She Represents You Quotes

Chaol kept his sword drawn. “I will not go to Anielle,” he growled. “And I will not serve you a moment longer. There is one true king in this room—­there always has been. And he is not sitting on that throne.” Dorian stiffened. But Chaol went on. “There is a queen in the north, and she has already beaten you once. She will beat you again. And again. Because what she represents, and what your son represents, is what you fear most: hope. You cannot steal it, no matter how many you rip from their homes and enslave. And you cannot break it, no matter how many you murder.

Excuse me? Tonight you represent every dateless woman in this city, every woman who's about to sit down to a lonely meal of Weight Watchers past primavera she's just nuked in the microwave. Every woman who will get into bed tonight with a book or reruns of Sex and the City as her only companion. You are our shining hope....But no pressure.

Hello' said a vague and dreamy voice from behind them. Harry looked up: Luna Lovegood had drifted over from the Ravenclaw table. Many people were staring at her and few people openly laughing and pointing; she had managed to procure a hat shaped like a life-size lion's head, which was perched precariously on her head. 'I'm supporting Gryffindor' said Luna, pointing unnecessarily at her hat. "Look what it does...' She reached up and tapped the hat with her wand. It opened its mouth wide and gave an extremely realistic roar that made everyone in the vicinity jump. 'It's good, isn't it?' said Luna happily. 'I wanted to have it chewing up a serpent to represent Slytherin, you know, but there wasn't time. Anyway...good luck, Ronald!

You want me to give her a key?" the guy asked. "I want you to give her a possibility," she told him, looking at my necklace again. "And that's what a key represents. An open door, a chance. You know?

Ethan extended his hand. "Mr. Merit. Thank you for your help." My grandfather shook his hand, but he also shook his head. "Thank your Sentinel. She's a fine representative of your House." Ethan looked at me, pride-and love?-in his eyes. "We're in agreement there.

So can I ask…?” I waved my hands vaguely. I didn’t have the words. “How it does work?” She smirked. “As long as you don’t ask me to represent every gender-fluid person for you, okay? I’m not an ambassador. I’m not a teacher or a poster child. I’m just”—she mimicked my hand-waving—“me. Trying to be me as best I can.

Hubris means deadly pride, Percy. Thinking you can do things better than anyone else... even the gods.' 'You feel that way?' She [Annabeth] looked down. 'Don't you ever feel like, what if the world really is messed up? What if we could do it all over again from scratch? No more war. Nobody homeless. No more summer reading homework.' 'I'm listening.' 'I mean, the West represents a lot of the best things mankind ever did - that's why the fire is still burning. That's why Olympus is still around. But sometimes you just see the bad stuff, you know? And you start thinking the way Luke does: "If I could tear this all down, I would do it better." Don't you ever feel that way? Like you could do a better job if you ran the world?

The witch reached into the picnic basket and pulled out a light brown chamois bag about the size of a playing card. “Maybe this will help you. It’ll boost your self-esteem.” Now we’re getting somewhere. Riley took the bag and opened it. She looked to the bottom to find … nothing. “Ah, it’s empty.” “Of course,” Ayden replied. “It’s up to you to fill it. Find things that mean something to you, that represent times where you’ve overcome an obstacle, learned something important. Put those items in the bag and they’ll help you find your strength.

Choose your lady wisely. She represents you.

You don't care what people think," he said. She couldn't tell from the way he emphasized the words if he was asking a question or making an observation. Still, she felt obliged to answer. "Of course I care. To a certain extent we all care, but we can't care to the point that we live in fear of others' opinion, that we allow them to change who we are. We must be willing to stand up and defend what represents the very core of our being. Otherwise what is the purpose of individuality? We'd be nothing but imitations of each other, and I daresay we'd all be rather boring.

Yes, we have different viewpoints represented among us," she continued. "Yes, we have a displacer in our number, and a half giant, and a seedman who publicly disgraced us." "She's talking about you," Drake muttered to Nollin, loud enough to draw a laugh. "No, Drake, I'm talking about you," Farfalee corrected.

I long ago became convinced that the most reliable source for arcane and obscure and seemingly unobtainable information does not lie with the government or law enforcement agencies. Apparently neither the CIA nor the military intelligence apparatus inside the Pentagon had even a slight inkling of the Soviet Union's impending collapse, right up to the moment the Kremlin's leaders were trying to cut deals for their memoirs with New York publishers. Or, if a person really wishes a lesson in the subjective nature of official information, he can always call the IRS and ask for help with his tax forms, then call back a half hour later and ask the same questions to a different representative. So where do you go to find a researcher who is intelligent, imaginative, skilled in the use of computers, devoted to discovering the truth, and knowledgeable about science, technology, history, and literature, and who usually works for dirt and gets credit for nothing? After lunch I drove to the city library on Main and asked the reference librarian to find what she could on Junior Crudup.

Every time I change wives I should burn the last one. That way I'd be rid of them. They wouldn't be around to complicate my existence. Maybe, that would bring back my youth, too. You kill the woman and you wipe out the past she represents.

Once I asked my dad how you know when you're in love. He said you just know, and that if you have to ask the question then you haven't been in love yet. And he's right. Because there aren't words for this. No combination of letters could ever represent what she is to me.

We are living in a time when sensitivities are at the surface, often vented with cutting words. Philosophically, you can believe anything so as you do not claim it a better way. Religiously, you can hold to anything, so long as you do not bring Jesus Christ into it. If a spiritual idea is eastern, it is granted critical immunity; if western, it is thoroughly criticized. Thus, a journalist can walk into a church and mock its carryings on, but he or she dare not do the same if the ceremony is from eastern fold. Such is the mood at the end of the twentieth century. A mood can be a dangerous state of mind, because it can crush reason under the weight of feeling. But that is precisely what I believe postmodernism best represents - a mood.

Far more powerful than religion, far more powerful than money, or even land or violence, are symbols. Symbols are stories. Symbols are pictures, or items, or ideas that represent something else. Human beings attach such meaning and importance to symbols that they can inspire hope, stand in for gods, or convince someone that he or she is dying. These symbols are everywhere around you.

My name," I tell Wilbur in the most dignified voice I can find, "Was inspired by Harriet Quimby, the first female American pilot and the first woman ever to cross the Channel in an aeroplane. My mother chose it to represent freedom and bravery and independence, and she gave it to me just before she died." There's a short pause while Wilbur looks appropriately moved. Then Dad says, "Who told you that?" "Annabel did." "Well, it's not true at all. You were named after Harriet the tortoise, the second longest living tortoise in the world." There's a silence while I stare at Dad and Annabel puts her head in her hands so abruptly that the pen starts to leak into her collar. "Richard," she moans quietly. "A tortoise?" I repeat in dismay. "I'm named after a tortoise? What the hell is a tortoise supposed to represent?" "Longevity?

Caldenia blinked. “Who are the attending parties?” “The Holy Anocracy represented by House Krahr, the Hope-crushing Horde, and the Merchants of Baha-char. They coming here for Arbitration and they will probably try to murder each other the moment they walk through the door.” Caldenia’s eyes widened. “Do you really think so? This is absolutely marvelous!” She would think so, wouldn’t she?

Their [girls] sexual energy, their evaluation of adolescent boys and other girls goes thwarted, deflected back upon the girls, unspoken, and their searching hungry gazed returned to their own bodies. The questions, Whom do I desire? Why? What will I do about it? are turned around: Would I desire myself? Why?...Why not? What can I do about it? The books and films they see survey from the young boy's point of view his first touch of a girl's thighs, his first glimpse of her breasts. The girls sit listening, absorbing, their familiar breasts estranged as if they were not part of their bodies, their thighs crossed self-consciously, learning how to leave their bodies and watch them from the outside. Since their bodies are seen from the point of view of strangeness and desire, it is no wonder that what should be familiar, felt to be whole, become estranged and divided into parts. What little girls learn is not the desire for the other, but the desire to be desired. Girls learn to watch their sex along with the boys; that takes up the space that should be devoted to finding out about what they are wanting, and reading and writing about it, seeking it and getting it. Sex is held hostage by beauty and its ransom terms are engraved in girls' minds early and deeply with instruments more beautiful that those which advertisers or pornographers know how to use: literature, poetry, painting, and film. This outside-in perspective on their own sexuality leads to the confusion that is at the heart of the myth. Women come to confuse sexual looking with being looked at sexually ("Clairol...it's the look you want"); many confuse sexually feeling with being sexually felt ("Gillete razors...the way a woman wants to feel"); many confuse desiring with being desirable. "My first sexual memory," a woman tells me, "was when I first shaved my legs, and when I ran my hand down the smooth skin I felt how it would feel to someone else's hand." Women say that when they lost weight they "feel sexier" but the nerve endings in the clitoris and nipples don't multiply with weight loss. Women tell me they're jealous of the men who get so much pleasure out of the female body that they imagine being inside the male body that is inside their own so that they can vicariously experience desire. Could it be then that women's famous slowness of arousal to men's, complex fantasy life, the lack of pleasure many experience in intercourse, is related to this cultural negation of sexual imagery that affirms the female point of view, the culture prohibition against seeing men's bodies as instruments of pleasure? Could it be related to the taboo against representing intercourse as an opportunity for a straight woman actively to pursue, grasp, savor, and consume the male body for her satisfaction, as much as she is pursued, grasped, savored, and consumed for his?

We are all women you assure me? Then I may tell you that the very next words I read were these – ‘Chloe liked Olivia …’ Do not start. Do not blush. Let us admit in the privacy of our own society that these things sometimes happen. Sometimes women do like women. ‘Chloe liked Olivia,’ I read. And then it struck me how immense a change was there. Chloe liked Olivia perhaps for the first time in literature. Cleopatra did not like Octavia. And how completely Antony and Cleopatra would have been altered had she done so! As it is, I thought, letting my mind, I am afraid, wander a little from Life’s Adventure, the whole thing is simplified, conventionalized, if one dared say it, absurdly. Cleopatra’s only feeling about Octavia is one of jealousy. Is she taller than I am? How does she do her hair? The play, perhaps, required no more. But how interesting it would have been if the relationship between the two women had been more complicated. All these relationships between women, I thought, rapidly recalling the splendid gallery of fictitious women, are too simple. So much has been left out, unattempted. And I tried to remember any case in the course of my reading where two women are represented as friends. There is an attempt at it in Diana of the Crossways. They are confidantes, of course, in Racine and the Greek tragedies. They are now and then mothers and daughters. But almost without exception they are shown in their relation to men.

Carl Parker observes, if you took all the fools out of the Lege, it wouldn’t be a representative body anymore.

Question." "Yes," Candace asked expectantly, eyes fixed on the dark street ahead. "Have you ever had to chose sides between a friend and a boyfriend?" Candace nodded. "Which side are you suppose to pick?" "The right one." "What if they're both right?" "They're not." "But they are," Melody insisted. "That's the problem." "No." Candace slowly rolled past a police cruiser. "They both think they're right. But who do you think is right? Which side represents the thing you think is worth fighting for?" Melody glanced out the window as though she was expecting the answer to be revealed on a neighbor's lawn. Every house except hers had the lights turned off. "I dunno." "You do," Candace insisted. "You just don't have the courage to be honest with yourself. Because then you'd have to do the thing you don't want to do, and you hate doing anything that's hard. Which is why you gave up singing and why you have no life and why you've always been a -" "Um okay! Can we get back to the part where you were sounding like Oprah?" "I'm just saying, Melly, what would you do if you weren't afraid? That's your answer. That's your side." She turned into the circular driveway and put the SUV in PARK. "And if you don't choose it, you're lying to yourself and everyone around you." She opened the door and grabbed her purse. "Oprah out!" The door slammed behind her.

The medial woman is immersed in the psychic atmosphere of her environment and the spirit of her period, but above all in the collective (impersonal) unconscious. The unconscious, once it is constellated and can become conscious, exerts an effect. The medial woman is overcome by this effect, she is absorbed and moulded by it and sometimes she represents it herself. She must for instance express or act what is “in the air,” what the environment cannot or will not admit, but what is nevertheless a part of it. It is mostly the dark aspect of a situation or of a predominant idea, and she thus activates what is negative and dangerous. In this way she becomes the carrier of evil, but that she does, is nevertheless exclusively her personal problem. As the contents involved are unconscious, she lacks the necessary faculty of discrimination to perceive and the language to express them adequately. The overwhelming force of the collective unconscious sweeps through the ego of the medial woman and weakens it. By its nature the collective unconscious is not limited to the person concerned further reason why the medial woman identifies herself and others with archetypal contents. But to deal with the collective unconscious demands a solid ego consciousness and an adequate adaptation to reality. As a rule the medial woman disposes of neither and consequently she will create confusion in the same measure as she herself is confused. Conscious and unconscious, I and you, personal and impersonal psychic contents remain undifferentiated. As objective psychic contents in herself and in others are not understood, or are taken personally, she experiences a destiny not her own as though it were her own and loses herself in ideas which do not belong to her. Instead of being a mediatrix, she is only a means and becomes the first victim of her own nature.

Saying you are a "Diverse" Corporation in your hiring practice and vendor relations program by only have 1 person of color represent your diversity department is and having 'Oprah' as your spokesperson, is not really 'Diverse'. It is having a 'token' person of color in that company. 1 person of 1 ethnic race does not mean she or he represents the other ethnic races who make up the population in America in that company. And an Asian person from one country versus another Asian country does not mean the same. - On Diversity by Kailin Gow

She was one of those exceptional children who do still spend time outside, in solitude. In her case nature represented beauty - and refuge. "It's so peaceful out there and the air smells so good. I mean, it's polluted, but not as much as the city air. For me, it's completely different there," she said. "It's like you're free when you go out there. It's your own time. Sometimes I go there when I'm mad - and then, just with the peacefulness, I'm better. I can come back home happy, and my mom doesn't even know why."      The she described her special part of the woods.      "I had a place. There was a big waterfall and a creek on one side of it. I'd dug a big hole there, and sometimes I'd take a tent back there, or a blanket, and just lie down in the hole, and look up at the trees and sky. Sometimes I'd fall asleep back there. I just felt free; it was like my place, and I could do what I wanted, with nobody to stop me. I used to go down there almost every day."      The young poet's face flushed. Her voice thickened.      "And then they just cut the woods down. It was like they cut down part of me.

When you love a woman, what do you really love in her? It will be different with different people and it will be different at different times. If love really grows, this is the way: first you fall in love with the woman because her body is beautiful. That is the first available beauty - her face, her eyes, her proportion, her elegance, her dancing, pulsating energy. Her body is beautiful. That is the first approach. You fall in love. Then after a few days you start going deeper into the woman. You start loving her heart. Now a far more beautiful revelation is coming to you. The body becomes secondary; the heart becomes primary. A new vision has arisen, a new peak. If you go on loving the woman, sooner or later you will find there are peaks beyond peaks, depths beyond depths. Then you start loving the soul of the woman. Then it is not only her heart - now that has become secondary. Now it is the very person, the very presence, the very radiance, the aliveness, that unknown phenomenon of her being - that she is. The body is very far away, the heart has also gone away - now the being is. And then one day this particular woman's being becomes far away. Now you start loving womanhood in her, the femininity, the feminineness, that receptivity. Now she is not a particular woman at all, she simply reflects womanhood, a particular form of womanhood. Now it is no longer individual, it is becoming more and more universal. And one day that womanhood has also disappeared - you love the humanity in her. Now she is not just a representative of woman, she is also a representative of man as much. The sky is becoming bigger and bigger. Then one day it is not humanity, but existence. That she exists, that's all that you want - that she exists. You are coming very close to God. Then the last point comes - all formulations and all forms disappear and there is God. You have found God through your woman, through your man. Each love is an echo of God's love.

You represent everything that someone has been searching their entire lives for. I hope you find the person who is searching for you.

Whenever you feel down, remember it is always daylight somewhere on this rock we call Earth. Whenever you are belittled by a human, remember that she or he does not represent the whole for the Earth is way bigger than any puny creature you may encounter.

Just the word beautiful was seductive - but what did it really mean? Beauty was a soft word that ached with possibility, pliant as dough. You could not presume to define it, she realized, because the very idea of beauty and all it represented was a subjective thing - in the eye of the beholder - but that wasn't really true anymore.

Monster stories are powerful. They explore prejudice, rejection, anger and every imaginable negative aspect of living in society. However, only half of society is reflected in the ranks of the people who create these monsters. Almost every single iconic monster in film is male and was designed by a man: the Wolfman, Frankenstein, Dracula, King Kong. The emotions and problems that all of them represent are also experienced by women, but women are more likely to see themselves as merely the victims of these monsters. Women rarely get to explore on-screen what it's like to be a giant pissed-off creature. Those emotions are written off. If a woman is angry or upset, she'll be considered hysterical and too emotional. One of the hardest things about misogyny in the film industry isn't facing it directly, it's having to tamp down your anger about it so that when you speak about the problem, you'll be taken seriously. Women don't get to stomp around like Godzilla. Someone will just ask if you're on your period.

She liked to scatter hope," Minerva said, taking his offering. "Pardon?" "Snowdrops. They represent hope. The first flowers in the spring. Hope for a new beginning." She took a sniff of the delicate blossoms and then shyly glanced over at him. "Perhaps you were meant to be here today. To find your hope.

We all believe in you two. We are all fighting for you. Do you know why?" She shook her head. She didn't have the faintest idea. "Because you two represent something, something more than you do individually. You are the impossible dreamers. The two who took on fate to be together. No one believed you could be anything. More than once, you both strove for more, for dreams that you should've never dreamed. So when you say you fight for peace, people believe it. Because you have cheated death and fate. Compared to that, finding peace will surely be easy.

And what she understood - what none of the ones who came to touch Simon's forehead understood - was that the misery of war represented the world's only truly universal language. Its native speakers occupied different ends of the world, and the prayers they recited were not the same and the empty superstitions to which they clung so dearly were not the same - and yet they were. War broke them the same way, made them scared and angry and vengeful the same way. In times of peace and good fortune they were nothing alike, but stripped of these things they were kin. The universal slogan of war, she'd learned, was simple: If it had been you, you'd have done no different.

How may we address you this night?” Darlington inquired. The wearer of the mask represented Lan Caihe, one of the eight immortals of Chinese myth, who could move amongst genders at will. At each gathering of Manuscript, a different Caihe was chosen. “Tonight I am she.

You speak as if you envied him." "And I do envy him, Emma. In one respect he is the object of my envy." Emma could say no more. They seemed to be within half a sentence of Harriet, and her immediate feeling was to avert the subject, if possible. She made her plan; she would speak of something totally different—the children in Brunswick Square; and she only waited for breath to begin, when Mr. Knightley startled her, by saying, "You will not ask me what is the point of envy.—You are determined, I see, to have no curiosity.—You are wise—but I cannot be wise. Emma, I must tell you what you will not ask, though I may wish it unsaid the next moment." "Oh! then, don't speak it, don't speak it," she eagerly cried. "Take a little time, consider, do not commit yourself." "Thank you," said he, in an accent of deep mortification, and not another syllable followed. Emma could not bear to give him pain. He was wishing to confide in her—perhaps to consult her;—cost her what it would, she would listen. She might assist his resolution, or reconcile him to it; she might give just praise to Harriet, or, by representing to him his own independence, relieve him from that state of indecision, which must be more intolerable than any alternative to such a mind as his.—They had reached the house. "You are going in, I suppose?" said he. "No,"—replied Emma—quite confirmed by the depressed manner in which he still spoke—"I should like to take another turn. Mr. Perry is not gone." And, after proceeding a few steps, she added—"I stopped you ungraciously, just now, Mr. Knightley, and, I am afraid, gave you pain.—But if you have any wish to speak openly to me as a friend, or to ask my opinion of any thing that you may have in contemplation—as a friend, indeed, you may command me.—I will hear whatever you like. I will tell you exactly what I think." "As a friend!"—repeated Mr. Knightley.—"Emma, that I fear is a word—No, I have no wish—Stay, yes, why should I hesitate?—I have gone too far already for concealment.—Emma, I accept your offer—Extraordinary as it may seem, I accept it, and refer myself to you as a friend.—Tell me, then, have I no chance of ever succeeding?" He stopped in his earnestness to look the question, and the expression of his eyes overpowered her. "My dearest Emma," said he, "for dearest you will always be, whatever the event of this hour's conversation, my dearest, most beloved Emma—tell me at once. Say 'No,' if it is to be said."—She could really say nothing.—"You are silent," he cried, with great animation; "absolutely silent! at present I ask no more." Emma was almost ready to sink under the agitation of this moment. The dread of being awakened from the happiest dream, was perhaps the most prominent feeling. "I cannot make speeches, Emma:" he soon resumed; and in a tone of such sincere, decided, intelligible tenderness as was tolerably convincing.—"If I loved you less, I might be able to talk about it more. But you know what I am.—You hear nothing but truth from me.—I have blamed you, and lectured you, and you have borne it as no other woman in England would have borne it.—Bear with the truths I would tell you now, dearest Emma, as well as you have borne with them. The manner, perhaps, may have as little to recommend them. God knows, I have been a very indifferent lover.—But you understand me.—Yes, you see, you understand my feelings—and will return them if you can. At present, I ask only to hear, once to hear your voice.

At that, Ascher stood up. “Hi,” she said, smiling brightly. “You don’t know me. I’m Hannah. Back off my partner before you get hurt.” “I know who you are, hot stuff,” I drawled, not standing. I set my staff down across the table. “And I already backed off your partner. You can tell from how there aren’t any splatter marks. Play nice, Ascher.” Her smile vanished at my response, and her dark eyes narrowed. She drummed her nails on the tabletop exactly once, slowly, as if contemplating a decision. A smirk touched her mouth. “So you’re the infamous Dresden.” Her eyes went past me, to Karrin. Ascher was a foot taller than she was. “And this is your bodyguard? Seriously? Aren’t they supposed to be a little bigger?” “She represents the Lollipop Guild,” I replied. “She’ll represent them right through the front and out the back of your skull if you don’t show a little respect.

if you were to identify a single person who embodies us Indians the best, who do you think it should be? Ideally, it should be a tribal woman because she is most likely to be carrying the deepest-rooted and widest-spread mtDNA lineage in India today, M2. In a genetic sense, she would represent all of our history, with very little left out. She shares the most with the largest number of Indians, no matter where in the social ladder they stand, what language they speak and which region they inhabit because we are all migrants, and we are all mixed.

A quantum is the smallest amount of energy there is. So when you hear someone say such and such a thing was or is a “quantum leap,” he or she is actually talking about the smallest possible leap of any kind found in nature. It’s an ironic use of the phrase. However, I’ll grant you that the quantum leap represents an enormous step in thought. In a quantum leap, a particle is either here, or it’s there—in an instant. This discovery changed the world.

I can tell you what The Eye wanted with Sophie,” Archer spoke up. He was grinning, but his voice was tight with pain. “We heard she was particularly skilled at Chutes and Ladders, and since The Eye holds a Chutes and Ladders tournament every summer-“ His voice broke on a cry of pain as Lara twisted her fingers, and the glowing threads of magic around him burned white hot for a moment. I had to bite the inside of my cheek to keep from screaming. “Archer Cross is not only a member of L’Occhio di Dio, but he’s also a traitor to his people,” Lara said, moving to stand closer to him. “He represents the greatest threat any of us can ever face. Which is why he’ll be so very useful to us.” Jenna slipped her hand in mine and squeezed my fingers as Lara said, “Today, we’ll be using Mr. Cross for practice.

Caroline nodded. "I understand that. The bayou is a huge part of your life and the local lifestyle. And people might come in here because of the bayou, but they don't fall in love with it and come back because of that. They fall in love and come back because they feel like a part of the family. Because they feel welcome and accepted here. That's what all of this represents." She gestured to encompass all of the photographs they had hanging on the wall. "I think these photographs are key. The posters and sports banners are great, but these photographs need to stay for sure.

They're testing you to see if you qualify for Foxfire." Fitz paused, like that was supposed to mean something. "Isn't that glowing fungus?" she asked. Alden cracked up. Fitz looked a little insulted. "It's our most prestigious academy." "You named your most prestigious academy after fungus?" "It represents a bright glow in a dark world." "But... the light comes from fungus.

By inspiring someone, you stimulate that person’s creativity; and when someone is gifted with creativity, he or she inherently holds the source of progress and prosperity. Creativity is the simple but powerful ability to make something from nothing, and it just so happens that making something from nothing is also the definition of magic. Become a storyteller and help us keep fairy tales alive. Even if people don’t believe in it, never let the world forget what magic represents. Wherever there is a storyteller, there will always be hope. Thank you, and may you all have a happily-ever-after! With love, The Fairy Godmother

...you needs uh man.” Janie laughed at all these well-wishers because she knew that they knew plenty of women alone; that she was not the first one they had ever seen. But most of the others were poor. Besides she liked being lonesome for a change. This freedom feeling was fine. These men didn’t represent a thing she wanted to know about. She had already experienced them...

Tía is older, with little money. She is respected in the neighborhood & beloved by the people to whom she offers care, but El Cero occupies a world of men who care little of healers, & even less of the girls who represent little more than dollar signs.

She has no hope, Prince. She has no hope left in her heart. Help her. If not for her sake, then at least for what she represents—what she could offer all of us, you included.” “And what is that?” he dared ask. Emrys met his gaze unflinchingly as he whispered, “A better world.

[she] told me once that if you ask the sea for help it never fails you. I tried it a few times. It does make you feel better. You can just ask the sea for help and see what happens, or, alternatively, you can give it your problems. It's big enough to take them, after all. You could choose some large stones, make each one represent one of your problems and throw them in the water.' He shrugged. 'Probably sounds a bit hippy for you. I know you're more down to earth than we are—but sometimes you just need something to help you focus and let things go.

THE ORGANIC FOODS MYTH A few decades ago, a woman tried to sue a butter company that had printed the word 'LITE' on its product's packaging. She claimed to have gained so much weight from eating the butter, even though it was labeled as being 'LITE'. In court, the lawyer representing the butter company simply held up the container of butter and said to the judge, "My client did not lie. The container is indeed 'light in weight'. The woman lost the case. In a marketing class in college, we were assigned this case study to show us that 'puffery' is legal. This means that you can deceptively use words with double meanings to sell a product, even though they could mislead customers into thinking your words mean something different. I am using this example to touch upon the myth of organic foods. If I was a lawyer representing a company that had labeled its oranges as being organic, and a man was suing my client because he found out that the oranges were being sprayed with toxins, my defense opening statement would be very simple: "If it's not plastic or metallic, it's organic." Most products labeled as being organic are not really organic. This is the truth. You pay premium prices for products you think are grown without chemicals, but most products are. If an apple is labeled as being organic, it could mean two things. Either the apple tree itself is free from chemicals, or just the soil. One or the other, but rarely both. The truth is, the word 'organic' can mean many things, and taking a farmer to court would be difficult if you found out his fruits were indeed sprayed with pesticides. After all, all organisms on earth are scientifically labeled as being organic, unless they are made of plastic or metal. The word 'organic' comes from the word 'organism', meaning something that is, or once was, living and breathing air, water and sunlight. So, the next time you stroll through your local supermarket and see brown pears that are labeled as being organic, know that they could have been third-rate fare sourced from the last day of a weekend market, and have been re-labeled to be sold to a gullible crowd for a premium price. I have a friend who thinks that organic foods have to look beat up and deformed because the use of chemicals is what makes them look perfect and flawless. This is not true. Chemical-free foods can look perfect if grown in your backyard. If you go to jungles or forests untouched by man, you will see fruit and vegetables that look like they sprouted from trees from Heaven. So be cautious the next time you buy anything labeled as 'organic'. Unless you personally know the farmer or the company selling the products, don't trust what you read. You, me, and everything on land and sea are organic. Suzy Kassem, Truth Is Crying

Let me be very clear. I am headed north to escape everything you are, and everything you represent. You are all I loathe about the aristocracy – arrogant, vapid, without purpose, and altogether too reliant on your title and your fortune, which you have come by without any effort of your own. You haven’t a thought in your head worth thinking – as all of your intelligence is used up in planning seductions and winning silly carriage races. In case you have not noticed, I was perfectly fine in the stables until you came along and revealed me to be a woman. And when I left, with every intention of finding my own way north, it was you who followed me! And somehow I am looking to trap you into marriage?” She paused. “I do not know how I can put it more plainly. Go away.

As I look back on my own life, I recognize that some of the greatest gifts I received from my parents stemmed not from what they did for me—but rather from what they didn’t do for me. One such example: my mother never mended my clothes. I remember going to her when I was in the early grades of elementary school, with holes in both socks of my favorite pair. My mom had just had her sixth child and was deeply involved in our church activities. She was very, very busy. Our family had no extra money anywhere, so buying new socks was just out of the question. So she told me to go string thread through a needle, and to come back when I had done it. That accomplished—it took me about ten minutes, whereas I’m sure she could have done it in ten seconds—she took one of the socks and showed me how to run the needle in and out around the periphery of the hole, rather than back and forth across the hole, and then simply to draw the hole closed. This took her about thirty seconds. Finally, she showed me how to cut and knot the thread. She then handed me the second sock, and went on her way. A year or so later—I probably was in third grade—I fell down on the playground at school and ripped my Levi’s. This was serious, because I had the standard family ration of two pairs of school trousers. So I took them to my mom and asked if she could repair them. She showed me how to set up and operate her sewing machine, including switching it to a zigzag stitch; gave me an idea or two about how she might try to repair it if it were she who was going to do the repair, and then went on her way. I sat there clueless at first, but eventually figured it out. Although in retrospect these were very simple things, they represent a defining point in my life. They helped me to learn that I should solve my own problems whenever possible; they gave me the confidence that I could solve my own problems; and they helped me experience pride in that achievement. It’s funny, but every time I put those socks on until they were threadbare, I looked at that repair in the toe and thought, “I did that.” I have no memory now of what the repair to the knee of those Levi’s looked like, but I’m sure it wasn’t pretty. When I looked at it, however, it didn’t occur to me that I might not have done a perfect mending job. I only felt pride that I had done it. As for my mom, I have wondered what

She shook her head. - “I believe in the race,” she cried. - “It represents the survival of the pushing.” - “It has development.” - “Decay fascinates me more.” - “What of art?” she asked. - “It is a malady.” - “Love?” - “An illusion.” - “Religion?” - “The fashionable substitute for belief.” - “You are a sceptic.” - “Never! Scepticism is the beginning of faith.” - “What are you?” - “To define is to limit.” - “Give me a clue.” - “Threads snap. You would lose your way in the labyrinth.” - “You bewilder me.

I wanted to get you flowers but none of the flower shops are open at this hour. I checked six all-night variety stores before finding any at all and this was the best of the-" "They're lovely," Rachel interrupted as she took the flowers. Limp and sad-looking as they were, they truly were lovely to Rachel. They represented hope, and she accepted them gladly, offering a shy smile as she lifted them to her face and sniffed the delicate bouquet of- "Salami?" They were kept in the deli fridge," he muttered, looking embarrassed.

Generally, a mood will run its course in an inteligent man; if a woman doesn't puncture it prematurely, the man will puncture it himself. He will regain his senses somewhere along the way; he will say, "Now wait, we had better think about this." That is, if his wife hasn't said five minutes before, "Now, dear, don't you think we had better think about this?" Because then he won't, of course. If a woman is needling, it is doubly hard for a man to come out of a mood. That intensifies it. A man is really in a kind of travail when he is in a mood. He needs help, not needling, but feminine help. He probably won't thank you for it, but inside he will be awfully grateful. When a woman has to deal with a man in a mood, she generally does the wrong thing. She generally gets her animus out, that nasty thing, and says, "Now, look, this is utter nonsense, stop it. We don't need any more fishline leader." That is just throwing gasoline on the fire. There will be an anima-animus exchange, and all will be lost. The two are in the right hand and in the left hand of the goddess Maya, and you might as well give up for the afternoon. There is, however, a point of genius that a woman can bring forth if she is capable of it and willing to do it. If she will become more feminine than the mood attacking the man , she can dispel it for him. But this is a very, very difficult thing for a woman to do. Her automatic response is to let out the sword of the animus and start hacking away. But if a woman can be patient with a man and not critical, but represent for him a true feminine quality, then, as soon as his sanity is sufficiently back for him to comprehend such subtleties, he will likely come out of his mood. A wife can help a great deal if she will function from her feminine side in this way. She has to have a mature feminity to do this, a femininity that is strong enough to stand in the face of this spurious femininity the man is producing.

Justice will not be served until those who are unaffected are as outraged as those who are. -Benjamin Franklin Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it is faced. -James Baldwin She wore an expression I've only seen in paintings in museums, of a love and a grief so fierce that they forged together to create some new, raw emotion. There are two types of people who become public defenders: those who believe they can save the world, and those who know damn well they can. Any public defender who tells you justice is blind is telling you a big fat lie. If no one ever talks about race in court, how is anything ever supposed to change? It is amazing how you can look in a mirror your whole life & think you are seeing yourself clearly. Then one day, you peel off a filmy gray layer of hypocrisy, & you realize you've never truly seen yourself at all. My client hates me. She thinks I'm a racist. Micah: She has a point. You're white and she's not, and you both happen to live in a world where white people have all the power. It is a strange thing being suddenly motherless. It's like losing a rudder that was keeping me on course, one that I never paid much mind to before now. Who will teach me how to parent, how to deal with the unkindness of strangers, how to be humble? You already did, I realize. She looks at me, and we laugh....we have more in common than we have differences. Everyone has prejudices. It's my job to make sure that they work in favor of the person I'm representing. The Millennials are the me generation. They usually think everything revolves around them, and make decisions based on what's going on in their lives & how it will affect their lives. They're minfields of egocentrism.

Their missed connection was the rare kind of adolescent regret that, with time and maturity, became more rather than less painful. She was now, in his mind, far more than a person. She had to come to represent every decision he hadn't made, every opportunity forgone. She was regret personified. One can get over bad decisions, lovers lost. But it is impossible to get over someone you never really had.

Acceptance is a word not in Delilah Johnson’s vocabulary,” Avery announced. “I’m sure you’ve noted why.” It was dawning on him. “Because she sees no difference. She doesn’t have to accept, because she doesn’t even begin to judge.” Avery nodded again. “She takes everyone just as they are. Even under frightening circumstances and even more frightening explanations, she took Abel’s side almost immediately. The power of that, Lucien, coupled with her capacity for love, loyalty, hope…There is nothing more powerful than that on the planet. Delilah is not all that we are. Delilah represents all that we can be.

We had not got halfway to the door before she had overtaken us and was holding his arm. She had turned in a moment from steel to velvet. "Come and sit down, gentlemen. Let us talk this matter over. I feel that I may be frank with you, Mr. Holmes. You have the feelings of a gentleman. How quick a woman's instinct is to find it out. I will treat you as a friend." "I cannot promise to reciprocate, madame. I am not the law, but I represent justice so far as my feeble powers go. I am ready to listen, and then I will tell you how I will act." "No doubt it was foolish of me to threaten a brave man like yourself.

Ian also had issues with Elizabeth’s management, especially the way she siloed the groups off from one another and discouraged them from communicating. The reason she and Sunny invoked for this way of operating was that Theranos was “in stealth mode,” but it made no sense to Ian. At the other diagnostics companies where he had worked, there had always been cross-functional teams with representatives from the chemistry, engineering, manufacturing, quality control, and regulatory departments working toward a common objective. That was how you got everyone on the same page, solved problems, and met deadlines.

Lord Randall barreled inside, brandishing his cane in Drew's face. "You beggarly knave, I was told this marriage was in name only! Who gave you permission to consummate the vows?" "Theodore Hopkin, governor of this colony, representative of the kind, and it's going to cost you plenty, for that daughter of yours is nothing but trouble. What in the blazes were you thinking to allow her an education?" Drew bit back his smile at the man's shocked expression. Nothing like landing the first punch. Lord Randall furrowed his bushy gray brows. "I knew not about her education until it was too late." Drew straightened the cuffs of his shirt. "Well, be prepared to pay dearly for it. No man should have to suffer through what I do with the constant spouting of the most addlepated word puzzles you could imagine." ----------------------------------------- "I require fifteen thousand pounds." Lord Randall spewed ale across the floor. "What! Surely drink has tickled your poor brain. You're a FARMER, you impudent rascal. I'll give you five thousand." Drew plopped his drink onto the table at his side, its contents sloshing over the rim. A satisfied smile broke across his face. "Excellent." He stood. "When will you take her back to England with you? Today? Tomorrow?" The old man's red-rimmed eyes widened. "I cannot take her back. Why, she's already birthed a child!" Drew shrugged. "Fifteen thousand or I send her AND the babe back, with or without you.

All time is all time. It does not change. It does not lend itself to warnings or explanations. It simply is. Take it moment by moment, and you will find that we are all, as I've said before, bugs in amber. Just because some of us can read and write and do a little math, that doesn't mean we deserve to conquer the Universe. Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt. Any reviewer who expresses rage and loathing for a novel is preposterous. He or she is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae. Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college. Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter could be said to remedy anything. Life happens too fast for you ever to think about it. If you could just persuade people of this, but they insist on amassing information. Our awareness is all that is alive and maybe sacred in any of us. Everything else about us is dead machinery.

These words on the screen represented her latest project, an attempt at a series of commercial, discreetly feminist crime novels. She had read all of Agatha Christie at eleven years old, and later lots of Chandler and James M.Cain. There seemed no reason why she shouldn't try writing something in between, but she was discovering once again that reading and writing were not the same-you couldn't just soak it up then squeeze it out again. She found herself unable to think of a name for her detective, let alone a cohesive original plot, and even her pseudonym was poor: Emma T. Wilde? She wondered if she was doomed to be one of those people who spend their lives trying things. She had tried being in a band, writing plays and children's books, she had tried acting and getting a job in publishing. Perhaps crime fiction was just another failed project to place alongside trapeze, Buddhism and Spanish. She used the computer's word counter feature. Thirty-five words, including the title page and her rotten pseudonym. Emma groaned, released the hydraulic lever on the side of her office chair and sank a little closer to the carpet.

The moment I was old enough to play board games I fell in love with Snakes and Ladders. O perfect balance of rewards and penalties O seemingly random choices made by tumbling dice Clambering up ladders slithering down snakes I spent some of the happiest days of my life. When in my time of trial my father challenged me to master the game of shatranji I infuriated him by preferring to invite him instead to chance his fortune among the ladders and nibbling snakes. All games have morals and the game of Snakes and Ladders captures as no other activity can hope to do the eternal truth that for every ladder you climb a snake is waiting just around the corner and for every snake a ladder will compensate. But it's more than that no mere carrot-and-stick affair because implicit in the game is the unchanging twoness of things the duality of up against down good against evil the solid rationality of ladders balances the occult sinuousities of the serpent in the opposition of staircase and cobra we can see metaphorically all conceivable opposition Alpha against Omega father against mother here is the war of Mary and Musa and the polarities of knees and nose... but I found very early in my life that the game lacked one crucial dimension that of ambiguity - because as events are about to show it is also possible to slither down a ladder and lcimb to truimph on the venom of a snake... Keeping things simple for the moment however I recrod that no sooner had my mother discovered the ladder to victory represented by her racecourse luck than she was reminded that the gutters of the country were still teeming with snakes.

It’s like I have this demon inside of me, and I want it gone, but the idea of removing it via pill is . . . I don’t know . . . weird. But a lot of days I get over that, because I do really hate the demon.” “You often try to understand your experience through metaphor, Aza: It’s like a demon inside of you; you’ll call your consciousness a bus, or a prison cell, or a spiral, or a whirlpool, or a loop, or a—I think you once called it a scribbled circle, which I found interesting.” “Yeah,” I said. “One of the challenges with pain—physical or psychic—is that we can really only approach it through metaphor. It can’t be represented the way a table or a body can. In some ways, pain is the opposite of language.” She turned to her computer, shook her mouse to wake it up, and then clicked an image on her desktop. “I want to share something Virginia Woolf wrote: ‘English, which can express the thoughts of Hamlet and the tragedy of Lear, has no words for the shiver and the headache. . . . The merest schoolgirl, when she falls in love, has Shakespeare or Keats to speak her mind for her; but let a sufferer try to describe a pain in his head to a doctor and language at once runs dry.’ And we’re such language-based creatures that to some extent we cannot know what we cannot name. And so we assume it isn’t real. We refer to it with catch-all terms, like crazy or chronic pain, terms that both ostracize and minimize. The term chronic pain captures nothing of the grinding, constant, ceaseless, inescapable hurt. And the term crazy arrives at us with none of the terror and worry you live with. Nor do either of those terms connote the courage people in such pains exemplify, which is why I’d ask you to frame your mental health around a word other than crazy.

But I left out something significant when I told you about my conversation with Granny Peterson: when she asked me what kind of books I liked to read, the prevailing feeling I remember is bashfulness, just a few inches shy of outright embarrassment. I was standing in her front room with my hand on the table where the grownups always played canasta, and I stared at the linoleum floor, wishing she hadn’t asked me that question. Ask me about something else, I thought. Anything else. Skateboarding or girlfriends or grades or Jesus. Leave my stories alone. My craving for those tales occupied a private part of my adolescence; they represented my loneliness, the only antidote for which was the seemingly impossible dream that life could be lived alongside trusty companions and in defiance of great evil.

Does everyone get this opportunity?" he asked while walking beside her along the shore. "Of course they do," she replied. "But..." "But what?" "But first they have to wake up. Do you understand the meaning of what I am telling you?" In a strange new way, he was beginning to understand. "I do. And I also now know that 11:11 is somehow connected to this process of waking up." She smiled. "For some people, yes. For others it represents a profound moment of growth. Still others receive it as an affirmation of what they already know.

Nightbitch resolved to demand things- all sorts of things. To ask. To not assume she had to cook the dinner and do the night-nights and clean the house and pay the bills and buy the presents and send the cards and schedule to appointments and keep track of every last thing all by herself. This was, after all, a partnership, wasn’t it? This was, after all, the modern era, empowerment and feminism and all that, and she had not been taking advantage of any of it because, she discovered as she thought further, she did not have a job. Or, rather, she did not have a job that paid any money whatsoever; in fact, it was a drain on money, represented negative money, this mothering job. Because her husband paid for their lives, paid for the privilege she had of staying home each and every day devoting herself completely to motherhood and nothing else, she had felt, ever since she stepped down from her position at the gallery, that she was in no place to demand anything, He worked all week, and she felt it was too much to ask him to lift a finger on the weekend, because she had automatically devalued her work from the start. She had been, she saw now, inculcated by a culture that told her, Look, it’s cute you’re a mom, and go do your thing, but, honestly, it’s not that hard; you’re probably not all that smart or interesting , but good for you for feeling fulfilled by mothering.

[Author's note:] When I decided to write this book, I worried that my privilege would make me blind to certain truths, that I would get things wrong, as I may well have. I worried that, as a non-immigrant and non-Mexican, I had no business writing a book set almost entirely in Mexico, set entirely among migrants. I wished someone slightly browner than me would write it. But then I thought, 'If you're a person who has the capacity to be a bridge, why not be a bridge?' So I began. In the early days of my research, before I'd fully convinced myself that I should undertake the telling of this story, I was interviewing a very generous scholar, a remarkable woman who was chair of the Chicana and Chicano studies Department at San Diego State University. Her name is Norma Iglesias Prieto, and I mentioned my doubts to her. I told her I felt compelled, but unqualified, to write this book. She said, "Jeanine. We need as many voices as we can get, telling this story." Her encouragement sustained me for the next four years. I was careful and deliberate in my research. I traveled extensively on both sides of the border and learned as much as I could about Mexico and migrants, about people living throughout the borderlands. The statistics in this book are all true, and though I changed some names, most of the places are real, too. But the characters, while representative of the folks I met during my travels, are fictional.

Never Underestimate the Divine Strength of a Mother who appears Broken..... This phrase, in the most reciprocal form, is powerful. A broken woman is perceived as weak, battered, useless, and incapable, among many other low states of Human life, effortlessly causing her to think it might be best to lie down and die. The thought represents a desperation to escape a pain more powerful than she. There is, but one superseding power, greater than the pain itself. You take this woman, who loves her kids to the highest degree of unselfishness and give her a hint they’re suffering. A Divine Strength that can’t be seen, perhaps not even felt will ignite a fire within her from miles away. No one in its path will see it coming, not even her. This strength indicates that she will go beyond any limits to protect her offspring even if it means rising to her death. There’s no mountain too high, no fire too crucible, nor a fear she won’t face, to ensure they are safe, both mentally and physically. The best part is, no matter how broken down she appears, or how robbed she may be, no one can take from her, what they don’t know she possesses. Following the exhaustion of all other choices, this strength is activated, only when it’s most necessary. It may never be discovered in a lifetime by many, but you can bet it’s there when you need it most. It’s in every one of us, festering, waiting for what may be the last moments of life or death.

How was it that the profound simplicity of those words had the power to rock her world? Never again would she lose sight of what mattered, not for a day or an hour or even a minute. She would treasure every instant of her life from now on, for she knew something now, a deep truth that had eluded her all of her life. Love wasn’t a great, burning brushfire that swept across your soul and charred you beyond recognition. It was being there, simply that. It was a few people, standing together in a living room, trimming a Christmas tree with the decorations that represented the sum total of who they were, where they’d been, what they believed in. It was simple, everyday moments that laid like bricks, one atop another, until they formed a foundation so solid that nothing could make them fall. Not wind, not rain … not even the faded, watercolor memories of a once-brushfire passion.

You wish to hear the origin story?” “Uh, yes.” I passed him the bottle. “Very well.” He drank, handing it to Jack, starting another round. “A goddess of magic devised a contest to the death for select mortals. She invited deities of other realms to send a representative from their most prestigious house, all youths. Each one bore their god’s emblem upon his or her right hand.” My heart raced . . . I had been one of those youths. “These players would fight inside Tar Ro, a sacred realm as large as a thousand kingdoms, harvesting their victims’ emblems; only the player who’d collected them all would leave Tar Ro alive. Naturally, the gods cheated, gifting their own representative with superhuman abilities, making them more than mortal. Secret abilities. That’s why we’re called Arcana.” “Hail Tar Ro,” I murmured. “The High Priestess told me that.” “An old-fashioned greeting. She’s quite knowledgeable about the games. Very respectful of the old ways.

In matters of affection, the rules of engagement at Empire High were detailed yet unambiguous, an extension of procedures established in junior high, a set of guidelines that couldn't have been clearer if they'd been posted on the schoolhouse door. If you were a girl and your heart inclined toward a particular boy, you had one of your girlfriends make inquiries from one of that boy's friends. Such contact represented the commencement of a series of complex negotiations, the opening rounds of which were handled by friends. Boy's friend A might report to Girl's friend B that the boy in question considered her a fox, or, if he felt particularly strongly, a major fox. Those experienced in these matters knew that it was wise to proceed cautiously, since too much ardor could delay things for weeks. The girl in question might be in negotiations with other parties, and no boy wanted to be on record as considering a girl a major fox only to discover that she considered him merely cool. Friends had to be instructed carefully about how much emotional currency they could spend, since rogue emotions led to inflation, lessening the value of everyone's feelings. Once a level of affection within the comfort zone of both parties was agreed upon, the principals could then meet for the exchange of mementos - rings, jackets, photos, key chains - to seal the deal, always assuming that seconds had properly represented the lovers to begin with.

His hand came to her neck, his fingers tracing the corded muscle there, and she knew he could feel her pulse racing. “You think I did not miss you?” She froze at the words, her breath coming shallow, desperate for him to say more. “You think I did not miss everything about you? Everything you represented?” He pressed against her, his breath soft against her temple. She closed her eyes. How had they found themselves here, in this place where he was so dark and so broken? “You think I did not want to come home?” His voice was thick with emotion. “But there was no home to which I could return. There was no one there.” “You’re wrong,” she argued. “I was there. I was there . . . and I was . . .” Alone. She swallowed. “I was there.

I think you’re asking too much. You know what I have? Toward this Pris android?” “Empathy,” he said. “Something like that. Identification; there goes I. My god; maybe that’s what’ll happen. In the confusion you’ll retire me, not her. And she can go back to Seattle and live my life. I never felt this way before. We are machines, stamped out like bottle caps. It’s an illusion that I—I personally—really exist; I’m just representative of a type.” He could not help being amused; Rachael had become so mawkishly morose. “Ants don’t feel like that,” he said, “and they’re physically identical.” “Ants. They don’t feel period.” “Identical human twins. They don’t—” “But they identify with each other; I understand they have an empathic, special bond.

...she did not have ajob that paid any money whatsoever; in fact, it was a drain on money, represented negative money, this mothering job. Because her husband paid for their lives, paid for the privilege she had of staying hom each and every day and devoting herself to motherhoos and nothing else, she had felt... that she had no place to demand anything. He worked all week, and she felt it was too much to ask him to lift a finger on the weekend, because she had automatically devalued her work from the start. She had been, she saw now, inculcated by a culture that told her, Look, it's cute your a mom, and go do your thing, but honestly, it's not that hard; you're probably not all that smart of interesting, but good for you for feeling fulfilled by mothering.

While Cinder walked down the endless black-carpeted aisle, she tried not to think of all the people in the universe who were watching her. She tried not to wonder whether they were judging her or admiring her, afraid of her or impressed by her. She tried not to guess how many saw her as the lost princess or a pathetic cyborg, a vigilante or a criminal, a revolutionary or a mechanic that had gotten lucky. She tried not to think about the smear of yellow frosting on her priceless gown. Kai and Winter stood at the altar encased in the light of glowing orbs, Winter holding the queen's crown and Kai a ceremonial scepter. Together, they represented how both Earth and Luna would accept her right to rule. The rest of her friends were in their reserved seats in the front row. Thorne, on the aisle, held out his hand as Cinder passed. She snorted and accepted the high five before floating up the stairs. Winter winked at her. "Well done, Cinder-friend. You didn't trip. The hard part is over." Kai gave a smile meant for only Cinder, even though the entire universe was watching. "She's right, that really is the hard part." "Thank the stars," Cinder whispered back. "Now let's get this over with." Taking a long shaky breath, she turned to face her kingdom.

At the very same time that we witnessed the explosion of white celebrity moms, and the outpouring of advice to a surveillance of middle-class mothers, the welfare mother, trapped in a "cycle of dependency," became ubiquitous in our media landscape, and she came to represent everything wrong with America. She appeared not in the glossy pages of the women's magazines but rather as the subject of news stories about the "crisis" in the American family and the newly declared "war" on welfare mothers. Whatever ailed America--drugs, crime, loss of productivity--was supposedly her fault. She was portrayed as thumbing her nose at intensive mothering. Even worse, she was depicted as bringing her kids into the realm of market values, as putting a price on their heads, by allegedly calculating how much each additional child was worth and then getting pregnant to cash in on them. For middle-class white women in the media, by contrast, their kids were priceless, these media depictions reinforced the divisions between "us" (minivan moms) and "them" (welfare mothers, working-class mothers, teenage mothers), and did so especially along the lines of race. For example, one of the most common sentences used to characterize the welfare mother was, "Tanya, who has_____ children by ______ different men" (you fill in the blanks). Like zoo animals, their lives were reduced to the numbers of successful impregnations by multiple partners. So it's interesting to note that someone like Christie Brinkley, who has exactly the same reproductive MO, was never described this way. Just imagine reading a comparable sentence in Redbook. "Christie B., who has three children by three different men." But she does, you know.

I begin this chapter with President Ronald Reagan’s Farewell Speech on January 11, 1989. President Reagan encouraged the rising generation to “let ’em know and nail ’em on it”—that is, to push back against teachers, professors, journalists, politicians, and others in the governing generation who manipulate and deceive them: An informed patriotism is what we want. And are we doing a good enough job teaching our children what America is and what she represents in the long history of the world? Those of us who are over 35 or so years of age grew up in a different America. We were taught, very directly, what it means to be an American. And we absorbed, almost in the air, a love of country and an appreciation of its institutions. If you didn’t get these things from your family, you got them from the neighborhood, from the father down the street who fought in Korea or the family who lost someone at Anzio. Or you could get a sense of patriotism from school. And if all else failed, you could get a sense of patriotism from the popular culture. The movies celebrated democratic values and implicitly reinforced the idea that America was special. TV was like that, too, through the mid-sixties. But now, we’re about to enter the nineties, and some things have changed. Younger parents aren’t sure that an unambivalent appreciation of America is the right thing to teach modern children. And as for those who create the popular culture, well-grounded patriotism is no longer the style. Our spirit is back, but we haven’t reinstitutionalized it. We’ve got to do a better job of getting across that America is freedom—freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of enterprise. And freedom is special and rare. It’s fragile; it needs [protection]. So, we’ve got to teach history based not on what’s in fashion but what’s important—why the Pilgrims came here, who Jimmy Doolittle was, and what those 30 seconds over Tokyo meant. You know, 4 years ago on the 40th anniversary of D-Day, I read a letter from a young woman writing to her late father, who’d fought on Omaha Beach. Her name was Lisa Zanatta Henn, and she said, “We will always remember, we will never forget what the boys of Normandy did.” Well, let’s help her keep her word. If we forget what we did, we won’t know who we are. I’m warning of an eradication of the American memory that could result, ultimately, in an erosion of the American spirit. Let’s start with some basics: more attention to American history and a greater emphasis on civic ritual. And let me offer lesson number one about America: All great change in America begins at the dinner table. So, tomorrow night in the kitchen, I hope the talking begins. And children, if your parents haven’t been teaching you what it means to be an American, let ’em know and nail ’em on it. That would be a very American thing to do.1

Well before she became famous — or infamous, depending on where you cast your vote — Loftus's findings on memory distortion were clearly commodifiable. In the 1970s and 1980s she provided assistance to defense attorneys eager to prove to juries that eyewitness accounts are not the same as camcorders. "I've helped a lot of people," she says. Some of those people: the Hillside Strangler, the Menendez brothers, Oliver North, Ted Bundy. "Ted Bundy?" I ask, when she tells this to me. Loftus laughs. "This was before we knew he was Bundy. He hadn't been accused of murder yet." "How can you be so confident the people you're representing are really innocent?" I ask. She doesn't directly answer. She says, "In court, I go by the evidence.... Outside of court, I'm human and entitled to my human feelings. "What, I wonder are her human feelings about the letter from a child-abuse survivor who wrote, "Let me tell you what false memory syndrome does to people like me, as if you care. It makes us into liars. False memory syndrome is so much more chic than child abuse.... But there are children who tonight while you sleep are being raped, and beaten. These children may never tell because 'no one will believe them.'" "Plenty of "Plenty of people will believe them," says Loftus. Pshaw! She has a raucous laugh and a voice with a bit of wheedle in it. She is strange, I think, a little loose inside. She veers between the professional and the personal with an alarming alacrity," she could easily have been talking about herself.

She’d just come back when Marvel tapped the computer screen and said, “See, what happened was, this guy, Representative Diller, got the licensing fees on semi-trailers reduced by about half, so they’d supposedly be in line with what they were in the surrounding states. He said he wanted to do that so the trucking companies wouldn’t move out of Minnesota. But what you see over here is a bunch of 1099 forms that were sent by trucking companies to Sisseton High-Line Consulting, LLC, of Sisseton, South Dakota. Over here is the South Dakota LLC form and we find out that a Cheryl Diller is the president of Sisseton High-Line Consulting. And we see that she got, mmm, fifty-five thousand dollars for consulting work that year, from trucking companies.” “So if these two Dillers are related . . .” Lucas began. “I promise you, they are,” Marvel said. Kidd said, “Marvel’s a state senator. In Arkansas.” Marvel added, “This shit goes on all the time. On everything you can think of, and probably a lot you can’t think of.

Still, the tendency to scramble for security will try to reassert itself and gain some ground. We can’t underestimate the very real (and very fleeting) comfort it provides. The meditation teacher Tara Brach, in her book Radical Acceptance, describes a practice she uses at such times. It’s based on the Buddha’s encounters with his nemesis, Mara, a demon who kept appearing to tempt the Buddha to give up his spiritual resolve and go back to his old unaware ways. Psychologically, Mara represents the false promise of happiness and security offered by our habitual responses. So whenever Mara appeared, often with beautiful women or other temptations in tow, the Buddha would say, “I see you, Mara. I know you’re a trickster. I know what you’re trying to do.” And then he’d invite his nemesis to sit down for tea. When we’re tempted to go back to our habitual ways of avoiding groundlessness, we can look temptation in the eye and say, “I see you, Mara,” then sit down with the fundamental ambiguity of being human without any judgment of right or wrong.

Had she been able to listen to her body, the true Virginia would certainly have spoken up. In order to do so, however, she needed someone to say to her: “Open your eyes! They didn’t protect you when you were in danger of losing your health and your mind, and now they refuse to see what has been done to you. How can you love them so much after all that?” No one offered that kind of support. Nor can anyone stand up to that kind of abuse alone, not even Virginia Woolf. Malcolm Ingram, the noted lecturer in psychological medicine, believed that Woolf’s “mental illness” had nothing to do with her childhood experiences, and her illness was genetically inherited from her family. Here is his opinion as quoted on the Virginia Woolf Web site: As a child she was sexually abused, but the extent and duration is difficult to establish. At worst she may have been sexually harassed and abused from the age of twelve to twenty-one by her [half-]brother George Duckworth, [fourteen] years her senior, and sexually exploited as early as six by her other [half-] brother… It is unlikely that the sexual abuse and her manic-depressive illness are related. However tempting it may be to relate the two, it must be more likely that, whatever her upbringing, her family history and genetic makeup were the determining factors in her mood swings rather than her unhappy childhood [italics added]. More relevant in her childhood experience is the long history of bereavements that punctuated her adolescence and precipitated her first depressions.3 Ingram’s text goes against my own interpretation and ignores a large volume of literature that deals with trauma and the effects of childhood abuse. Here we see how people minimize the importance of information that might cause pain or discomfort—such as childhood abuse—and blame psychiatric disorders on family history instead. Woolf must have felt keen frustration when seemingly intelligent and well-educated people attributed her condition to her mental history, denying the effects of significant childhood experiences. In the eyes of many she remained a woman possessed by “madness.” Nevertheless, the key to her condition lay tantalizingly close to the surface, so easily attainable, and yet neglected. I think that Woolf’s suicide could have been prevented if she had had an enlightened witness with whom she could have shared her feelings about the horrors inflicted on her at such an early age. But there was no one to turn to, and she considered Freud to be the expert on psychic disorders. Here she made a tragic mistake. His writings cast her into a state of severe uncertainty, and she preferred to despair of her own self rather than doubt the great father figure Sigmund Freud, who represented, as did her family, the system of values upheld by society, especially at the time.   UNFORTUNATELY,

It is a poor conclusion, is it not?’ he observed, having brooded awhile on the scene he had just witnessed: ‘an absurd termination to my violent exertions? I get levers and mattocks to demolish the two houses, and train myself to be capable of working like Hercules, and when everything is ready and in my power, I find the will to lift a slate off either roof has vanished! My old enemies have not beaten me; now would be the precise time to revenge myself on their representatives: I could do it; and none could hinder me. But where is the use? I don’t care for striking: I can’t take the trouble to raise my hand! That sounds as if I had been labouring the whole time only to exhibit a fine trait of magnanimity. It is far from being the case: I have lost the faculty of enjoying their destruction, and I am too idle to destroy for nothing.'Nelly, there is a strange change approaching; I'm in its shadow at present. I take so little interest in my daily life that I hardly remember to eat and drink. Those two who have left the room are the only objects which retain a distinct material appearance to me; and that appearance causes me pain, amounting to agony. About HER I won't speak; and I don't desire to think; but I earnestly wish she were invisible: her presence invokes only maddening sensations. HE moves me differently: and yet if I could do it without seeming insane, I'd never see him again! You'll perhaps think me rather inclined to become so,' he added, making an effort to smile, 'if I try to describe the thousand forms of past associations and ideas he awakens or embodies. But you'll not talk of what I tell you; and my mind is so eternally secluded in itself, it is tempting at last to turn it out to another.

Sherri Solvig had had cancer, lymphatic cancer, but due to valiant efforts by her doctors she had gone into remission. However, encoded in the memory-tapes of her brain was the datum that patients with lymphoma who go into remission usually eventually lose their remission. They aren’t cured; the ailment has somehow mysteriously passed from a palpable state into a sort of metaphysical state, a limbo. It is there but it is not there. So despite her current good health, Sherri (her mind told her) contained a ticking clock, and when the clock chimed she would die. Nothing could be done about it, except the frantic promotion of a second remission. But even if a second remission were obtained, that remission, too, by the same logic, the same inexorable process, would end. Time had Sherri in its absolute power. Time contained one outcome for her: terminal cancer. This is how her mind had factored the situation out; it had come to this conclusion, and no matter how good she felt or what she had going for her in her life, this fact remained a constant. A cancer patient in remission, then, represents a stepped-up case of the status of all humans; eventually you are going to die.

What interested these gnostics far more than past events attributed to the “historical Jesus” was the possibility of encountering the risen Christ in the present.49 The Gospel of Mary illustrates the contrast between orthodox and gnostic viewpoints. The account recalls what Mark relates: Now when he rose early on the first day of the week, he appeared first to Mary Magdalene … She went and told those who had been with him, as they mourned and wept. But when they heard that he was alive and had been seen by her, they would not believe it.50 As the Gospel of Mary opens, the disciples are mourning Jesus’ death and terrified for their own lives. Then Mary Magdalene stands up to encourage them, recalling Christ’s continual presence with them: “Do not weep, and do not grieve, and do not doubt; for his grace will be with you completely, and will protect you.”51 Peter invites Mary to “tell us the words of the Savior which you remember.”52 But to Peter’s surprise, Mary does not tell anecdotes from the past; instead, she explains that she has just seen the Lord in a vision received through the mind, and she goes on to tell what he revealed to her. When Mary finishes, she fell silent, since it was to this point that the Savior had spoken with her. But Andrew answered and said to the brethren, “Say what you will about what she has said. I, at least, do not believe that the Savior has said this. For certainly these teachings are strange ideas!”53 Peter agrees with Andrew, ridiculing the idea that Mary actually saw the Lord in her vision. Then, the story continues, Mary wept and said to Peter, “My brother Peter, what do you think? Do you think that I thought this up myself in my heart? Do you think I am lying about the Savior?” Levi answered and said to Peter, “Peter, you have always been hot-tempered … If the Savior made her worthy, who are you to reject her?”54 Finally Mary, vindicated, joins the other apostles as they go out to preach. Peter, apparently representing the orthodox position, looks to past events, suspicious of those who “see the Lord” in visions: Mary, representing the gnostic, claims to experience his continuing presence.55 These gnostics recognized that their theory, like the orthodox one, bore political implications. It suggests that whoever “sees the Lord” through inner vision can claim that his or her own authority equals, or surpasses, that of the Twelve—and of their successors. Consider the political implications of the Gospel of Mary: Peter and Andrew, here representing the leaders of the orthodox group, accuse Mary—the gnostic—of pretending to have seen the Lord in order to justify the strange ideas, fictions, and lies she invents and attributes to divine inspiration. Mary lacks the proper credentials for leadership, from the orthodox viewpoint: she is not one of the “twelve.” But as Mary stands up to Peter, so the gnostics who take her as their prototype challenge the authority of those priests and bishops who claim to be Peter’s successors.

At a law school in Canada, we are in deep discussion of the law as a universal instrument that feminists should expect to be flexible. I am arguing that this is what judges are for - otherwise, justice could be meted out by a computer. The mostly male law students are arguing that any exception is dangerous and creates a "slippery slope." Make one exception, and the number will grow until the law will be overturned de facto. I am not a lawyer. I am stuck. Those young men may or may not represent the common-sense majority in the audience, but they have triumphed. Then a tall young woman in jeans rises from the back of the room. "Well," she says calmly, "I have a boa constrictor." This quiets the audience right down. "Once a month," she continues, "I go to the dissection lab on campus to get frozen mice to feed my boa constrictor. But this month, there is a new professor in charge, and he said to me 'I can't give you frozen mice. If I give you frozen mice, everyone will want frozen mice." There is such an explosion of laughter that even the argumentative young men can't resist. She has made her point: not everyone wants the same thing. A just law can be flexible. To be just, a law has to be flexible. She has saved the day.

Harry, you are dreadful! I don't know why I like you so much." "You will always like me, Dorian," he replied. "Will you have some coffee, you fellows? Waiter, bring coffee, and fine-champagne, and some cigarettes. No, don't mind the cigarettes--I have some. Basil, I can't allow you to smoke cigars. You must have a cigarette. A cigarette is the perfect type of a perfect pleasure. It is exquisite, and it leaves one unsatisfied. What more can one want? Yes, Dorian, you will always be fond of me. I represent to you all the sins you have never had the courage to commit." "What nonsense you talk, Harry!" cried the lad, taking a light from a fire-breathing silver dragon that the waiter had placed on the table. "Let us go down to the theatre. When Sibyl comes on the stage you will have a new ideal of life. She will represent something to you that you have never known." "I have known everything," said Lord Henry, with a tired look in his eyes, "but I am always ready for a new emotion. I am afraid, however, that, for me at any rate, there is no such thing. Still, your wonderful girl may thrill me. I love acting. It is so much more real than life. Let us go. Dorian, you will come with me. I am so sorry, Basil, but there is only room for two in the brougham. You must follow us in a hansom.

Are there no men present? Do you promise me that behind that red curtain over there the figure of Sir Chartres Biron is not concealed? We are all women, you assure me? Then I may tell you that the very next words I read were these—“Chloe liked Olivia . . .” Do not start. Do not blush. Let us admit in the privacy of our own society that these things sometimes happen. Sometimes women do like women. “Chloe liked Olivia,” I read. And then it struck me how immense a change was there. Chloe liked Olivia perhaps for the first time in literature. Cleopatra did not like Octavia. And how completely Antony and Cleopatra would have been altered had she done sol As it is, I thought, letting my mind, I am afraid, wander a little from Life’s Adventure, the whole thing is simplified, conventionalised, if one dared say it, absurdly. Cleopatra’s only feeling about Octavia is one of jealousy. Is she taller than I am? How does she do her hair? The play, perhaps, required no more. But how interesting it would have been if the relationship between the two women had been more complicated. All these relationships between women, I thought, rapidly recalling the splendid gallery of fictitious women, are too simple. So much has been left out, unattempted. And I tried to remember any case in the course of my reading where two women are represented as friends.

Our study of psychoneurotic disturbances points to a more comprehensive explanation, which includes that of Westermarck. When a wife loses her husband, or a daughter her mother, it not infrequently happens that the survivor is afflicted with tormenting scruples, called ‘obsessive reproaches’ which raises the question whether she herself has not been guilty through carelessness or neglect, of the death of the beloved person. No recalling of the care with which she nursed the invalid, or direct refutation of the asserted guilt can put an end to the torture, which is the pathological expression of mourning and which in time slowly subsides. Psychoanalytic investigation of such cases has made us acquainted with the secret mainsprings of this affliction. We have ascertained that these obsessive reproaches are in a certain sense justified and therefore are immune to refutation or objections. Not that the mourner has really been guilty of the death or that she has really been careless, as the obsessive reproach asserts; but still there was something in her, a wish of which she herself was unaware, which was not displeased with the fact that death came, and which would have brought it about sooner had it been strong enough. The reproach now reacts against this unconscious wish after the death of the beloved person. Such hostility, hidden in the unconscious behind tender love, exists in almost all cases of intensive emotional allegiance to a particular person, indeed it represents the classic case, the prototype of the ambivalence of human emotions. There is always more or less of this ambivalence in everybody’s disposition; normally it is not strong enough to give rise to the obsessive reproaches we have described. But where there is abundant predisposition for it, it manifests itself in the relation to those we love most, precisely where you would least expect it. The disposition to compulsion neurosis which we have so often taken for comparison with taboo problems, is distinguished by a particularly high degree of this original ambivalence of emotions.

What is the most beautiful place you’ve ever seen?” Dragging his gaze from the beauty of the gardens, Ian looked down at the beauty beside him. “Any place,” he said huskily, “were you are.” He saw the becoming flush of embarrassed pleasure that pinkened her cheeks, but when she spoke her voice was rueful. “You don’t have to say such things to me, you know-I’ll keep our bargain.” “I know you will,” he said, trying not to overwhelm her with avowals of love she wouldn’t yet believe. With a grin he added, “Besides, as it turned out after our bargaining session, I’m the one who’s governed by all the conditions, not you.” Her sideways glance was filled with laughter. “You were much too lenient at times, you know. Toward the end I was asking for concessions just to see how far you’d go.” Ian, who had been multiplying his fortune for the last four years by buying shipping and import-export companies, as well as sundry others, was regarded as an extremely tough negotiator. He heard her announcement with a smile of genuine surprise. “You gave me the impression that every single concession was of paramount importance to you, and that if I didn’t agree, you might call the whole thing off.” She nodded with satisfaction. “I rather thought that was how I ought to do it. Why are you laughing?” “Because,” he admitted, chuckling, “obviously I was not in my best form yesterday. In addition to completely misreading your feelings, I managed to buy a house on Promenade Street for which I will undoubtedly pay five times its worth.” “Oh, I don’t think so,” she said, and, as if she was embarrassed and needed a way to avoid meeting his gaze, she reached up and pulled a leaf off an overhanging branch. In a voice of careful nonchalance, she explained, “In matters of bargaining, I believe in being reasonable, but my uncle would assuredly have tried to cheat you. He’s perfectly dreadful about money.” Ian nodded, remembering the fortune Julius Cameron had gouged out of him in order to sign the betrothal agreement. “And so,” she admitted, uneasily studying the azure-blue sky with feigned absorption, “I sent him a note after you left itemizing all the repairs that were needed at the house. I told him it was in poor condition and absolutely in need of complete redecoration.” “And?” “And I told him you would consider paying a fair price for the house, but not one shilling more, because it needed all that.” “And?” Ian prodded. “He has agreed to sell it for that figure.” Ian’s mirth exploded in shouts of laughter. Snatching her into his arms, he waited until he could finally catch his breath, then he tipped her face up to his. “Elizabeth,” he said tenderly, “if you change your mind about marrying me, promise me you’ll never represent the opposition at the bargaining table. I swear to God, I’d be lost.” The temptation to kiss her was almost overwhelming, but the Townsende coach with its ducal crest was in the drive, and he had no idea where their chaperones might be. Elizabeth noticed the coach, too, and started toward the house. "About the gowns," she said, stopping suddenly and looking up at him with an intensely earnest expression on her beautiful face. "I meant to thank you for your generosity as soon as you arrived, but I was so happy to-that is-" She realized she'd been about to blurt out that she was happy to see him, and she was so flustered by having admitted aloud what she hadn't admitted to herself that she completely lost her thought. "Go on," Ian invited in a husky voice. "You were so happy to see me that you-" "I forgot," she admitted lamely.

My dad gave me these charms, and each one represents something different. The raven protects against black magic. The bear inspires courage. The fish signifies a refusal to recognize other people’s magic.” “I never knew those charms had meaning.” Absently, Vivian reaches up and touches her own necklace. Looking closely at the pewter pendant for the first time, Molly asks, “Is your necklace—significant?” “Well, it is to me. But it doesn’t have any magical qualities.” She smiles. “Maybe it does,” Molly says. “I think of these qualities as metaphorical, you know? So black magic is whatever leads people to the dark side—their own greed or insecurity that makes them do destructive things. And the warrior spirit of the bear protects us not only from others who might hurt us but our own internal demons. And I think other people’s magic is what we’re vulnerable to—how we’re led astray. So . . . my first question for you is kind of a weird one. I guess you could think of it as metaphorical, too.” She glances at the tape recorder once more and takes a deep breath. “Okay, here goes. Do you believe in spirits? Or ghosts?” “My, that is quite a question.” Clasping her frail, veined hands in her lap, Vivian gazes out the window. For a moment Molly thinks she isn’t going to answer. And then, so quietly that she has to lean forward in her chair to hear, Vivian says, “Yes, I do. I believe in ghosts.” “Do you think they’re . . . present in our lives?” Vivian fixes her hazel eyes on Molly and nods. “They’re the ones who haunt us,” she says. “The ones who have left us behind.

Some researchers, such as psychologist Jean Twenge, say this new world where compliments are better than sex and pizza, in which the self-enhancing bias has been unchained and allowed to gorge unfettered, has led to a new normal in which the positive illusions of several generations have now mutated into full-blown narcissism. In her book The Narcissism Epidemic, Twenge says her research shows that since the mid-1980s, clinically defined narcissism rates in the United States have increased in the population at the same rate as obesity. She used the same test used by psychiatrists to test for narcissism in patients and found that, in 2006, one in four U.S. college students tested positive. That’s real narcissism, the kind that leads to diagnoses of personality disorders. In her estimation, this is a dangerous trend, and it shows signs of acceleration. Narcissistic overconfidence crosses a line, says Twenge, and taints those things improved by a skosh of confidence. Over that line, you become less concerned with the well-being of others, more materialistic, and obsessed with status in addition to losing all the restraint normally preventing you from tragically overestimating your ability to manage or even survive risky situations. In her book, Twenge connects this trend to the housing market crash of the mid-2000s and the stark increase in reality programming during that same decade. According to Twenge, the drive to be famous for nothing went from being strange to predictable thanks to a generation or two of people raised by parents who artificially boosted self-esteem to ’roidtastic levels and then released them into a culture filled with new technologies that emerged right when those people needed them most to prop up their self-enhancement biases. By the time Twenge’s research was published, reality programming had spent twenty years perfecting itself, and the modern stars of those shows represent a tiny portion of the population who not only want to be on those shows, but who also know what they are getting into and still want to participate. Producers with the experience to know who will provide the best television entertainment to millions then cull that small group. The result is a new generation of celebrities with positive illusions so robust and potent that the narcissistic overconfidence of the modern American teenager by comparison is now much easier to see as normal.

Tobias emerges from a door hidden behind a length of white cloth. He flicks the cloth out of the way irritably before coming toward us and sitting beside me at the table in the Gathering Place. “Kang is going to meet with a representative of Jeanine Matthews at seven in the morning,” he says. “A representative?” Zeke says. “She’s not going herself?” “Yeah, and stand out in the open where a bunch of angry people with guns can take aim?” Uriah smirks a little. “I’d like to see her try. No, really, I would.” “Is Kang the Brilliant taking a Dauntless escort, at least?” Lynn says. “Yes,” Tobias says. “Some of the older members volunteered. Bud said he would keep his ears open and report back.” I frown at him. How does he know all this information? And why, after two years of avoiding becoming a Dauntless leader at all costs, is he suddenly acting like one? “So I guess the real question is,” says Zeke, folding his hands on the table, “if you were Erudite, what would you say at this meeting?” They all look at me. Expectantly. “What?” I say. “You’re Divergent,” Zeke replies. “So is Tobias.” “Yeah, but he doesn’t have aptitude for Erudite.” “And how do you know I do?” Zeke lifts his shoulder. “Seems likely. Doesn’t it seem likely?” Uriah and Lynn nod. Tobias’s mouth twitches, as if in a smile, but if that’s what it is, he suppresses it. I feel like a stone just dropped into my stomach. “You all have functional brains, last time I checked,” I say. “You can think like the Erudite, too.” “But we don’t have special Divergent brains!” says Marlene. She touches her fingertips to my scalp and squeezes lightly. “Come on, do your magic.” “There’s no such thing as Divergent magic, Mar,” says Lynn.

So, then...” Petra interjected, caught up for the moment in the story, “nobody knows who was right? “Who was right?” Growland repeated slowly. “How do you mean?” “In the war.” As she tried to articulate her question, she became less sure of it. “You don't know which side was... right?” “Cub,” the big bear explained patiently, “nobody has ever gone to war believing their cause to be wrong!” “Well, sure, I get that. But afterwards... don't people usually... figure out... who was really right?” she finished lamely. “What people?” “I don't know!” Petra said, flinging her arms wide. “Historians, maybe?” Jumphrey snorted and removed his pipe from between his teeth. “Historians are people, and people have opinions and sympathies. I think if you pay attention, you'll find that histories usually demonstrate that the winning side was in the right all along; or else, occasionally, they demonstrate that those who won are despots and tyrants who deserved to be fought against, and still should be. You see? Everyone has a perspective. If you convened a representative post-war council to discuss what started the conflict and who ought to have given way to whom, a new war would break out from their arguments.” Petra felt her spirits slump a little. “But then... how–” “As everyone has always done,” the rabbit answered. “You pray that war does not come. But if it does come, you fight in accordance with your own convictions, or to defend the home or people you love; or you take a vow of pacifism, and follow your conscience some other way, if you are allowed. Whatever the political justification for war is said to be, armies are invariably made up of ordinary people fighting for the most basic of ideas, the simplest of reasons. 'Sides' are largely determined by the happenstance of birth, nothing more.” “That's... tragic,” Petra said, realizing a truth she'd heard before but never really processed. Jumphrey shrugged, and said simply, “All war is.

Power has always been a temptation, and I want to argue that majority rule in America carries with it an empire temptation for many Christian citizens. Those of us who know our American history might be tempted to say, “That’s precisely the opposite of what our democracy, or representative democracy, stands for.” True enough, at one level, because giving everyone a voice vastly surpasses anything less. But take any heated political issue, from abortion to same-sex marriage to national health care to free-market enterprise to nuclear build-up for security, and you may glimpse what I’m trying to say. The political left takes one posture on issues while the political right draws swords from another posture. If we step back we see that each side seeks to impose its view on the minority. This is ruling over the other. Now to a few questions. Is this imposition of power over others consistent with following Christ? Do we ever wonder if the right to vote is the right to coerce and impose, the right to use the power of the majority against the minority?17 Is the power of the majority that different from the power of King Charles when the pilgrims and Puritans left England to establish the “city on a hill”? We would all agree that empowering the people improved the conditions, but I want to ask another question: Does it make the political process of voting the source of seeking for power over others? What is the best Christian response to the drive for power? I call this quest for power through the political process the “eschatology of politics”—that is, the belief that if we usher in the right political candidates and the right laws, then kingdom conditions will arrive. Every two years America goes through convulsions as one candidate after another promises (all but) the kingdom if he or she is elected. Every two years Americans go through the same convulsions as they lather up for the election because they believe if they get their candidate, not only will they win, but (all but) the kingdom will come. This is idolatry and yet another example of Constantinianism

fear of death.” Our study of psychoneurotic disturbances points to a more comprehensive explanation, which includes that of Westermarck. When a wife loses her husband, or a daughter her mother, it not infrequently happens that the survivor is afflicted with tormenting scruples, called ‘obsessive reproaches’ which raises the question whether she herself has not been guilty through carelessness or neglect, of the death of the beloved person. No recalling of the care with which she nursed the invalid, or direct refutation of the asserted guilt can put an end to the torture, which is the pathological expression of mourning and which in time slowly subsides. Psychoanalytic investigation of such cases has made us acquainted with the secret mainsprings of this affliction. We have ascertained that these obsessive reproaches are in a certain sense justified and therefore are immune to refutation or objections. Not that the mourner has really been guilty of the death or that she has really been careless, as the obsessive reproach asserts; but still there was something in her, a wish of which she herself was unaware, which was not displeased with the fact that death came, and which would have brought it about sooner had it been strong enough. The reproach now reacts against this unconscious wish after the death of the beloved person. Such hostility, hidden in the unconscious behind tender love, exists in almost all cases of intensive emotional allegiance to a particular person, indeed it represents the classic case, the prototype of the ambivalence of human emotions. There is always more or less of this ambivalence in everybody’s disposition; normally it is not strong enough to give rise to the obsessive reproaches we have described. But where there is abundant predisposition for it, it manifests itself in the relation to those we love most, precisely where you would least expect it. The disposition to compulsion neurosis which we have so often taken for comparison with taboo problems, is distinguished by a particularly high degree of this original ambivalence of emotions.

In attunement, it is the infant who leads and the mother who follows. “Where their roles differ is in the timing of their responses,” writes John Bowlby, one of the century’s great psychiatric researchers. The infant initiates the interaction or withdraws from it according to his own rhythms, Bowlby found, while the “mother regulates her behaviour so that it meshes with his... Thus she lets him call the tune and by a skillful interweaving of her own responses with his creates a dialogue.” The tense or depressed mothering adult will not be able to accompany the infant into relaxed, happy spaces. He may also not fully pick up signs of the infant’s emotional distress, or may not be able to respond to them as effectively as he would wish. The ADD child’s difficulty reading social cues likely originates from her relationship cues not being read by the nurturing adult, who was distracted by stress. In the attunement interaction, not only does the mother follow the child, but she also permits the child to temporarily interrupt contact. When the interaction reaches a certain stage of intensity for the infant, he will look away to avoid an uncomfortably high level of arousal. Another interaction will then begin. A mother who is anxious may react with alarm when the infant breaks off contact, may try to stimulate him, to draw him back into the interaction. Then the infant’s nervous system is not allowed to “cool down,” and the attunement relationship is hampered. Infants whose caregivers were too stressed, for whatever reason, to give them the necessary attunement contact will grow up with a chronic tendency to feel alone with their emotions, to have a sense — rightly or wrongly — that no one can share how they feel, that no one can “understand.” Attunement is the quintessential component of a larger process, called attachment. Attachment is simply our need to be close to somebody. It represents the absolute need of the utterly and helplessly vulnerable human infant for secure closeness with at least one nourishing, protective and constantly available parenting figure. Essential for survival, the drive for attachment is part of the very nature of warm-blooded animals in infancy, especially. of mammals. In human beings, attachment is a driving force of behavior for longer than in any other animal. For most of us it is present throughout our lives, although we may transfer our attachment need from one person — our parent — to another — say, a spouse or even a child. We may also attempt to satisfy the lack of the human contact we crave by various other means, such as addictions, for example, or perhaps fanatical religiosity or the virtual reality of the Internet. Much of popular culture, from novels to movies to rock or country music, expresses nothing but the joys or the sorrows flowing from satisfactions or disappointments in our attachment relationships. Most parents extend to their children some mixture of loving and hurtful behavior, of wise parenting and unskillful, clumsy parenting. The proportions vary from family to family, from parent to parent. Those ADD children whose needs for warm parental contact are most frustrated grow up to be adults with the most severe cases of ADD. Already at only a few months of age, an infant will register by facial expression his dejection at the mother’s unconscious emotional withdrawal, despite the mother’s continued physical presence. “(The infant) takes delight in Mommy’s attention,” writes Stanley Greenspan, “and knows when that source of delight is missing. If Mom becomes preoccupied or distracted while playing with the baby, sadness or dismay settles in on the little face.

A monk lived near the temple of Shiva. In the house opposite lived a prostitute. Noticing the large number of men who visited her, the monk decided to speak to her. ‘You are a great sinner,’ he said sternly. ‘You reveal your lack of respect for God every day and every night. Do you never stop to think about what will happen to you after your death?’ The poor woman was very shaken by what the monk said. She prayed to God out of genuine repentance, begging His forgiveness. She also asked the Almighty to help her to find another means of earning her living. But she could find no other work and, after going hungry for a week, she returned to prostitution. But each time she gave her body to a stranger, she would pray to the Lord for forgiveness. Annoyed that his advice had had no effect, the monk thought to himself: ‘From now on, I’m going to keep a count of the number of men who go into that house, until the day the sinner dies.’ And from that moment on, he did nothing but watch the comings and goings at the prostitute’s house, and for each man who went in, he added a stone to a pile of stones by his side. After some time, the monk again spoke to the prostitute and said: ‘You see that pile of stones? Each stone represents a mortal sin committed by you, despite all my warnings. I say to you once more: do not sin again!’ Seeing how her sins accumulated, the woman began to tremble. Returning home, she wept tears of real repentance and prayed to God: ‘O Lord, when will Your mercy free me from this wretched life?’ Her prayer was heard. That same day, the angel of death came to her house and carried her off. On God’s orders, the angel crossed the street and took the monk with him too. The prostitute’s soul went straight up to Heaven, while the devils bore the monk down into Hell. They passed each other on the way, and when the monk saw what was happening, he cried out: ‘Is this Your justice, O Lord? I spent my whole life in devotion and poverty and now I am carried off into Hell, while that prostitute, who lived all her life steeped in sin, is borne aloft up to Heaven!’ Hearing this, one of the angels replied: Angels are always just. You thought that God’s love meant judging the behaviour of your neighbour. While you filled your heart with the impurity of another’s sin, this woman prayed fervently day and night. Her soul is so light after all the tears she has shed that we can easily bear her up to Paradise. Your soul is so weighed down with stones it is too heavy to lift.

With our desire to have more, we find ourselves spending more and more time and energy to manage and maintain everything we have. We try so hard to do this that the things that were supposed to help us end up ruling us. We eventually get used to the new state where our wishes have been fulfilled. We start taking those things for granted and there comes a time when we start getting tired of what we have. We're desperate to convey our own worth, our own value to others. We use objects to tell people just how valuable we are. The objects that are supposed to represent our qualities become our qualities themselves. There are more things to gain from eliminating excess than you might imagine: time, space, freedom and energy. When people say something is impossible, they have already decided that they don't want to do it. Differentiate between things you want and things you need. Leave your unused space empty. These open areas are incredibly useful. They bring us a sense of freedom and keep our minds open to the more important things in life. Memories are wonderful but you won't have room to develop if your attachment to the past is too strong. It's better to cut some of those ties so you can focus on what's important today. Don't get creative when you are trying to discard things. There's no need to stock up. An item chosen with passion represents perfection to us. Things we just happen to pick up, however, are easy candidates for disposal or replacement. As long as we stick to owning things that we really love, we aren't likely to want more. Our homes aren't museum, they don't need collections. When you aren't sure that you really want to part with something, try stowing it away for a while. Larger furniture items with bold colors will in time trigger visual fatigue and then boredom. Discarding things can be wasteful. But the guilt that keeps you from minimizing is the true waste. The real waste is the psychological damage that you accrue from hanging on to things you don't use or need. We find our originality when we own less. When you think about it, it's experience that builds our unique characteristics, not material objects. I've lowered my bar for happiness simply by switching to a tenugui. When even a regular bath towel can make you happy, you'll be able to find happiness almost everywhere. For the minimalist, the objective isn't to reduce, it's to eliminate distractions so they can focus on the things that are truly important. Minimalism is just the beginning. It's a tool. Once you've gone ahead and minimized, it's time to find out what those important things are. Minimalism is built around the idea that there's nothing that you're lacking. You'll spend less time being pushed around by something that you think may be missing. The qualities I look for in the things that I buy are: - the item has a minimalistic kind of shape and is easy to clean - it's color isn't too loud - I'll be able to use it for a long time - it has a simple structure - it's lightweight and compact - it has multiple uses A relaxed moment is not without meaning, it's an important time for reflection. It wasn't the fallen leaves that the lady had been tidying up, it was her own laziness that she had been sweeping away. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit. With daily cleaning, the reward may be the sense of accomplishment and calmness we feel afterward. Cleaning your house is like polishing yourself. Simply by living an organized life, you'll be more invigorated, more confident and like yourself better. Having parted with the bulk of my belongings, I feel true contentment with my day-to-day life. The very act of living brings me joy. When you become a minimalist, you free yourself from all the materialist messages that surround us. All the creative marketing and annoying ads no longer have an effect on you.

Dreams in which the dead interact with the living are typically so powerful and lucid that there is no denying contact was real. They also fill us with renewed life and break up grief or depression. In chapter 16, on communicating with the dead, you will learn how to make such dreams come about. Another set of dreams in which the dead appear can be the stuff of horror. If you have had a nightmare concerning someone who has recently passed, know that you are looking into the face of personal inner conflict. You might dream, for instance, that your dead mother is buried alive or comes out of her grave in a corrupted body in search of you. What you are looking at here is the clash of two sets of ideas about death. On the one hand, a person is dead and rotting; on the other hand, that same person is still alive. The inner self uses the appropriate symbols to try to come to terms with the contradiction of being alive and dead at the same time. I am not sure to what extent people on the other side actually participate in these dreams. My private experience has given me the impression that the dreams are triggered by attempts of the departed for contact. The macabre images we use to deal with the contradiction, however, are ours alone and stem from cultural attitudes about death and the body. The conflict could lie in a different direction altogether. As a demonstration of how complex such dreams can be, I offer a simple one I had shortly after the death of my cat Twyla. It was a nightmare constructed out of human guilt. Even though I loved Twyla, for a combination of reasons she was only second best in the hierarchy of house pets. I had never done anything to hurt her, and her death was natural. Still I felt guilt, as though not giving her the full measure of my love was the direct cause of her death. She came to me in a dream skinned alive, a bloody mass of muscle, sinew, veins, and arteries. I looked at her, horror-struck at what I had done. Given her condition, I could not understand why she seemed perfectly healthy and happy and full of affection for me. I’m ashamed to admit that it took me over a week to understand what this nightmare was about. The skinning depicted the ugly fate of many animals in human hands. For Twyla, the picture was particularly apt because we used to joke about selling her for her fur, which was gorgeous, like the coat of a gray seal. My subconscious had also incorporated the callous adage “There is more than one way to skin a cat.” This multivalent graphic, typical of dreams, brought my feelings of guilt to the surface. But the real meaning was more profound and once discovered assuaged my conscience. Twyla’s coat represented her mortal body, her outer shell. What she showed me was more than “skin deep” — the real Twyla underneath,

Can't you just let it go? Move on?" His face darkened. His eyes glared in response and he was silent a long time while his jaw worked over a toothpick. She'd used the same line that the prophet and his representatives had been using for years. Even if these things did happen, there is no point in being bitter. You should forgive and forget and let bygones be bygones. Kind of galling, considering the insistence upon forgiveness was being made by the people who had done the hurting and done nothing to make up for it. But then, that was the standard 'blame the victim' abuser mentally, and to be expected. Gideon seemed to work through this slap in the face and let it slide. He said, "For a while I thought maybe, you know, if I could talk to the people responsible. If I could show them how difficult life has been because of them, that maybe they would care. I don't know. I thought maybe if they apologized, it would be so much easier to forget this shit. You know? To do what they say and 'let it go'. But nobody will take any personal responsibility. My own parents have nothing to offer but a bunch of whiny excuses. They try to convince me that my life wasn't as bad as I remember it." "Fuck that," he said, "They weren't even there. They don't even know what went on with me. I just..." He paused and pulled his fingers through his hair. "Christ," he said. He paused again, eyes to the sky, and then back to her. "Even the people who never personally raised a hand against me still propped up the regime that made it happen. They stood by and allowed it. Played a part. All of them. Every single one was a participant. Either directly or by looking away. Institutionally, doctrinally, they abused us. Sent us into the streets to beg, denied us an education, had us beaten, starved, exorcised, and separated from our parents. They broke up our families, gave our bodies to perverts, and stole our future. And then they turn around and say we're supposed to just forget it happened and move on from it. If instead we bring up the past, then they'll call us liars. Say we're exaggerating or making it up completely. Why the hell would be make any of this shit up? What's the point in that? To make our lives seem worse than they were? Not that I would, but do you have any idea how much exaggeration it would take for the average person to even begin to grasp how fucking miserable it was? And then, if they ever do admit to any of it, they say that 'mistakes were made'. " "Mistakes." he said. He was leaning forward again, punctuating the air with his finger. "Michael, they commit crimes against children. You know, those things people in society go to jail for when they're caught. And then to the public they do what they always do. Deny. Deny. Deny. And we're left more raped than ever. Victimized first by what they did, and again by their refusal to admit that it happened. They paint us as bitter apostates and liars to a world that not only doesn't give a shit, but also couldn't possibly understand even if it did." "I do," Munroe said. And Gideon stopped.

By becoming the aggressor in sharing the good news of Christ with everyone in earshot, I became the one doing the influencing for good rather than the one being influenced for evil. I deduced that my Christianity is not about me but about Christ living through me. Jesus Christ represents everything that is truly good about me. Oddly enough, it started with a prank telephone call when I was seventeen. As I was studying the Bible one night, I had just said a prayer in which I asked God for the strength to be more vocal about my faith. All of a sudden, the phone rang and I answered. “Hello?” I asked. No one answered. “Hello?” I asked again. There was still silence on the other end. I started to hang up the phone, but then it hit me. “I’m glad you called,” I said. “You’re just the person I’m looking for.” Much to my surprise, the person on the other end didn’t hang up. “I want to share something with you that I’m really excited about,” I said. “It’s what I put my faith in. You’re the perfect person to hear it.” So then I started sharing the Gospel, and whoever was on the other end never said a word. Every few minutes, I’d hear a little sound, so I knew the person was still listening. After several minutes, I told the person, “I’m going to ask you a few questions. Why don’t you do one beep for no and two beeps for yes? We can play that game.” The person on the other end didn’t say anything. Undaunted by the person’s silence, I took out my Bible and started reading scripture. After a few minutes, I heard pages rustling on the other end of the phone. I knew the person was reading along with me! After a while, every noise I heard got me more excited! At one point, I heard a baby crying in the background. I guessed that the person on the phone was a mother or perhaps a babysitter. I asked her if she needed to go care for her child. She set the phone down and came back a few minutes later. I figured that once I started preaching, she would hang up the phone. But the fact that she didn’t got my adrenaline flowing. For three consecutive hours, I shared the message of God I’d heard from my little church in Luna, Louisiana, and what I’d learned by studying the Bible and listening to others talk about their faith over the last two years. By the time our telephone call ended, I was out of material! “Hey, will you call back tomorrow night?” I asked her. She didn’t say anything and hung up the phone. I wasn’t sure she would call me back the next night. But I hoped she would, and I prepared for what I was going to share with her next. I came across a medical account of Jesus’ death and decided to use it. It was a very graphic account of Jesus dying on a cross. Around ten o’clock the next night, the phone rang. I answered it and there was silence on the other end. My blood and adrenaline started pumping once again! Our second conversation didn’t last as long because I came out firing bullets! I worried my account of Jesus’ death was too graphic and might offend her. But as I told her the story of Jesus’ crucifixion--how He was sentenced to death by Pontius Pilate, beaten with leather-thonged whips, required to strip naked, forced to wear a crown of thorns on His head, and then crucified with nails staked through His wrists and ankles--I started to hear sobs on the other end of the phone. Then I heard her cry and she hung up the phone. She never called back. Although I never talked to the woman again or learned her identity, my conversations with her empowered me to share the Lord’s message with my friends and even strangers. I came to truly realize it was not about me but about the power in the message of Christ.