Rewrite Our Story Quotes

When our villains win, do not fret, just rewrite the story. - mother knows best II

Our beliefs are merely stories in our minds that we ourselves wrote long ago. Knowing that, don’t you feel empowered to rewrite them if they no longer serve you?

In a sense we re-write our past. We change our narrative. We reprogram ourselves. There is no objective history, this we know, only stories. Our character is the result of this story we tell ourselves about ourselves, and the process of inventorying breaks down the hidden and destructive personal grammar that we have unwittingly allowed to govern our behaviour.

There are so many different forms of silence: the silence that tyrannical states force on their citizens, stealing their memories, rewriting their histories, and imposing on them a state-sanctioned identity. Or the silence of witnesses who choose to ignore or not speak the truth, and of victims who at times become complicit in the crimes committed against them. Then there are the silences we indulge in about ourselves, our personal mythologies, the stories we impose upon our real lives.

We all spend our lives kicking the crap out of ourselves for not being this way or that way, not having this thing or that thing, not being like this person or that person. For not living up to some standard we think applies across the board to all of us. We all spend our lives trying to follow the same path, live by the same rules. I think we believe that happiness lies in following the same list of rules. In being more like everyone else. That? Is wrong. There is no list of rules. There is one rule. The rule is: there are no rules. Happiness comes from living as you need to, as you want to. As your inner voice tells you to. Happiness comes from being who you actually are instead of who you think you are supposed to be. Being traditional is not traditional anymore. It’s funny that we still think of it that way. Normalize your lives, people. You don’t want a baby? Don’t have one. I don’t want to get married? I won’t. You want to live alone? Enjoy it. You want to love someone? Love someone. Don’t apologize. Don’t explain. Don’t ever feel less than. When you feel the need to apologize or explain who you are, it means the voice in your head is telling you the wrong story. Wipe the slate clean. And rewrite it. No fairy tales. Be your own narrator. And go for a happy ending. One foot in front of the other. You will make it.

We live and die by our stories if we don't rewrite our own history. The past is merely what we make of it, the future ours to create. Rewrite revise, erase.

when our villains win, do not fret. just rewrite the story.

Sometimes when you’re grieving you don’t want to be told things will get better. You just want to feel the pain without people making false promises. With death nothing gets better. They’re still gone. Things just get more tolerable to deal with.

Our differences are treasures and they’re also tools. They are useful, valid, worthy, and important to share. Recognizing this, not only in ourselves but in the people around us, we begin to rewrite more and more stories of not-mattering. We start to change the paradigms around who belongs, creating more space for more people. Step by step by step, we can lessen the loneliness of not-belonging.

Feminism can be a friend to science. It not only improves how science is done by pushing researchers to include the female perspective, but science in turn can also show us that we're not as different as we seem. Research to date suggests that humans survived, thrived and spread across the globe through the efforts of everyone equally sharing the same work and responsibilities. For most of our history, we lived hand in hand. And our biology reflects this.

Because I believe we all deserve the chance to be seen for who we are in our present, not for who we’ve been in our past. Because I believe that while you can’t rewrite life’s previous chapters, you have every present moment to do something new, something better, and I hold on to hope that anyone who wants to can shape their life into a story they’re proud of.

Our beliefs are merely stories in our minds that we ourselves wrote long ago. Knowing that, don’t you feel empowered to rewrite them if they no longer serve you? Scan your mind for viruses called fears, anxieties, judgments, doubts, hatred and despair, and put a little note next to them that says “Outdated; no longer valid.” I’ve learned so much from my mistakes, I think I’m gonna go out there and make some more! —Anonymous

Knowing our personal financial identity allows for healing, empathy, and further strengthening of relationships when we apply it in the context of family or other relationships with friends, a spouse, and co-workers. It is also a very helpful framework for healing our money mindset and money blocks (including ancestral money blocks), so we can re-write our own personal money stories, that are rooted in our own personal financial identity.

Right now each of us is a private oral culture. We rewrite our pasts to suit our needs and support the story we tell about ourselves. With our memories we are all guilty of a Whig interpretation of our personal histories, seeing our former selves as steps toward our glorious present selves.

[E]verything is fiction. When you tell yourself the story of your life, the story of your day, you edit and rewrite and weave a narrative out of a collection of random experiences and events. Your conversations are fiction. Your friends and loved ones—they are characters you have created. And your arguments with them are like meetings with an editor—please, they beseech you, you beseech them, rewrite me. You have a perception of the way things are, and you impose it on your memory, and in this way you think, in the same way that I think, that you are living something that is describable. When of course, what we actually live, what we actually experience—with our senses and our nerves—is a vast, absurd, beautiful, ridiculous chaos.

Inherited patterns and societal conditioning shape our emotional landscape, but we hold the power to rewrite our emotional story.

If we had the power to rewrite our histories, what stories would we tell?

If I’m being honest, Goldie, I’ve always loved the beautiful words you write, but I might like how your body speaks to me even more.

We must rewrite our story from one of fear to one of celebration.

I’ve loved her this entire time. While she was making her dreams come true, I was doing everything to build a house she could call home once she’d achieved every single one of her wildest dreams.

You alone own your story. Do not let another tell it, and if you find yourself in the company of one determined to rewrite your words or own your narrative, fight like hell until you hold it again. There is little in life that is solely ours. Your story is one of those priceless few things. It is beyond precious. The people meant to be In your life will only strengthen your voice, not take it from you.

What happened during the 2020 election must be investigated and discussed, not in spite of media and political opposition to an open inquiry, but because of that opposition. The American people deserve to know what happened. They deserve answers, even if those answers are inconvenient. They deserve to know the effect flooding the system with tens of millions of mail-in ballots had on their vote. They deserve to know how and why Big Tech and the corporate political media manipulated the news to support certain political narratives while censoring stories they now admit were true. They deserve to know why courts were allowed to unilaterally rewrite the rules in the middle of the contest, often without the consent of the legislative bodies charged with writing election laws.

but the way i see it is, hasn't it been long enough? Hasn't the world always been full of monsters and lies? Isn't it our place to fight them, to tell the truth, to rewrite the story? to ensure the return of spring in a world of winter

I realized that our only real goal in any of our marketing is to identify the false beliefs and false stories our customers are telling themselves—the ones that are keeping them from success—and to rewrite these stories inside their minds.

I want to hold her, to tell her how deep down I hate to see her cry. But right now I can’t see through the anger—the hurt—of her pretending that for one summer, she and I weren’t each other’s world. For me, she stayed my world every day after.

You know exactly what this house is. What this spot is,” he says, raising his voice. He points behind him. “We spent summer nights under the stars going over your favorite floor plans, what you wanted in a house. Right here. At this spot. You can’t tell me you forgot that.

A crucial step on this journey is to acknowledge that the “self” is a fictional story that the intricate mechanisms of our mind constantly manufacture, update, and rewrite. There is a storyteller in my mind that explains who I am, where I come from, where I am heading, and what is happening to me right now.

Right now each of us is a private oral culture. We rewrite our pasts to suit our needs and support the story we tell about ourselves.

God began rewriting the ending to my life's story, our worlds collided with His, and He provided us with the most beautiful second chance.

God began rewriting the ending to my life's story, our worlds collided with His, and He provided us with the most beautiful second chance.

I haven’t fallen in love with anyone since you left. I’m not able to. You can’t fall in love with someone if your heart still belongs to someone else.

Yes. I’ve had you under the moon before, let me claim you under the sun, in our field of marigolds.

Her words unravel me. I haven’t even inched inside her yet, and I know no one else could ever compare to her. She’s my everything. My ruining, and I want everything she’ll give me.

All I want is you. With me. Wherever you want, Goldie. I can’t be without you.

I’m yours.” One thrust. “I love you.” Another thrust. “I won’t survive if I lose you again.

For my entire life, my heart has only beat for one person. That’s you, Cade Jennings. Even without knowing if you’d ever be mine, I knew I was yours.

She’s my everything. My ruining, and I want everything she’ll give me.

Spread those legs open and wide for me, baby. It’s time for me to show you how much better my tongue is compared to your fingers.

Even on a tight deadline, it is often possible to write, reflect and write again. Don’t stop rewriting until your deadline makes you stop.

Robert Brault said, “We are kept from our goal not by obstacles but by a clear path to a lesser goal.

It hurts too much. All I can think about in the end is how bad I hurt her. She spent all those years idolizing me, loving me, only for me to break her with a few words at the airport.

Our lives today are the culmination of every thought we’ve ever had. Once we embrace this concept—once we recognize we have created our world and take responsibility for it—we also realize we have the power to change our world by simply changing our thoughts. We can rewrite our story through new experiences and different responses, and enjoy a renewal of our inner lives.

I do.” “Ask me again if I’m yours.” “Are you mine?” “My heart only beats like that for you.” I press her hand against my chest, proving to her that no one controls my heartbeats like she does.

Look at you being such a good fucking girl, coating my cock in your cum. You’re doing so fucking good at making sure my cock is nice and wet, making it easier to slide into your perfect pussy.

Reassessing our own “failures” and rebranding them as “not yets” is a good way to start rewriting our own story: the internal narrative of our past struggles. When we decide to switch to abundant thinking, there is always a positive spin. Such is the stuff of success. It means we’re able to maintain the resilience to stick with our goals, rather than walking away at the first hurdle.

Why do you care if I’m lying or telling the truth? It shouldn’t matter. I shouldn’t matter to you.” “Some days I’m fucking terrified because it feels like you’re the only thing that really matters.

I’ve spent all these years trying to forget Cade but feeling him claim me all over again only proves one thing. I can pretend all I want, but nothing has changed. He still owns me—every fucking part of me.

After I left, I cried myself to sleep so many times, wondering where things went wrong. I obsessed over the idea of you being my world and I was nothing to you. You can’t tell me years later that you loved me.

Your pinkies would be touching across the pillows, and I could tell that no matter the fact you had just lost a mother and your father was distant, that you were going to be okay. Because of my baby boy, you were going to be okay.

Why wouldn’t it matter?” “Because either way, things ended up the way they did. Whether I hated you or not, you hurt me. You were supposed to be the person who didn’t hurt me. And you ended up being the person who hurt me the most.

It doesn’t feel right to say I want you because it’s so much more than that. Saying I want you makes it seem like it’s just a choice. What I feel for you—how bad I need you—doesn’t just feel like a choice. It feels undeniable. Like fate.

You don’t stop loving someone even after they break your heart. You can’t stop loving them, no matter what damage was done. I can only hope the same can be said for her. I know I broke her heart, I’m ready to plead with her and hope I kept her love.

I can’t keep it a secret any longer.” I grab her arms, pulling her closer to my body. “I fell for you so hard and fast, it was almost like that love had always been there. I loved you, Goldie. I loved you so fucking much that it killed me to watch you leave.

I think you’ll regret this,” she says, attempting to keep her shaky words steady. “One day, I think you’ll realize that what we had together was the realest thing you ever had, but you were too scared to fight for it. I won’t be waiting around for that moment.

Choosing one's own way is a primary purpose of our lives. Yet there is a fear in making choices, because choices have consequences. As a result, people avoid making decisions, fail to choose their own way, and limit their capacity for growth, learning, and change.

I sigh, wishing I could be honest and tell her I think she’ll be the only person I love my entire life. I think the ghost of our memories will haunt me on the ranch. It’ll be bittersweet to watch her make every single one of her dreams come true without me in her life.

My eyes burn with unshed tears from the reminder of how unbelievably hard that time of my life was. It felt like everything was going wrong and I couldn’t tell a soul—not even Pippa—what was happening. Nobody knew that I’d had my heart broken by a man who was my entire world.

The experiment changed Sally’s life. In the following days she realised she has been through a ‘near-spiritual experience…what defined the experience was not feeling smarter or learning faster: the thing that made the earth drop out from under my feet was that for the first time in my life, everything in my head finally shut up…My brain without self-doubt was a revelation. There was suddenly this incredible silence in my head…I hope you can sympathise with me when I tell you that the thing I wanted most acutely for the weeks following my experience was to go back and strap on those electrodes. I also started to have a lot of questions. Who was I apart from the angry bitter gnomes that populate my mind and drive me to failure because I’m too scared to try? And where did those voices come from?’7 Some of those voices repeat society’s prejudices, some echo our personal history, and some articulate our genetic legacy. All of them together, says Sally, create an invisible story that shapes our conscious decisions in ways we seldom grasp. What would happen if we could rewrite our inner monologues, or even silence them completely on occasion? 8

Let God begin to rewrite your story. Invite him to show you your past through his eyes. Ask him to surface good memories you have forgotten. He would love to do it. There is healing to be had there. There is a replacing of regret with mercy. Though our past has shaped us, we are not our past. Though our failures and sin have had an effect on who we are, we are not defined by our failures or our sin. Though thought patterns and addictions have overwhelmed us, we are not overcome by them and we will never be overcome by them. Jesus has won our victory. Jesus is our victory.

We write, edit, and rewrite the story of our own life employing descriptive words, metaphors, and symbols. Our lives are full of symbols including those supplied by nature and religion, which touch upon the mystical and spiritual aspects of life. Symbols inspire enduring hope by formulating idealist expectations.

I have a lot of dreams, Cade Jennings. But none of them compare to the best dream come true of all. Loving you. Being loved by you. It’s the most special and real feeling I’ve ever experienced. I think I’m in a place now where the whole author thing can be done from anywhere—from Sutten—as long as it’s somewhere with you.

We don't normally think of it as such, but writing is a technology, which means that a literate person is someone whose thought processes are technologically mediated. We became cognitive cyborgs as soon as we became fluent readers, and the consequences of that were profound. Before a culture adopts the use of writing, when its knowledge is transmitted exclusively through oral means, it can very easily revise its history. It's not intentional, but it is inevitable; throughout the world, bards and griots have adapted their material to their audiences and thus gradually adjusted the past to suit the needs of the present. The idea that accounts of the past shouldn't change is a product of literate cultures' reverence for the written word. Anthropologists will tell you that oral cultures understand the past differently; for them, their histories don't need to be accurate so much as they need to validate the community's understanding of itself. So it wouldn't be correct to say that their histories are unreliable; their histories do what they need to do. Right now each of us is a private oral culture. We rewrite our pasts to suit our needs and support the story we tell about ourselves. With our memories we are all guilty of a Whig interpretation of our personal histories, seeing our former selves as steps toward our glorious present selves.

I know this is long but I have a small request for you, Marigold. I know Cade held you together all those years—and he may not know it—but you were holding him together too. I ask that maybe this one last time, you help hold him together. Please believe him when he tells you he loves you. Please look in your heart… because maybe you still love him too.

And in order to understand ourselves, a crucial step is to acknowledge that the ‘self’ is a fictional story that the intricate mechanisms of our mind constantly manufacture, update and rewrite. There is a storyteller in my mind that explains who I am, where I am coming from, where I am heading to, and what is happening right now. Like the government spin doctors who explain the latest political upheavals, the inner narrator repeatedly gets things wrong but rarely, if ever, admits it. And just as the government builds up a national myth with flags, icons and parades, so my inner propaganda machine builds up a personal myth with prized memories and cherished traumas that often bear little resemblance to the truth.

Dropping into the world with a half-baked brain has proven a winning strategy for humans. We have outcompeted every species on the planet: covering the landmass, conquering the seas, and bounding onto the moon. We have tripled our life spans. We compose symphonies, erect skyscrapers, and measure with ever-increasing precision the details of our own brains. None of those enterprises were genetically encoded. At least they weren't encoded directly. Instead, our genetics bring about a simple principle: don't build inflexible hardware; build a system that adapts to the world around it. Our DNA is not a fixed schematic for building an organism; rather, it sets up a dynamic system that continually rewrites it's circuitry to reflect the world around it and to optimize its efficacy within it.

The opportunity to walk back in our stories with Jesus might present itself when a snapshot of a memory comes to mind and we invite Him to connect the way we feel today to any hurt from our past. It might mean taking an honest feeling (insecurity, anger, resentment, powerlessness) into God’s presence and allowing Him to uncover, rewrite, and release us from the power of a memory or pattern in our past.

I pull her body into mine. My arms wrap around her, caging her in and pressing her to my heartbeat. Her tears don’t hurt the way they did last time. They still hurt, but it’s different. Last time it was so heartbreaking to see her cry it felt like a piece of my soul died having to hurt her. This time, it feels like a piece of my heart is leaving, but I have the comfort and assurance to know that it’ll return.

You told me to leave!” she shouts, her hands angrily thrashing through the air. “You told me to leave and that you wanted nothing to do with me once I did. So that’s what I did, Cade. I left. Even though it broke my heart to leave things how we did.” She gasps for air as she tries to keep a grip on her emotions. “You can’t pretend like we know anything about each other now. You don’t know me, and I don’t know you.

Why the fuck would I want you to stay away when I was in love with you?” Her mouth falls open. “What?” she asks, her voice breaking. I let out a dejected sigh, anger and sadness coursing through my veins. I shake my head. “You knew that.” “No.” She shakes her head back and forth, her eyes misting over. “I didn’t know. I hoped. God, I wanted that more than anything. But I asked you if you loved me and you told me no. How can I trust you now?

DW: Some critics have written that they don’t admire your so-called simple style. You have contended that your writing is a result of much rewriting and much revision and is deliberate. CP: The style is simplicity for the sake of complexity. Whoever feels that it is a “simple style” has to look into it and find the right way. Of course the style has become over the years much more complex and much more simple. Two fundamental things about the novel continue to intrigue me and I think this is our gift to ourselves as far as this form is concerned. One is the handling of character, people. No other form can handle people in significant depth over long periods of time. No other form can move back and forth, in and out, nothing can move the way the novel can in terms of the dimension of time. People and time are what I think the novel is really all about and I think they are limitless.

Like Willow, we all can honor our pain and then move toward something more joyful. We can focus on our resilience and remember our joys or sorrows. We can craft stories that tell us we are loved, strong, resilient, respected, worthy, generous, forgiven, and happy. We all have such stories if only we can uncover them.... To rewrite our story, we need effort and imagination. We can access imagination by journaling, painting, music, or art. One of my favorite things about writing is that I get to tell a second story about whatever happens to me. And, in this second story I can shape events in ways that are more beautiful and happiness-producing. Indeed, what is all art if not an attempt to tell a better story? Some of our stories bring out the best in us, whereas others induce despair, fear or anger. We can ask ourselves questions that remind us of our kindness, hard work, and strength over the years. We can explore our uncelebrated virtues and our survival skills.

What Kant took to be the necessary schemata of reality,' says a modern Freudian, 'are really only the necessary schemata of repression.' And an experimental psychologist adds that 'a sense of time can only exist where there is submission to reality.' To see everything as out of mere succession is to behave like a man drugged or insane. Literature and history, as we know them, are not like that; they must submit, be repressed. It is characteristic of the stage we are now at, I think, that the question of how far this submission ought to go--or, to put it the other way, how far one may cultivate fictional patterns or paradigms--is one which is debated, under various forms, by existentialist philosophers, by novelists and anti-novelists, by all who condemn the myths of historiography. It is a debate of fundamental interest, I think, and I shall discuss it in my fifth talk. Certainly, it seems, there must, even when we have achieved a modern degree of clerical scepticism, be some submission to the fictive patterns. For one thing, a systematic submission of this kind is almost another way of describing what we call 'form.' 'An inter-connexion of parts all mutually implied'; a duration (rather than a space) organizing the moment in terms of the end, giving meaning to the interval between tick and tock because we humanly do not want it to be an indeterminate interval between the tick of birth and the tock of death. That is a way of speaking in temporal terms of literary form. One thinks again of the Bible: of a beginning and an end (denied by the physicist Aristotle to the world) but humanly acceptable (and allowed by him to plots). Revelation, which epitomizes the Bible, puts our fate into a book, and calls it the book of life, which is the holy city. Revelation answers the command, 'write the things which thou hast seen, and the things which are, and the things which shall be hereafter'--'what is past and passing and to come'--and the command to make these things interdependent. Our novels do likewise. Biology and cultural adaptation require it; the End is a fact of life and a fact of the imagination, working out from the middle, the human crisis. As the theologians say, we 'live from the End,' even if the world should be endless. We need ends and kairoi and the pleroma, even now when the history of the world has so terribly and so untidily expanded its endless successiveness. We re-create the horizons we have abolished, the structures that have collapsed; and we do so in terms of the old patterns, adapting them to our new worlds. Ends, for example, become a matter of images, figures for what does not exist except humanly. Our stories must recognize mere successiveness but not be merely successive; Ulysses, for example, may be said to unite the irreducible chronos of Dublin with the irreducible kairoi of Homer. In the middest, we look for a fullness of time, for beginning, middle, and end in concord. For concord or consonance really is the root of the matter, even in a world which thinks it can only be a fiction. The theologians revive typology, and are followed by the literary critics. We seek to repeat the performance of the New Testament, a book which rewrites and requites another book and achieves harmony with it rather than questioning its truth. One of the seminal remarks of modern literary thought was Eliot's observation that in the timeless order of literature this process is continued. Thus we secularize the principle which recurs from the New Testament through Alexandrian allegory and Renaissance Neo-Platonism to our own time. We achieve our secular concords of past and present and future, modifying the past and allowing for the future without falsifying our own moment of crisis. We need, and provide, fictions of concord.

It means neither one of us can hide the fact that we know every single fucking thing there is to know about the other person. Time, miles, nothing will change that I know you, Goldie. I know you almost better than I know myself. And I know for a fucking fact that you’re lying.” “How?” “Because I know how much it fucking hurts my soul to see another man look at you the way I look at you. To see him touch you the way I want to touch you. And I know that after every fucking thing between us, even after you leaving me, that you feel the same.

Nine years ago you made a wish, and I desperately wanted to know what you’d wished for. I wanted it to be for me—for us. I want to spend every birthday with you, be your every birthday wish, Goldie. Because you’ll always be mine. I want to be your forever. There isn’t a version of my future that doesn’t have you in it.” He taps his chest, hitting against his heart. “You’re my entire heart. My entire world. I love you so much that it feels like I live and breathe you. Marry me, Goldie? Make me the luckiest man in the world and become my wife?

It is possible - given absolute control over the media and the police - to rewrite the memories of hundreds of millions of people, if you have a generation to accomplish it in. Almost always, this is done to improve the hold that the powerful have on power, or to serve the narcissism or megalomania or paranoia of national leaders. It throws a monkey wrench into the error-correcting machinery. It works to erase public memory of profound political mistakes, and thus to guarantee their eventual repetition. In our time, with total fabrication of realistic stills, motion pictures, and videotapes technologically within reach, with television in every home, and with critical thinking in decline, restructuring societal memories even without much attention from the secret police seems possible. What I’m imagining here is not that each of us has a budget of memories implanted in special therapeutic sessions by state-appointed psychiatrists, but rather that small numbers of people will have so much control over news stories, history books, and deeply affecting images as to work major changes in collective attitudes.

[M]ost Americans are still drawing some water from the Christian well. But a growing number are inventing their own versions of what Christianity means, abandoning the nuances of traditional theology in favor of religions that stroke their egos and indulge or even celebrate their worst impulses. . . . Both doubters and believers stand to lose if religion in the age of heresy turns out to be complicit in our fragmented communities, our collapsing families, our political polarization, and our weakened social ties. Both doubters and believers will inevitably suffer from a religious culture that supplies more moral license than moral correction, more self-satisfaction than self-examination, more comfort than chastisement. . . . Many of the overlapping crises in American life . . . can be traced to the impulse to emphasize one particular element of traditional Christianity—one insight, one doctrine, one teaching or tradition—at the expense of all the others. The goal is always progress: a belief system that’s simpler or more reasonable, more authentic or more up-to-date. Yet the results often vindicate the older Christian synthesis. Heresy sets out to be simpler and more appealing and more rational, but it often ends up being more extreme. . . . The boast of Christian orthodoxy . . . has always been its fidelity to the whole of Jesus. Its dogmas and definitions seek to encompass the seeming contradictions in the gospel narratives rather than evading them. . . . These [heretical] simplifications have usually required telling a somewhat different story about Jesus than the one told across the books of the New Testament. Sometimes this retelling has involved thinning out the Christian canon, eliminating tensions by subtracting them. . . . More often, though, it’s been achieved by straightforwardly rewriting or even inventing crucial portions of the New Testament account. . . . “Religious man was born to be saved,” [Philip Rieff] wrote, but “psychological man is born to be pleased.” . . . In 2005, . . . . Smith and Denton found no evidence of real secularization among their subjects: 97 percent of teenagers professed some sort of belief in the divine, 71 percent reported feeling either “very” or “somewhat” close to God, and the vast majority self-identified as Christian. There was no sign of deep alienation from their parents’ churches, no evidence that the teenagers in the survey were poised to convert outright to Buddhism or Islam, and no sign that real atheism was making deep inroads among the young. But neither was there any evidence of a recognizably orthodox Christian faith. “American Christianity,” Smith and Denton suggested, is “either degenerating into a pathetic version of itself,” or else is “actively being colonized and displaced by a quite different religious faith.” They continued: “Most religious teenagers either do not really comprehend what their own religious traditions say they are supposed to believe, or they do understand it and simply do not care to believe it.” . . . An ego that’s never wounded, never trammeled or traduced—and that’s taught to regard its deepest impulses as the promptings of the divine spirit—can easily turn out to be an ego that never learns sympathy, compassion, or real wisdom. And when contentment becomes an end unto itself, the way that human contents express themselves can look an awful lot like vanity and decadence. . . . For all their claims to ancient wisdom, there’s nothing remotely countercultural about the Tolles and Winfreys and Chopras. They’re telling an affluent, appetitive society exactly what it wants to hear: that all of its deepest desires are really God’s desires, and that He wouldn’t dream of judging. This message encourages us to justify our sins by spiritualizing them. . . . Our vaunted religiosity is real enough, but our ostensible Christian piety doesn’t have the consequences a casual observer might expect. . . . We nod to God, and then we do as we please.

EVERYDAY MAINTENANCE OF THE SOUL What does it mean to care for your soul? Care of the soul is the constant practice of bringing loving attention to the problems, conflicts, and longings of our lives. Emotional suffering is something to be attended to, not split off from. We can learn to read our life as a story, rather than as a clinical case. Moreover, if the story we have been telling ourselves is a melodrama or tragedy, we need to rewrite the story. Every human life, when seen from the perspective of the unrelenting Divine Mercy, is the story of grace unfolding. Love is revealing itself in the precise details of each human life, if only we do not impose the script of self-pity, bitterness, and fearfulness. The soul is where the divine attributes of God may be awakened from their latent state to be integrated into our character. These qualities are the soul's natural inheritance from the Divine. It is through communion with the Divine that the soul takes on the spiritual attributes of kindness, generosity, courage, forgiveness, patience, and freedom.

Astonishment: these women’s military professions—medical assistant, sniper, machine gunner, commander of an antiaircraft gun, sapper—and now they are accountants, lab technicians, museum guides, teachers…Discrepancy of the roles—here and there. Their memories are as if not about themselves, but some other girls. Now they are surprised at themselves. Before my eyes history “humanizes” itself, becomes like ordinary life. Acquires a different lighting. I’ve happened upon extraordinary storytellers. There are pages in their lives that can rival the best pages of the classics. The person sees herself so clearly from above—from heaven, and from below—from the ground. Before her is the whole path—up and down—from angel to beast. Remembering is not a passionate or dispassionate retelling of a reality that is no more, but a new birth of the past, when time goes in reverse. Above all it is creativity. As they narrate, people create, they “write” their life. Sometimes they also “write up” or “rewrite.” Here you have to be vigilant. On your guard. At the same time pain melts and destroys any falsehood. The temperature is too high! Simple people—nurses, cooks, laundresses—behave more sincerely, I became convinced of that…They, how shall I put it exactly, draw the words out of themselves and not from newspapers and books they have read—not from others. But only from their own sufferings and experiences. The feelings and language of educated people, strange as it may be, are often more subject to the working of time. Its general encrypting. They are infected by secondary knowledge. By myths. Often I have to go for a long time, by various roundabout ways, in order to hear a story of a “woman’s,” not a “man’s” war: not about how we retreated, how we advanced, at which sector of the front…It takes not one meeting, but many sessions. Like a persistent portrait painter. I sit for a long time, sometimes a whole day, in an unknown house or apartment. We drink tea, try on the recently bought blouses, discuss hairstyles and recipes. Look at photos of the grandchildren together. And then…After a certain time, you never know when or why, suddenly comes this long-awaited moment, when the person departs from the canon—plaster and reinforced concrete, like our monuments—and goes on to herself. Into herself. Begins to remember not the war but her youth. A piece of her life…I must seize that moment. Not miss it! But often, after a long day, filled with words, facts, tears, only one phrase remains in my memory (but what a phrase!): “I was so young when I left for the front, I even grew during the war.” I keep it in my notebook, although I have dozens of yards of tape in my tape recorder. Four or five cassettes… What helps me? That we are used to living together. Communally. We are communal people. With us everything is in common—both happiness and tears. We know how to suffer and how to tell about our suffering. Suffering justifies our hard and ungainly life.

The humanities, in contrast, emphasise the crucial importance of intersubjective entities, which cannot be reduced to hormones and neurons. To think historically means to ascribe real power to the contents of our imaginary stories. Of course, historians don’t ignore objective factors such as climate changes and genetic mutations, but they give much greater importance to the stories people invent and believe. North Korea and South Korea are so different from one another not because people in Pyongyang have different genes to people in Seoul, or because the north is colder and more mountainous. It’s because the north is dominated by very different fictions. Maybe someday breakthroughs in neurobiology will enable us to explain communism and the crusades in strictly biochemical terms. Yet we are very far from that point. During the twenty-first century the border between history and biology is likely to blur not because we will discover biological explanations for historical events, but rather because ideological fictions will rewrite DNA strands; political and economic interests will redesign the climate; and the geography of mountains and rivers will give way to cyberspace. As human fictions are translated into genetic and electronic codes, the intersubjective reality will swallow up the objective reality and biology will merge with history. In the twenty-first century fiction might thereby become the most potent force on earth, surpassing even wayward asteroids and natural selection. Hence if we want to understand our future, cracking genomes and crunching numbers is hardly enough. We must also decipher the fictions that give meaning to the world.

Yeah,” said Alex excitedly. “We’ve read all the Seth the Elf and Captain Cowman comics that we have, and we finished Diary of a Skateboarding Cowman, so we thought we’d write a comic of our own.” “Gosh, how fun,” said Porkins, “what’s it called?” “The Legend of Carl the Creeper,” said Carl. “It’s the true story of all my awesome adventures.” Dave picked up one of the pages. On the page was a crudely drawn picture of Carl fighting a big green squid. Above the picture of Carl was a speech bubble: Taek that craken! Itz creepa tiem! And above the picture of the squid was another speech bubble: O no Carl the creepa, u hav defeeted me! “Um, there are a few spelling errors,” said Dave. “No one cares about spelling errors,” said Carl, “it’s all about the epic story.” “Wait a minute,” said Dave, looking at the picture again, “is this meant to be you defeating the kraken? Are you punching it in the face?” “I’ve changed some of the stories to make them a bit more exciting,” shrugged Carl. Dave picked up another page. This one showed Carl and Alex both beating up a big black monster with tentacles. There was a speech bubble above Alex’s head: Taek that endabrin! Did sumbuddy orda the Alex? “Um, and I suppose this is you two defeating Enderbrine?” said Dave. “And what is this thing you’re saying Alex — ‘did somebody order the Alex?’” “Yeah,” grinned Alex. “Captain cowman’s catchphrase is ‘did somebody order the beef?’. So, my catchphrase is ‘did somebody order the Alex?’” “These are all early drafts,” said Carl. “Once we bring it to a publisher and they pay us a load of emeralds, we’ll get our secretary to rewrite it all.” Dave picked up another page. This one showed Carl punching Herobrine and Herobrine’s head exploding. “Right,” said Dave, putting the page back down, “um, it looks great so far.

I’m not blind. I know the way you look at the girl. I remember looking at your mother the same way. Like she hung the damn moon and all the stars around it.

Our story is nowhere near perfect. We had bumps and bruises along the way that took ages to heal. But the imperfections make it ours. And to me, it’s the best love story that’s ever been told.

That’s the thing about marigolds, they’re all beautiful.

His eyes soften as he looks at me with such a powerful look, it’s the first time I wonder if he may love me back. And not the kind of love that comes with growing up with someone. The kind of love that’s all consuming. The kind of love that’s like a brand to the soul, one that lingers in the deepest depths of your heart for the rest of your life. The kind that goes from I love you to I’m in love with you.

The story of our lives unfolds only once, and each time a page is turned, we force ourselves into knowing that we can never edit or rewrite our past. We move closer and closer to an ending. And we can only hope that when we read ourselves, the story will unfold lucidly enough to teach us something.

Hold the reins, wild stallion! It's time to play thought detective and show those unruly ideas who's boss. So, hit that "delete" button on your ego, and let's turn the tables on chaos. We'll navigate the mind's maze like witty wizards, casting spells of self-control and rewriting the story of our triumph.

When a person feels unseen or unheard for a long time, it’s inevitable that the one who finally helps them feel known becomes important. It is the truest act of intimacy to help someone feel fully known and fully loved.

Her grief over the death of the future she had dreamt of went unexpressed, but never unfelt.

No matter how much our parents’ choices aren’t about us, we deeply internalize them. While our head may mature beyond those beliefs, it can be very difficult to get our inner child to catch up and believe the same thing.

The sins of the father are visited upon future generations…” EXODUS 34:7 Oh, how I used to hate this verse. I once had a client tell me that she hated it, too. It made her think of an-impossible-to-please, vengeful god. A god she wanted no part of. I completely understood, because for a big part of my life, I agreed with her. But then one day, a different perspective on this controversial verse presented itself to me. One that I shared with my client. It’s one I would like to share with you, too. What if this verse is not some warning of wrath from a vengeful, punitive deity? What if this verse is not talking about something God does to us, but rather something we do to ourselves—and to each other? What if this verse is actually a compassionate, albeit cryptic, warning? Perhaps it is a rallying cry to get us to show up and own our crap; to heal and to grow, and to set future generations up to do the same. What if this verse is a plea from on High to recognize our choices can set off ripple effects that are far beyond our understanding and that our choices influence the future beyond what we are able to recognize in the tangible, relational realms. And what if this ominous, poetic warning is really pointing us toward something much more scientific and even holistic? What if it’s a proof-text that we are incapable of living compartmentalized lives—that every part of us is inextricably connected to the other, not only within our own lives, but in all the lives that lead up to our existence? What if the ripples set in motion by those who have gone before us cast destructive waves upon the present and have potential to reach into future generations, unless there is some intervention?