculating move, Rothbury sprang forward, covering her body with his own. For a second her breath felt trapped in her chest and she was instantly immobile underneath his weight. His warm, hard thigh sat heavy between hers. Panting from exertion, a shameful lick of heat ignited deep in her belly. Effortlessly, he joined her wrists together, holding them above her head with only one hand while the long, blunt-tipped fingers of the other trailed a silky path down her cheek. "Who are you?" he whispered. Her breath hitched at the explosion of feeling and thought thrumming through her. He looked so dominant above her, so beautiful, like he was created specifically for seduction. None of her wicked imaginings had prepared her for the plethora of sensations he sparked with only his fingertips upon her face. Belatedly, she realized her body refused to listen to her mind. She had quit squirming. In fact, she had begun to relish the intoxicating feel of his long, lean-muscled body atop hers. His warm, bare chest pressed onto her bodice, his solid thigh planted firmly against her sex. Her eyes dipped to his mouth, which was partially open, baring his straight white teeth. All she would have to do was arch her neck and her mouth would fasten to his. She shivered, surprised and ashamed at the way her body reacted to him. She needed to escape before he discovered her identity. But her mind warred between what was right and what felt wonderful. In the end, years of dire warnings from her pious father about the sins of the flesh returned at least some of her good sense. "Get off of me," she demanded, albeit weakly. "Absolutely not," he growled, his breath feathering hotly against her mouth, her cheek, her neck. "I'll not let you get away now. Not before I find out who you are. Wanted a taste, did you?
Olivia Parker (To Wed a Wicked Earl (Devine & Friends, #2))
Elvis was pretty slick. Nonetheless, I knew that he was cheating. His four-of-a-kind would beat my full house. I had two choices. I could fold my hand and lose all the money I’d contributed to the pot, or I could match Elvis’s bet and continue to play. If a gambler thought he was in an honest game, he would probably match the bet thinking his full house was a sure winner. The con artist would bet large amounts of money on the remaining cards, knowing he had a winning hand. I narrowed my eyes and pursed my lips, as if struggling to decide whether to wager five hundred pesos or fold my hand and call it quits. I knew there were five men between me and the door and watched them from the corner of my eye. Even if I folded and accepted my losses, I knew they would not let me leave without taking all my cash. They had strength in numbers and would strong arm me if they could. The men stared, intently watching my next move. I set down my beer and took five one hundred peso notes from my wallet. The men at the bar relaxed. My adrenaline surged, pumping through my brain, sharpening my focus as I prepared for action. I moved as if to place my bet on the table, but instead my hand bumped my beer bottle, spilling it onto Elvis’ lap. Elvis reacted instinctively to the cold beer, pushing back from the table and rising to his feet. I jumped up from my chair making a loud show of apologizing, and in the ensuing pandemonium I snatched all the money off the table and bolted for the door! My tactics took everyone by complete surprise. I had a small head start, but the Filipinos recovered quickly and scrambled to cut off my escape. I dashed to the door and barely made it to the exit ahead of the Filipinos. The thugs were nearly upon me when I suddenly wheeled round and kicked the nearest man square in the chest. My kick cracked ribs and launched the shocked Filipino through the air into the other men, tumbling them to the ground. For the moment, my assailants were a jumble of tangled bodies on the floor. I darted out the door and raced down the busy sidewalk, dodging pedestrians. I looked back and saw the furious Filipinos swarming out of the bar. Running full tilt, I grabbed onto the rail of a passing Jeepney and swung myself into the vehicle. The wide-eyed passengers shrunk back, trying to keep their distance from the crazy American. I yelled to the driver, “Step on the gas!” and thrust a hundred peso note into his hand. I looked back and saw all six of Johnny’s henchmen piling onto one tricycle. The jeepney driver realized we were being pursued and stomped the gas pedal to the floor. The jeepney surged into traffic and accelerated away from the tricycle. The tricycle was only designed for one driver and two passengers. With six bodies hanging on, the overloaded motorcycle was slow and unstable. The motorcycle driver held the throttle wide open and the tricycle rocked side to side, almost tipping over, as the frustrated riders yelled curses and flailed their arms futilely. My jeepney continued to speed through the city, pulling away from our pursuers. Finally, I could no longer see the tricycle behind us. When I was sure I had escaped, I thanked the driver and got off at the next stop. I hired a tricycle of my own and carefully made my way back to my neighborhood, keeping careful watch for Johnny and his friends. I knew that Johnny was in a frustrated rage. Not only had I foiled his plans, I had also made off with a thousand pesos of his cash. Even though I had great fun and came out of my escapade in good shape, my escape was risky and could’ve had a very different outcome. I feel a disclaimer is appropriate for those people who think it is fun to con street hustlers, “Kids. Don’t try this at home.
William F. Sine (Guardian Angel: Life and Death Adventures with Pararescue, the World's Most Powerful Commando Rescue Force)
She wet her lips, clenching her fists against my shoulders. “Im afraid of giving you control again. And, I’m afraid of how I’ll react, but I want it. It is what it is.” I can be reasonable, but you need to stop considering the impossible. You can’t go home, you can’t escape, and I can’t let you go. It is what it is. How dare she use those words against me? My anger swelled, vibrating through my muscles, but Rose didn’t move-she didn’t even look worried. Her head shook slightly, then she pressed her lips against mine. Coaxing me past the anger, and back to sanity. I felt like a hundred pound weight sat on my chest by the time she finished. “Where’d all that come from?” She dragged her hand through her hair. “I figured it was about time I give you a little reminder that I’m not so easily broken. Whatever it is you need, I’m game-I do like… watching you. The look you get when you’re up to no good and can’t hold back. I could get off on that.” With a nervous giggle, she dropped her hear forward, her hair creating a curtain around her face. I brushed it back, then pushed her to the floor again, pinning her under me. "God, I love you.
Skye Callahan (Bend, Don't Break (Irrevocable, #2))
day, the trigger was an older woman with deep wrinkles. To this day, I cannot be certain about what caused her to react so strongly. Perhaps she had used up her patience simmering in the sun for hours at the back of the line. Perhaps she had some desperately hungry grandchildren who she needed to get back to. It is impossible to know exactly what happened. But after she received her allocation of wheat, she broke the established rules of the feeding site and moved toward Bubba. She looked up at him and unleashed a verbal attack. Bubba, as gentle as ever, simply smiled at her. The more he smiled, the angrier she got. I noticed the commotion when our Somali guards suddenly tensed and turned toward the disturbance. All I could see was Bubba, head and shoulders above a gathering crowd, seemingly unperturbed, and smiling down at someone. His patient response only fueled the woman’s rage. I heard her sound of fury long before I spotted the source when she launched a long stream of vile curses at Bubba. Thankfully, he didn’t understand a word that she was saying. It was now possible to understand her complaint. She was upset about the quality of the “animal feed” that was being distributed for human consumption. She was probably right in her assessment of the food. These were surplus agricultural products that United Nations contributing members didn’t want, couldn’t sell, and had no other use for. As this hulking American continued to smile, the woman realized that she was not communicating. Now, furious and frustrated, she bent down, set her plastic bag on the ground, grabbed two fistfuls of dirty, broken wheat, grain dust, dirt and chaff. She straightened to her full height and flung the filthy mixture as hard as she could into Bubba’s face. The crowd was deathly silent as I heard a series of loud metallic clicks that indicated that an entire squad of American soldiers had instinctively locked and loaded all weapons in readiness for whatever might happen next. Everything felt frozen in time as everyone waited and watched for Bubba’s reaction. A Somali man might have beaten the woman for such a public insult—and he would have considered his action and his anger entirely justified. I knew that Bubba had traveled half-way around the world at his own expense to spend three months of personal vacation time to help hurting people. And this was the thanks that he received? He was hot, sweaty, and drained beyond exhaustion—and he had just been publicly embarrassed. He had every reason to be absolutely livid. Instead, he raised one hand to rub the grit out of his eyes, and then he gave the woman one more big smile. At that point, he began to sing. And what he sang wasn’t just any song. She didn’t understand the words, of course. But she, and the entire crowd, stood in silent amazement as Bubba belted out the words to the 1950’s Elvis Presley rock-n-roll classic: You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog Cryin’ all the time You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog Cryin’ all the time Well, you ain’t never caught a rabbit And you ain’t no friend of mine. By the time he started singing the next verse, the old woman had turned and stomped off in frustration, angrily plowing a path through the now-smiling crowd of Somalis to make her escape. Watching her go, Bubba raised his voice to send her off with rousing rendition of the final verse: Well they said you was high-classed Well, that was just a lie Ya know they said you was high-classed Well, that was just a lie Well, you ain’t never caught a rabbit And you ain’t no friend of mine.
Nik Ripken (The Insanity of God: A True Story of Faith Resurrected)
You have to be a Starter. And then you have to be brave enough and prepared enough to react when a surprise presents itself. When
Jon Acuff (Start: Punch Fear in the Face, Escape Average and Do Work That Matters)
My God!” Sophia sat back, her eyes wide with horror. “It’s a drug! He’s drugging her and she doesn’t even know it.” Here we go. “It’s common knowledge that we’re genetic traders—the fact that we have more than one means to attract a mate of an entirely different species should come as no surprise,” he pointed out. “You…you cold blooded bastard.” Sophia shook her head. “Poor Liv—she has no idea what he’s doing to her.” “It wouldn’t matter even if she did,” Sylvan explained patiently, ignoring her insults. “The mating scent is too strong to fight, even with advanced warning. Stronger species than yours have tried and they have all failed. With very few exceptions.” He closed his eyes briefly thinking of Feenah, of her pure white hair and pale crystal eyes. I’m sorry, Sylvan… “It’s not right. You’re not fighting fair.” Sophia’s words pushed back the painful memory and Sylvan opened his eyes again to see the look of despair and anger on her lovely face. She looked almost on the brink of tears. Wonderful—she was even more upset and irrational than he had thought she would be. He supposed he ought to feel irritated. Instead, the illogical urge to hold and comfort her came over him so strongly that he had to sit back and cross his arms over his chest to keep from reaching for her. “I believe you humans have a saying that covers this—‘All’s fair in love and war.’ Is that right?” he said softly. “Yes, but that doesn’t mean—” Sylvan leaned forward again and took her soft, small hands between his own larger ones. “You must understand, Sophia—Baird isn’t trying to trick your sister into anything. He’s simply using every power at his disposal to keep her. Because he needs her—he loves her. She is the only woman in the entire universe for him and the bond that will form between them will be one of undying love and devotion.” “Maybe for him.” She looked down as though mesmerized by the sight of her own small hands being engulfed in his much larger ones. “But not for Liv. He’s going to trick her into having bonding sex with him —whatever that is—and then she’ll spend the rest of her life hating him once she finds out how he did it.” She looked up at Sylvan. “You don’t know her like I do—she hates being lied to. Her last boyfriend cheated on her and then lied about it and she dumped him and never looked back. If she knew what Baird was doing to her…” “It’s not as though it’s a conscious choice on his part,” Sylvan tried to explain. “It’s the way our bodies react chemically to our chosen mates. We can’t turn it off, even if we try. Sometimes it comes even when it’s not wanted. We have a saying for it—‘The blood knows what the mind does not wish to see.’” Lifting a hand, he cupped her cheek and brushed away the single tear that had escaped her wide green eyes with his thumb. “It cannot be helped.” Sophia
Evangeline Anderson (Claimed (Brides of the Kindred, #1))
paddock. Before Lily could reach the horses, Cade was behind her, catching her waist and holding her kicking to his side. Always aware of his greater strength, he spread his legs and braced himself so he could pull her up against his chest where neither of them could harm the other. Lily's head jerked angrily, and her long braid swung from her shoulder and down her back as she glared at him, face to face. "If you ride, you must take someone with you." "Says who? You're not my boss. Put me down, Cade. I'm a grown woman. I can go anywhere I want." "Jim was a grown man, and he lost his life out there alone. Promise me you will go nowhere without company." "And if I don't?" Here was an area where she could defy him, and Lily faced him triumphantly. The fact that Cade held her so close his belt buckle pressed into her stomach did not go unnoticed, but she was too angry to react differently. "I will have Abraham follow you around all day. If you want to pay one of the men to watch over you, then defy me in this." And Abraham would do anything Cade told him. Wriggling, Lily escaped his grasp and spat, "I hate you," before retreating indignantly to the house. The
Patricia Rice (Texas Lily (Too Hard to Handle, #1))
They ask themselves: “What will he do?” “How will he react?” “Will he go mad?” “Will he bite?” “Will he be armed?” They’re pumped up with fear. Adrenaline pumping, fingers tense on the trigger, brains racing. And I’m cool as a cat! The name ‘Charles Bronson’ causes panic! The name ‘Mickey Peterson’ causes stress! The police all love to arrest me, as I’m the most exciting madman they will ever arrest! It’s a fact. So here I am years later, and I’m still the madman. There is no escaping my past.
Stephen Richards (Insanity: My Mad Life)
You can’t change Holly. You can only change yourself. You can work on your own life so you’re not desperate, so what she says doesn’t affect you so much, because the way you feel about yourself comes from yourself. Having it come from what Holly thinks, what anybody else thinks—those are shifting sands. You can’t stand on that. If you feel better about yourself, you’ll react less to Holly, or you’ll react differently, and the whole relationship will … it’ll change.
Rosalind James (Just Say Yes (Escape to New Zealand, #10))
The latent conflict between the intellectual and the economic upper class is nowhere openly engaged as yet, least of all by the artists, who, with their less developed social consciousness, react more slowly than their humanistic masters. But the problem, even if it is un-admitted and unexpressed is present all the time and in all places, and the whole intelligenstsia, both literary and artistic, is threatened by the danger of developing either into an uprooted, "unbourgeois", and envious class of bohemians or into a conservative, passive cringing class of academics. The humanists escape from from this alternative into their ivory tower, and finally succumb to both the dangers which they had intended to avoid.
Arnold Hauser (The Social History of Art: Volume 2: Renaissance, Mannerism, Baroque)
all of life is a choice. We’re choosing every day. Not just every day. Every minute of every day, you choose what you do. How you react. What you learn, and what you take with you. And none of life is perfect. It will never be perfect. You never get everything you want.
Rosalind James (Just Say Christmas (Escape to New Zealand, #13))
Somehow one feels unfettered by any of the harsh, restricting influences of human existence as we live it these days. There are no buildings, no roads, no street lights, no artificial or even natural noises, no hustle and bustle, no need for anyone to shout or to have money or to pretend about anything; those human beings who are with you are probably fairly well known to you, and are there for the same reason that you are—they know the dangers and delights of solitude just the same as you do, and they will react to the unblemished and staggering loveliness of a huge expanse of desert sky, deep blue by day and of a marvellous purple at night sprinkled haphazardly with hundreds and thousands of stars silently lighting up that great canopy of night-time that drifts down with the close of day. I personally think I know of nothing more restorative than lying on the soft sand—cool now after the retirement of the day’s sun— and just staring at the miracle of such a sky. And then you fall asleep, rolled up in a sleeping bag against the considerable fall in temperature as the night goes on, perhaps waking an hour or two before dawn for just long enough to notice that those little stars are still there—as bright as ever—and do not even look as though they are getting ready to be extinguished by the advent of another day. It is a lovely, comforting feeling when the world around you is quite still; and there is no sound anywhere to penetrate the delightful peace that surrounds you. When the dawn comes, and the stars have all gone away, there is something sharp and exhilarating about the smell in the air. It is fresh and clean and tantalisingly different to the atmosphere which will pervade the day once the sun has come up over the distant horizon. Then there will be no escape from its merciless and desiccating heat, which drains you of energy and leaves you burned and incapable of any prolonged activity. And the bright reflection of the sun off the light-coloured sand can be piercing and painful to the eyes. There is probably not even a tiny breeze to move that sullen, sultry air, and there can be no relief from its effects until once more, and inevitably, the great ball of fire that is the sun will slide slowly below the land and allow it to grow cool. It would be foolish to pretend that all of those who served with the LRDG saw the desert in the way that I have described it, all or even much of the time. But I am quite sure that when their minds were not diverted by rather more pressing considerations concerning the enemy, there were few who were not moved by the beauty of the sky at night. They all spent quite a number of hours on sentry duty, when, alone with his thoughts and in such surroundings, no man can be oblivious of such a miraculous revelation.
David Lloyd Owen (The Long Range Desert Group, 1940–1945: Providence Their Guide)
The technosphere is described here as if neither history nor social or political dynamics mattered. It does not take into account collective agency or political, economic, and social structures, let alone the evolution of knowledge with its powerful impact on shaping technological systems. Has human technology now reached a stage (or will it any time soon) at which it attains the autonomy of an organism with its own agency - an autopoietic structure reproducing its own organization? Such generalizations tend to overlook some essential features of human interaction with the global environment. For instance, while the biosphere has proven its resilience over the course of at least 3.5 billion years of evolution, the technosphere may turn out to be a rather fragile scaffolding for human existence. While it is quite conceivable that the sum total of the unintended consequences of our actions has developed its own dynamics, even in the age of the Anthropocene escape routes may still be left to us - an observation, however, that does not imply, vice versa, that there will be a guarantee for the existence of an escape route. It rather appears that the dynamics underlying the Anthropocene might well enhance both the challenges with which we are confronted and our opportunities to react to them, leaving the question open as to whether the latter will always be sufficient to match the former. Is it possible, for instance, that geoengineering can intervene in the planetary system to the point that a new state of the planetary system would be reached in which high carbon dioxide concentration, radioactive pollution, and other unintended consequences of industrialization are no longer challenging problems but can be safely kept under control by novel technologies? Given the fact that macro-scale interventions in the Earth system are beyond anything that human engineering has achieved so far, and given the fact that there are still important gaps in our knowledge about our planetary system, we are certainly on the safer side to prioritize, at least for the time being and to the extent that it is possible at all, the preservation of our existing Earth system and damage control.
Jürgen Renn (The Evolution of Knowledge: Rethinking Science for the Anthropocene)
Fascist regimes were particularly successful with young people. Fascist arrival in power sent a shock wave down through society to each neighborhood and village. Young Italians and Germans had to face the destruction of their social organizations (if they came from socialist or the anatomy of fascism communist families) as well as the attraction of new forms of sociability. The temptation to conform, to belong, and to achieve rank in the new fascist youth and leisure organizations (which I will discuss more fully below) was very powerful. Especially when fascism was still new, joining in its marching and uniformed squads was a way to declare one’s independence from smothering bourgeois homes and boring parents.94 Some young Germans and Italians of otherwise modest attainments found satisfaction in pushing other people around.95 Fascism was more fully than any other political movement a declaration of youthful rebellion, though it was far more than that. Women and men could hardly be expected to react in the same way to regimes that put a high priority on restoring women to the traditional spheres of homemaking and motherhood. Some conservative women approved. The female vote for Hitler was substantial (though impossible to measure precisely), and scholars have argued sharply about whether women should be considered accomplices or victims of his regime. In the end, women escaped from the roles Fascism and Nazism projected for them, less by direct resistance than simply by being themselves, aided by modern consumer society. Jazz Age lifestyles proved more powerful than party propaganda. In Fascist Italy, Edda Mussolini and other modern young women smoked and asserted an independent lifestyle like young women everywhere after World War I, while also participating in the regime’s institutions. The Italian birth rate did not rise on the Duce’s command. Hitler could not keep his promise to remove women from the workforce when the time came to mobilize fully for war.
Robert O. Paxton (The Anatomy of Fascism)
The topic of motivation often comes up when dealing with the issue of follow-through on plans. Many adults with ADHD may aspire to achieve a goal (e.g., exercise) or get through an unavoidable obligation (e.g., exam, paying bills), but fall prey to an apparent lack of motivation, despite their best intentions. This situation reminds us of a quote attributed to the late fitness expert, Jack LaLanne, who at the age of 93 was quoted as saying, “I’m feeling great and I still have sex almost every day. Almost on Monday, almost on Tuesday . . .” Returning to the executive dysfunction view of ADHD, motivation is defined as the ability to generate an emotion about a task that promotes follow-through in the absence of immediate reward or consequence (and often in the face of some degree of discomfort in the short-term). Said differently, motivation is the ability to make yourself “feel like” doing the task when there is no pressing reason to do so. Thus, you will have to find a way to make yourself feel like exercising before you achieve the results you desire or feel like studying for a midterm exam that is still several days away. You “know” logically that these are good ideas, but it is negative feelings (including boredom) or lack of feelings about a task that undercut your attempts to get started. In fact, one of the common thinking errors exhibited by adults with ADHD when procrastinating is the magnification of emotional discomfort associated with starting a task usually coupled with a minimization of the positive feelings associated with it. Adults with ADHD experience the double whammy of having greater difficulty generating positive emotions (i.e., motivation) needed to get engaged in tasks and greater difficulty inhibiting the allure of more immediate distractions, including those that provide an escape from discomfort. In fairness, from a developmental standpoint, adults with ADHD have often experienced more than their fair share of frustrations and setbacks with regard to many important aspects of their lives. Hence, our experience has been that various life responsibilities and duties have become associated with a degree of stress and little perceived reward, which magnifies the motivational challenges already faced by ADHD adults. We have adopted the metaphor of food poisoning to illustrate how one’s learning history due to ADHD creates barriers to the pursuit of valued personal goals. Food poisoning involves ingesting some sort of tainted food. It is an adaptive response that your brain and digestive system notice the presence of a toxin in the body and react with feelings of nausea and rapid expulsion of said toxin through diarrhea, vomiting, or both. Even after you have fully recuperated and have figured out that you had food poisoning, the next time you encounter that same food item, even before it reaches your lips, the sight and smell of the food will reactivate protective feelings of nausea due to the previous association of the stimulus (i.e., the food) with illness and discomfort. You can make all the intellectual arguments about your safety, and obtain assurances that the food is untainted, but your body will have this initial aversive reaction, regardless. It takes progressive exposure to untainted morsels of the food (sometimes mixing it in with “safe” food, in extreme cases) in order to break the food poisoning association. Similarly, in the course of your efforts to establish and maintain good habits for managing ADHD, you will encounter some tasks that elicit discomfort despite knowing the value of the task at hand. Therefore, it is essential to be able to manufacture motivation, just enough of it, in order to be able to shift out of avoidance and to take a “taste” of the task that you are delaying.
J. Russell Ramsay (The Adult ADHD Tool Kit)
Almost two hundred years ago, during the War of 2062, back when the world was inhabited exclusively by humans, a war between North American Countries and Middle Eastern countries arose.  It began over religious reasons, though I have no idea what the word religious even means just that whatever was inherent in their opposing beliefs led to the Middle Eastern people creating powerful weapons that no one had ever seen or heard of at the time.  Biological weapons they were called, and they were unleashed on North America.  The name of the weapon was evictium.  It warped the mind as well as the body and drove everyone mad.  The North Americans retaliated by launching nuclear weapons, which destroyed the rest of the world.  The only survivors were those who had something called money.  Back then, money was equated to power and value.  The more one had, the more value he held in society and the more power he had.  Those who had money were able to flee to large underground shelters that had been built.  Hundreds of underground shelters existed around North America that held hundreds of people with enough supplies to last twenty years.  When the supplies ran out, those who lived below ground feared that radiation, an after effect of the nuclear blast that made living things ill and caused death over time, would affect them and had affected any source of food above ground.  They soon learned radiation was the least of their concerns.  What waited for them at the surface was far, far worse.  Those who’d been exposed to evictium survived the nuclear blast.  However, the radiation that remained in the atmosphere and contaminated the food supply reacted with the evictium.  It created monstrous, demented beings, bloodthirsty and filled with rage.  When the inhabitants of the underground shelters returned to the world above, they were met by what we now know as Urthmen.  The Urthmen slaughtered them.  Very few managed to escape.  They fled to the forest and hid deep within it.  They were our ancestors.  Almost two hundred years later, the offspring of those warped creatures that waited at the surface are the ones that rule the Urth today.  They’ve evolved, however.  They’re no longer as demented and wild as their predecessors.  But they are far from civilized, and they no longer retain a shred of humanity.  They hate us in a way that is as much as part of them as breathing.  It’s instinctive.  And these creatures rule the only inhabitable section of the planet we know of: North America.
Jennifer Martucci (Remains of Urth: The Arena (Planet Urth, #7))
I didn’t read to escape. I didn’t even read to be entertained. It was more elemental, more essential than that. I read because imagination was the only thing that elevated me beyond my own reality. To look at my world as my only plane of existence was so limiting, and a little depressing. I needed the boundless worlds I found in good fiction. I could stare at the characters and obsess over them. But they couldn’t stare back. They couldn’t ask me any questions, or know me. They couldn’t ever love me but they couldn’t judge or reject me, either. They couldn’t react to me. It was kind of like stalking, but a character in a novel can’t get a restraining order.
Katie Ray (Don't Kiss the Messenger (Edgelake High School, #1))
He went on, hurting her, torturing her. And then a very strange thing happened. Very strange. So strange she didn’t understand it at first. So strange she couldn’t think about it, couldn’t even realize what it was. All she could do was react. The fire in her breasts and loins turned from pain to pleasure. The ache that dominated her entire being became an ache that craved immediate satisfaction. She didn’t want to escape, not any more.
Lawrence Block (The Adulterers: Collection of Classic Erotica - Book 13)
In the imagination of two late-twentieth-century filmmakers, an unseen force of artificial intelligence has overtaken the human species, has managed to control humans in an alternate reality in which everything one sees, feels, hears, tastes, smells, touches is in actuality a program. There are programs within programs, and humans become not just programmed but are in danger of and, in fact, well on their way to becoming nothing more than programs. What is reality and what is a program morph into one. The interlocking program passes for life itself. The great quest in the film series The Matrix involves those humans who awaken to this realization as they search for a way to escape their entrapment. Those who accept their programming get to lead deadened, surface lives enslaved to a semblance of reality. They are captives, safe on the surface, as long as they are unaware of their captivity. Perhaps it is the unthinking acquiescence, the blindness to one’s imprisonment, that is the most effective way for human beings to remain captive. People who do not know that they are captive will not resist their bondage. But those who awaken to their captivity threaten the hum of the matrix. Any attempt to escape their imprisonment risks detection, signals a breach in the order, exposes the artifice of unreality that has been imposed upon human beings. The Matrix, the unseen master program fed by the survival instinct of an automated collective, does not react well to threats to its existence. In a crucial moment, a man who has only recently awakened to the program in which he and his species are ensnared consults a wise woman, the Oracle, who, it appears, could guide him. He is uncertain and wary, as he takes a seat next to her on a park bench that may or may not be real. She speaks in code and metaphor. A flock of birds alights on the pavement beyond them. “See those birds,” the Oracle says to him. “At some point a program was written to govern them.” She looks up and scans the horizon. “A program was written to watch over the trees and the wind, the sunrise and sunset. There are programs running all over the place.” Some of these programs go without notice, so perfectly attuned they are to their task, so deeply embedded in the drone of existence. “The ones doing their job,” she tells him, “doing what they were meant to do are invisible. You’d never even know they were here.” So, too, with the caste system as it goes about its work in silence, the string of a puppet master unseen by those whose subconscious it directs, its instructions an intravenous drip to the mind, caste in the guise of normalcy, injustice looking just, atrocities looking unavoidable to keep the machinery humming, the matrix of caste as a facsimile for life itself and whose purpose is maintaining the primacy of those hoarding and holding tight to power.
Isabel Wilkerson (Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents)
Mike Fisher had extradited Bundy to Aspen in January from the Utah state prison in Draper, where the personable former law student was serving up to 15 years for the 1975 aggravated kidnap of a 19-year-old telephone operator. Bundy already had been caught in an escape attempt from the penitentiary print shop, “a miserable little plot that I hatched,” as he’d later describe it to me. At the time, I agreed with Mike Fisher and others that he’d probably try again. Since his arrival in Aspen, Ted had become a celebrity to many of the mountain resort’s young and irreverent fun seekers, who reacted to his dramatic courthouse leap with amusement.
Stephen G. Michaud (Terrible Secrets: Ted Bundy on Serial Murder)
Apart from loss, what we really fear in death is not death itself but the gloomy thought of being bound up forever and ever in the dark. If it is true that we cease to exist upon death—who can say for sure?—then death is not something to be experienced. Dying perhaps, but not death itself. It is as though the entire world doesn’t exist and never has. Death would be precisely the same kind of experience as we had before our earliest memory. An unfathomable void beyond experience. So instead, when we recoil at the thought of death, when we really think it through this is really a fear of being trapped. And our animal instincts cannot stand for that. We recoil at being stuck in a cage and so naturally we react. Our heart races and we immediately seek escape
Jonathan Lee (Different Vessels)
Whether or not alcoholism, the obvious “iceberg” the writer could not escape, drowned some more private and secret suffering related to sexual desire or even gender identity, Robertson clearly wanted fate to absolve him for some compulsion that he feared was a choice, and perhaps also give him the ability to free himself from that compulsion—an impossible, contradictory, ambivalent wish. His precognitive habit seems to have answered both needs. Eisenbud makes a very key observation in this regard, one that goes well beyond Robertson in its implications: “With such an ambivalent attitude toward fate,” he writes, “all one would need, it might seem, would be heads and tails on the same throw. But any good precognitive event provides just this, since … the metaphysical significance of such an occurrence is sufficiently in question to satisfy both schools.”24 There was surely no better “precognitive event” than reading a New York Times headline about a sea disaster you had written a novel about 14 years earlier. The psychoanalytic rule of thumb is that nothing is ever an accident.25 The disasters and misfortunes that repeat themselves over and over in the lives of neurotics like Robertson look for all the world as though some higher power or cosmic theater director is testing them or just being cruel, but these situations are actually elicited by the neurotic in deviously subtle ways. For Freudians, the thematic consistency of the neurotic’s failures is always assumed to represent unresolved past situations confusedly haunting the neurotic’s present reality, governed by the repetition-compulsion beyond the pleasure principle. Instead of seeing things as they are, the neurotic sees replays of situations from early life and reacts accordingly, with predictably disappointing outcomes—the idiomatic “carrying baggage.” The alternative possibility that a case like Robertson’s suggests is that some of our baggage comes from our future. Robertson seems all his life to have been confusedly presponding to a future upheaval, even a kind of near miss or close call (since, having written about it beforehand, the Titanic disaster was in some sense “his” disaster), but treating it again and again as a present reality, a disaster that had already occurred or was in the process of occurring. By the time the real thing happened, he himself was already sunk, “washed up,” and could not even successfully capitalize on what might have been the perfect advertisement for his precognitive gift. What if something like this is true of many neurotics? What portion of ordinary human floundering and failure might really be attributable to misrecognized precognition, a kind of maladaptive prematurity of feeling and thought? We now turn to another deeply neurotic writer whose life even more clearly illustrates the painful temporal out-of-synch-ness of the strongly precognitive soul.
Eric Wargo (Time Loops: Precognition, Retrocausation, and the Unconscious)
Teachers sometimes view students with disabilities who act out because of their disorder as oppositional and defiant. Teachers who understand the cycle of fear, avoidance, stress, and escape (FASE) understand what “saving FASE” means. Teachers learn not to react to the behavior but to the underlying cause of the behavior. Teachers who understand FASE recognize that all human behavior sends a message. By looking for the message and reframing the behavior as a way of communicating, teachers can see the oppositional behaviors, frequent trips to the nurse, being unprepared for class, and frequent absences as attempts to avoid the shame of underperforming in the classroom (Schultz, 2011, pp. 137-142). For teachers to have success with managing their classrooms, it is imperative for them to understand that the students are not unmotivated or oppositional, but are sending a message about their need for help.
William Ribas (Social-Emotional Learning in the Classroom second edition: Practice Guide for Integrating All SEL Skills into Instruction and Classroom Management)
I took a step away, pulling my sheets over her and intending to take a position in the armchair by the fire for the night but she caught my hand before I could leave. I looked at her in surprise and found her eyes open, her gaze locked on mine. “Don’t go,” she breathed, her grip tightening. “I don’t think you really-” “Please don’t leave me alone,” she begged and the vulnerability in her voice broke down any further protests I’d been going to make. She sat up a little and tugged on my arm, trying to pull me down into the bed with her. And I couldn’t really deny the fact that I’d thought about getting her in my bed more than once before. Not that I’d lay a finger on her in her current state but even seeing her here, surrounded by gold and half undressed was sending zips of turbulent energy right through me. She pulled on my hand again and I gave up trying to talk myself out of it as I kicked my shoes off and got in beside her. She smiled at me and it wasn’t sarcastic or taunting, the difference that made taking my breath away for a moment. I settled back against the pillows and she rolled against me, pressing her nearly naked body flush to mine. I could feel myself getting hard just from that small amount of contact. I tried to prise her away from me but she wriggled closer, pressing her full breasts against me and giving me a clear view of them trying to break free of the confines of her bra. “Fuck, Roxy, I cant sleep next to you while you’re dressed like that,” I said, rolling her away from me more forcefully. She blinked up at me in confusion for a moment before pushing herself upright and looking down at her undressed state. “Oh, sorry,” she mumbled before pulling off the unbuttoned shirt and throwing it to the floor. “Better?” My mouth dried up and a growl escaped me as the Dragon writhed beneath my skin. “You need to be putting more on, not taking things off,” I said tersely. She huffed like I was the one who was being ridiculous. “Give me your shirt then,” she demanded, reaching out to pull at my black t-shirt. “I don’t think it will help if I start taking off my clothes too,” I said, catching her wrist to stop her. “You’re so fucking bossy,” she muttered, a bit of her usual fire rising to the surface. “Just do as you’re told for once.” Before I could respond to that, she shoved my hand aside and moved to straddle me in one quick movement. I was so surprised that for a moment I couldn’t even react as she yanked on my shirt and pulled it over my head. My hands found her waist, my thumbs brushing against her hip bones as she looked down at me with her dark hair tumbling around her shoulders and that sexy as sin underwear begging me to touch it. She laughed as she waved the shirt at me triumphantly, doing a little victory dance which meant she was grinding right against my hard-on and sending my body haywire. Before I could say or do anything, she pulled the shirt over her head and covered herself with it. I was so much bigger than her that it fell right down to pool around her thighs, trapping my hands beneath the material where I still held her. Her gaze locked with mine and for a moment it was like none of the shit that had passed between us had ever happened and we were just us, alone...in my bed. (DariusPOV)
Caroline Peckham (The Reckoning (Zodiac Academy, #3))
Over a period of time, based on how much mental energy you invest in the act of listening and reacting to music, it will impact your being and identity, the type of person you are, an amalgamation of beliefs, habits, routines, preferences, choices, and of course, playlists.
Tushar Shukla (AR Rahman: On Loop from 27 Years A lifelong mausam of escape)
Relieving Stress Stress is your reaction to outside stimuli pushing your mind, body or spirit out of balance. Adapting to new stimuli is how you increase your capabilities and develop new skills, i.e., the basis of growth. But, if the stimuli is too great or arrives so quickly that you are unable to adapt, then the resulting stress can lead to physical, emotional or mental problems. Stress can be triggered by many factors, including: physical, emotional or mental abuse; life changing events such as a new job, moving, pregnancy or divorce; work or school-related deadlines; high stress occupations; and uncomfortable social situations Exposure to stress affects us in stages: In the first stage, when we experience stress, our bodies automatically react with the characteristic “fight or flight” response, also known as an adrenaline rush. In life threatening situations this is helpful, as adrenaline causes our bodies to increases our pulse, blood pressure and rate of breathing, better preparing us to do battle or to escape. When the outside stimuli disappear, often with a good night’s sleep, we return to normal. Continued exposure to stress, without a break, results in the second stage. In today’s modern society, everyday stress from traffic jams, work, or just plain living, triggers this same reaction. We end up in a constant state of stress. We deplete our reserves, especially our adrenal glands, and lessen our ability to handle additional stress. Even our ability to sleep can be affected. The final stage results from the accumulation of stress over time and leads to exhaustion. Unable to return our body, mind and spirit to its normal state of balance due to overwhelming stress, we suffer physical, emotional and mental breakdowns. Warning signs are: weight gain or loss, ulcers, indigestion, insomnia, depression, anxiety, fear, anger, inability to concentrate, moodiness, and other problems. It can be argued that all disease is a consequence of stress.
Edwin Harkness Spina (Escaping the Matrix: 8 Steps Beyond Stress and Anger Management For Attaining Inner Peace)
I’m sorry, I should have realized you’d be hungry. If you let me give you intravenous fluids, it would help.” The moment she put the glass down, she retreated to her computer desk. He ignored her comment. Why do you not feed? The question was asked casually, curiously. His black eyes were thoughtful as he studied her. From her position of safety across the room, Shea watched him. The weight of his gaze alone broke her concentration, took her breath away. She was feeling far too possessive of this patient. She had no right to tangle her life around his. It was frightening that she was reacting so uncharacteristically to him. She had always felt aloof, remote, detached from people and things around her. Her analytical mind simply computed facts. But right now, she could think only of him, his pain and suffering, the way his eyes watched her, half-closed, sexy. Shea nearly jumped out of her skin. Where had that thought come from? Knowing she wouldn’t want to think he was reading her mind at that precise moment, Jacques did the gentlemanly thing and pretended merely a casual interest. It was nice to know she found him sexy. Smugly he lay back with his eyes closed, long lashes dark against his washed-out complexion. Despite the fact that his eyes were closed, Shea felt as though he witnessed every move she made. “You rest while I shower and change my clothes.” Her hands went to her hair in a futile effort to tidy the wild thickness of it. His eyes remained closed, his breathing relaxed. I can feel your hunger, your need for blood nearly as great as my own. Why would you attempt to hide this from me? With sudden insight he let out his breath. Or is it that you are hiding from your own needs? That is it--you do not realize it is your hunger, your need. The gentleness in his flooded her body with unexpected heat. Furious that he could be right, she stalked into the bathroom, shrugged off her robe, and allowed the warm shower to cascade over her head. His laughter was low and taunting. You think to escape me, little red hair? I live in you as you live in me. Shea gasped, whirled around, grabbed frantically for a towel. It took a moment to realize he was still in the other room.
Christine Feehan (Dark Desire (Dark, #2))
The applause rose again. It was coming from outside the curtain. I stood up, almost ready to run. “So, you react to simple escape reflexes? That’s a good sign.” Eldridge was behind me. My emotions surged, not sure if I should attempt to lunge at him in anger or break down and cry. But I respected him. And his sentence had piqued my interest enough to keep all my emotions concealed. “Escape reflexes? They’re just applauding,” I replied. “Yes,” Eldridge said as if pondering that. “But applause is frightening because, in its absence, silence would take its place. With no applause, there is a void of disapproval. It’s easy to be threatened by applause. It’s addicting. Let’s go, shall we?
Laura Campbell (The Five Unnecessaries: Book 1 of the 27th Protector Series)
Escaping from fascism, European Jews had poured into Palestine—more than sixty thousand in 1935 alone. Arab residents reacted angrily to the flood of immigrants. The British government was convinced that the hostility was due, in part, to the region’s lack of resources; the immigrants were exceeding Palestine’s “absorptive capacity” (that is, its carrying capacity). The limit to absorptive capacity was water—British experts argued that regional supplies couldn’t sustain a big influx of immigrants. In this arid, eroded landscape, the supply of well-watered farmland was so small that incoming Jews who used their superior financial resources to acquire it would necessarily create “a considerable landless Arab population.” Zionist groups sent out water testers, who proclaimed that they had found much more water than Britain allowed. London ignored the reports and in 1939 restricted Jewish immigration to fifteen thousand a year. No! Lowdermilk protested. Britain had it backward! The new Jewish settlements were the only bright spots he had seen in the entire dismal region! In the midst of the desolation were Zionist village cooperatives where jointly owned farms grew newly bred crop varieties that thrived in the dry heat. The farms were investing their profits to buy advanced well-boring equipment and create small industries—carpentry and printing shops, food-processing facilities, factories for building material. Most important to Lowdermilk were the irrigation and soil-retention programs—“the most remarkable” he had encountered “in twenty-four countries.” If the British increased immigration, rather than restricted it, he said, Palestine would be able to support “at least four million Jewish refugees from Europe.
Charles C. Mann (The Wizard and the Prophet: Two Remarkable Scientists and Their Dueling Visions to Shape Tomorrow's World)
They were angry, and angry people want the other party to react with equal ferocity in order to escape the intrinsic ugliness of having that emotion. When that unconscious expectation is betrayed, they feel as if their own spite is being pointed out to them and grow even more furious. It’s a vicious cycle.
Makoto Shinkai (your name. Another Side:Earthbound)
Our fear of death seems to me to be an error of evolution. Many animals react instinctively with terror and flight at the approach of a predator. It is a healthy reaction, one that allows them to escape from danger. But it’s a terror that lasts an instant, not something that remains with them constantly. Natural selection has produced these big apes with hypertrophic frontal lobes, with an exaggerated ability to predict the future. It’s a prerogative that’s certainly useful but one that has placed before us a vision of our inevitable death, and this triggers the instinct of terror and flight. Basically, I believe that the fear of death is the result of an accidental and clumsy interference between two distinct evolutionary pressures—the product of bad automatic connections in our brain rather than something that has any use or meaning. Everything has a limited duration, even the human race itself. (“The Earth has lost its youthfulness; it is past, like a happy dream. Now every day brings us closer to destruction, to desert,” as Vyasa has it in the Mahābhārata.129) Fearing the transition, being afraid of death, is like being afraid of reality itself; like being afraid of the sun. Whatever for?
Carlo Rovelli (The Order of Time)
You own me now,” he declares, before I feel the sharp sting of a bite on the flesh of my ass. Before I can even react, I feel his hand grip the hair at my crown. Pulling my head back until I’m facing the ceiling, he says, “Know this, Briony. There’s no escaping me.
Jescie Hall (That Sik Luv)
hidden in the center caught the moonlight, casting a spell on my heart. He offered his arm. When I hesitated, he took my hand and placed it on the crook. He pressed my fingers closed with his own, and again I shivered. Though fabric was between us I felt the solid muscle hidden beneath. My body responded, confusing me with the effects of alcoholic spirits and desire. My legs became noodles, forcing me to lean into Oliver for support. He smiled, closing his hand over mine and holding tight. “I fear the refreshments have gone to my head. I’ve not been out in a while and indulged a little more than I should have.” My comment earned me a look of surprise. “A little more?” “Yes. A pinch.” I emphasized the point by gesturing with my thumb and index finger. “Hmm.” He paused for the thought. “Then I suppose we must get you out more to build up your tolerance. We can’t have you tripping every time you drink champagne.” A small giggle escaped me, earning a wink and a smile from a man whose presence, at the moment, caused my body to react on its own—and I liked it. “Now, that’s what I like to hear, the sound of laughter.” His voice dropped lower. “Yours is delightful.” My blood rushed with heat. His words and tone were deep, dark, and exciting, and caused a clenching sensation of my most intimate parts.
D.D. Lorenzo (Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star)
In this same contemporary world of ours there remains the indestructible (for otherwise human nature itself would have to be destroyed) gift innate in all men which impels them now and again to escape from the restricted sphere where they labor for their necessities and provide for their security—to escape not by mere forgetting, but by undeceived recollection of the greater, more real reality. Now, as always, the workaday world can be transcended in poetry and the other arts. In the shattering emotion of love, beyond the delusions of sensuality, men continue to find entrance to the still point of the turning world. Now, as always, the experience of death as man's destiny, if accepted with an open and unarmored heart, acquaints us with a dimension of existence which fosters a detachment from the immediate aims of practical life. Now, as always, the philosophical mind will react with awe to the mystery of being revealed in a grain of matter or a human face.
Josef Pieper (In Tune With The World)
I tried to escape, insinuating myself with crawling movements toward the center of the spirals, where the lines slithered like serpents following the writhing of Irina’s limbs, supple and restless, in a slow dance where it is not the rhythm that counts but the knotting and loosening of serpentine lines. There are two serpents whose heads Irina grasps with her hands, and they react to her grasp, intensifying their own aptitude for rectilinear penetration, while she was insisting, on the contrary, that the maximum of controlled power should correspond to a reptile pliability bending to overtake her in impossible contortions.
Italo Calvino (If on a Winter's Night a Traveler)
You can survive violence  by reacting more violently  But you cannot escape ignorance  by continuing to act ignorantly 
Ricardo Derose
Practice accepting and wanting any anxiety that you notice. Remind yourself that you are looking for frequency, intensity, and duration of distress. Linger in the moment of being anxious and uncertain. Give your body-&-mind time to respond to your message of, “I can handle this, and I want this.” Don’t be in a rush to escape your feelings; hang out with your distress. And don’t get derailed by your negative thoughts. Notice them, accept and want them, allow them to hang around, but don’t bother reacting to them. Then refocus on your task. Remind yourself that you can cope with whatever happens.
R. Reid Wilson (Don't Panic: Taking Control of Anxiety Attacks)
After i had escaped, the police had so persistently and brutally badgered my mother that she had had a heart attack. What they had done to Evelyn was beyond belief. I understood why Evelyn had reacted to my call the way she did. At one time, Evelyn’s office telephone had ten intercepts on it. She and my mother had received phony notes in my handwriting. They had received telephone calls with my voice telling them to “come to the spot and bring some money.” They had found electric eyes and all kinds of other devices in and around their houses.
Assata Shakur (Assata: An Autobiography)
Habit 1 says “You’re the programmer” and Habit 2 says “Write the program,” then Habit 3 says “Run the program,” “Live the program.” And living it is primarily a function of our independent will, our self-discipline, our integrity, and commitment—not to short-term goals and schedules or to the impulse of the moment, but to the correct principles and our own deepest values, which give meaning and context to our goals, our schedules, and our lives. As you go through your week, there will undoubtedly be times when your integrity will be placed on the line. The popularity of reacting to the urgent but unimportant priorities of other people in Quadrant III or the pleasure of escaping to Quadrant IV will threaten to overpower the important Quadrant II activities you have planned. Your principle center, your self-awareness, and your conscience can provide a high degree of intrinsic security, guidance, and wisdom to empower you to use your independent will and maintain integrity to the truly important. But because you aren’t omniscient, you can’t always know in advance what is truly important. As carefully as you organize the week, there will be times when, as a principle-centered person, you will need to subordinate your schedule to a higher value. Because you are principle-centered, you can do that with an inner sense of peace.
Stephen R. Covey (The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People: Powerful Lessons in Personal Change)
Are you telling me you want this? That you want to get married?” She arched a brow, and he couldn’t hold her gaze. For the first time in his life, Leo found himself truly nervous. Here was a situation he couldn’t hit, wrestle, or order into compliance. Baring feelings was all well and good, but talking about them sucked. But there came a time in a man’s life where he had to suck it up and gush, especially when he was a blind idiot for a while. “Would I be going through all this trouble if I didn’t want to get married? Listen, Vex, I know we got off to a rocky start. In my defense, you’re a little much for any man to handle. Not that I mind,” he hastened to add when her second brow shot up. “I like who you are, and I’m a big enough man to admit I might have reacted poorly when you declared I was your mate and that I couldn’t escape.” “I said what?” Again, she gaped in open surprise. Then laughed. Pretty damned hard as a matter of fact. He frowned. “Don’t you dare deny it, Vex. You had me all but in front a preacher within five minutes of us meeting. And it scared me. But you were right about us belonging together, even if it took me longer to realize it. You are the one for me, Meena. The chaos to balance my serenity. The colored rainbow to enrich the grayness of my current life. I want you, Vex. Catastrophes and all. I just hope, even after what I’ve done, and the fact I might sometimes have a stick up my ass, at least according to Luna, that you’ll forgive me and still want me too.” He ended his gush of words and stared at Meena hopefully, and a little fearfully, given she once again stared at him slack-jawed. Would she say something? She did, just not from her lips. No, Meena’s voice came from behind him. “Oh, Pookie, that has got to be the most beautiful thing I ever heard.” Either Meena had some mad ventriloquist skills or… Leo froze as he stared at the woman in front of him, a woman that he realized the more he stared was Meena and yet not. This one wore her hair in soft curls around her shoulders, a tiny scar marred the tip of her chin, and her scent… was all wrong. However, the body that jumped on his back and the lips that noisily kissed the flesh of his neck? That was his Vex. What the hell? “Who are you?” he asked. The Meena clone grinned and waved. “Teena, of course.” “My twin,” Meena added against his ear. “Identical twin?” “Well, duh. And it’s a good thing too, or I’d be a little miffed right now that you just said all those beautiful things to her.” “I thought it was you.” “Apparently. It happens a lot, which I totally don’t get. She looks nothing like me.” “I feel like such an idiot.” He tried to crane his head to see the Meena clinging to his back, but she slapped her hands over his eyes. “No, you can’t look. It’s bad luck.” “But…” “No buts. Although I will say yours looks awfully delicious in those pants. But it will look even better when it’s naked and wearing my teeth marks.” “Vex!” “I know. I know. Don’t start something we can’t finish. Consider yourself warned, however. As soon as that priest says I do, your ass is mine. All mine.” Such a low, husky promise. “Come on, Teena, you are just in time to help me get into my gown. Can you believe my Pookie arranged all this?” The pride in her voice made him smile, but he did have to shake his head at the whole twin sister thing. With one last kiss on his neck, Meena whispered, “See you in a little bit, Pookie.
Eve Langlais (When an Omega Snaps (A Lion's Pride, #3))
fear clouds judgment and encourages you to REACT - rather than carefully consider alternatives - thus ensuring a less than optimal response to your problem.   Even
Edwin Harkness Spina (Escaping the Matrix: 8 Steps Beyond Stress and Anger Management For Attaining Inner Peace)
When you are aware that you are being triggered, rather than simply reacting, you can remain detached, and separate your emotions from your true self.   Tolle
Edwin Harkness Spina (Escaping the Matrix: 8 Steps Beyond Stress and Anger Management For Attaining Inner Peace)
To understand the phenomenon of avoidance in TMS one must constantly bear in mind how radically the unconscious mind differs from its conscious counterpart. The unconscious is terrified by the rage and reacts to avoid it by keeping it repressed and employing physical symptoms to aid in that repression. One of Freud’s biographers, Peter Gay, likened the unconscious to a maximum-security prison where all the desperate criminals, the undesirables and unacceptables, are incarcerated under heavy lock and key. In other words, they are repressed. If these feelings are already repressed, you may ask, what is the need for a distraction? The prison analogy is particularly apt; the repressed feelings, like desperadoes, will try to escape. Despite the force of repression, powerful emotions like rage will strive to rise to consciousness. I call it the “drive to consciousness.” Yale
John E. Sarno (The Mindbody Prescription: Healing the Body, Healing the Pain)
Your Behavioral Responses to Anxiety The ways in which people react to social situations are often a result of physical and mental responses. Feeling anxious is a clue from your body that you are in danger and need to take action. However, because the danger is exaggerated, your actions often do not fit the situation and do not help you. Two typical behaviors are freezing and avoidance. When people freeze in a situation, they cannot react. Movement, speech, and memory are all affected. You may have experienced freezing when a teacher called on you in class. When attention like that was placed upon you, you probably felt the physical responses of blushing, shortness of breath, and rapid heart rate, among others. You probably had negative thoughts running through your head, such as “I’m such an idiot. I look stupid.” As a result of the strong physical and mental reactions, you froze and were unable to remember the answer; perhaps you could not speak at all. Because feelings of anxiety are unpleasant, some people try to avoid stressful situations altogether. If you are nervous around crowds of people, you may avoid going to parties or dances. If you are afraid of speaking in public, you probably avoid classes or situations in which you would be asked to speak or make a presentation. There are also other, subtler forms of avoidance. If you are nervous in crowds, you may not avoid parties entirely, but you might leave early or latch onto one person the entire time. Or, you may distract yourself by daydreaming or flipping through CDs instead of talking with people. Because of her social anxiety, Ruby hadn’t participated in any extracurricular activities during high school. At the beginning of her senior year, her guidance counselor told her she would have a better chance of getting into her top-choice college if she would join activities, so she joined the Spanish club. The group was led by the Spanish teacher and met once a week before school. When Ruby joined, they were beginning to plan the annual fiesta, and there were many decisions to make. At first, the other students tried to include her and would ask her opinion about decorations or games, but Ruby was so anxious that she couldn’t respond. Soon, they stopped asking and left her alone. Ruby thought she was being a part of the group simply by showing up, but she never volunteered for any of the planning committees and never offered suggestions. When it was time to fill out college applications, Ruby asked the Spanish teacher to write her a recommendation. The teacher said she couldn’t because she didn’t know Ruby well enough. Patterns of avoidance may be so deeply ingrained in your lifestyle that you are not even aware that you are exhibiting them. Think carefully about your reactions to various situations. When you receive an invitation, do you instantly think of reasons why you can’t accept? When you are with a group of people, do you use escape mechanisms, such as reading a magazine, hiding in the restroom, or daydreaming? Avoidance may help lessen your anxiety in the moment, but in the long run, it usually makes things worse. Life is very unsatisfying when you avoid so many situations, and such behavior hurts self-esteem and self-confidence.
Heather Moehn (Social Anxiety (Coping With Series))
The return journey was nothing like the arrival. Bea couldn’t wait to get out of the car. She remembered feeling like this before, with Brandon, on several occasions. It was an excruciating need to escape the confinement of being in too close a proximity to passive-aggressive behaviour. She hated conflict, after a row, it would take her hours, perhaps days to become fully relaxed and herself again. She became anxious, not entirely brought on by his coldness, but by old memories, and the way her body would instinctively react to them. It wasn’t a feeling that she wanted to experience with someone new, of whom she’d told his sister only a short time ago that she was falling in love with.
Tracey-anne McCartney (A Carpet of Purple Flowers)
He tried again and again to have you killed or to usurp your power. If it was up to me, he would die for his treachery. But the final decision must be yours, my Lady,” he sent through our bond. “I don’t believe the bastard deserves to be healed but I know how compassionate you are.” First do no harm, I told myself. With a sigh, I placed my glowing hands gently on Morbain’s shoulders. He reacted with a gasp and tried to shake off my grip. But he couldn’t—again I felt the Goddess’s energy flow through me and again she spoke, using my mouth as her own. “For the sins you have committed against your own mother, Sundalla the 999th and for the attempts you have made against my new scion, Sundalla the 1000th, I condemn you,” the Goddess boomed. “You shall carry the wounds and pain of your time in the Garden of Death with you for the rest of your immortal life, Morbain. Never healing, never scarring—always fresh and weeping—your wounds will serve as a reminder to those that come after. This is your punishment from which you may not escape, even into death.” Then
Evangeline Anderson (Descended (Alien Mate Index, #3))
Belief shapes how we see the world, how we react to difficult situations, and what we offer to those with whom we share this planet. In some cases, belief can be positive. It encourages moral behavior, gives us a nudge to reach out and act compassionately, and
Kelly Gaines (Murderous Minds Volume 4: Stories of Real Life Murderers That Escaped the Headlines)
I'm Lady Codell-Fitch, and like so many of us, I wish to offer congratulations on your betrothal." "Yes, congratulations." "Congratulations!" "Amazing betrothal!" The felicitations were insincere and accompanied by many an ogling stare, but Eleanor pretended, as Madeline would, to be pleased. Taking Mr. Knight's arm, she pressed it. "He is quite handsome." She found herself daring to defy them all with an up-tilted chin. "I wish you all could be so lucky." The lushly garbed and overly perfumed people were obviously taken aback. They must have expected her to align herself with them, the English nobility, and with a wink and a sigh show how very much she hated this match. But she didn't even have to wonder how Madeline would react to this situation, for in this instance the two cousins thought as one. Neither of them would allow Mr. Knight to suffer the slights of society. They might not wish for this marriage, but the de Lacy pride wouldn't allow them to let anyone else know. Close by her ear, Mr. Knight said quietly, "A pretty pretense, yet lest you imagine I'm impressed, let me assure you I remember this morning when you tried to escape. Tonight you defied me in the matter of your hair and your clothing, and lied to me to get your way. I take your words with a grain of salt." He chuckled deeply.
Christina Dodd (One Kiss From You (Switching Places, #2))
How many times have we done all of this?” I ask. “Thousands, I suspect. More than I could possibly count.” “So why do I keep failing?” He sighs, looking over his shoulder at me. There’s a sense of weariness in his bearing, as though every loop is sediment, pressing down on him. “It’s a question I’ve pondered myself from time to time,” he says, melting wax running down the side to stain his glove. “Chance has played its part, stumbling when being surefooted would have saved you. Mostly, though, I think it’s your nature.” “My nature?” I ask. “You think I’m destined to fail?” “Destined? No. That would be an excuse, and Blackheath is intolerant of excuses,” he says. “Nothing that’s happening here is inevitable, much as it may appear otherwise. Events keep happening the same way day after day, because your fellow guests keep making the same decisions day after day. They decide to go hunting; they decide to betray each other; one of them drinks too much and skips breakfast, missing a meeting that would change his life forever. They cannot see another way, so they never change. You are different, Mr. Bishop. Throughout the loops, I’ve watched you react to moments of kindness and cruelty, random acts of chance. You make different decisions, and yet repeat the same mistakes at crucial junctures. It’s as though some part of you is perpetually pulled toward the pit.” “Are you saying I have to become somebody else to escape?” “I’m saying every man is in a cage of his own making,” he says. “The Aiden Bishop who first entered Blackheath.” He sighs, as if the memory troubles him. “The things he wanted and his way of getting them were…unyielding. That man could never have escaped Blackheath. This Aiden Bishop before me is different. I think you’re closer than you’ve ever been, but I’ve thought that before and been fooled. The truth is you’ve yet to be tested, but that’s coming, and if you’ve changed, truly changed, then who knows, there may be hope for you.
Stuart Turton (The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle)
As soon as it becomes clear that “I” cannot possibly escape from the reality of the present, since “I” is nothing other than what I know now, this inner turmoil must stop. No possibility remains but to be aware of pain, fear, boredom, or grief in the same complete way that one is aware of pleasure. The human organism has the most wonderful powers of adaptation to both physical and psychological pain. But these can only come into full play when the pain is not being constantly restimulated by this inner effort to get away from it, to separate the “I” from the feeling. The effort creates a state of tension in which the pain thrives. But when the tension ceases, mind and body begin to absorb the pain as water reacts to a blow or cut.
Alan W. Watts (The Wisdom of Insecurity)
Her hair was up, tucked into a horrid lace cap, but a few auburn curls had escaped and were brushing against the nape of her neck, drawing his attention to the lovely, straight column, flushed with excitement. For a fleeting moment, he considered what it would be like to kiss the skin there. The scene at the Allendale ball earlier in the evening had confirmed his suspicions that Lady Calpurnia Hartwell was an eager and passionate woman. Her responses were irresistibly uninhibited- so different from those of the women he usually partnered- he couldn't help but wonder how she would react to his touch in other, more scandalous places.
Sarah MacLean (Nine Rules to Break When Romancing a Rake (Love By Numbers, #1))
Grief experienced in intimate relationships and marriages is complicated. There was no escape from the pain and brokenness for either of us. He couldn't ignore my sadness, depression, and anxiety when they finally fully arrived, and I couldn't keep my envy at bay when he didn't share these emotions. Our ability to support each other was limited. We each processed the experience differently, needed different things, and at different times. I began to see how loss can break an otherwise stable relationship. Managing shared loss in an intimate partnership is deeply complex, and wildly uncomfortable, and at times everything will seem upside down. The relationship you've both normalized is pushed aside when you're dealing with grief. Grief impacts how you react to the world mentally and physically, and that doesn't stop with your relationship. Grief is all-consuming and requires your attention. Whether you are grieving the same thing or something you experienced separately, when grief enters the relationship, it can be lonely. You are different human beings, and either one or both of your are going through an intense period. There are plenty of opportunities for resentment to fester and frustration to produce fissures too deep to mend.
Marisa Renee Lee (Grief Is Love: Living with Loss)