Redirect Quotes

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Sometimes the dreams that come true are the dreams you never even knew you had.
Alice Sebold (The Lovely Bones)
That’s pretty much how we get through our own lives, watching television. Smoking crap. Self-medicating. Redirecting our attention. Jacking off. Denial.
Chuck Palahniuk (Choke)
Every time I thought I was being rejected from something good, I was actually being re-directed to something better.
Steve Maraboli (Unapologetically You: Reflections on Life and the Human Experience)
No neurotic harbors thoughts of suicide which are not murderous impulses against others redirected upon himself.
Sigmund Freud (Totem and Taboo)
Let us evade the grueling imprisonment of our mental cage and invade the explosive power of love. Only by redirecting lost momentum to positive thinking we can restrengthen the mold of our trust. (“Le ciel c’est l’autre”)
Erik Pevernagie
There is no rejection, there is only redirection.
Matt Haig (The Midnight Library)
Ron, you're making it snow," said Hermione patiently, grabbing his wrist and redirecting his wand away from the ceiling from which, sure enough, large white flakes had started to fall. Lavender Brown, Harry noticed, glared at Hermione from a neighboring table through very red eyes, and Hermione immediately let go of Ron's arm. "Oh yeah," said Ron, looking down at his shoulders in vague surprise." Sorry...looks like we've all got horrible dandruff now...." He brushed some of the fake snow off Hermione's shoulder. Lavender burst into tears. Ron looked immensely guilty and turned his back on her. "We split up," he told Harry out of the corner of his mouth. "Last night. When she saw me coming out of the dormitory with Hermione. Obviously she couldn't see you, so she thought it had just been the two of us." "ah," said Harry. "Well - you don't mind it's over, do you?" "No," Ron admitted. "It was pretty bad while she was yelling, but at least I didn't have to finish it." "Coward," said Hermione, though she looked amused. "Well, it was a bad night for romance all around. Ginny and Dean split up too, Harry." Harry thought there was a rather knowing look in her eye as she told him that, but she could no possibly know that his insides were suddenly dancing the conga.
J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Harry Potter, #6))
During moments of strife and 'dis-ease', check your flow and redirect your focus to that which is naturally good.
T.F. Hodge (From Within I Rise: Spiritual Triumph over Death and Conscious Encounters With the Divine Presence)
Time and again, racist ideas have not been cooked up from the boiling pot of ignorance and hate. Time and again, powerful and brilliant men and women have produced racist ideas in order to justify the racist policies of their era, in order to redirect the blame for their era’s racial disparities away from those policies and onto Black people.
Ibram X. Kendi (Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America)
You can guess this is how men have been handling Eva's hostility for her whole life. Just distract her. Get through the moment. Avoid confrontation. Run away. That's pretty much how we get through our own lives, watching television. Smoking crap. Self-medicating. Redirecting our own attention. Jacking off. Denial.
Chuck Palahniuk (Asfixia)
In Aikido we never attack. An attack is proof that one is out of control. Never run away from any kind of challenge, but do not try to suppress or control an opponent unnaturally. Let attackers come any way they like and then blend with them. Never chase after opponents. Redirect each attack and get firmly behind it.
Morihei Ueshiba
The obstacles in our path are not blocking us-they are redirecting us. Their purpose is not to interfere with our happiness; it is to point us toward new routes to our happiness, new possibilities, new doorways.
Barbara De Angelis (How Did I Get Here?: Finding Your Way to Renewed Hope and Happiness When Life and Love Take Unexpected Turns)
Doing nothing requires effort. Over time, that effort is greater than the effort necessary to improve, or move somewhere better. The trick is to redirect energy.
Max McKeown (Adaptability: The Art of Winning In An Age of Uncertainty)
Five years later, I take a deep, shuddery breath to stop myself crying. It’s not just that I can’t hold Aoife again, it’s everything: It’s grief for the regions we deadlanded, the ice caps we melted, the Gulf Stream we redirected, the rivers we drained, the coasts we flooded, the lakes we choked with crap, the seas we killed, the species we drove to extinction, the pollinators we wiped out, the oil we squandered, the drugs we rendered impotent, the comforting liars we voted into office—all so we didn’t have to change our cozy lifestyles.
David Mitchell (The Bone Clocks)
Fear is a matter of misplaced attention. Focus on redirecting it.
Patricia Ryan Madson (Improv Wisdom: Don't Prepare, Just Show Up)
Ever see yourself doing something in the past and no matter how many times you remember it you still want to scream stop, somehow redirect the action, reorder the present?
Mark Z. Danielewski (House of Leaves)
A key element in everyone’s hero’s journey is the “decision point,” the moment when, often following a crisis, the hero is confronted by a major choice, a crossroad, a life redirection, a safe or a risky option. Choose one path and your life changes in a certain way, choose another and you veer off into an alternate reality.
Paul Spencer Sochaczewski ("Look Here, Sir, What a Curious Bird": Searching for Ali, Alfred Russel Wallace's Faithful Companion)
If we hope to stem the mass destruction that inevitably attends our economic system (and to alter the sense of entitlement - the sense of contempt, the hatred - on which it is based), fundamental historical, social, economic, and technological forces need to be pondered, understood, and redirected. Behavior won't change much without a fundamental change in consciousness. The question becomes: How do we change consciousness?
Derrick Jensen (The Culture of Make Believe)
Rejection is merely a redirection; a course correction to your destiny.
Bryant McGill (Simple Reminders: Inspiration for Living Your Best Life)
Accepting God’s acceptance of me doesn’t mean I’m going to stop trying. It means I’m going to stop trying out. And I am intentionally redirecting my obsession.
Steven Furtick (Crash the Chatterbox: Hearing God's Voice Above All Others)
Friedrich Nietzsche, who famously gave us the ‘God is dead’ phrase was interested in the sources of morality. He warned that the emergence of something (whether an organ, a legal institution, or a religious ritual) is never to be confused with its acquired purpose: ‘Anything in existence, having somehow come about, is continually interpreted anew, requisitioned anew, transformed and redirected to a new purpose.’ This is a liberating thought, which teaches us to never hold the history of something against its possible applications. Even if computers started out as calculators, that doesn’t prevent us from playing games on them. (47) (quoting Nietzsche, the Genealogy of Morals)
Frans de Waal (The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism Among the Primates)
Great and pure thoughts cannot be deposited in minds accumulated with rubbish.
Michael Bassey Johnson
The quiet power of a life transformed by the grace of God is so explosive that it can redirect the course of human events
Richard W. Foster
For so long, we woman have turned our anger inwards, redirecting it towards ourselves and allowing it to manifest as shame. We have told ourselves, instead, that we are sad or hormonal or stressed, but these have been placeholder emotions. And for so long we have been encouraged to do this by a misogynistic culture that realises female anger is dangerous not because it is the product of mental imbalance but because it is fuel. Female anger is power.
Elizabeth Day (How to Fail)
It's not enough to know pain; you must know how to redirect it's force.
T.F. Hodge (From Within I Rise: Spiritual Triumph over Death and Conscious Encounters With the Divine Presence)
Hard times are purposeful, meant to refine and redirect us. They're not arbitrary or random, and they're definitely not cruel.
Liz Curtis Higgs (The Girl's Still Got It: Take a Walk with Ruth and the God Who Rocked Her World)
I mean it, Ava.” “Oh, I know you do… which is why your opinions will now be redirected to ‘1-800-I-fail-to-give-a-flying-fuck’.
Suzanne Wright (Consumed (Deep in Your Veins, #4))
As with all the principles of aikijutsu, you do not meet the force of the strike head-on. You parry, you step to the side to avoid the blow, your redirect the force and unbalance your opponent. It is the same with the ken, the sword. These principles apply to you daily life as well. Never meet a person’s anger directly. Deflect, distract him, even agree with him. Unbalance his mind, and you can lead him anywhere you want.
Tan Twan Eng (The Gift of Rain)
If he didn't get what he wanted at that party, then he would at the next. We are taught assault is likely to occur, but if you dressed modestly, you'd lower the chances of it being you. But this would never eradicate the issue, only redirecting the assailant to another unsuspecting victim, offloading the violence.
Chanel Miller (Know My Name)
anyone with enough compassion has the power to transform and redirect someone else's troubled life.
Sampson Davis
... when murder is as scheduled, habitual, industrial as it was here in Cracow yo could scarcely, with tentative heroism, redirect the overriding energy of the system.
Thomas Keneally
Five years later, I take a deep, shuddery breath to stop myself crying. It’s not just that I can’t hold Aoife again, it’s everything: It’s grief for the regions we deadlanded, the ice caps we melted, the Gulf Stream we redirected, the rivers we drained, the coasts we flooded, the lakes we choked with crap, the seas we killed, the species we drove to extinction, the pollinators we wiped out, the oil we squandered, the drugs we rendered impotent, the comforting liars we voted into office—all so we didn’t have to change our cozy lifestyles. People talk about the Endarkenment like our ancestors talked about the Black Death, as if it’s an act of God. But we summoned it, with every tank of oil we burned our way through. My generation were diners stuffing ourselves senseless at the Restaurant of the Earth’s Riches knowing—while denying—that we’d be doing a runner and leaving our grandchildren a tab that can never be paid.
David Mitchell (The Bone Clocks)
In terms of business resilience, it's important to have the ability to repurpose inputs and redirect outputs. It's important to have a good amount of flexibility designed into the businesses operating systems. When a business can answer the if this then that question over and over again with different fill in the blanks, it's got resilience.
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
If someone you love and care for is determined to traverse the path of despair, natural law obliges that they ‘will’ regardless of any and all efforts to redirect their lowly path.
T.F. Hodge (From Within I Rise: Spiritual Triumph over Death and Conscious Encounters With the Divine Presence)
You've done it before and you can do it now. See the positive possibilities. Redirect the substantial energy of your frustration and turn it into positive, effective, unstoppable determination.
Ralph Marston
To clarify: defunding the police doesn’t mean abolishing the police, though there are more radical calls for that, too. It instead means redirecting money from police budgets to other government agencies funded by the city. Defunding the police could mean more money for underfunded schools, for mental health programs, or for drug recovery programs, all of which can help to reduce crime.
Emmanuel Acho (Uncomfortable Conversations With a Black Man)
The racial terrorism of lynchings in many ways created the modern death penalty. America's embrace of speedy executions was, in part, an attempt to redirect the violent energies of lynching while ensuring white southerners that black men would still pay the ultimate price.
Bryan Stevenson (Just Mercy)
GONE. You're gone. ...Another case of not getting what I thought I wanted. Instead I'll get what I'm supposed to have because the Powers That Be can make better decisions for me than I can.
Kate McGahan
When an entire cohort unintentionally eliminated time alone with their thoughts from their lives, their mental health suffered dramatically. On reflection, this makes sense. These teenagers have lost the ability to process and make sense of their emotions, or to reflect on who they are and what really matters, or to build strong relationships, or even to just allow their brains time to power down their critical social circuits, which are not meant to be used constantly, and to redirect that energy to other important cognitive housekeeping tasks. We shouldn’t be surprised that these absences lead to malfunctions.
Cal Newport (Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World)
Every talent you have is not wasted. It is there because of a reason and God will open that door when the right time comes along to use it.
Shannon L. Alder
Any perceived 'rejection' is simply a 're-direction'.
The Truth
The key here is that when your child is drowning in a right-brain emotional flood, you’ll do yourself (and your child) a big favor if you connect before you redirect.
Daniel J. Siegel (The Whole-Brain Child: 12 Revolutionary Strategies to Nurture Your Child's Developing Mind)
Mistakes are great teachers. They are stern, confident and fierce in redirecting you from what you should not do; to what you should do.
Kunle Olusegun-Emmanuel (Guidance for Your Way)
A true leader leads for the sake of love and his knowledge of the path, a bad leader redirects his followers to the path of destruction.
Michael Bassey Johnson
Energy spent regretting a decision was best redirected toward addressing its consequences.
Max Gladstone (Empress of Forever)
Those who favor a “grand plan” over experimentation fail to understand the role that failed experiments play in creating progress in society. Failures quickly and efficiently signal what doesn’t work, minimizing waste and redirecting scarce resources to what does work. A market economy is an experimental discovery process, in which business failures are inevitable and any attempt to eliminate them only ensures even greater failures.
Charles G. Koch (Good Profit: How Creating Value for Others Built One of the World's Most Successful Companies)
The individualism of current economic theory is manifest in the purely self-interested behavior it generally assumes. It has no real place for fairness, malevolence, and benevolence, nor for the preservation of human life or any other moral concern.
Herman E. Daly (For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy toward Community, the Environment, and a Sustainable Future)
The whole crazy business seemed to pull out of my guts the very worst in me—my worst fears—the worst aspects of my character—my worst insecurities and feelings of shame and guilt. I didn't know it at the time, but that was exactly what was supposed to be happening. That's what Solomonic magick is all about. The worst in me was my problem. The worst in me was the demon. When it finally dawned on me that I had successfully evoked the demon, and I had the worst of me trapped in that magick Triangle, I had no alternative but to harness and redirect its monstrous power and give it new marching orders. From then on, that particular demon would be working for me rather than against me.
Lon Milo DuQuette (Low Magick: It's All In Your Head ... You Just Have No Idea How Big Your Head Is)
God made us capable of craving so we’d have an unquenchable desire for more of Him, and Him alone. Nothing changes until we make the choice to redirect our misguided cravings to the only one capable of satisfying them.
Lysa TerKeurst (Made to Crave: Satisfying Your Deepest Desire with God, Not Food)
Something is not right,' Weavyr announced. She crouched lower over one spot in the Wyrd and tugged, redirecting the threads. In the moments that followed, throughout the world, hearts were broken, brilliant careers were launched and dreams were dashed. A volleyball serve also went awry.
Maurissa Guibord (Warped)
We don’t need the money that badly,” my mother said. “According to my sisters, we do.” I slid the photograph with dollar signs toward her. Mom swung toward Grandma Frida. “Mom!” Grandma Frida’s eyes got really big. “What? Don’t look at me!” “You started this.” Ha! Attack deflected and redirected. “I did no such thing. I’m innocent. You always blame me for everything.” “You started it and you encouraged it. Now look, she’s taking on murders because you’re guilt-tripping her to put food on the table. And what kind of message does this send?” “A true-love kind of message.” Grandma Frida grinned.
Ilona Andrews (White Hot (Hidden Legacy, #2))
When I look back on my life,I realize that every time I thought I was being rejected from something Good, I was actually being redirected to something Better.
Jan Jansen
Your heart of devotion and obedience is not in vain. Who knows but God how many people have come near to you and were forever changed simply by the fragrance of his love in you? Who knows but God if he will put you before kings and leaders to speak the truth, redirecting the future of nations? Who knows when that small crack in the dam of our enemy’s plans will give way and God’s glory will truly cover the earth as the sea? Do not become distracted or discouraged by the death around you. Death must always give way when the life of Christ enters the picture.
Amy Layne Litzelman (This Beloved Road: A Journey of Revelation and Worship)
I would like to buy about three dollars worth of gospel, please. Not too much – just enough to make me happy, but not so much that I get addicted. I don't want so much gospel that I learn to really hate covetousness and lust. I certainly don't want so much that I start to love my enemies, cherish self-denial, and contemplate missionary service in some alien culture. I want ecstasy, not repentance; I want transcendence, not transformation. I would like to be cherished by some nice, forgiving, broad-minded people, but I myself don't want to love those from different races – especially if they smell. I would like enough gospel to make my family secure and my children well behaved, but not so much that I find my ambitions redirected or my giving too greatly enlarged. I would like about three dollars worth of gospel, please.
D.A. Carson (Basics for Believers: An Exposition of Philippians)
It [Communism] is not new. It is, in fact, man's second oldest faith. Its promise was whispered in the first days of the Creation under the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil: "Ye shall be as gods." It is the great alternative faith of mankind. Like all great faiths, its force derives from a simple vision. Other ages have had great visions. They have always been different versions of the same vision: the vision of God and man's relationship to God. The Communist vision is the vision of Man without God. It is the vision of man's mind displacing God as the creative intelligence of the world. It is the vision of man's liberated mind, by the sole force of its rational intelligence, redirecting man's destiny and reorganizing man's life and the world. It is the vision of man, once more the central figure of the Creation, not because God made man in his image, but because man's mind makes him the most intelligent of the animals. Copernicus and his successors displaced man as the central fact of the universe by proving that the earth was not the central star of the universe. Communism restores man to his sovereignty by the simple method of denying God.
Whittaker Chambers (Witness)
What did you do?’ I whisper to Aithinne. Aithinne pushes to her feet, dusting off her clothes.‘I redirected its blast away from us so it used its weapon on itself. ’ She scans the destruction.‘Easy.’ ‘Ah, yes,’ I murmur, trying to quell the emotions that rush through me at seeing my childhood home destroyed. ‘Simple’s sibling, Easy. I don’t even want to imagine the levels of chaos that would prompt visits from their cousins Straightforward and Uncomplicated.
Elizabeth May (The Vanishing Throne (The Falconer, #2))
The enormous amount of financial resources and creative energy that nations have spent on wars and weapons could have been redirected to curing deadly diseases, feeding the hungry, eliminating poverty, promoting art and culture, investing in renewable clean energy, and solving a host of other important challenges facing humanity.
Newton Lee (Counterterrorism and Cybersecurity: Total Information Awareness)
If nonsatiety were the natural state of human nature then aggressive want-stimulating advertising would not be necessary, nor would the barrage of novelty aimed at promoting dissatisfaction with last year's model. The system attempts to remake people to fit its own presuppositions. If people's wants are not naturally insatiable we must make them so, in order to keep the system going.
Herman E. Daly (For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy toward Community, the Environment, and a Sustainable Future)
Even if we could grow our way out of the crisis and delay the inevitable and painful reconciliation of virtual and real wealth, there is the question of whether this would be a wise thing to do. Marginal costs of additional growth in rich countries, such as global warming, biodiversity loss and roadways choked with cars, now likely exceed marginal benefits of a little extra consumption. The end result is that promoting further economic growth makes us poorer, not richer.
Herman E. Daly (For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy toward Community, the Environment, and a Sustainable Future)
The proper management of one's feelings clearly lies along a complex (and therefore not simple or easy) balanced middle path, requiring constant judgment and continuing adjustment. Here the owner treats his feelings (slaves) with respect, nurturing them with good food, shelter and medical care, listening and responding to their voices, encouraging them, inquiring as to their health, yet also organizing them, limiting them, deciding clearly between them, redirecting them and teaching them, all the while leaving no doubt as to who is the boss. This is the path of healthy self-discipline.
M. Scott Peck (The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth)
At issue for Peladan is the potency of the visual image: art's ability to construct images for viewing that can mobilize, concentrate and redirect instinctive responses. He brings out into the open the recognition underlying all decadent art; that is, the political function of the fascinated gaze.
Jennifer Birkett
Good teachers put snags in the river of children passing by, and over the years, they redirect hundreds of lives. Many people find it easy to imagine unseen webs of malevolent conspiracy around the world, and they are not always wrong. But there is also an innocence that conspires to hold humanity together, and it is made of people who can never fully know the good that they have done.
Tracy Kidder (Among Schoolchildren)
Happiness is not a zero-sum game. It's the only case in which the resources are limitless, and in which the rich can get richer at no expense to anyone else. That day in the park, I found it remarkably easy to own my happiness and celebrate Kate's as well. It's a strange thing, though, how rare, maybe impossible, it is to have everyone you care about thriving at the same time. For a short spell, life seems certain and stable, until something shifts and redistributes, randomly, unpredictably, and when you look around at the new landscape, you see that it's someone else's turn now. You redirect your attention to focus on the friend in need. You hope - you know - they will do the same for you, when your turn comes.
Amy Poeppel (Small Admissions)
Donia looked away. "I pushed her toward you.I just made a mistake when I let myself think that you'd be mine for a few years... She's your match. I'm not." "Maybe someday, but right now... I was carried away by the first summer. It's a heady thing, but I can redirect that energy. Let me have the dream of us for as long as we can. That's what the court needs--a happy king, a king who can't stop dreaming of being lost in someone who wants to be just as lost. Tell me you'll let me get lost in you.
Melissa Marr (Fragile Eternity (Wicked Lovely, #3))
Losing your home and possessions and often your job; being stamped with an eviction record and denied government housing assistance; relocating to degrading housing in poor and dangerous neighborhoods; and suffering from increased material hardship, homelessness, depression, and illness - this is eviction's fallout. Eviction does not simply drop poor families into a dark valley, a trying yet relatively brief detour on life's journey. It fundamentally redirects their way, casting them onto a different, and much more difficult, path. Eviction is a case, not just a condition, of poverty.
Matthew Desmond (Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City)
Clay, what do you think about this one?" I asked, trying to redirect his attention. He was looking at Hunter like he hoped he would spontaneously combust. He glanced at the screen. "King Triton and a mermaid?" "Yeah. It's kind of cool." "Clay doesn't have the abs to pull that off," Hunter spoke, peering over. "You on the other hand would look fabulous as a mermaid." I could feel Clay's temperature starting to boil. "I suppose you think you're the perfect one to pull off this costume?" he accused. Hunter snorted. "I wouldn't be caught dead dressing up like that, but yeah, my abs would work.
Lacey Weatherford (Crush (Crush, #1))
I remember how covered in blood Rhys was. All over his shirt, his jeans, caked on his neck, his hands. I didn't even think about it then, but it must have belonged to his mother, father. For seven days, he wore their deaths and he never said a word to any of us about it. I feel so bad for him and I don't know how to tell him, so I reach for his hand and hold it as hard as I can, crushing his fingers in mine. It's a futile attempt to redirect his pain. He lets me hurt him for a few minutes before gently pulling away.
Courtney Summers (This is Not a Test (This is Not a Test, #1))
Listen, you mind if I take a T.O. and check in for a sec,” he interjected. V’s diamond eyes narrowed. “With who?” Right on cue, John jumped in, asking about the Hummer and its rehab plan—like somebody waving a torch in front of a T. rex to redirect it. As V started talking about the SUV’s future as lawn sculpture, Qhuinn nearly blew a kiss at his buddy.
J.R. Ward
As I look back on my life, I realize that every time I thought I was being rejected from something good, I was actually being re-directed to something better
Steve Maraboli
If women are the earliest sources of emotional caring and physical nurture for both female and male children, it would seem logical, from a feminist perspective at least, to pose the following questions: whether the search for love and tenderness in both sexes does not originally lead toward women; why in fact women would ever redirect that search; why species-survival, the means of impregnation, and emotional/erotic relationships should ever have become so rigidly identified with each other; and why such violent strictures should be found necessary to enforce women's total emotional, erotic loyalty and subservience to men.
Adrienne Rich (Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence)
Every Spring, nature teaches a class on business entrepreneurship. ....We see how capital is re-allocated, currencies are re-directed, growth is re-emphasized, and numerous life forms promote their value with re-vitalized marketing programs that implement flowers or seeds or aromas or habitability or pollination in an effort demonstrate a unique value proposition in a busy economy.
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
Strong passions are the precious raw material of sanctity. Individuals that have carried their sinning to extremes should not despair or say, “I am too great a sinner to change,” or “God would not want me.” God will take anyone who is willing to love, not with an occasional gesture, but with a “passionless passion,” a “wild tranquility.” A sinner, unrepentant, cannot love God, any more that a man on dry land can swim; but as soon as he takes his errant energies to God and asks for their redirection, he will become happy, as he was never happy before. It is not the wrong things one has already done which keep one from God; it is the present persistence in that wrong.
Fulton J. Sheen (Peace of Soul: Timeless Wisdom on Finding Serenity and Joy by the Century's Most Acclaimed Catholic Bishop)
Factfulness and the Fact-Based Worldview This book is my very last battle in my lifelong mission to fight devastating global ignorance. It is my last attempt to make an impact on the world: to change people’s ways of thinking, calm their irrational fears, and redirect their energies into constructive activities. In my previous battles I armed myself with huge data sets, eye-opening software, an energetic lecturing style, and a Swedish bayonet. It wasn’t enough. But I hope that this book will be.
Hans Rosling (Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think)
Sometimes chaos is the very thing that deliberately shakes up our neatly ordered world’s in order to get us out of the neatly ordered ruts that have kept us stuck.
Craig D. Lounsbrough
Without question, the balance of power on the planet today lies in the hands of business. Corporations rival governments in wealth, influence, and power. Indeed, business all too often pulls the strings of government. Competing institutions-religion, the press, even the military-play subordinate roles in much of the world today. If a values-driven approach to business can begin to redirect this vast power toward more constructive ends than the simple accumulation of wealth, the human race and Planet Earth will have a fighting chance.
Ben Cohen (Values-Driven Business: How to Change the World, Make Money, and Have Fun)
Education isn't what some people declare it to be, namely, putting knowledge into souls that lack it, like putting sight into blind eyes...The power to learn is present in everyone's soul and...the instrument with which each learns is like an eye that cannot be turned around from darkness to light without turning the whole body... Then education is the craft concerned with doing this very thing, this turning around, and with how the soul can most easily and effectively be made to do it. it isn't the craft of putting sight into the soul. Education take for granted that sight is there but that it isn't turned the right way or looking where it ought to look, and it tries to redirect it appropriately.
Plato
At the foundation of the Christian life, there is a kind of sacred individuality, a sort of holy aloneness that cries out to be left alone with God. This isn't all of the Christian life. It doesn't erase those parts of a Christian's experience that happen in the context of relationships, but this sacred solitude needs to be discovered, respected, and protected. It is that place where we most irrefutably hear God tell us that he loves us, and we come to know that, no matter what other people may say about us or do to us, God will not abandon us. That holy solitude is the place where we find God's Spirit changing our affections and redirecting our identities. It is, for Jesus-followers, holy ground.
Michael Spencer (Mere Churchianity: Finding Your Way Back to Jesus-Shaped Spirituality)
When a parent interferes with a child's anger response in these heavy-handed ways [ridiculing, ignoring, isolating, goading, punishing, distracting, hitting, joking], the anger increases and is redirected at the parent: now the parent is the one who's violating the child's sense of well-being by interfering with a natural and necessary outlet of emotion. Most parents stifle this secondary outburst of anger, too, only this time with more force. [...] Instead of allowing the anger to flow through the child's system the first time it's expressed, the parent unwittingly fans the anger, then dams it up. The anger becomes trapped in the little girl's stomach, muscles, and jaw, and becomes an enduring wound.
Patricia Love (The Emotional Incest Syndrome: What to do When a Parent's Love Rules Your Life)
As you look back on your life, you will often realize that many of the times you thought you were being rejected from something good, you were in fact being redirected to something better. You can’t control everything. Sometimes you just need to relax and have faith things will work out. Let go and just let life happen the way it’s supposed to. Sometimes the outcomes you can’t change end up changing you and helping you grow mentally, emotionally or spiritually. When things fall apart, consider the possibility that life knocked them down for a reason. It was not to punish you, but to prompt you to build something better to fit your personality and your purpose. Sometimes things fall apart so better things can fall together.
John Geiger
The first and most basic thing we can and must do is to keep God before our minds… This is the fundamental secret of caring for our souls. Our part in this practicing the presence of God is to direct and redirect our minds constantly to Him. In the early time of our ‘practicing’ we may well be challenged by our burdensome habits of dwelling on things less than God. But these are habits – not the law of gravity – and can be broken… A new, grace-filled habit will replace the former ones as we take intentional steps toward keeping God before us. Soon our minds will return to God as the needle of a compass constantly returns to the north. If God is the great longing of our souls, He will become the pole star of our inward beings.
Dallas Willard
You will encounter resentful, sneering non-readers who will look at you from their beery, leery eyes, as they might some form of sub-hominid anomaly, bookimus maximus. You will encounter redditters, youtubers, blogspotters, wordpressers, twitterers, and facebookers with wired-open eyes who will shout at from you from their crazy hectoring mouths about the liberal poison of literature. You will encounter the gamers with their twitching fingers who will look upon you as a character to lock crosshairs on and blow to smithereens. You will encounter the stoners and pill-poppers who will ignore you, and ask you if you have read Jack Keroauc’s On the Road, and if you haven’t, will lecture you for two hours on that novel and refuse to acknowledge any other books written by anyone ever. You will encounter the provincial retirees, who have spent a year reading War & Peace, who strike the attitude that completing that novel is a greater achievement than the thousands of books you have read, even though they lost themselves constantly throughout the book and hated the whole experience. You will encounter the self-obsessed students whose radical interpretations of Agnes Grey and The Idiot are the most important utterance anyone anywhere has ever made with their mouths, while ignoring the thousands of novels you have read. You will encounter the parents and siblings who take every literary reference you make back to the several books they enjoyed reading as a child, and then redirect the conversation to what TV shows they have been watching. You will encounter the teachers and lecturers, for whom any text not on their syllabus is a waste of time, and look upon you as a wayward student in need of their salvation. You will encounter the travellers and backpackers who will take pity on you for wasting your life, then tell you about the Paulo Coelho they read while hostelling across Europe en route to their spiritual pilgrimage to New Delhi. You will encounter the hard-working moaners who will tell you they are too busy working for a living to sit and read all day, and when they come home from a hard day’s toil, they don’t want to sit and read pretentious rubbish. You will encounter the voracious readers who loathe competition, and who will challenge you to a literary duel, rather than engage you in friendly conversation about your latest reading. You will encounter the slack intellectuals who will immediately ask you if you have read Finnegans Wake, and when you say you have, will ask if you if you understood every line, and when you say of course not, will make some point that generally alludes to you being a halfwit. Fuck those fuckers.
M.J. Nicholls (The 1002nd Book to Read Before You Die)
Monroe is about sixty miles outside of New York City. It’s home to approximately eight thousand people. It’s a small community where most everyone knows one another. There’s nothing but strip malls and second-tier grocery chains you never see elsewhere. If you click on the “Attractions” tab on TripAdvisor’s Monroe page, it brings up a message that says, “I’m sorry, you must have clicked here by mistake. No one could possibly be planning a trip to Monroe to see its ‘Attractions.’ I have a feeling about why you’d want to go to Monroe. Here, let me redirect you to a suicide-prevention site.
Aziz Ansari (Modern Romance: An Investigation)
Every Spring, nature teaches a class on business entrepreneurship. ....We see how capital is re-allocated, currencies are re-directed, growth is re-emphasized, and numerous life forms promote their value with re-vitalized marketing programs that implement flowers or seeds or aromas or habitability or pollination in an effort demonstrate a unique value proposition in a busy economy. Smart entrepreneurs enroll in this class every Spring and take good notes. Whether you're an entrepreneur of a small business or an entrepreneur of a line of business within a large company... learn from nature.
Hendrith Vanlon Smith Jr.
Here’s the basic strategy: 1.  Turn off the starvation response by eating whenever you’re hungry and until fully satisfied. 2.  Tame your fat cells with a diet that lowers insulin levels, reduces inflammation (insulin’s troublemaker twin), and redirects calories to the rest of your body. 3.  Follow a simple lifestyle prescription focused on enjoyable physical activities, sleep, and stress relief to improve metabolism and support permanent behavior change.
David Ludwig (Always Hungry?: Conquer Cravings, Retrain Your Fat Cells, and Lose Weight Permanently)
In art, as in biology, there is a phenomenon that can be described as mutation, in which appearances radically change at a tempo much more rapid than that at which they normally proceed. As in the case of biology, we have no means to determine the process by which this radical change occurs. Yet we do know that it is a reaction to a form of congestion. It is a desperate change due to the arrival at a point where the corollaries to a situation are exhausted, when the stimulus to additional growth is sluggish and a rapid rejuvenation is needed so that art, through disuse, does not atrophy in much the same way as an unused human organ. Here art must attain a new start if it is to survive. Then, assiduously, it renews its traditions by marriage with alien traditions, by the reexamination of its own processes, and by those means reestablishes contact again with its own roots. It is in this way that new plastic worlds are born. For art, like a race, cannot inbreed very long without losing its incentives to continue; it needs the rejuvenation of new experiences and new blood. These mutations, it must be clear, however, do not constitute a change in properties, or mean that art has discarded its past. On the contrary, mutation involves a more conscious evaluation of art’s inheritance and the redirection of that inheritance into channels where it can be continued with greater force.
Mark Rothko (The Artist's Reality: Philosophies of Art)
The model minority myth is often used to separate Asian Americans from other people of color by using their perceived socioeconomic and academic success and docile nature to compare and contrast with black Americans, Hispanic Americans, and Native Americans. This divide-and-conquer technique serves to redirect struggle against oppressive White Supremacy to competition between Asian Americans and other people of color. The real animosity between some Asian Americans and other people of color that has been manufactured by the model minority myth prevents Asian Americans and non-Asian people of color from recognizing and organizing around shared experiences of labor exploitation, lack of government representation, lack of pop culture representation, cultural appropriation, and much more.
Ijeoma Oluo (So You Want to Talk About Race)
Straining to hear, I can make out something acoustic. Coming from...the backyard? I glance down from my bedroom window and feel my jaw fall open. Matt Finch is standing below my window, guitar strapped across his chest. I pull my window up, and I expect the song from that old movie - the one about a guy with a trench coat and the big radio and his heart on his sleeve. But it's not that. It's not anything I recognise, and I strain to make out the lyrics: Stop being ridiculous, stop being ridiculous, Reagan. What an asshole. The mesh screen and two floors between us don't seem like enough to protect him from my anger. "Nice apology," I call down to him. "I've apologised thirteen times," he yells back, "and so far you haven't called me back." I open my mouth to say it doesn't matter, but he's already redirecting the song. "Now I'm gonna stand here until you forgive me," he sings loudly, "or at least until you hear me out, la-la, oh-la-la. I drove seven hours overnight, and I won't leave until you come out here." (...) "This is private property!" My throat feel coarse from how loudly I'm yelling. "And that doesn't even rhyme!" The guitar chord continues as he sings, "Then call the cops, call the cops, call the cops..." I storm downstairs, my feet pounding against the staircase. When I turn the corner, my dad looks almost amused from his seat in the recliner. Noticing my expression, he stares back at his newspaper, as if I won't notice him. (...) "Dad. How did Matt know which window was mine?" "Well..." he peeks over the sports section. "I reckon I told him." "You talked to him?" My voice is no longer a voice. It's a shriek. "God, Dad!" He juts out his chin, defensive. "How was I supposed to know you had some sort of drama with him? He shows up, lookin' to serenade my daughter. Thought it seemed innocent enough. Sweet, even. Old-fashioned." "It's not any of those things! I hate him!
Emery Lord (Open Road Summer)
I am developing new coping mechanisms for lost words and lost negatives, as here for instance: compensate by describing the episode instead. When something is lost, redirect energy, follow the derivé, the chance and flow of what life tosses us, and make something new instead. Remember that I'm often struck by certain passages of descriptive writing, writing that is not about driving home a point but about providing detail, background, setting the scene (it's tempting to call this the stadium of writing). It has a "something from nothing" quality: a pleasurable experience has been had, and no one has paid a price. Remember that writing does not have to be torture (107).
Moyra Davey (Long Life Cool White: Photographs and Essays)
Humanity does not gradually progress from combat to combat until it arrives at universal reciprocity, where the rule of law finally replaces warfare; humanity installs each of its violences in a system of rules and thus proceeds from domination to domination. The nature of these rules allows violence to be inflicted on violence and the resurgence of new forces that are sufficiently strong to dominate those in power. Rules are empty in themselves, violent and unfinalized; they are impersonal and can be bent to any purpose. The successes of history belong to those who are capable of seizing these rules, to replace those who had used them, to disguise themselves so as to pervert them, invert their meaning, and redirect them against those who had initially imposed them; controlling this complex mechanism, they will make it function so as to overcome the rulers through their own rules.
Michel Foucault (Nietzsche, la Genealogía, la Historia)
It's hard to trust your child to find his or her own path, especially when we're told everyday by professionals that children must fit into rigid boxes. We all want to give our kids the best opportunities we can, which is why it feels like such a disservice if we don't push them in the "right" direction. Celebrating you children's passions rather than redirecting them, especially when those passions don't line up neatly with a checklist for future success, can feel like jumping off a cliff. It certainly did for me. But that leap of faith is necessary if your kids are going to fly.
Kristine Barnett
The law of manifestation operates like a triangle: First, know what you want and visualize it as if you already had it; Second, see it behind the illusion of reality, practice it in your decisions, choose the people you hang out with, etc; Third, believe, have faith and work on your emotions to be at the right frequency. This triangle of manifestation is one of the secrets of many religions: Christianity, Scientology, and Freemasonry. In Masonry is seen as "heart, mind and desire"; in Scientology is perceived as "reality, communication and affinity"; in Christianity is understood as "Father, son and holy ghost"; basically, "actions, learnings and emotions". In Christianity, the Father equals reality or the Creator of the illusion, the son is the way, the path, he road of our decisions and actions, and the holy ghost is our heart, instincts and desires manifested in that same path. In word words, through Jesus, and with the power of the holy ghost, you reach God. This is an allegory that not many Christians can understand. Jesus represent behavior - right and wrong, the holy ghost is our faith, your heart and emotions reflecting back at you what you attract, it's the energy that connects you to your dreams, and God represents the Architect of Reality. So, through moral behavior and positive emotions, your understand God and life, and then you receive "paradise". This paradise is whatever you dream for yourself. Furthermore, if someone has shown you this way, he has been as an angel to you, a messenger of God; if someone stopped you from reaching it, he has been as a demon, a worker for Satan, the enemy, if you failed in seeing this path, you have redirected yourself towards hell. And if you hate your life, you are already in hell. If you want to get out of hell, you must accept the truth, and this truth is that you must know God, for He is the truth. He and the truth are one and the same.
Robin Sacredfire
Most such criticism and confrontation, usually made impulsively in anger or annoyance, does more to increase the amount of confusion in the world than the amount of enlightenment. For the truly loving person the act of criticism or confrontation does not come easily; to such a person it is evident that the act has great potential for arrogance. To confront one’s beloved is to assume a position of moral or intellectual superiority over the loved one, at least so far as the issue at hand is concerned. Yet genuine love recognizes and respects the unique individuality and separate identity of the other person. (I will say more about this later.) The truly loving person, valuing the uniqueness and differentness of his or her beloved, will be reluctant indeed to assume, “I am right, you are wrong; I know better than you what is good for you.” But the reality of life is such that at times one person does know better than the other what is good for the other, and in actuality is in a position of superior knowledge or wisdom in regard to the matter at hand. Under these circumstances the wiser of the two does in fact have an obligation to confront the other with the problem. The loving person, therefore, is frequently in a dilemma, caught between a loving respect for the beloved’s own path in life and a responsibility to exercise loving leadership when the beloved appears to need such leadership. The dilemma can be resolved only by painstaking self-scrutiny, in which the lover examines stringently the worth of his or her “wisdom” and the motives behind this need to assume leadership. “Do I really see things clearly or am I operating on murky assumptions? Do I really understand my beloved? Could it not be that the path my beloved is taking is wise and that my perception of it as unwise is the result of limited vision on my part? Am I being self-serving in believing that my beloved needs redirection?” These are questions that those who truly love must continually ask themselves. This self-scrutiny, as objective as possible, is the essence of humility or meekness. In the words of an anonymous fourteenth-century British monk and spiritual teacher, “Meekness in itself is nothing else than a true knowing and feeling of
M. Scott Peck (The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth)
Some version of this story has repeated itself throughout the world over the last century. A cast of political outsiders, including Adolf Hitler, Getulio Vargas in Brazil, Alberto Fujimori in Peru, and Hugo Chavez in Venezuela, came to power on the same path: from the inside, via elections or alliances with powerful political figures. In each instance, elites believed the invitation to power would contain the outsider, leading to a restoration of control by mainstream politicians. But their plans backfired. A lethal mix of ambition, fear, and miscalculation conspired to lead them to the same fateful mistake: willingly handing over the keys of power to an autocrat-in-the-making. … If a charismatic outsider emerges on the scene, gaining popularity as he challenges the old order, it is tempting for establishment politicians who feel their control is unraveling to try to co-opt him. … And then, establishment politicians hope, the insurgent can be redirected to support their own program. This sort of devil’s bargain often mutates to the benefit of the insurgent …
Steven Levitsky (How Democracies Die: What History Reveals About Our Future)
If we think of eroticism not as sex per se, but as a vibrant, creative energy, it’s easy to see that Stephanie’s erotic pulse is alive and well. But her eroticism no longer revolves around her husband. Instead, it’s been channeled to her children. There are regular playdates for Jake but only three dates a year for Stephanie and Warren: two birthdays, hers and his, and one anniversary. There is the latest in kids’ fashion for Sophia, but only college sweats for Stephanie. They rent twenty G-rated movies for every R-rated movie. There are languorous hugs for the kids while the grown-ups must survive on a diet of quick pecks. This brings me to another point. Stephanie gets tremendous physical pleasure from her children. Let me be perfectly clear here: she knows the difference between adult sexuality and the sensuousness of caring for small children. She, like most mothers, would never dream of seeking sexual gratification from her children. But, in a sense, a certain replacement has occurred. The sensuality that women experience with their children is, in some ways, much more in keeping with female sexuality in general. For women, much more than for men, sexuality exists along what the Italian historian Francesco Alberoni calls a “principle of continuity.” Female eroticism is diffuse, not localized in the genitals but distributed throughout the body, mind, and senses. It is tactile and auditory, linked to smell, skin, and contact; arousal is often more subjective than physical, and desire arises on a lattice of emotion. In the physicality between mother and child lie a multitude of sensuous experiences. We caress their silky skin, we kiss, we cradle, we rock. We nibble their toes, they touch our faces, we lick their fingers, let them bite us when they’re teething. We are captivated by them and can stare at them for hours. When they devour us with those big eyes, we are besotted, and so are they. This blissful fusion bears a striking resemblance to the physical connection between lovers. In fact, when Stephanie describes the early rapture of her relationship with Warren—lingering gazes, weekends in bed, baby talk, toe-nibbling—the echoes are unmistakable. When she says, “At the end of the day, I have nothing left to give,” I believe her. But I also have come to believe that at the end of the day, there may be nothing more she needs. All this play activity and intimate involvement with her children’s development, all this fleshy connection, has captured Stephanie’s erotic potency to the detriment of the couple’s intimacy and sexuality. This is eros redirected. Her sublimated energy is displaced onto the children, who become the centerpiece of her emotional gratification.
Esther Perel (Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence)
The redirection of orientation and attention can be as simple as asking clients to become aware of a "good" or "safe" feeling in the body instead of focusing on their physical pain or elevated heart rate. Or the therapist can ask clients to experiment with focusing attention away from the traumatic activation in their body and toward thoughts or images related to their positive experiences and competencies, such as success in their job. This shift is often difficult for clients who have habituated to feeling pulled back repetitively into the most negative somatic reminders of their traumatic experiences. However, if the therapist guides them to practice deeply immersing themselves in a positive somatic experience (i.e., noting the changes in posture, breath, and muscular tone that emerge as they remember their competence), clients will gain the ability to reorient toward their competencies. They experience their ability to choose to what they pay attention and discover that it really is possible to resist the somatic claims of the past.
Pat Ogden (Trauma and the Body: A Sensorimotor Approach to Psychotherapy (Norton Series on Interpersonal Neurobiology))
The goal that you hope you will one day arrive at after a long and roundabout journey you are able to possess right now, if only you do not deny it to yourself. That is, if you can let go of the past, entrust the future to Providence and redirect the present according to justice and the sacred. To the sacred, so that you welcome what has been given to you, for Nature has brought this to you, and you to it; and to justice, in order that you may speak the truth freely and without distortion, and that you may act in accordance with what is lawful and right. Do not allow yourself to be hindered by the harmful actions, judgments, or the words of another, or by the sensations of the flesh which has formed itself around you. Let the body take care of those. But if, when you have come to the end, having let go of all other things, you honor only your guiding part and the divinity that is within you, and you do not fear ceasing to live so much as you fear never having begun to live in accordance with Nature--then you will be a man who is worth of the Cosmos that created you; and you will cease to live like a stranger in your own land, that is, surprised at unexpected everyday occurrences and wholly distracted by this and that.
Marcus Aurelius (The Essential Marcus Aurelius (Tarcher Cornerstone Editions))
Perfection’s firsts, creation’s pampered favourites, the peaks and summits we look to where they redden in the first touch of the created world – spilt pollen of flowering Godhead, knots of light, passageways, stairs, thrones, spaces of life, the blazoned shields of bliss, tumults of ecstasy and as suddenly, solely – mirrors, scooping up that flood of beauty that pours from them and re-directing it back into themselves. For we, even as we feel, evaporate in the act of breathing ourselves out and beyond, ember after ember, we burn away to nothing. We give off an ever-diminishing scent. Though somebody might come and say, ‘Yes! You are in my blood now. This room, the whole of spring is full of your presence . . .’ What’s the use? He cannot preserve us. We still disappear in him or around him. Even the truly beautiful – who holds them? Nothing but appearance
Rainer Maria Rilke (Duino Elegies)
Gregori stepped away from the huddled mass of tourists, putting distance between himself and the guide. He walked completely erect,his head high, his long hair flowing around him. His hands were loose at his sides, and his body was relaxed, rippling with power. "Hear me now, ancient one." His voice was soft and musical, filling the silence with beauty and purity. "You have lived long in this world, and you weary of the emptiness. I have come in anwer to your call." "Gregori.The Dark One." The evil voice hissed and growled the words in answer. The ugliness tore at sensitive nerve endings like nails on a chalkboard. Some of the tourists actually covered their ears. "How dare you enter my city and interfere where you have no right?" "I am justice,evil one. I have come to set your free from the bounaries holding you to this place." Gregori's voice was so soft and hypnotic that those listening edged out from their sanctuaries.It beckoned and pulled, so that none could resist his every desire. The black shape above their head roiled like a witch's cauldron. A jagged bolt of lightning slammed to earth straight toward the huddled group. Gregori raised a hand and redirected the force of energy away from the tourists and Savannah. A smile edged the cruel set of his mouth. "You think to mock me with display,ancient one? Do not attempt to anger what you do not understand.You came to me.I did not hunt you.You seek to threaten my lifemate and those I count as my friends.I can do no other than carry the justice of our people to you." Gregori's voice was so reasonable, so perfect and pure,drawing obedience from the most recalcitrant of criminals. The guide made a sound,somewhere between disbelief and fear.Gregori silenced him with a wave of his hand, needing no distractions. But the noise had been enough for the ancient one to break the spell Gregori's voice was weaving around him. The dark stain above their heads thrashed wildly, as if ridding itself ot ever-tightening bonds before slamming a series of lightning strikes at the helpless mortals on the ground. Screams and moans accompanied the whispered prayers, but Gregori stood his ground, unflinching. He merely redirected the whips of energy and light, sent them streaking back into the black mass above their heads.A hideous snarl,a screech of defiance and hatred,was the only warning before it hailed. Hufe golfball-sized blocks of bright-red ice rained down toward them. It was thick and horrible to see, the shower of frozen blood from the skies. But it stopped abruptly, as if an unseen force held it hovering inches from their heads. Gregori remained unchanged, impassive, his face a blank mask as he shielded the tourists and sent the hail hurtling back at their attacker.From out of the cemetery a few blocks from them, an army of the dead rose up. Wolves howled and raced along beside the skeletons as they moved to intercept the Carpathian hunter. Savannah. He said her name once, a soft brush in her mind. I've got it, she sent back instantly.Gregori had his hands full dealing with the abominations the vampire was throwing at him; he did't need to waste his energy protecting the general public from the apparition. She moved out into the open, a small, fragile figure, concentrating on the incoming threat. To those dwelling in the houses along the block and those driving in their cars, she masked the pack of wolves as dogs racing down the street.The stick=like skeletons, grotesque and bizarre, were merely a fast-moving group of people. She held the illusion until they were within a few feet of Gregori.Dropping the illusion, she fed every ounce of her energy and power to Gregori so he could meet the attack.
Christine Feehan (Dark Magic (Dark, #4))
In the course of a short city-block this frantic old woman frenetically caricatured the features of forty or fifty passers-by, in a quick-fire sequence of kaleidoscopic imitations, each lasting a second or two, sometimes less, and the whole dizzying sequence scarcely more than two minutes. And there were ludicrous imitations of the second and third order; for the people in the street, startled, outraged, bewildered by her imitations, took on these expressions in reaction to her; and those expressions, in turn, were re-reflected, re-directed, re-distorted, by the Touretter, causing a still greater degree of outrage and shock. This grotesque, involuntary resonance, or mutuality, by which everyone was drawn into an absurdly amplifying interaction, was the source of the disturbance I had seen from a distance. This woman who, becoming everybody, lost her own self, became nobody. This woman with a thousand faces, masks, personae- how must it be for her in this whirlwind of identities? The answer came soon- and not a second too late; for the build-up of pressures, both hers and others’, was fast approaching the point of explosion. Suddenly, desperately, the old woman turned aside, into an alley-way which led off the main street. And there, with all the appearances of a woman violently sick, she expelled, tremendously accelerated and abbreviated, all the gestures, the postures, the expressions, the demeanours, the entire behavioural repertoires, of the past forty or fifty people she had passed. She delivered one vast, pantomimic egurgitation, in which the engorged identities of the last fifty people who had possessed her were spewed out. And if the taking-in had lasted two minutes, the throwing-out was a single exhalation- fifty people in ten seconds, a fifth of a second or less for the time-foreshortened repertoire of each person. I was later to spend hundreds of hours, talking to, observing, taping, learning from, Tourette patients. Yet nothing, I think, taught me as much, as swiftly, as penetratingly, as overwhelmingly as that phantasmagoric two minutes in a New York street.
Oliver Sacks (The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales)
In the first place, this is a history of Europe’s reduction. The constituent states of Europe could no longer aspire, after 1945, to international or imperial status. The two exceptions to this rule—the Soviet Union and, in part, Great Britain—were both only half-European in their own eyes and in any case, by the end of the period recounted here, they too were much reduced. Most of the rest of continental Europe had been humiliated by defeat and occupation. It had not been able to liberate itself from Fascism by its own efforts; nor was it able, unassisted, to keep Communism at bay. Post-war Europe was liberated—or immured—by outsiders. Only with considerable effort and across long decades did Europeans recover control of their own destiny. Shorn of their overseas territories Europe’s erstwhile sea-borne empires (Britain, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Portugal) were all shrunk back in the course of these years to their European nuclei, their attention re-directed to Europe itself. Secondly, the later decades of the twentieth century saw the withering away of the ‘master narratives’ of European history: the great nineteenth-century theories of history, with their models of progress and change, of revolution and transformation, that had fuelled the political projects and social movements that tore Europe apart in the first half of the century. This too is a story that only makes sense on a pan-European canvas: the decline of political fervor in the West (except among a marginalized intellectual minority) was accompanied—for quite different reasons—by the loss of political faith and the discrediting of official Marxism in the East. For a brief moment in the 1980s, to be sure, it seemed as though the intellectual Right might stage a revival around the equally nineteenth-century project of dismantling ‘society’ and abandoning public affairs to the untrammelled market and the minimalist state; but the spasm passed. After 1989 there was no overarching ideological project of Left or Right on offer in Europe—except the prospect of liberty, which for most Europeans was a promise now fulfilled. Thirdly, and as a modest substitute for the defunct ambitions of Europe’s ideological past, there emerged belatedly—and largely by accident—the ‘European model’. Born of an eclectic mix of Social Democratic and Christian Democratic legislation and the crab-like institutional extension of the European Community and its successor Union, this was a distinctively ‘European’ way of regulating social intercourse and inter-state relations. Embracing everything from child-care to inter-state legal norms, this European approach stood for more than just the bureaucratic practices of the European Union and its member states; by the beginning of the twenty-first century it had become a beacon and example for aspirant EU members and a global challenge to the United States and the competing appeal of the ‘American way of life’.
Tony Judt (Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945)