Siri Quotes

Every sickness has an alien quality, a feeling of invasion and loss of control that is evident in the language we use about it.

There is no future without a past, because what is to be cannot be imagined except as a form of repetition.

Pain is always emotional. Fear and depression keep constant company with chronic hurting.

I will turn human anatomy into roses and stars and sea. I will dissect the beloveds body in metaphor.

A book is a collaboration between the one who reads and what is read and, at its best, that coming together is a love story like any other.

Reading is a private pursuit; one that takes place behind closed doors.

I don't want the words to be naked the way they are in faxes or in the computer. I want them to be covered by an envelope that you have to rip open in order to get at. I want there to be a waiting time -a pause between the writing and the reading. I want us to be careful about what we say to each other. I want the miles between us to be real and long. This will be our law -that we write our dailiness and our suffering very, very carefully.

I’m beginning to view democracy as the Siri of political systems. So much better in theory.

That night as I lay in bed, I thought of several things I could have said and mourned the fact that my wit usually bloomed late, peaking when it no longer mattered, during the solitary hours close to midnight.

Dreams are stories made by and for the dreamer, and each dreamer has his own folds to open and knots to untie.

The truth is that personality inevitably bleeds into all forms of our intellectual life. We all extrapolate from our own lives in order to understand the world.

When I spoke to her, I had the feeling that her thoughts had been nourished in wide-open spaces where talk was sparse and silence ruled.

Why does it always have to be that way? Why do good men always have to sacrifice themselves for others? Because they believe that the rest of us are worth it.

I've always thought of wholeness and integration as necessary myths. We're fragmented beings who cement ourselves together, but there are always cracks. Living with the cracks is part of being, well, reasonably healthy

Time is not outside us, but inside. Only we live with past, present, and future, and the present is too brief to experience anyway; it is retained afterward and then it is either codified or it slips into amnesia.

We read each other through our eyes, and anatomically they are an extension of our brains. When we catch someone's eye, we look into a mind.

That is the strangeness of language: it crosses the boundaries of the body, is at once inside and outside, and it sometimes happens that we don't notice the threshold has been crossed.

Siry answered with one simple, shattering word. "Veelox.

Our memory fragments don't have any coherence until they're imagined in words. Time is a property of language, of syntax, and tense.

We are all dying one by one. We all smell of mortality, and we can't wash it off.

I've always thought that love thrives on a certain kind of distance, that it requires an awed separateness to continue. Without that necessary remove, the physical minutiae of the other person grows ugly in its magnification.

Honesty can be a dirty gift.

Memory changes as a person matures.

Reading is perception as translation. The inert signs of an alphabet become living meanings in the mind.

He put his hand on his forehead and scoured the French department of his memory for a word. He knew it was in there. He'd put it in almost fifty years before and hadn't had cause to remove it. But for the life of him he couldn't find it.

A hero without faults is like an omelet without little bits of eggshell in it.

I remember thinking how easy it is to speak in clichés, to steal a line from pulp fiction and let it fall. We can only hover around the inexpressible with our words anyway, and there is comfort in saying what we have heard before.

Great books are the ones that are urgent, life-changing, the ones that crack open the reader’s skull and heart.

Escribir es un modo de localizar mi hambre, y el hambre no es sino un vacío.

Who has ever deserved anything they've been given? Love isn't about deserving,cara mia. It's about giving. And accepting. And sharing. The most worthy heart is also the most courageous.

There are tragedies and there are comedies, aren’t there? And they are often more the same than different, rather like men and women, if you ask me. A comedy depends on stopping the story at exactly the right moment.

This table is a pigeon trap. A dozen different forks and knives and spoons. Four different goblets. All of them just waiting to be knocked over or misapplied and mishandled. It’s a wonder anyone is ever tempted to eat.

Fiction is not an escape from the world either. Imaginary experience is also experience. O

People can't help what they feel. It's what they do that counts

Your past is not as important as your future. Did you know that? Can't change anything about what you've been, but you can change who you'll become.

There's a phenomenology of being sick, one that depends on temperament, personal history, and the culture which we live in.

Siri whispered an answer to my unasked question. "No, Merin, one is never really too old. At least not too old to want the warmth and closeness. You decide, my love. I will be content either way." I decided. Towards the dawn we slept.

The faculty of memory cannot be separated from the imagination. They go hand in hand. To one degree or another, we all invent our personal pasts. And for most of us those pasts are built from emotionally colored memories.

Love is not some tool for manipulation. Love is a gift - love is from God. Love means everything.

Ture stories can't be told forward, only backward. We invent them from the vantage point of an ever-changing present and tell ourselves how they unfolded.

I've often thought that one of us is what we imagine, that each of us normalizes the terrible strangeness of inner life with a variety of convenient fictions.

Memory is essential to who we are, and memories can be both implicit and explicit - unconscious and conscious.

Pero todos vivimos aquí, pensé para mis adentros, en esas historias imaginarias que nos relatamos sobre nuestras vidas.

Dreaming is another form of thinking, more concrete, more economical, more visual, and often more emotional than the thoughts of the day, but a thinking through of the day, nevertheless.

The recollections of an older man are different from those of a younger man. What seemed vital at forty may lose its significance at seventy. We manufacture stories, after all, from the fleeting sensory material that bombards us at every instant, a fragmented series of pictures, conversations, odors, and the touch of things and people. We delete most of it to live with some semblance of order, and the reshuffling of memory goes on until we die.

The genius of women has always been easy to discount, suppress, or attribute to the nearest man. When

There was nothing fake or added about him. He was all himself.

I suppose we are all products of our parents' joy and suffering. Their emotions are written into us, as much as the inscriptions made by their genes.

Widowers marry again because it makes their lives easier. Widows often don't, because it makes their lives harder. [p. 61]

Ukitaka kuwa mfanyabiashara mzuri wa madawa ya kulevya usitumie madawa ya kulevya. Siri ya mafanikio ya Kolonia Santita ni nidhamu na kitalifa.

The woman’s brain has two hemispheres,” she slurred. “One for loving, one for hating. They can operate quite competently at the same time.

Forgetting," I said, "is probably as much a part of life as remembering. We're all amnesiacs.

But if it wasn't you, then who would I dream about?

True stories can't be told forward, only backward. We invent them from the vantage point of an ever-changing present and tell ourselves how they unfolded.

I’m left doing all the unskilled labor myself, which is exactly when you realize there’s nothing unskilled about labor.

Some of us are fated to live in a box from which there is only temporary release. We of the damned-up spirits, of the thwarted feelings, of the blocked hearts, and the pent-up thoughts, we who long to blast out, flood forth in a torrent of rage or joy or even madness, but there is nowhere for us to go, nowhere in the world because no one will have us as we are, and there is nothing to do except to embrace the secret pleasures of our sublimations, the arc of a sentence, the kiss of a rhyme, the image that forms on paper or canvas, the inner cantata, the cloistered embroidery, the dark and dreaming needlepoint from hell or heaven or purgatory or none of those three, but there must be some sound and fury from us, some clashing cymbals in the void.

Memory offers up its gifts only when jogged by something in the present. It isn't a storehouse of fixed images and words, but a dynamic associative network in the brain that is never quiet and is subject to revision each time we retrieve an old picture or old words.

Libraries are sexual dream factories. The langour brings it on.

Las Vegas. Madhali umeona tunafanya nini katika maisha, fumba macho kwa kuyakodoa. Wanaosema hawajui wanaojua hawasemi. Siri ni siri milele. Kinachofanyika hapa hubakia hapa.

did you realize every time you speak a query into Apple’s Siri artificial intelligence agent, your voice recording is analyzed and stored by the company for at least two years?

But Siri knew the slow pace of books and the cadences of theater under the stars. I knew only the stars.

If only you could command your brain to actually do that. It would be cool to have some kind of remote control to switch off your thoughts. Thoughts off, Siri. Or, more positive thoughts, Siri. Forget about this thought, Siri. if only.

The man was heavy with life. So often it’s lightness that we admire. Those people who appear weightless and unburdened, who hover instead of walk, attract us with their defiance of ordinary gravity. Their carelessness mimics happiness, but Bill had none of that.

the spectator is the true vanishing point

Honesty can be a dirty gift. It can muddy a sparkling stream of memories.

Concentrate on the small things and do them well.

I often felt the girls' speech was interchangeable, without any individuality whatsoever, a kind of herd-speak they had all agreed upon.

We project our feelings onto other people, but there is always a dynamic that creates those inventions. The fantasies are made between people, and the ideas about those people live inside us ... And, even after they die, they are still there. I am made of the dead.

Lots of women read fiction. Most men don't. Women read fiction written by women and by men. Most men don't. If a man opens a novel,. he likes to have a masculine name on the cover; it's reassuring somehow. You never know what might happen to that external genitalia if you immerse yourself in imaginary doings concocted by someone with the goods on the inside.

Everyone had grown used to giving orders to the pleasant-voiced feminine robots. Alexa, Siri, Sophia, Sage, do this for me. A perky ‘okay’, and your wish was her command. They’d all been doing it for years before women started realising the men in their lives had been conditioned to do the same to them. And by then it was too late.

We must all allow ourselves the fantasy of projection from time to time, a chance to clothe ourselves in the imaginary gowns and tails of what has never been and never will be. This gives some polish to our tarnished lives, and sometimes we may choose one dream over another, and in the choosing find some respite from ordinary sadness. After all, we, none of us, can ever untangle the knot of fictions that make up that wobbly thing we call a self.

Nyhetene forgifter meg, og jeg merker jeg er sjeleglad for at det kommer en generasjon som er oppfostret på såkalt virkelighetsflukt. For de kommer til å redde ræva til oss alle. De vil ikke vippes av pinnen når problemet blir for stort. De har lest nok dystopier til å vite at regimer kan lyve. Nok fantasy til å vite at enkeltmennesker kan vinne over umulige odds. Nok sci-fi til å vite at framskritt også kan være et skritt tilbake. Og de vet at alle har lik verdi, uansett rase, legning eller religion. Og neste gang noen spør meg hvorfor fantasy er så populært skal jeg svare at det ikke spiller noen rolle, vi skal bare være glad for at det er det. Det er sånne som kommer til å overleve zombieapokalypsen, for å si det sånn.

Do you suppose it all means something? That we're being left clues? Perhaps. Then, no offense, but I fear they've badly overestimated us.

Old places fire the internal weather of our pasts. The mild winds, aching calms, and hard storms of forgotten emotions return to us when we return to the spots where they happened.

There was a Lao proverb that called teachers the engineers of the soul

Artists are cannibals. We consume other artists, and they become part of us—flesh and bone—only to be spewed out again in our own works.

Love doesn't make you run away. Love makes you come back.

But we all live there, I thought to myself, in the imaginary stories we tell ourselves about our lives.

It was about sharing our lives. Building a dream. Starting a family. Together. It was about life being so much richer, so fuller, just because you were at my side.

Worries about the power of a doctor's suggestions to influence and shape his patient's mind, whether they are made under hypnosis or not, are still with us.

It seems to me that going backward sometimes means going forward.

Una mujer sentada junto a la ventana. Piensa / y mientras piensa, desespera / desespera por ser quien es / y no otra persona.

It has taken me a very long time, a very long time to give myself permission to fly and breathe fire.

Not telling is just as interesting as telling I have found. Why speech, that short verbal journey from inside to outside can be excrutiating under certain circumstances is fascinating.

Gratitude” is about letting go of desired outcomes and fully embracing the privilege and process of pursuing goals and dreams. “Believe” refers to the confidence that arises naturally through this process, a self-trust that is the antithesis of the doubt-fueled fixation on goals and dreams expressed in Siri’s nightly fantasy of having the perfect race at the 2000 Olympics. Siri

Imagine you are Siri Keeton: You wake in an agony of resurrection, gasping after a record-shattering bout of sleep apnea spanning one hundred forty days. You can feel your blood, syrupy with dobutamine and leuenkephalin, forcing its way through arteries shriveled by months on standby. The body inflates in painful increments: blood vessels dilate; flesh peels apart from flesh; ribs crack in your ears with sudden unaccustomed flexion. Your joints have seized up through disuse. You're a stick-man, frozen in some perverse rigor vitae. You'd scream if you had the breath. Vampires did this all the time, you remember. It was normal for them, it was their own unique take on resource conservation. They could have taught your kind a few things about restraint, if that absurd aversion to right-angles hadn't done them in at the dawn of civilization. Maybe they still can. They're back now, after all— raised from the grave with the voodoo of paleogenetics, stitched together from junk genes and fossil marrow steeped in the blood of sociopaths and high-functioning autistics. One of them commands this very mission. A handful of his genes live on in your own body so it too can rise from the dead, here at the edge of interstellar space. Nobody gets past Jupiter without becoming part vampire.

I have begun to wonder what actually happens in our brains when we return to half-remembered places. What is memory's perspective? Does the man revise the boy's view or is the imprint relatively static, a vestige of what was once intimately known?

He was one of those people in New York who was purported to "know everybody". "Knowing everybody" is a phrase that denotes not having many relations with people but having relations with a few people generally thought to be significant and powerful.

Dipping a cockroach in ink and having it scamper around the page would have left more legible traces to the average reader.

So, there it was in a nutshell. Poverty led him to religion, religion to education, education to lust, lust to communism. And Communism had brought him back full circle to poverty.

Only the unprotected self can feel joy.

I had read my way not to knowledge but into an inscrutable oblivion.

We chart delusions through collective agreement.

But what they had achieved apart on the dance floors of the world was nothing compared to what they achieved together.

...a sense that even if every scrap of a life were saved, thrown into a giant mound and then carefully sifted to extract all possible meaning, it would not add up to a life.

under our love making I felt a bleakness that couldnt be dispelled. The sadness was in both of us, and I think we pitied ourselves that night, as if we were other people looking down on the couple who lay together on the bed

Sina jinsi. Nguzo ya maisha yangu ni historia ya maisha yangu. Historia ya maisha yangu ni urithi wa watu waliojifunza kusema hapana kwa ndiyo nyingi – waliojitolea vitu vingi katika maisha yao kunifikisha hapa nilipo leo – walionifundisha falsafa ya kushindwa si hiari. Siri ya mafanikio yangu ni kujitahidi kwa kadiri ya uwezo wangu wote; au 'pushing the envelope' kwa lugha ya kigeni.

Shorn of intimacy and seen from a considerable distance, we are all comic characters, farcical buffoons who bumble through our lives, making fine messes as we go, but when you get close, the ridiculous quickly fades into the sordid or the tragic or the merely sad. [p. 73]

When I was a child, Mama had the best voice of all the members of the church. She had loved to sing. Her words had soared like an angel's over the swells of the organ. In fact, I now suspected, her entire theology had been taken from the hymnal.

Michael gave her the five-sentence rundown. "A fluid-borne disease made the dead come back to life. They like to attack the living. There are hundreds of them out there. The only way to kill them is to get them in the head with a weapon. There's a good chance we're all going to die." Vespertine was quiet for a moment before saying, with her usual coolness, "That will be engraved on a plaque someday, sir.I vote you Poet Laureate of the Undebuted Set.

I had left small-town, rural life for good, and I had no intention of ever returning, not because I didn't like my home but because I had always known that I would leave. Leaving was part of my life romance, part of an idea I had about myself as a person destined for adventure; and as far as I could tell, adventure lay in the urban wilds of Manhattan, not in the farmland of Minnesota.

No one rejoices more in revenge than women, wrote Juvenal. Women do most delight in revenge, wrote Sir Thomas Browne. Sweet is revenge, especially to women, wrote Lord Byron. And I say, I wonder why, boys. I wonder why.

The best works of art are never innocuous: they alter the viewer's perceptual predictions. It is only when the patterns of our vision are disrupted that we truly pay attention and must ask ourselves what we are looking at.

May I ask how your revolution's going? Revolutions always go more smoothly around a campfire in the jungle than they do in real life.

Distortion is part of desire. We always change the things we want.

New York City is the place where people come to invent, reinvent, or find the room they need to be who they wish to be.

I'm not sure that love is an excuse for everything

I don't know why you are better and more beautiful than anybody else.

It's odd the way life works, the way it mutates and wanders, the way one thing becomes another.

The fictive is an emormous territory it turns out, its boundaries vague, and there is little certainty about where it begins and ends.

Maybe what God had done was give her a great gift. She'd come to this country helpless and friendless. She'd been given both friends and a family

You have to feel what's right, and sometimes what's right in art is sad.

...I often thought of our marriage as one long conversation.

Siri ni siri ya mafanikio.

Wasifu wa viongozi wa Kolonia Santita ni siri kwa sababu siri ni siri ya mafanikio.

Loss. A known absence. If you didn't know it, it would be nothing, which it is, of course, a nothing of another kind, as acutely felt as a blister, but a tumult, too, in the region of the heart and lungs, an emptiness with a name: You

Dtui with her laundry-bin build was off the scale. There were no suitors queuing at her door. They wouldn’t have to dig deep to find her kindness and humour, but they didn’t even bring a spade.

Do you remember when you told me I had beautiful knees? I never like my knees. In fact, I thought they were ugly. But your eyes have rehabilitated them. Whether I see you again or not, I'm going to live out my life with these two beautiful knees.

Very soon he’ll be well enough to roll about in mud, eat worms, and walk aimlessly around Nam Poo Fountain again.’ ‘I’m sure he doesn’t see it as aimless. We all have different goals. His are achievable.

So, you tracked me down, did you?" "I did." Hayes's gravelly voice filled the phone. "Very resourceful." "I have an assistant..." "Of yourse you do." "Her name is Siri. She's quite good at her job.

You can wish or you can do." That's what the dean always said. "You might have done the wrong thing in the first place, but you don't have to do the wrong thing in the second place." That's way I always said.

Sometimes even now I think I see him in the street or standing in a window or bent over a book in a coffee shop. And in that instant, before I understand that it's someone else, my lungs tighten and I lose my breath.

Det var like før daggry, men fremdeles mørkt ute. En flik av himmelen var synlig mellom klippene, langt over henne. Millioner av stjerner lå som støv. Flere stjerner enn Umpiri, mennesker, og ætlinger til sammen. Verden var så uendelig mye større enn skapningene den rommet.

Encounters with the living always drained him more than those with the dead.

The problem wasn't drinking. The problem was people. And what they needed wasn't a new law; what they needed was a new heart.

Laws have never been able to change human nature, and only God can change hearts.

Aggressive questions are usually pedagogic - that is, the answer has already been written in the mind of the questioner, who then waits with a reply. It's pretend listening.

Very simply, for the mind, absence can be a catalyst for presence.

...socialism had somehow made time more flexible. There were often situations when 1 PM and 5 PM were interchangeable.

I curtsied. 'Thank you, Mr. Stansbury. And I apologize for my lack of grace.' He bowed. 'Never apologize for being courageous, Miss Withersby.

I was afraid of it, because I liked it. It excited me.

People imagine that hope has degrees, but I think not. There is hope and there is no hope.

My father once asked me if I knew where yonder was. I said I thought yonder was another word for there. He smiled and said, "No, yonder is between here and there.

But it's no good preaching to a grief-stricken soul. And it can actually cause much harm. God is long-suffering in His patience, however, and infinite in His kindness,

The current philosophy was that Buddha was a communist.

THERE MIGHT BE A CONNECTION BETWEEN THE MOON'S ENERGY WHEN IT'S FULL AND THE ELECTRICAL IMPULSES IN THE BRAIN.

The history of art is full of women lying around naked for erotic consumption by men.

We are all wishful creatures, and we wish backward, too, not only forward, and thereby rebuild the curious, crumbling architecture of memory into structures that are more habitable.

Six months isn't such a long time. That's how long it's been since I came to see you in May, but the fact is it's been much longer than that. We've spent years living inside each other.

In effect, painting is the still memory of [the artist's] human motion, and our individual responses to it depend on who we are, on our character, which underlines the simple truth that no person leaves himself behind in order to look at a painting.

You didn’t have to travel very far out of Vientiane before the road turned to pebbles and potholes. Traveling in a truck was like falling down an endless flight of uneven steps in a coffin.

This skin, this hair, all this outside stuff. It isn't me. It's just my package. It's like the wrapper around the sweet; it isn't the sweet itself. What we really are is all inside the package. All our feelings. All our good moods and bad moods. All our ideas, our cleverness, our love, that's what a person really is.

My mother’s idiosyncratic definition of the word is the following: we all suffer and we all die.“Never, ever,” my mother said to me when I was eleven,“say ‘pass away’ for ‘to die.’ People die. They don’t evaporate.

All right, here comes the philosophy. You can leave if you like but I suggest you stick it out. You don’t measure your own success against the size or volume of the effect you’re having. You gauge it from the difference you make to the subject you’re working on. Is leading an army that wins a war really that much more satisfying than teaching a four-year-old to ride a bicycle? At our age,” she said, “you go for the small things and you do them as well as you can.” In the back of the pony trap, squashed beside his two large boxes, Siri still felt Daeng’s lip prints on his cheek and heard her whisper, “Go for the small things and do them well.” It would be his new mantra. Forget the planet, save the garden.

Their version of rock-paper-scissors was elephant—fist, mouse—palm, and ant—little finger. The elephant crushed the mouse, the mouse squashed the ant, and the ant crawled up the elephant’s trunk and paralyzed his brain.

As Siri walked along that oh-so-noisy riverbank on his way to work, he saw a pelican gliding above the surface of the water. It was a marvelous bird, proud and resourceful, and he imagined how it would taste with a little chili paste and fresh yams. Hungry people made poor environmentalists.

The concept of the Trinity seems very esoteric and irrelevant in today's world, but it seems to me that only a faith embracing each person of the Trinity can save us from imbalance. While love without faith offers no hope, faith without love offers no mercy. We must have both faith and love or run the danger of discovering that, in the end, we have nothing at all.

Sir—I got a Ministry of Magic leaflet by owl, about security measures we should all take against the Death Eaters…" "Yes, I received one myself," said Dumbledore, still smiling. "Did you find it useful?" "Not really." "No, I thought not. You have not asked me, for instance, what is my favorite flavor of jam, to check that I am indeed Professor Dumbledore and not an impostor.

It was babies I loved looking at, the little Lords, sensuous delights of pudgy flesh and fluids. For at least three years I was awash in milk and poop and piss and spit-up and sweat and tears. It was paradise. It was exhausting. It was boring. It was sweet, exciting, and sometimes, curiously, very lonely.

But spectacular lies don't need to be perfect. They rely less on the liar's skill than on the listener's expectations and wishes. After Mark's dishonesty was exposed, I understood how much I wised that what he had told me had been true.

A good communist,” the man had said, “does not let go of the plough halfway across the paddy and leave the buffalo to find its own direction. He eats with her, tends to her injuries, and sleeps with her until the job is done.” Siri had resisted the temptation to spread the word that the Party was advocating bestiality.

Biblioll College. Sir,—I have read your letter with interest; and, judging from your description of yourself as a working-man, I venture to think that you will have a much better chance of success in life by remaining in your own sphere and sticking to your trade than by adopting any other course. That, therefore, is what I advise you to do. Yours faithfully, T. Tetuphenay. To Mr. J. Fawley, Stone-mason.

What's your "secret" to staying young, staying slim, staying in shape, staying married, staying happy. None of those things are secret. Diet and exercise are not. Love and devotion are not. Now I answer simply "Orgasm." Their expressions: Priceless!

This was not to be the only time Apple completely forgot about at least 50% of their users. When Apple launched their AI, Siri, she (ironically) could find prostitutes and Viagra suppliers, but not abortion providers. Siri could help you if you’d had a heart attack, but if you told her you’d been raped, she replied ‘I don’t know what you mean by ‘I was raped.’ These are basic errors that surely would have been caught by a team with enough women on it – that is, by a team without a gender data gap.

...the distance needed for humor is always missing from dreams.

I don’t know. On my last junket I was caught in the middle of a massacre. The one before that I was tortured and left for dead. Joy and recreation seem to have escaped me somehow.

My purely practical advice: Don't get excited. Don't raise your voice. Bite back. Bite back hard, but never cry.

I am fascinated that no one I have read seems to have noticed that the literature on Picasso continually turns grown-up women into girls.

First loves are often terrible, probably because they are first and there is no conscious history into which they may be absorbed.

The articulation of the other's body in words turns it into a map of possible pleasure, effectively distancing that body by transforming it into an erotic object.

Feminism was good for me, as were any number of causes, but as I developed as a thinking person, the truisms and dogmas of every ideology became as worn as that book's cover.

I dreamed the world was an awful place,” he said. “It wasn’t a dream,” she told him.

nonsense can also be real

Je n'écris plus, je suis écrite. (p.86)

D. W. Winnicott, un psychanaliste et pédiatre anglais: "Se réfugier dans la normalité, ce n'est pas la santé." (p.96)

Le cou n'est-il pas l'endroit où finit la tête et où le corps commence? (p.148)

Desire is the engine of life, the yearning that goads us forward with stops along the way, but it has no destination, no final stop, except death.

It is not that there is no difference between men and women; it is how much difference that difference makes, and how we choose to frame it.

Medicine had granted permission to a fantasy that men have never abandoned, a muddled version of what Pygmalion wanted - something between a real woman and a beautiful thing.

But mixing is the way of the world. The world passes through us - food, books, pictures, other people.

You're saying that anything's art if people say it is? Even me?" "Exactly. It's perspective - not content.

No. I’m afraid it would be quite impossible to use a hammer without hammering.

He hunched his shoulders and looked at the floor. With that movement, he entered the past. When he put on his jacket, kissed me again, and walked to the door, he was already a memory.

A statue of Mary, sheltered inside, implied infinite peace. A listening ear. A willingness to give you the benefit of the doubt. God knew what he was doing when he gave Jesus a mother.

All I can say is that every time I'm with him, she's there. She walks through every game I play with him. She whispers behind me every time I talk to him. When we draw, she's there. When we build blocks, she's there. When I scold him, she's there. Whenever I look up, she's there.

He’d come to believe two conflicting ideas with equal conviction: that communism was the only way man could be truly content; and that man, given his selfish ways, could never practice communism with any success. The natural product of these two views was that man could never be content. History, with its procession of disgruntled political idealists, tended to prove him right.

IMAGINE YOU ARE Siri Keeton. You wake in an agony of resurrection, gasping after a record-shattering bout of sleep apnea spanning one hundred forty days. You can feel your blood, syrupy with dobutamine and leuenkephalin, forcing its way through arteries shriveled by months on standby. The body inflates in painful increments: blood vessels dilate, flesh peels apart from flesh, ribs crack in your ears with sudden unaccustomed flexion. Your joints have seized up through disuse. You’re a stick man, frozen in some perverse rigor vitae. You’d scream if you had the breath.

Treba se cuvati sanjarije koja se namece. Sanjarija nosi u sebi tajanstvenost i opojnost mirisa.Ona je katkada kao otrovna ideja koja se siri i prodire kao dim. Covek moze da otruje snovima isto onako kao i sa cvecem. Opojno divno i kobno samoubistvo. Rdjave misli su samoubistvo duse.U tome se i sastoji trovanje. Masta privlaci, pridobija lepim,mami,veze,a potom postajete njen saucesnik. Ona vas uortaci da zajednicki obmanjujete svest. Opcini vas,a potom vas pokvari. O mastanju se moze reci ono isto sto i o igri. Najpre bivas prevaren,a zatim i sam postajes varalica.

In order to be accepted, women must compensate for their ambition and strength by being nice. Men don't have to be nearly as much d as women. I do not believe women are natively nicer than men. They may learn that niceness brings rewards and hat names ambition is often punished. They may ingratiate themselves because such behavior is rewarded and a strategy of stealth may lead to better results than being forthright, but even when women are open and direct, they are not always seen or heard.

Her head was on my shoulder and her breathing was so deep and regular that I thought her to be asleep. I was almost asleep myself when her warm hand slid up my leg and lightly cupped me. I was startled even as I began to stir and stiffen. Siri whispered an answer to my unasked question. “No, Merin, one is never really too old. At least not too old to want the warmth and closeness. You decide, my love. I will be content either way.” I

Words accrue and lose meaning through a semantic mobility dependent on the community in which they thrive, and these meanings cannot be divorced from bodily sensation and emotion. Slang emerges among a circle of speakers. Irony requires double consciousness, reading one meaning and understanding another. Elegant prose involves a feeling for the rhythms and the music of sentences, a product of the sensual pleasure a writer takes in the sounds of words and the varying metric beats of sentences. Creative translation must take all this into account. If a meaning is lost in one sentence, it might be gained or added to the next one. Such considerations are not strictly logical. They do not involve a step-by-step plan but come from the translator’s felt understanding of the two languages involved. Rodney

We all start out the same in our mothers' wombs. We, all of us, when floating in the amniotic sea of our earliest oblivion, have gonads. If the Y chromosome didn't swoop in to act on the gonads of some of us and make testes, we would all become women. In biology, the Genesis story is reversed: Adam becomes Adam out of Eve, not the other way around.

I've decided that mixing is a key term. It's better than suggestion, which is one-sided. It explains what people rarely talk about, because we define ourselves as isolated, closed bodies who bump up against each other but stay shut. Descartes was wrong. It isn't: I think, there I am. It's: I am because you are. That's Hegel - well, the short version.

Es imposible adivinar el final de una historia mientras la estás viviendo; carece de contornos y se constituye como una serie de palabras y datos incipientes y, para ser sinceros, nunca recuperamos toda la información de aquello que fue.

Ujanja wote ulimwisha Murphy. Ilimbidi kutoboa siri ili adui asizidi kumuumiza. Alilaumu mno kufa wakati alishakula ng’ombe mzima. Alifikiri Mogens na Yehuda walishauwawa kulingana na hasira nyingi za magaidi. Walihakikisha hawafanyi makosa hata kidogo. Alivyomaliza kumhoji, yule adui alizunguka nyuma katika mgongo wa Murphy na kwenda katika dirisha lililokuwa wazi – la mashariki – ambapo aliegemea na kuvuta sigara. Alichungulia kidogo nje kisha akageuka na kuendelea kupata upepo mdogo wa baridi.

I do understand! I understand what they do not, and that is you can only do with what you have. What God has given you. If you try to be anyone else, it is the worst thing that can happen because you cannot ever be them - and then you give up being you

I've come to think of consciousness as a continuum of states, from fully awake cogitation to daydreaming to the altered consciousness of hallucinations and dreams. Still, interpreting dreams can only take place when we're awake. I believe meaning is what the mind makes and wants. It's essential to perception and to consciousness in all its forms. But the important meanings of psychotherapy are subjective. There's a lot of research that confirms that drem content reflects the dreamer's emotional conflicts.

My mother said the bizarre name Raccoona had surely been inspired, at least on a subliminal level, by the masks raccoons don't wear but simply have - the ones given them by nature..... [S]he pointed out that Le Guin had suspected all along that Raccoona and Tiptree were two authors that came from the same source, but in a letter to Alice she wrote that she preferred Tiptree to Raccoona: 'Raccoona, I think, has less control, thus less wit and power.' Le Guin, Mother said, had understood something deep. 'When you take on a male persona, something happens.' When I asked her what that was, she sat back in her chair, waved her arm, and smiled. 'You get to be the father.

All thoughts of revenge are born of the pain of helplessness. 'I suffer' becomes 'You will suffer'. And let us not lie: Vengeance is invigorating. It focuses and enlivens us, and it quashes grief because it turns the emotion outward. In grief we go to pieces. In revenge we come together as a single pointed weapon aimed at a target. However destructive in the long run, it serves a useful purpose for a time

I move through it like a phantom, and I have begun to wonder what actually happens in our brains when we return to half-remembered places. What is memory's perspective? Does the man revise the boy's view or is the imprint relatively static, a vestige of what was once intimately known?

There comes a time when even the thing you love betrays you...you have to know when it's time to give it up, I suppose. Doesn't mean you love it any less, of course. Just means it's time to move on. When you can't agree with the decisions that bind you, then you have to take your talents elsewhere.

In May, she wrote to tell me that she was coming to New york or a week in June. She was going to stay with me, but her letters made it clear that the visit didnt mean a resumption for our old life. As the day approached, my agitation mounted. By the morning of her arrival, it had reached a pitch that felt something like an inner scream.The very thought that I would soon see Erica again didnt excite me as much as wound me. As I wandered around the loft trying to calm myself, I realized that I was holding my chest like a man who had just been stabbed. After sitting down, I tried to untangled that feeling of injury but couldnt do it - not fully.

The transience of human feeling is nothing short of ludicrous. My mercurial fluctuations in the course of a single evening made me feel as if I had a character made pf chewing gum. I had fallen into the ugly depths of self-pity, a terrain just above the even more hideous lowlands of despair. Then, easily distracted twit that I am, I had, soon after, found myself on maternal heights, where I had practically swooned with pleasure as I bobbed and fondled the borrowed homunculus next door. I had eaten well, drunk too much wine, and embraced a young woman I hardly knew. In short, I had thoroughly enjoyed myself and had every intention of doing so again. [p. 59]

Fear helps us survive. I've spent a larger portion of my life being afraid than I have being in control. But, here I am. Forget this escape idea, son. It won't help you or your family. Play the game. Find a tall tree somewhere. A tree that's survived all the coups and massacres of history. Go to that tree and dig a hole near its roots and bury your pride there.

Looking at a human being or even a picture of a human being is different from looking at an object. Newborn babies, only hours old, copy the expressions of adults. They pucker up, try to grin, look surprised, and stick out their tongues. The photographs of imitating infants are both funny and touching. They do not know they are doing it; this response is in them from the beginning. Later, people learn to suppress the imitation mechanism; it would not be good if we went on forever copying every facial expression we saw. Nevertheless, we human beings love to look at faces because we find ourselves there. When you smile at me, I feel a smile form on my own face before I am aware it is happening, and I smile because I am seeing me in your eyes and know that you like what you see.

How's the blood-stream, my dear, invaluable little woman? How's the blood-stream?"... "It's quite comfortable, sir...I think, sir, thank you."... "Aha!"..."a comfortable stream, is it? Aha! v-e-r-y good. V-e-r-y good. Dawdling 'twixt hill and hill, no doubt. Meandering through groves of bone, threading the tissues and giving what sustenance it can to your dear old body...I am so glad. But in yourself - right deep down in yourself - how do you feel? Carnally speaking, are you at peace - from the dear grey hairs of your head to the patter of your little feet - are you at peace?" "What does he mean, dear?" said poor Mrs. Slagg, clutching Fuschia's arm.... "He wants to know if you feel well or not.

But when the time comes to judge, to understand a betrayal which will spread like flame across the Web, which will end worlds, I ask you not to think of me—my name was not even writ on water as your lost poet’s soul said—but to think of Old Earth dying for no reason, to think of the dolphins, their gray flesh drying and rotting in the sun, to see—as I have seen—the motile isles with no place to wander, their feeding grounds destroyed, the Equatorial Shallows scabbed with drilling platforms, the islands themselves burdened with shouting, trammeling tourists smelling of UV lotion and cannabis. Or better yet, think of none of that. Stand as I did after throwing the switch, a murderer, a betrayer, but still proud, feet firmly planted on Hyperion’s shifting sand, head held high, fist raised against the sky, crying “A plague on both your houses!” For you see, I remember my grandmother’s dream. I remember the way it could have been. I remember Siri.

Kuna ndoto za mchana na kuna ndoto za usiku. Ndoto za mchana ni maono ya kile ambacho roho inatamani kuwa. Ndoto za usiku ni maono yanayotokea wakati akili imetulia baada ya mwili wote kupumzika. Ukiota kuhusu moto, hiyo ni ishara ya hasira; ukiota kuhusu maji, hiyo ni ishara ya siri; ukiota kuhusu ardhi, hiyo ni ishara ya huzuni; ukiota kuhusu Yesu, hiyo ni ishara ya mafanikio. Kitu cha kwanza kufanya unapoota ndoto za kishetani, utakapoamka, mwombe Mungu akunusuru kutoka katika matatizo yoyote yanayokunyemelea; au yanayomnyemelea mtu mwingine yoyote yule, hata usiyemjua. Ubongo ni kitu cha ajabu kuliko vyote ulimwenguni na umetengenezwa na Mungu. Ndoto zinapatikana ndani ya ubongo. Ubongo unapatikana ndani ya ufahamu. Ufahamu mtawala wake ni malaika mwema. Malaika mwema anajua siri ya ndoto. Kila mtu anaota na kila ndoto ina maana yake. Rekodi ndoto zako kila siku kwa angalau mwezi mzima kupata maana halisi ya ndoto hizo, na kujua kwa nini ulizaliwa.

Like you, I grew up in a remote animist village. But then I went to a strict Catholic education in France. I was perfectly content to accept the grand Shee Yee of the Otherworld and the Lord B, and Jesus and his mother as my spiritual icons as long as I didn't have to spend too long on my knees. I would have settled for a committee. I just wanted order. But once I started to see my own ghosts I understood what these religions were all about. They were clubs set up by people like me to stop themselves from going mad. You know what I really think happens? You die. You wait for your number. There's a bit of time to take care of unfinished business. And you pass on. And, as you don't come back, nobody actually knows what you pass on to. But that description has never been acceptable. People want an ending. They don't want to vanish into thin air. So these great religious gurus made some endings up. The more comfortable and happy your ending, the more members signed up and paid their fees. And the kings and emperors started to add rules and regulations to subjugate the commoners and keep them in line. As so they invented hell and told you if you coveted your neighbor's mule you wouldn't even get into the clubhouse at the end of it all.

When I say my wound became political in the years that followed, I don't mean that my involvement in the anti-war movement was somehow insincere or that I have any regrets about my activism. As a champion of the downtrodden, the disenfranchised, the poor, and the oppressed, I found a new outlet for the somewhat irrational but nevertheless strong sense I had of being an outsider in a group - uncomfortable, awkward, and quick to feel a slight. Political feeling can't exist without identification, and mine inevitably went to people without power, In contrast, right-wing ideologies often appeal to those who want to link themselves to authority, people for whom the sight of military parades or soldiers marching off to war is aggrandizing, not painful. Inevitably, there is sublimation in politics, too. It becomes an avenue for suppressed aggression and anger, and I was no exception. And so it was that armed with passion and gorged on political history, I became a firebrand at fourteen. For three years, I read and argued and demonstrated. I marched against the Vietnam War, helped print strike T-shirts at Carleton College after the deaths of four students at Kent State, attended rallies, raised money for war-torn Mozambique, signed petitions, licked envelopes for the American Indian Movement, and turned into a feminist. But even then, I didn't believe all the rhetoric.