Remake Yourself Quotes

I wanted to kill the me underneath. That fact haunted my days and nights. When you realize you hate yourself so much, when you realize that you cannot stand who you are, and this deep spite has been the motivation behind your behavior for many years, your brain can’t quite deal with it. It will try very hard to avoid that realization; it will try, in a last-ditch effort to keep your remaining parts alive, to remake the rest of you. This is, I believe, different from the suicidal wish of those who are in so much pain that death feels like relief, different from the suicide I would later attempt, trying to escape that pain. This is a wish to murder yourself; the connotation of kill is too mild. This is a belief that you deserve slow torture, violent death.

Forgetting... is a beautiful thing. When you forget, you remake yourself... For a caterpillar to become a butterfly, it must forget it was a caterpillar at all. Then it will be as if the caterpillar never was & there was only ever a butterfly.

Productiveness is your acceptance of morality, your recognition of the fact that you choose to live--that productive work is the process by which man's consciousness controls his existence, a constant process of acquiring knowledge and shaping matter to fit one's purpose, of translating an idea into physical form, of remaking the earth in the image of one's values--that all work is creative work if done by a thinking mind, and no work is creative if done by a blank who repeats in uncritical stupor a routine he has learned from others--that your work is yours to choose, and the choice is as wide as your mind, that nothing more is possible to you and nothing less is human--that to cheat your way into a job bigger than your mind can handle is to become a fear-corroded ape on borrowed motions and borrowed time, and to settle down into a job that requires less than your mind's full capacity is to cut your motor and sentence yourself to another kind of motion: decay--that your work is the process of achieving your values, and to lose your ambition for values is to lose your ambition to live--that your body is a machine, but your mind is its driver, and you must drive as far as your mind will take you, with achievement as the goal of your road--that the man who has no purpose is a machine that coasts downhill at the mercy of any boulder to crash in the first chance ditch, that the man who stifles his mind is a stalled machine slowly going to rust, that the man who lets a leader prescribe his course is a wreck being towed to the scrap heap, and the man who makes another man his goal is a hitchhiker no driver should ever pick up--that your work is the purpose of your life, and you must speed past any killer who assumes the right to stop you, that any value you might find outside your work, any other loyalty or love, can be only travelers you choose to share your journey and must be travelers going on their own power in the same direction.

Sometimes," my grandfather put in, "even if you can't be what you want, making the most of what you can be isn't a bad second choice. You have a chance to remake yourself, baby girl.

Will you be at the harvest, Among the gatherers of new fruits? Then you must begin today to remake Your mental and spiritual world, And join the warriors and celebrants Of freedom, realizers of great dreams. You can’t remake the world Without remaking yourself. Each new era begins within. It is an inward event, With unsuspected possibilities For inner liberation. We could use it to turn on Our inward lights. We could use it to use even the dark And negative things positively. We could use the new era To clean our eyes, To see the world differently, To see ourselves more clearly. Only free people can make a free world. Infect the world with your light. Help fulfill the golden prophecies. Press forward the human genius. Our future is greater than our past.

They make you settle for second best." That's what I like about the movies. There's always some minor character standing round to tell you the moral, just in case you're too dumb to figure it out for yourself. "You never get what you want.

The character you seem to have been born with is not necessarily who you are; beyond the characteristics you have inherited, your parents, your friends, and your peers have helped to shape your personality. The Promethean task of the powerful is to take control of the process, to stop allowing others that ability to limit and mold them. Remake yourself into a character of power. Working on yourself like clay should be one of your greatest and most pleasurable life tasks. It makes you in essence an artist — an artist creating yourself.

When you're traumatized, your sense of self, your individuality, is beaten up. Your skin color, your background, your pain, your hope, your gender, your faith, it's all defiled. Those essential pieces of yourself are stolen. You, as a person, are emptied and flattened, and that violence, that theft, keeps you from embodying a life that feels like your own. To continue to exist, as a whole person, you need to re-create, for yourself, an identity untouched by everything that's been used against you. You need to imagine and build a self out of elements that are not tainted. You need to remake yourself on your own terms.

That is marriage, he thought, remaking yourself in someone else’s image. And who knew where the truth of it began or would end?

you possess the innate power to create transformation and change—personally, communally, and globally. Bring forth your Het-Hru warrior queen skills and you will be victorious in remaking yourself into a divine vision. Now is your time—the time to reclaim your self and unleash your power as a Sacred Woman.

Only one thing is inarguable: without a body of convictions, life becomes a series of events in futile pursuit of utopia on earth, or of endless material possessions, or of sybaritic comfort, or of self-satisfied mastery of a narrow series of intellectual disciplines.... If you choose faith, then you move beyond ritual to search for your own individual path. You become engaged in a process of remaking yourself--by what you do, what values you adopt, what you teach your children, how closely you listen to a neighbor, how good a steward you are for future generations, how sincerely you try to understand another persons suffering and joy, and how loving you are, not only to those who you love but also to strangers.

Dearest Mac, I love you. I will always love you. But I can live with you no longer. I've tried to be strong for you, for three years I have tried. I have failed. You tried to remake me in your image, dear Mac, and I tried to be what you wanted, but I no longer can. I am sorry. I want to write that my heart is breaking, but it is not. It broke some time ago, and I have just now realised that I can leave me heartbreak behind and go on. The decision to live without you was a painful one and not lightly made. I realise you can legally cause me much harm for taking this step, and I ask you, for the love we once shared, not to. It could be that I will not need to leave forever, but I know that I need time apart, alone, to heal. You have explained that you sometimes leave me for my own good, so I will have a chance to recover from life with you. Now I am doing the same, leaving so that both of us have a chance to breath, a chance to cool. Living with you is like being with a shooting star, one that burns so brightly that it scorches me. And I am watching the star burn out. In the end, Mac, I fear there will be nothing left of you. I know you will be angry when you read this, because you can grow so angry! But when you stop being angry, you will realize that my decision is sound. Together, we are destroying each other. Apart, I can remember my love for you. But you are burning me. You have exhausted me, and I have nothing left to give. Ian has agreed to bring this letter to you, and he will inform me of what steps you decide to take. I trust Ian to help us through. Please do not try to seek me yourself. I love you, Mac. I will always love you. Please be well. Isabella

Whomever you become, whatever you make yourself into, that is who you always were. It was always in you. Not in Cambridge. In you. You are gold. And returning to BYI, or even that mountain you came from, will not change who you are. It may change how others see you, it may even change how you see yourself—even gold appears dull in some lighting—but that is the illusion. And it always was.... The most powerful determination of who you are is inside you, he said, ‘Professor Steinberg says this Pygmalion.... She was just a cockney in a nice dress. Until she believed in herself. Then it didn’t matter what dress she wore.’ I wanted to believe him, to take his words and remake myself, but I’d never had that kind of faith. No matter how deeply I interred the memories, how tightly I shut my eyes against them, when I thought of my self, the images that came to mind were of that girl, in the bathroom, in the parking lot.

The character you seem to have been born with is not necessarily who you are… The Promethean task of the powerful is to remake yourself into a character of power. Working on yourself like clay should be one of your greatest and most pleasurable life tasks. It makes you in essence an artist - an artist creating yourself.

And what we can see if we look deep within is that the authentic self is the Soul made visible. Do not try to remake yourself into something you’re not. Just try making the best of what God made. The sacred art and craft of nurturing our souls and the souls of those we love is Simple Abundance soulcraft. Begin today by turning on the Light.

Please, choose to be a traditional American man if that is how you want to perform masculinity, that's fine. But it’s not the only way to be a man. There are many ways. Too many to count. And in the moment you ditch the part of the Man Box that says everyone has to be like you, you free all of us. Men, women and children. And you free yourself.

Yes, fear was the kind of prison where you made yourself the inmate and the jailer.

We call them survivors, but once the vampires get you, the person you were dies, like any traumatized part of you never leaves that room, that car, that moment, and you walk forward a ghost of your former self. You rebuild yourself over the years, but the person you were isn’t the person you become. The great bad thing happens, and you become a ghost in your own life, and then you become flesh and blood and remake your life, but the ghosts of what happened don’t go away completely. They wait for you in low moments, and then they wail at you, shaking their chains in your face and trying to strangle you with them.

On behalf of those you killed, imprisoned, tortured, you are not welcome, Erdogan! No, Erdogan, you’re not welcome in Algeria. We are a country which has already paid its price of blood and tears to those who wanted to impose their caliphate on us, those who put their ideas before our bodies, those who took our children hostage and who attempted to kill our hopes for a better future. The notorious family that claims to act in the name of the God and religion—you’re a member of it—you fund it, you support it, you desire to become its international leader. Islamism is your livelihood Islamism, which is your livelihood, is our misfortune. We will not forget about it, and you are a reminder of it today. You offer your shadow and your wings to those who work to make our country kneel down before your “Sublime Door.” You embody and represent what we loathe. You hate freedom, the free spirit. But you love parades. You use religion for business. You dream of a caliphate and hope to return to our lands. But you do it behind the closed doors, by supporting Islamist parties, by offering gifts through your companies, by infiltrating the life of the community, by controlling the mosques. These are the old methods of your “Muslim Brothers” in this country, who used to show us God’s Heaven with one hand while digging our graves with the other. No, Mr. Erdogan, you are not a man of help; you do not fight for freedom or principles; you do not defend the right of peoples to self-determination. You know only how to subject the Kurds to the fires of death; you know only how to subject your opponents to your dictatorship. You cry with the victims in the Middle East, yet sign contracts with their executioners. You do not dream of a dignified future for us, but of a caliphate for yourself. We are aware of your institutionalized persecution, your list of Turks to track down, your sinister prisons filled with the innocent, your dictatorial justice palaces, your insolence and boastful nature. You do not dream of a humanity that shares common values and principles, but are interested only in the remaking of the Ottoman Empire and its bloodthirsty warlords. Islam, for you, is a footstool; God is a business sign; modernity is an enemy; Palestine is a showcase; and local Islamists are your stunned courtesans. Humanity will not remember you with good deeds Humanity will remember you for your machinations, your secret coups d’état, and your manhunts. History will remember you for your bombings, your vengeful wars, and your inability to engage in constructive dialogue with others. The UN vote for Al-Quds is only an instrument in your service. Let us laugh at this with the Palestinians. We know that the Palestinian issue is your political capital, as it is for many others. You know well how to make a political fortune by exploiting others’ emotions. In Algeria, we suffered, and still suffer, from those who pretend to be God and act as takers and givers of life. They applaud your coming, but not us. You are the idol of Algerian Islamists and Populists, those who are unable to imagine a political structure beyond a caliphate for Muslim-majority societies. We aspire to become a country of freedom and dignity. This is not your ambition, nor your virtue. You are an illusion You have made beautiful Turkey an open prison and a bazaar for your business and loved ones. I hope that this beautiful nation rises above your ambitions. I hope that justice will be restored and flourish there once again, at least for those who have been imprisoned, tortured, bombed, and killed. You are an illusion, Erdogan—you know it and we know it. You play on the history of our humiliation, on our emotions, on our beliefs, and introduce yourself as a savior. However, you are a gravedigger, both for your own country and for your neighbors. Turkey is a political miracle, but it owes you nothing. The best thing you can do

You long for transcendence and are likely to describe yourself as spiritual, open to the supernatural, and even as praying sometimes. Even if the God of Abraham is dead to you, your language, legal framework, moral imagination, and sense of self are all haunted by his ghost.4

In those hours I began to realize that izzat, honor, was an aesthetic idea more than a moral idea. It was a way of carrying yourself, the bluster of claiming to go to any length for your relatives, to love and be loved more than others loved and were loved. But while it purported to be fundamentally about others, it was really about oneself: about one's own marvelous virtue and the elaborate public demonstration of it. The same person who honored you by preparing meat, or inviting you to sleep in his house, had little conception of what it meant to make a promise to you, to keep his word, to empathize.

The boys who have done you harm are surrounded by girls you will choose never to be. girls who are disgusting, who bleed and weep and wail. Girls who spend too much time in the bathroom. Girls who are never ready on time. Girls who titter, who are soft, who wear pretty clothes that are easily dirties, girls in hoop earrings and perfect wings of black eyeliner, girls who don't know what's cool. Girls who read the wrong books, twirl their hair around, are pursued, are hunted. You will remake yourself into something else: a boys' girl, a tough girl, a girl without needs or feelings, a girl who wisecracks and drinks whiskey in the backseat of cars, a girl cool as the first frost in winter, a girl so totally unlike other girls. If you cannot be loved and safe, you will be clever, mean, a girl as vicious as the serrated edge of a hunting knife. If you cannot be pretty, you will disdain beauty and its trappings. If you cannot be heard, you will be silent on purpose. You will find your knights again, a different set of boys, this time united against a common enemy: the softness and fragility of girls, of anything girlish within you, of anything girlish in any other girl. Against girls who are sad and silly and weeping (you don't cry), girls who complain (you protest nothing), girls who make demands (you never ask). This time, however, you will not be queen. Some of these boys will never even know your name.

A not-so-easy pill to swallow, is the fact that much of the time, you are fighting monsters that you yourself have fashioned. Yes, there are toxic relationships, toxic individuals, but there also exists the monsters that you have fashioned with your own mind. You think you are being chased, captured, wounded, by these monsters when in fact you alone are composed of the entire capability to dismantle them piece-by-piece, because in reality they exist in your mind and you have fashioned them as the creator of your inner world, as the author of your own epic tale. In this sense, you may reassemble your world and you may remake the plot of your own story. The key is realising how much of the darkness is actually your own doing, digging for their roots, and figuring out how to begin dismantling.

You know what I mean, Mr Wind-up Bird? What you were just talking about … it’s kind of impossible for anybody to do that stuff, like, ‘OK, now I’m gonna make a whole new world’ or ‘OK, now I’m gonna make a whole new self.’ That’s what I think. You might think you made a new world or a new self, but your old self is always gonna be there, just below the surface, and if something happens, it’ll stick its head out and say ‘Hi’. You don’t seem to realize that. You were made somewhere else. And even this idea you have of remaking yourself: even that was made somewhere else. Even I know that much, Mr Wind-up Bird. You’re a grown-up, aren’t you? How come you don’t get it? That’s a big problem, if you ask me. And that’s what you’re being punished for – by all kinds of things: by the world you tried to get rid of, or by the self you tried to get rid of. Do you see what I’m saying?

Productiveness is your acceptance of morality, your recognition of the fact that you choose to live—that productive work is the process by which man’s consciousness controls his existence, a constant process of acquiring knowledge and shaping matter to fit one’s purpose, of translating an idea into physical form, of remaking the earth in the image of one’s values—that all work is creative work if done by a thinking mind, and no work is creative if done by a blank who repeats in uncritical stupor a routine he has learned from others—that your work is yours to choose, and the choice is as wide as your mind, that nothing more is possible to you and nothing less is human—that to cheat your way into a job bigger than your mind can handle is to become a fear-corroded ape on borrowed motions and borrowed time, and to settle down into a job that requires less than your mind’s full capacity is to cut your motor and sentence yourself to another kind of motion: decay—that your work is the process of achieving your values, and to lose your ambition for values is to lose your ambition to live—that your body is a machine, but your mind is its driver, and you must drive as far as your mind will take you, with achievement as the goal of your road—that the man who has no purpose is a machine that coasts downhill at the mercy of any boulder to crash in the first chance ditch, that the man who stifles his mind is a stalled machine slowly going to rust, that the man who lets a leader prescribe his course is a wreck being towed to the scrap heap, and the man who makes another man his goal is a hitchhiker no driver should ever pick up—that your work is the purpose of your life, and you must speed past any killer who assumes the right to stop you, that any value you might find outside your work, any other loyalty or love, can be only travelers you choose to share your journey and must be travelers going on their own power in the same direction. “Pride

Dr. Kerry said he'd been watching me. "You act like someone who is impersonating someone else. And it's as if you think your life depends on it." I didn't know what to say, so I said nothing. "It has never occurred to you," he said, "that you might have as much right to be here as anyone." He waited for an explanation. "I would enjoy serving the dinner," I said, "more than eating it." Dr. Kerry smiled. "You should trust Professor Steinberg. If he says you're a scholar-'pure gold,' I heard him say-then you are." "This is a magical place," I said. "Everything shines here." "You must stop yourself from thinking like that," Dr. Kerry said, his voice raised. "You are not fool's gold, shining only under a particular light. Whomever you become, whatever you make yourself into, that is who you always were. It was always in you. Not in Cambridge. In you. You are gold. And returning to BYU, or even to that mountain you came from, will not change who you are. It may change how others see you, it may even change how you see yourself-even gold appears dull in some lighting-but that is the illusion. And it always was." I wanted to believe him, to take his words and remake myself, but I'd never had that kind of faith. No matter how deeply I interred the memories, how tightly I shut my eyes against them, when I thought of my self, the images that came to mind were of that girl, in the bathroom, in the parking lot. I couldn't tell Dr. Kerry about that girl. I couldn't tell him that the reason I couldn't return to Cambridge was that being here threw into great relief every violent and degrading moment of my life. At BYU I could almost forget, allow what had been to blend into what was. But the contrast here was too great, the world before my eyes too fantastical. The memories were more real-more believable-than the stone spires. To myself I pretended there were other reasons I couldn't belong at Cambridge, reasons having to do with class and status: that it was because I was poor, had grown up poor. Because I could stand in the wind on the chapel roof and not tilt. That was the person who didn't belong in Cambridge: the roofer, not the whore. I can go to school, I had written in my journal that very afternoon. And I can buy new clothes. But I am still Tara Westover. I have done jobs no Cambridge student would do. Dress us any way you like, we are not the same. Clothes could not fix what was wrong with me. Something had rotted on the inside. Whether Dr. Kerry suspected any part of this, I'm not sure. But he understood that I had fixated on clothes as the symbol of why I didn't, and couldn't, belong. It was the last thing he said to me before he walked away, leaving me rooted, astonished, beside that grand chapel. "The most powerful determinant of who you are is inside you," he said. "Professor Steinberg says this is Pygmalion. Think of the story, Tara." He paused, his eyes fierce, his voice piercing. "She was just a cockney in a nice dress. Until she believed in herself. Then it didn't matter what dress she wore.

In many cases we can do this and avoid the exponential blowup. Suppose you’re leading a platoon in single file through enemy territory in the dead of night, and you want to make sure that all your soldiers are still with you. You could stop and count them yourself, but that wastes too much time. A cleverer solution is to just ask the first soldier behind you: “How many soldiers are behind you?” Each soldier asks the next the same question, until the last one says “None.” The next-to-last soldier can now say “One,” and so on all the way back to the first soldier, with each soldier adding one to the number of soldiers behind him. Now you know how many soldiers are still with you, and you didn’t even have to stop. Siri uses the same idea to compute the probability that you just said, “Call the police” from the sounds it picked up from the microphone. Think of “Call the police” as a platoon of words marching across the page in single file. Police wants to know its probability, but for that it needs to know the probability of the; and the in turn needs to know the probability of call. So call computes its probability and passes it on to the, which does the same and passes the result to police. Now police knows its probability, duly influenced by every word in the sentence, but we never had to construct the full table of eight possibilities (the first word is call or isn’t, the second is the or isn’t, and the third is police or isn’t). In reality, Siri considers all words that could appear in each position, not just whether the first word is call or not and so on, but the algorithm is the same. Perhaps Siri thinks, based on the sounds, that the first word was either call or tell, the second was the or her, and the third was police or please. Individually, perhaps the most likely words are call, the, and please. But that forms the nonsensical sentence “Call the please,” so taking the other words into account, Siri concludes that the sentence is really “Call the police.” It makes the call, and with luck the police get to your house in time to catch the burglar.

Don’t worry about how you look to the world; remember, the world is an illusion. It will remake itself according to what you resonate and focus on. Concern yourself only with living a life that FEELS miraculous, wondrous, and magical to you.

At which point, you either bail out or you start changing. And yes, you can bail out and hold on to the patterns of living you had created for yourself long ago. You can choose to defend them to the death. Men and women do it all the time. Sometimes they physically walk out the door. Sometimes they just check out emotionally, leaving behind an automaton of a parent who goes through the motions with some secret part of themselves locked away for twenty years. Those folks do not make the change that parenting demands. Those fierce souls go another lonelier way. And they never came to know their children.

Sometimes you do it with a gun, sometimes by talking to the people they leave behind. We call them survivors, but once the vampires get you, the person you were dies, like any traumatized part of you never leaves that room, that car, that moment, and you walk forward a ghost of your former self. You rebuild yourself over the years, but the person you were isn’t the person you become. The great bad thing happens, and you become a ghost in your own life, and then you become flesh and blood and remake your life, but the ghosts of what happened don’t go away completely. They wait for you in low moments, and then they wail at you, shaking their chains in your face and trying to strangle you with them.

You panic and you rage, then this calm settles over you, and you remake yourself.

You’re going to have to extract yourself from the business,” he said. “You’re going to have to bring up your management team, give them more responsibility, coach them more, and let them run the operation.” Pagano didn’t argue. He knew Anderson was right. Sale price aside, the number of potential acquirers, and thus Pagano’s own exit options, would be severely limited as long as he was essential to the company’s operation. He had to remake the business so that it could run without him if he wanted to improve his chances of getting a deal he’d be happy with.

if you leave yourself at home and are eager to let the world remake you as it sees fit, you can be at home almost everywhere you go. Home is the condition, the state of unencumbered ease, you export to everyone you visit. —

Forgetting.” she said, “is a beautiful thing. When you forget, you remake yourself. The Continent must forget. It is trying not to—but it must. For a caterpillar to become a butterfly, it must forget it was ever a caterpillar at all. Then it will be as if the caterpillar never was, & there was only ever the butterfly.

Remake yourself into a character of power. Working on yourself like clay should be one of your greatest and most pleasurable life tasks. It makes you in essence an artist—an artist creating yourself.

By the time we are aware we feel anxious, our thinking center is already engaged. Once that happens, we have access to more than just our habitual responses. We have access to choice. This is the start of control and change. Not just the perceptual kind, but the hardwired kind. Researchers have even put a number on how much control we actually have: 40 percent. According to data compiled by positive psychologist, Sonja Lyubomirsky and detailed in The How of Happiness, approximately 50 percent of variance in happiness is determined by genes, 10 percent of variance in happiness is determined by circumstance, and the rest of our happiness is determined by our actions.33 This is powerful information. “To understand that 40 percent of our happiness is determined by intentional activity,” Lyubomirsky writes, “is to appreciate the promise of the great impact that you can make on your own life through intentional strategies that you can implement to remake yourself as a happier person

Stop. Right now. Remake your life from the inside out. I don’t know a way to remake anything without first taking down the existing structures, and that’s what no does—it puts the brakes on your screaming-fast life and gives you a chance to stop and inspect just exactly what you’ve created for yourself, as difficult as that might be.

You can remake your life to suit you by doing more than you're told, refusing to be a victim, becoming radically yourself, aiming high, and never being afraid to fuck some shit up.

The character you seem to have been born with is not necessarily who you are; beyond the characteristics you have inherited, your parents, your friends, and your peers have helped to shape your personality. The Promethean task of the powerful is to take control of the process, to stop allowing others that ability to limit and mold them. Remake yourself into a character of power. Working on yourself like clay should be one of your greatest and most pleasurable life tasks. It makes you in essence an artist – an artist creating yourself.

And for Roosevelt, life threw a lot at him: He lost a wife and his mother in rapid succession, he faced powerful, entrenched political enemies who despised his progressive agenda, was dealt defeat in elections, the nation was embroiled in foreign wars, and he survived nearly fatal assassination attempts. But he was equipped for it all because of his early training and because he kept at it every single day. Are you similarly prepared? Could you actually handle yourself if things suddenly got worse? We take weakness for granted. We assume that the way we’re born is the way we simply are, that our disadvantages are permanent. And then we atrophy from there. That’s not necessarily the best recipe for the difficulties of life. Not everyone accepts their bad start in life. They remake their bodies and their lives with activities and exercise. They prepare themselves for the hard road. Do they hope they never have to walk it? Sure. But they are prepared for it in any case. Are you? Nobody is born with a steel backbone. We have to forge that ourselves. We craft our spiritual strength through physical exercise, and our physical hardiness through mental practice (mens sana in corpore sano—sound mind in a strong body).

Fundamental to your understanding of human freedom is the capacity to make choices. From breakfast cereals to career paths, fabric softeners to family size, marriage partners to religious commitments, you expect to be able to choose for yourself rather than acting out of legal compulsion or familial obligation. Remarkably, all of these things are true regardless of whether you are male or female.

It is very hard for people to relate to a complex system in a personal way. However, doing so is important for anyone who is trying to use creative approaches to fix or remake many of the systems that shape daily life; for instance, health care, government, education, and beyond. Designing a system is such an abstract idea that you need ways to provoke a deep inner understanding of that system. You need to stretch yourself to relate to it emotionally and intuitively. With better context and empathy, you will ask better questions, embrace more humility, and make better decisions about your design work.

Focusing on your own relational practice optimizes our chances of making the relationship work, which is not the same as saying we always get what we want. Digest each other's imperfections, and grieve the things you wanted in your relationship that this partnership will not afford. Embrace what you do have, and allow it to be enough, to be an occasion for joy. These are the grown-up skills of intimacy: skills potent enough not only to transform your relationship but ultimately to heal and remake yourself.

Don’t try to remake yourself into something you’re not, just try making the best of what God has made. Making the best of ourselves is the reason we were born, but it requires patience and perseverance. For many of us it also requires prayer.

To ride the chaos, remake the world in their own image. It takes a special kind of hubris to throw the world into the fires and believe you can pull it back out without being consumed yourself.” “So that’s what this is all about?” Roth asked, the irony clear in his voice. “A ‘better’ world?” “Isn’t it always?” Harry allowed himself a grim smile. A nameless wag had once observed that the reason history repeated itself was that no one had been listening the first time around. Not that they ever did. “They believe they can accomplish with this what none of the wars they bled and died in ever have—eliminate the Islamist threat to the UK, once and for all. A ‘final solution’, you might call it.

I mean, he asked for the keys to the truck last night and brought them back earlier this morning.  Truck’s fixed.  I checked myself.  So, I’m wondering what you said to him.” My mouth popped open.  I couldn’t believe he’d actually listened to me.  A silly smile tugged at my mouth.  Did this really mean he’d let me go?  My barely formed smile faded.  Or would I just wake up back in this apartment tomorrow morning if I tried to leave? Sam continued to remake the bed with the clean sheets from the hidden compartment in the matching sofa ottoman. There had to be a catch.  Sam had told me a tied pair didn’t part until completing the Claim.  When Clay had scented me, and I’d recognized him openly, the Elders saw us as a pair.  They, in turn, announced it to everyone over their mental link.  Every werewolf, whether in a pack or Forlorn, recognized our tie.  If my words truly changed Clay’s mind, great—but Sam’s question caused me to begin to doubt that possibility, and I struggled to come up with what I’d overlooked. “The truth,” I said answering Sam’s question.  “Let’s say he is my Mate.  He’s an uneducated man from the backwoods.  How are we going to live?  I can’t turn on the fur like you guys can and live as a wolf like he’s done for most of his life.  Where does that leave us?  I just pointed out that I had to go to school to get the education I needed to land a good job to support myself because he can’t.” Sam had stopped remaking the bed and looked at me in disbelief. “Well, I said it nicer than that.” He gave me a disappointed look. “You don’t know anything about him, Gabby.  He may have lived most of his life in his fur, but it doesn’t mean he isn’t intelligent or that he’s more wolf than man.  You may have caused yourself more trouble than you intended.” I shifted against the door.  “Hold on, I didn’t say either of those things to him.”  Granted, I did tell him he needed to bathe.  “And what do you mean ‘more trouble’?” “He said that you suggested he live with you so you could get to know each other better.” I froze in disbelief.  That is not what I said. “Wait.  Did he actually talk to you?” “Well, I had to put on my fur to understand him since he was in his, but yes.” Sam’s kind communicated in several ways when in their fur—typically, through body language or howls.  Claimed and Mated pairs shared a special bond using an intuitive, mental link.  Once establishing a Claim, the pair could sense strong emotions as well as each other’s location.  Mated pairs had the same ability to communicate with each other as the Elders had with everyone in the pack. I closed my eyes and thought back to my exact wording. “I didn’t say we should live together, but that he should come back with me to get an education.”  Fine, I hadn’t worded it well, but how did he get “hey, we should live together” out of that? “Like I said, you’ve got trouble.”  He gave me another disappointed look, folded the bed back into the sofa, then picked up his bag from the floor.  He strode to the bathroom and closed the door on any further conversation. Crap.  I needed to talk to Clay again and find out what he intended.  I’d been counting on his feral upbringing and his need for freedom to cause him to reject my suggestion—a suggestion that hadn’t included him living with me.  I’d meant he should find a place nearby so we could go through the motions of human dating, which was the extent of my willingness to compromise.  I hadn’t thought he’d take any of it seriously but that, instead, he would just let me go. I

The S curve is not just important as a model in its own right; it’s also the jack-of-all-trades of mathematics. If you zoom in on its midsection, it approximates a straight line. Many phenomena we think of as linear are in fact S curves, because nothing can grow without limit. Because of relativity, and contra Newton, acceleration does not increase linearly with force, but follows an S curve centered at zero. So does electric current as a function of voltage in the resistors found in electronic circuits, or in a light bulb (until the filament melts, which is itself another phase transition). If you zoom out from an S curve, it approximates a step function, with the output suddenly changing from zero to one at the threshold. So depending on the input voltages, the same curve represents the workings of a transistor in both digital computers and analog devices like amplifiers and radio tuners. The early part of an S curve is effectively an exponential, and near the saturation point it approximates exponential decay. When someone talks about exponential growth, ask yourself: How soon will it turn into an S curve? When will the population bomb peter out, Moore’s law lose steam, or the singularity fail to happen? Differentiate an S curve and you get a bell curve: slow, fast, slow becomes low, high, low. Add a succession of staggered upward and downward S curves, and you get something close to a sine wave. In fact, every function can be closely approximated by a sum of S curves: when the function goes up, you add an S curve; when it goes down, you subtract one. Children’s learning is not a steady improvement but an accumulation of S curves. So is technological change. Squint at the New York City skyline and you can see a sum of S curves unfolding across the horizon, each as sharp as a skyscraper’s corner. Most importantly for us, S curves lead to a new solution to the credit-assignment problem. If the universe is a symphony of phase transitions, let’s model it with one. That’s what the brain does: it tunes the system of phase transitions inside to the one outside. So let’s replace the perceptron’s step function with an S curve and see what happens.

We take too much for granted when it comes to separations and reunions, and pay the price for not understanding the natural human imperative to make and continually remake secure connections with our most important others. Don’t take my word for this. Check your own launchings and landings. Play with them. Perform them properly, and then improperly or not at all. Compare the difference. Experience for yourself.

You remake yourself as you grow and as the world changes. Your identity doesn’t get found. It emerges.

Remake yourself into a character of power. Working on yourself like clay should be one your greatest and most pleasurable life tasks. It makes you in essence an artist - an artist creating yourself.

Imagine guilt as an iron band fastened around something that is growing: the trunk of a tree, the neck of a child. Sooner or later, one of two things must happen. If the band does not break, the growing thing will be deformed. “Commit yourself to change, Lixia, to living in the present, to making and remaking who you are. Do the best you can. Understand what you do. And do not feel guilty.

She was not able to return to the beginning, of course, and remake her life more to her liking, but now she was free to go on with the life she did have.

We call them survivors, but once the vampires get you, the person you were dies, like any traumatized part of you never leaves that room, that car, that moment, and you walk forward a ghost of your former self. You rebuild yourself over the years, but the person you were isn’t the person you become. The great bad thing happens, and you become a ghost in your own life, and then you become flesh and blood and remake your life, but the ghosts of what happened don’t go away completely. They wait for you in low moments, and then they wail at you, shaking their chains in your face and trying to strangle you with them.” ―Laurell K. Hamilton, Affliction