Stacy Quotes

I don't deserve you. I'm not made for relationships. I know I'm going to fuck this up. I'm going to drive you away or do something to hurt you, and you'll be added to my list of people I screwed over. You should walk away now.

As always, an educated woman was a dangerous woman.

If the entire cheerleading squad turns into mice, Robin, I will be very upset with you. Mortal adolescents are blind and cruel. You know that. You mustn't take revenge, no matter how you feel about the girl. Especially now. There are more worrisome things on the move. -Ms Stacy

Tomorrow is always fresh with no mistakes in it...well with no mistakes in it yet.

And in the absence of facts, myth rushes in, the kudzu of history.

Men are like dogs," Stacy was fond of saying. And she usually went on to add that, like dogs, they all took up too much space on the bed, and they always went for the crotch.

When a woman teams up with a snake a moral storm threatens somewhere.

We both smile at the classic misunderstanding. It’s all so cliché-ridden, it’s embarrassing. I wish our story could have some more original twists and turns. Maybe one of us will turn into a vampire or something.

Stacy can choke on store-bought sugar cookies like the rest of us. Why's he even bringing them? They're dentists. They should be eating celery.

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that, in the process, he does not become a monster. If you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.

[Eating disorders] are a wonderful tool for helping you reject others before they can reject you. Example: You're at a party. The popular girls are there. You know you can never be as cool as they are, but when one of the pops a potato chip into her mouth or chooses real Coke over Diet, for that moment you are better

I always watch you. You consume my every thought.

Each day we stood almost shoulder to shoulder, occupying the same space, breathing the same air, but we remained strangers.

Cleopatra stood at one of the most dangerous intersections in history; that of women and power. Clever women, Euripides had warned hundreds of years earlier, were dangerous.

Braveness isn't always loud. Sometimes it's silent. There's braveness in sacrifice and kindness. It's in doing a thing that needs to be done, even though it's hard, and even though it hurts.

Cincinatti was where I learned that running away from your problems has a three-month statute of limitations, a lesson I have found repeatedly to be true. Three months is still a first impression -- of a city, of other people, of yourself in that place. But there comes a point when you can no longer hide who you are, and the reactions of others become all too familiar...

A depressed person is selfish because her self, the very core of who she is, will not leave her alone, and she can no more stop thinking about this self and how to escape it than a prisoner held captive by a sadistic serial killer can forget about the person who comes in to torture her everyday. Her body is brutalized by her mind.

Sophie has to go home and sleep in her own bed,” Stacy tells them with a smile. “She can sleep in our bed, like Caleb sleeps in Mommy’s bed,” Maddie replies. Just shoot me

To anyone who thinks eating disorders are something rich, bored white girls do to get attention, I bid you bite me. I have frequent, intense, inappropriate outbursts of anger over the lies little girls are told about what is beautiful.

Pursue your goal. Opinions be damned.

See what I mean? Your confidence is so strong it’s obnoxious.

what shall we drink to?" "How about family?" Stacy said, showing up just in time to pour a fourth shot. "To those who are here, those who are gone, and those who are lost." and she clicked glasses with mom

That’s the beauty of books, little sister. What means nothing to one has a profound effect on another.

There are so many subtle ways we women subconsciously protect ourselves throughout the day; protect ourselves from shadows, from unseen predators. From cautionary tales and urban legends. So subtle, in fact, that we hardly even realize we’re doing them.

[Cleopatra's] power has been made to derive from her sexuality, for obvious reason; as one of Caesar's murderers had noted, 'How much more attention people pay to their fears than to their memories!' It has always been preferable to attribute a woman's success to her beauty rather than to her brains, to reduce her to the sum of her sex life.

There is no length to love; it's infinite. It lives in you always. Hold on to it.

Maybe you need to stop retracing your footsteps. Maybe you need to try a new path.

You have to let go of who you were to allow yourself to become who you are.

Guys find me neutered, detached, invisible. I’m Switzerland. The girls Max dates are Brazil.

Nobody would commit suicide if the pain of being inside herself, the agony of the sleepless, tortured hours spent watching the world get smaller and uglier, were bearable or could be relieved by other people telling her how they wanted her to feel. A depressed person is selfish because her self, the very core of who she is, will not leave her alone, and she can no more stop thinking about this self and how to escape it than a prisoner held captive by a sadistic serial killer can forget about the person who comes in to torture her everyday. Her body is brutalized by her mind. It hurts to breathe, eat, walk, think. The gross maneuverings of her limbs are so overwhelming, so wearying, that the fine muscle movements or quickness of wit necessary to write, to actually say something, are completely out of the question.

I play by the rules even when there aren’t any.

Ancient history is oddly short on incorrect omens.

You are mine. Do you understand me? Mine! And if I have to spend the rest of my life finding every single piece of your broken heart, I will. I will put you back together again Em. I’ll do it because I’m still so in love with you. I will fix you, and I’ll fix this.

It has always been preferable to attribute a woman's success to her beauty rather to her brains, to reduce her to the sum of her sex life.

Everyone‘s screwed up. Just in different ways.

It’s like if Ryan Gosling showed up at your door dressed like Noah from The Notebook, bearing flowers and whiskey. You’d be stupid not to take that bike for a ride.

But that’s the thing about grief: There is no manual for it. There is no checklist outlining the optimal way to move through it and move on.

The singing stopped when I walked in. They all turned and stared at me, Bonne-Bell-Orange-Crush-glossed mouths hanging open, looking at me with the same horror and excitement they'd exhibit it I had just walked into the room naked. I stood there frozen, hyperaware of my scruffiness, my shirt untucked and one ponytail higher than the other. The Bad Dog turned me in on myself like a vortex, gleefully saying, Look, look. There they are, here you are. Separate. You do not belong.

My life was dark, torture and empty before you found me. You brought the light, Red. I love you.

Don't let fear or insecurity stop you from trying new things. Believe in yourself. Do what you love. And most importantly, be kind to others, even if you don't like them.

Oh, you want me to lie still while you check me out? Damn, Red, if I'd have known that earlier I would've been horizontal already.

As incandescent as was her personality, Cleopatra was every bit Caesar's equal as a coolheaded, clear-eyed pragmatist, though what passed on his part as strategy would be remembered on hers as manipulation.

The vanity extended most of all to his library, arguably the real love of Cicero's life. It is difficult to name anything in which he took more pleasure, aside possibly evasion of the sumptuary laws. Cicero liked to believe himself wealthy. He prided himself on his books. He needed no further reason to dislike Cleopatra: intelligent women who had better libraries than he did offended him on three counts.

We all subscribe to preposterous beliefs; we just don’t know yet which ones they are. We too have been known to prefer plot to truth; to deny the evidence before us in favor of the ideas behind us; to do insane things in the name of reason; to take that satisfying step from the righteous to the self-righteous; to drown our private guilts in a public well; to indulge in a little delusion.

We’ve talked it to death, Rose.” “Well, then talk to its ghost.

The truth is, people love violence—from a distance, that is. Anyone who disagrees is either in denial or hiding something.

And changing the world is a tall order for someone who is just trying to survive each day.

Salem is in part a story of what happens when a set of unanswerable questions meets a set of unquestioned answers.

Life is short, so short, so precious, every minute, every day. Don't let the people you love, the people who make you happy, the people who bring you joy — don't let them go. Hang on to them, even when it hurts. When it seems impossible. Hold on to the things that breathe life into you. Listen to your soul and honor what it tells you. Live. Fight for what you love. Because one day, you'll be where I am, and in that moment I want you to look back gladly, with no regrets.

I drop my face to my hands and scrub hard. "I wish I had your boobs," I hear Sam announce and raise my head to see who she's talking to. Of course, she's talking to Bryn. "Right," she smirks and takes another bite of brownie. "Dude, I do!" And just like that, Sam saunters across the room and cups Brynna's tit in her palm. "See? You have the perfect boobs. Stace, have you felt her boobs?" Just kill me. Put a bullet in my head and end the agony. "Oh yeah," Stacy waves her off. "She has great tits." She has amazing tits. "I wanna feel!" Jules bounces over and joins in. "Give me more chocolate and you can touch all you want." Brynna laughs and then glances over at me. "This is the most action I've had in months." "Motherfuckingsonofawhore." I grumble. "Is Brynna single?" Mark asks Will. "Keep your fucking hands off her," I growl at him before I know what's coming out of my mouth. "Hey," he holds his hands up in surrender and laughs. "It was just an innocent question.

Women play the villains in fairy tales—what are you saying when you place the very emblem of lowly domestic duty between your legs and ride off, defying the bounds of community and laws of gravity?

Damon Isaac King … wait, your initials are—” I grit my teeth. “I know. You don’t think Stacy has made that joke to our parents ever since I came out? ‘No wonder he likes dick when his initials are DIK.

A solitary eyebrow inched up Perry’s forehead. “Your lust for meat never ceases to amaze me.” “Don’t judge,” Dita said around a mouthful of bacon.

How’d you get to be so smart?" “Years of being stupid and learning from it.

Things disturb us in the night. Sometimes they are our consciences. Sometimes they are our secrets. Sometimes they are our fears, translated from one idiom to another.

To behold such majestic beauty, is admiring the creative mind and finger of God.

Feeling wanted beats feeling safe. So I stay.

Hard as nails Stacy Killian was one like one of those Tootsie Roll Pops - hard shell, soft, chewy center. Once a guy knew the center could be chewed, that's what they did. Chewed you up and spit you out. Or swallowed you, bite by bite. Goodbye respect. Goodbye self-esteem.

When people get hurt physically, you can see it in the bruises and the scars, but when they’re hurt emotionally, mentally, it runs deeper than that. You can see every sleepless night in the reflection of their eyes; you can see every tear stained into their cheeks, every bout of anger etched into the creases in their foreheads. The thirst for blood cracking the skin on their lips.

I lived a thousand lives to escape from real life, because real life is boring and shitty.

To the punishing study of Egyptian, however, Cleopatra applied herself. She was allegedly the first and only Ptolemy to bother to learn the language of the 7 million people over whom she ruled.

The two of us together were childhood trauma wrapped in a bow and placed delicately on the doorsteps of every doctor in Louisiana. Everybody knew who we were; everybody knew what was wrong with us. Everybody knew, but nobody could fix it. So I decided to fix it myself.

My fault? How the hell is this"--I waved my arm across the table-- my fault?" "You know we don't believe in hell, so stop using that word in our presence," Bridie said. "Fine. How in fucked-up fairyland is this my fault?

As Dio observed later, democracy sounded very well and good, “but its results are seen not to agree at all with its title. Monarchy, on the contrary, has an unpleasant sound, but is a most practical form of government to live under. For it is easier to find a single excellent man than many of them.

Not all deviance is negative; without it, we'd never change the world.

Would you just fall in love with me already so I can stop acting normal.

Power has for so long been a male construct that it distorted the shape of the first women who tried it on, only to find themselves in a sort of straitjacket.

Her palace shimered with onyx, garnet, and gold, but was richer still in political and sexual intrigue.

People tend to stash their dirtiest secrets in the most common of places.

But aren’t all of our lives just stories we tell ourselves? Stories we try to craft so perfectly and cast out into the world? Stories that become so vivid, so real, that eventually we start to believe them, too?

I raised an eyebrow at him. “Don’t be that guy. Didn’t you know that talking to someone while they’re reading a book ups the likelihood of you getting stabbed by like four hundred percent?

One of the things I’ve read about borderlines is that we alternate between a sense of entitlement and the belief that we’re lower than the dirt under people’s shoes.

The great thing about falling apart, is that you get to decide how to put yourself back together. Make good choices.

The key is to figure out how God can effectively use you where you're planted now, regardless of how you got there.

So unfair, she thought. Her baby was going to grow up, and her husband wasn't.

But loving someone isn't only making promises you know you can keep. That's just playing it safe. Where's the moral fiber in that? Loving someone is making promises you want to keep with all your heart, and then doing everything you can to make it happen, even if you fail sometimes. But the point is to try, because that's how you stretch yourself and learn you can do more than you thought you could. And maybe next time, you'll stretch a little farther.

I loved weekend mornings, those few hours where the world was still quiet, the day full of possibility, just me, a cup of coffee, a book, and the golden, early morning sunshine. That right there is happiness.

What are you talking about? You’re like a professional boyfriend.” “Thanks. You make me sound like a gigolo.

You make me burn with life, and yearn to set aside my cold and distant, solitary ways.

Yeah, well you know what they say. Honesty is the best policy, but insanity is a better defense.

He had a collection of cardigans that would give Mister Rogers a boner,

Didn’t you know that talking to someone while they’re reading a book ups the likelihood of you getting stabbed by like four hundred percent?

The witch hunt stands as a cobwebbed, crowd-sourced cautionary tale, a reminder that—as a minister at odds with the crisis noted—extreme right can blunder into extreme wrong.

If I were a character in one of my books, I'd be the optimistic one, believing the best and urging others to do the same.

Actually," Stacy says, "Stanley Tucci is everyone's type.

I wanted to apologize to everyone for simply existing.

Chemistry has energy and it's meant to be felt.

History is written not only by posterity, but for posterity as well.

Sometimes, the mind is just stronger than our attempts to override it.

Home is not a place, Not a smell, Not a face, But a space In your heart. -M. White

People are rarely what they seem, babe.

One loyal friend,” Euripides reminds us, “is worth ten thousand relatives.

And suddenly I started to cry. Serious sobs, the kind where your stomach hurts and you can’t breathe and there’s snot running down your face. I was crying so hard I couldn’t even mute the sounds I was making, and Luke put his hand on my back and I thought about how everyone would think that I was crying because of Stacy’s fucking speech and I wanted to kill someone. I wanted to kill someone and I wanted to die and I wanted to run as far and as fast as I could.

Stacy wasn't certain; she'd never bothered to pay attention to details like that, and was always regretting it, the half knowing, which felt worse than not knowing at all, the constant sense that she had things partly right, but not right enough to make a difference.

Remember that you’re mine, and we will get through this. I love you with every fiber in my soul, and if I have to love you enough for the both of us, for however long it takes, I will.

…I'm sorry, and a little dissatisfied as well. Miss Stacy told me long ago that by the time I was twenty my character would be formed, for good or evil. I don't feel that it's what it should be. It's full of flaws.' 'So's everybody's,' said Aunt Jamesina cheerfully. 'Mine's cracked in a hundred places. Your Miss Stacy likely meant that when you are twenty your character would have got its permanent bent in one direction or 'tother, and would go on developing in that line.

Monique, I realize that it's a short list of men in this town you haven't tied up, held down or sent to the free clinic, but why don't you just leave Leo alone. At least until he can update his vaccinations.

Borderline means you’re one of those girls… …who walk around wearing long sleeves in the summer because you’ve carved up your forearms over your boyfriend. You make pathetic suicidal gestures and write bad poetry about them, listen to Ani DiFranco albums on endless repeat, end up in the emergency room for overdoses, scare off boyfriends by insisting they tell you that they love you five hundred times a day and hacking into their email to make sure they’re not lying, have a police record for shoplifting, and your tooth enamel is eroded from purging. You’ve had five addresses and eight jobs in three years, your friends are avoiding your phone calls, you’re questioning your sexuality, and the credit card companies are after you. It took a lot of years to admit that I was exactly that girl, and that the diagnostic criteria for the disorder were essentially an outline of my life.

There is no length to love; it's infinite. It lives in you always. Hold on to it." "But it hurts," she sobbed. "That's how you know it was real.

Making you smile gives me life. Making you laugh gives me hope. Making you happy is all I want, other than to keep you.

The underlying notion of a world where the sane is insane

Levi and I live in the same world, but we see things very differently. I guess it would be boring if we all had the same view.

Don’t be afraid of numbers. Use them to compute your solutions. Look at the world as it is intended.

No one dances while he is sober. Unless he happens to be a lunatic. -Cicero

Apollodorus came, Caesar saw, Cleopatra conquered,

And for one single moment, like a flicker in the dark, it felt good.

She nonetheless survives as a wanton temptress, not the last time a genuinely powerful woman has been transmuted into a shamelessly seductive one.

And seriously, maybe you should stop tanning. You look like a fucking Cheeto.

There are always entire worlds that exist alongside the one you think you’ve chosen to live in. Sometimes you chose the worlds, and sometimes they chose you.

I can see the headline now: Archangel Busts Were Whisperer.

Politics have long been defined as “the systematic organization of hatreds.

Yet what difference does it make whether the women rule or the rulers are ruled by women? The result is the same.” —ARISTOTLE

I guess that’s the thing about grief, loss: it changes everything, not just you. Colors are duller, foods are blander. The words don’t sing like they used to.

that the past never stays where we try to keep it, stuffing it deep into the back of a closet and hoping to forget.

it hit me like a truck: It’s because mothers—and, honestly, women in general—are conditioned from birth to feel guilty about something. We always think things are our fault. We always feel the need to apologize: For being too much or too little. Too loud or too quiet. Too driven or too content.

And in that moment, the moment of the crash, it made me realize that monsters don’t hide in the woods; they aren’t shadows in the trees or invisible things lurking in darkened corners. No, the real monsters move in plain sight.

Faith aside, witchcraft served an eminently useful purpose. The aggravating, the confounding, the humiliating all dissolved in its cauldron. It made sense of the unfortunate and the eerie, the sick child and the rancid butter along with the killer cat. What else, shrugged one husband, could have caused the black and blue marks on his wife’s arm?

To be with someone, to live with someone who you thought you loved and who loved you, only to have them leave you for faults that you believed were strengths, was disorienting to say the least.

Because with that one look, I knew you were the girl who could ruin me.

There’s no such thing as repayment or scorecards in friendship. If you need me, tell me, and I’ll be there no matter what.

They asked me what I wanted to get out of this experience and I said me.

We all apologize, or fail to, in our own ways.

It used to be that the longest unprotected border in the world was that between the United States and Canada. Today it's the one between fact and fiction. If the two cozy up any closer together The National Enquirer will be out of business.

I love you. Don’t leave me. But I couldn’t speak. Not with words. So I told her the story of my love with the rest of me. With my lips and my hands. With a touch and a sigh. I loved her, and I didn’t know if I could keep her. But I would try.

See, when I met Cooper, something in me shifted on an elemental level, as if he changed my chemistry, rearranged me. I needed him, but not in the desperate way. Being with him was a universal truth. It was a quiet fact. Once I found him, the world made sense simply because he was in it and he loved me.

If you need something to help you get off, I'd prefer it if you used me.

she’s blinded by his douchesparkle.

Chance stifled a grin, and all I could think was that this girl had to be related to me. Only women who were related to me annoyed me this much.

I don’t look like the other girls, Camden.” “I know. That’s what makes you perfect.” And just like that, he melted me.

I could heal him, but he would ruin me. I would make that sacrifice without question, simply because he needed me, and I loved him.

It is a dangerous thing to have the same men in both the prophecy and the history business.

The best way to find out if you can trust somebody is to trust them. -Ernest Hemingway.

Love is one of the most powerful motivations there is. Love, hate, greed: the holy trinity of murder.

I swear to god if he hurts you I will string him up by his toes and shove a hot fire poker in his ass.

So close I can almost touch you But then you're gone Like mist around the edge...

I thought a shit storm was coming, and I had no umbrella.

Teachers and leaders and storytellers and healers will grow from the earth like blessed flowers, blossoming outward with Divine guidance, to lead the rest.

After I slid down the wall for the third time, breaking every single fingernail in the process, I finally figured out that Thor was hollering at me. I turned to see him standing in the bed of the truck. Which, of course, made much more sense, than pretending to be Spiderman. It's a humbling moment when you realize your dog is smarter than you.

Charlie says kissing is like baseball without the bat," Sam said. "I think it's more like fotball without the pads," Tess laughed. "You ever kiss a girl?" "Nah" Sam said. "Tried once, but Stacie Bing popped me in the nose and knocked me out. I woke up in the principal's office." "Really?" "Swear.

She fixed a smile that she hoped looked authentic. Pretending to be content continued to be hard work.

Thy will be done today. Today is a day of completion. I give thanks for this perfect day. Miracle shall follow miracle, and wonders shall never cease.

Girls got sucked into Dean’s gravity like rogue meteors, only to go down in glorious flames.

An inner conflict between the person she is and the person she thinks everyone wants her to be.

The Ptolemies were in fact Macedonian Greek, which makes Cleopatra approximately as Egyptian as Elizabeth Taylor.

Cleopatra descended from a long line of murderers and faithfully upheld the family tradition but was, for her time and place, remarkably well behaved.

I had come to think of him as a library book, entering my life on rented time. Something that I could enjoy for a few hours, curled up and comfortable, devouring as much of him as possible before our time was up. And because he wasn't mine, I couldn't scribble in the margins or write my name on the spine; I couldn't leave my mark on him in any discernable way.

The personal inevitably trumps the political, and the erotic trumps all: We will remember that Cleopatra slept with Julius Caesar and Mark Antony long after we have forgotten what she accomplished in doing so, that she sustained a vast, rich, densely populated empire in its troubled twilight in the name of a proud and cultivated dynasty. She remains on the map for having seduced two of the greatest men of her time, while her crime was to have entered into those same "wily and suspicious" marital partnerships that every man in power enjoyed. She did so in reverse and in her own name; this made her a deviant, socially disruptive, an unnatural woman. To these she added a few other offenses. She made Rome feel uncouth, insecure, and poor, sufficient cause for anxiety without adding sexuality into the mix.

A second of intense pain is the most profound thing you can live through. And another, and another, and another, and then you know what it is to feel, and to struggle through that feeling one small agonizing increment at a time, and if you know that, you know what it is to live with mental illness.

You are the only person I've ever wanted to share my silence

Love was something he had banished from his life years ago out of necessity, but she made him yearn to be loved.

I believed by age eleven that I was horribly ugly and undeserving of human companionship.

To live Is to feel So you know You are real.

Real relationships happen in person not through a device.

Blind passion was one thing, all-knowing intimacy a rarer commodity.

It is notable that when she is not condemned for being too bold and masculine, Cleopatra is taken to task for being unduly frail and feminine.

ALONE One of my new housemates, Stacy, wants to write a story about an astronaut. In his story the astronaut is wearing a suit that keeps him alive by recycling his fluids. In the story the astronaut is working on a space station when an accident takes place, and he is cast into space to orbit the earth, to spend the rest of his life circling the globe. Stacy says this story is how he imagines hell, a place where a person is completely alone, without others and without God. After Stacy told me about his story, I kept seeing it in my mind. I thought about it before I went to sleep at night. I imagined myself looking out my little bubble helmet at blue earth, reaching toward it, closing it between my puffy white space-suit fingers, wondering if my friends were still there. In my imagination I would call to them, yell for them, but the sound would only come back loud within my helmet. Through the years my hair would grow long in my helmet and gather around my forehead and fall across my eyes. Because of my helmet I would not be able to touch my face with my hands to move my hair out of my eyes, so my view of earth, slowly, over the first two years, would dim to only a thin light through a curtain of thatch and beard. I would lay there in bed thinking about Stacy's story, putting myself out there in the black. And there came a time, in space, when I could not tell whether I was awake or asleep. All my thoughts mingled together because I had no people to remind me what was real and what was not real. I would punch myself in the side to feel pain, and this way I could be relatively sure I was not dreaming. Within ten years I was beginning to breathe heavy through my hair and my beard as they were pressing tough against my face and had begun to curl into my mouth and up my nose. In space, I forgot that I was human. I did not know whether I was a ghost or an apparition or a demon thing. After I thought about Stacy's story, I lay there in bed and wanted to be touched, wanted to be talked to. I had the terrifying thought that something like that might happen to me. I thought it was just a terrible story, a painful and ugly story. Stacy had delivered as accurate a description of a hell as could be calculated. And what is sad, what is very sad, is that we are proud people, and because we have sensitive egos and so many of us live our lives in front of our televisions, not having to deal with real people who might hurt us or offend us, we float along on our couches like astronauts moving aimlessly through the Milky Way, hardly interacting with other human beings at all.

It was in Alexandria that the circumference of the earth was first measured, the sun fixed at the center of the solar system, the workings of the brain and the pulse illuminated, the foundations of anatomy and physiology established, the definitive editions of Homer produced. It was in Alexandria that Euclid had codified geometry.

Do yourself a favor—wait for someone special. Trust me, he’s not roaming the halls of your high school. And if he were, he wouldn’t be sleeping with some girl named Tracy, or Stacy, or anybody else. He’d only have eyes for you. Don’t give away something you can never get back, save it for someone you love and who really loves you, too.

She is the crescendo, the final astonishing work of God. Woman. In one least flourish creation comes to a finish not with Adam, but with Eve. She is the Master’s finishing touch… His piece de resistance. She fills a place in the world nothing and no one else can fill… (Ladies) Look out across the earth and say to yourselves, “The whole, vast world is incomplete without me. Creation reached its zenith in me.

One thing that pisses me off royally is hearing drug companies denounced as the devil. I don't like giant corporations (or, in the words of Spalding Gray, "the big indifferent machine") any more than anyone else, but I really don't like wanting to kill myself. A person who denounces psychopharmaceuticals based on a political agenda is a person who has never lain crumpled in a ball in the closet, sobbing uncontrollably, face covered in Sharpie, throat raw from induced vomiting. Accordingly, that person should be thankful and shut the hell up.

At the edge Of no more Is where we find Our truth.

I'm going to ignore him, but he better fucking notice me ignoring him.

Do you have my pussy? Oh God, cat! Do you have my cat?

Darkness is drowned by three lights; nature, knowledge, and truth.

That is the casualty of life in a small town. People scoop into your business, then hand out cones to anyone who asks for a lick.

Although, at the end of the day, I really did it because I was in love with love.

My heart was yours from the beginning whether I gave it or not, but I’m giving it to you of my own free will.

Dumbledore in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets: “It is not our abilities that show what we truly are. It is our choices.

You were worried about me?” “Of course I was, buddy. I would never have forgiven myself if something had happened. You didn’t think I’d be worried about you?” “No. I didn’t think you cared.” Dad looks sad. And surprised. I’m not sure why. “Really, buddy? You didn’t think I cared?” “No.” “Well, I do. A lot.” “Okay.” “I guess I need to do a better job of showing you.” “Yes. You could do a better job.” Dad laughs. And he hugs me again.

But how did you know that it was Stacy?” “There wasn’t a green light flashing, that’s for sure,” he said. “Mostly, I felt I’d met a person I wanted to spend the rest of my life with. That I didn’t need to look any further.”” “But how can you be sure?” I persisted. “You can’t. There’s not just one person in the world who’s your type. There’s a whole group with the same likes and dislikes. But you want to spend your whole life looking for all of them? You just feel that everything’s right. You’re at peace with yourself.

And some of these people have secrets. All of them do, really. But some of them have the real ones, the messy ones. The deep, dark, shadowy ones that lurk just beneath the skin, traveling through their veins and spreading like a sickness. Dividing, multiplying, then dividing again. I wonder which ones they are: the ones with the kinds of secrets that touch every organ and render them rotten. The kinds of secrets that will eat them alive from the inside out.

Did you notice?” “Notice what?” “How small she is? Even her hands are tiny, but her fingers are long. I don’t even know how that’s possible.” He was still making that face. "I mean, I guess it’s her fingers. They’re longer than her palms, so it gives the illusion that they’re long in general. Pretty sure one of her hands would fit on my palm. Like in Beauty and the Beast when he holds her hand and it’s just a wrist disappearing into his big, hairy fist.” He added blinking to the face. “Did you just compare yourself to a Disney movie?

So I chose to read about it instead. It’s supremely satisfying when the good guys win and the bad guys lose. When the guy gets the girl and everyone lives happily ever after. Reading is the greatest escape. Where life is unfair, fiction can be perfect. The appeal is infinite, and the reason why I read at least three romance novels a week. If I can’t have it, I may as well imagine it.

We all subscribe to preposterous beliefs; we just don't know yet which ones they are. We too have been known to prefer plot to truth; to deny the evidence before us in favor of the ideas behind us; to do insane things in the name of reason; to take that satisfying step from the righteous to the self-righteous; to drown our private guilt in a public well; to indulge in a little delusion.

A capable, clear-eyed sovereign, she knew how to build a fleet, suppress an insurrection, control a currency, alleviate a famine. An eminent Roman general vouched for her grasp of military affairs. Even at a time when women rulers were no rarity she stood out, the sole female of the ancient world to rule alone and to play a role in Western affairs. She was incomparably richer than anyone else in the Mediterranean. And she enjoyed greater prestige than any other woman of her age..... Cleopatra descended from a long line of murderers and faithfully upheld the family tradition but was, for her time and place, remarkably well behaved. She nonetheless survives as a wanton temptress, not the last time a genuinely powerful woman has been transmuted into a shamelessly seductive one.

The tattoo artist inflicts pain and I take it. With each breath I count to one again. Each inhale, each exhale, time passes in the smallest of pieces, and pieces still smaller than those. This is how you count a life. This is how you go through it. Each second of hurt is a second that's already passed, one you never have to go through again. I have counted in pieces that small, when walking from the bed to the fridge seemed an insurmountable goal. I have counted my breaths, my steps, my eye-blinks, my hiccups, the tiny pulse in my thumb. And when I started getting tattooed, two of the things I used to need were gone: to write on myself, and to find irrelevant things to count. A second of intense pain is the most profound thing you can live through. And another, and another, and another, and then you know what it is to feel, and to struggle through that feeling one small agonizing increment at a time, and if you know that, you know what it is to live with mental illness.

I found myself in the dark, found her in the dark. I found light and truth in the darkness, hiding there where I couldn't see, right in front of me the whole time. And all I had to do was reach out and touch her.

To think that this is my twentieth birthday, and that I've left my teens behind me forever," said Anne, who was curled up on the hearth-rug with Rusty in her lap, to Aunt Jamesina who was reading in her pet chair. They were alone in the living room. Stella and Priscilla had gone to a committee meeting and Phil was upstairs adorning herself for a party. "I suppose you feel kind of sorry," said Aunt Jamesina. "The teens are such a nice part of life. I'm glad I've never gone out of them myself." Anne laughed. "You never will, Aunty. You'll be eighteen when you should be a hundred. Yes, I'm sorry, and a little dissatisfied as well. Miss Stacy told me long ago that by the time I was twenty my character would be formed, for good or evil. I don't feel that it's what it should be. It's full of flaws." "So's everybody's," said Aunt Jamesina cheerfully. "Mine's cracked in a hundred places. Your Miss Stacy likely meant that when you are twenty your character would have got its permanent bent in one direction or 'tother, and would go on developing in that line. Don't worry over it, Anne. Do your duty by God and your neighbor and yourself, and have a good time. That's my philosophy and it's always worked pretty well.

No, if I knew my girl, she was fuming on the other end, because nobody held her back from doing what she wanted. Not cancer. Not a hundred and eighteen years of drumline tradition. Definitely not some insecure motherfucker who couldn’t stand not being the center of attention. And—if I was right—Reese Holland wanted me almost as badly as I wanted her.

Livvie has her own opinions and isn't afraid to voice them," he murmured. Tobias reclined in his chair in a deliberately casual pose. "So I've discovered." "And what will you do with your ... discovery?" "There is nothing to be done." "Many men would say she is unruly, headstrong, and disobedient. In need of a firm guiding hand." Was the man trying to persuade him to call off the rushed engagement? "Olivia is not a horse and I am not other men.

He was the type of person who believed he alone could do the job adequately and afterward complained that no one had helped.

She wasn't a spark. She was a wildfire.

God, how I want you.You are my obsession.

That’s a shame. A woman as beautiful and sexy as you deserves to have her body worshipped by any man she deems worthy of her bed

Why couldn't life come with guarantees? Or while I was at it, how about a Fairy Godmother to make all my dreams come true?

He was a demon in the sack. -Dita

He was funny, smart, charming...and a monumental slut. Dean had all the makings of a man-sized Venus Flytrap. -Lex

The fundamental virtue of success is that it allows you to know the true significance of what it means to have the freedom to make your dreams come true.

... mornings are dumb.

1) Know who you’re dealing with and put them on their shelf. 2) Don’t date anyone not on your shelf. 3) When something seems too good to be true, it probably is.

When I was in London in 2008, I spent a couple hours hanging out at a pub with a couple of blokes who were drinking away the afternoon in preparation for going to that evening's Arsenal game/riot. Take away their Cockney accents, and these working-class guys might as well have been a couple of Bubbas gearing up for the Alabama-Auburn game. They were, in a phrase, British rednecks. And this is who soccer fans are, everywhere in the world except among the college-educated American elite. In Rio or Rome, the soccer fan is a Regular José or a Regular Giuseppe. [...] By contrast, if an American is that kind of Regular Joe, he doesn't watch soccer. He watches the NFL or bass fishing tournaments or Ultimate Fighting. In an American context, avid soccer fandom is almost exclusively located among two groups of people (a) foreigners—God bless 'em—and (b) pretentious yuppie snobs. Which is to say, conservatives don't hate soccer because we hate brown people. We hate soccer because we hate liberals.

When a man loves his woman, he’ll turn himself inside out to make her happy. He’ll cherish her until she knows she’s cherished. He’ll never stop working on creating a safe haven for her and the children they’ll one day have, because even a king, if he’s smart, works his ass off to protect his queen. He watches for what makes her smile and for what makes her frown, and he never forgets the difference between the two. He’ll do whatever it takes to convince her that she’s his greatest treasure, and he’ll guard her with his every thought and word and action, because to lose her would be to lose his world. If she’s having a bad day where she’s feeling exhausted or sick or not pretty or whatever, it’s her man’s privilege to look her right in her gorgeous ice-chip blue eyes and tell her ‘I’m the luckiest man in the world to be with you, beautiful, and that’s a fact I’ll never forget.’ That’s how I believe a man should treat his woman, so that’s how I plan on treating you for the rest of our lives.

We’re here to help ease you through the labor process. The mainstream media and health organizations feed you an endless supply of fear and paranoia, but the truth is that childbirth does not have to be a painful experience. Today we will start our journey to a joyful and pleasurable labor. These three classes will help you refocus your negative feelings, drawing in serenity and pushing out fear.” “Are we in a breathing class or signing up for a cult?” Tucker whispers. Cult. Definitely cult. “Partners, helpers, move into position behind the mama.” “I already hate this woman,” I hiss as he crouches behind me. “Because she called you mama or because she says it’s not a painful experience?” A man a few mats down raises his hand. “Where should we put our hands?” “Great question, Mark.” Oh God, she remembers all our names. “During labor, the appropriate position will be the lower back, but for today, we’re concentrating on relaxation, so please place your hands on your partner’s shoulders.” Next to me, one expectant mother is taking copious notes, as if Stacy in the peasant skirt is the oracle of laborhood, speaking the ten commandments of birthing. “If she says, ‘There’s nothing to fear but fear itself,’ we’re out of here,” I say a little too loudly. The gunner and her equally serious partner turn around to glare at me. A burble of laughter threatens to escape. Can we get arrested for disturbing the peace in a breathing class

What’s wrong?” he asks, falling away immediately. “You were choking me!” I snap. “I thought you said I was joking you!” We stare at each other, filled with equal parts horror and hilarity. “Communication is always the key,” Stacy sings from the front. Laughter wins out. Tucker and I collapse against each other. We can’t stop laughing, and after a few seconds of calling our names and clapping for attention, Stacy finally asks us to leave.

Cleopatra moreover came of age in a country that entertained a singular definition of women’s roles. Well before her and centuries before the arrival of the Ptolemies, Egyptian women enjoyed the right to make their own marriages. Over time their liberties had increased, to levels unprecedented in the ancient world. They inherited equally and held property independently. Married women did not submit to their husbands’ control. They enjoyed the right to divorce and to be supported after a divorce. Until the time an ex-wife’s dowry was returned, she was entitled to be lodged in the house of her choice. Her property remained hers; it was not to be squandered by a wastrel husband. The law sided with the wife and children if a husband acted against their interests. Romans marveled that in Egypt female children were not left to die; a Roman was obligated to raise only his first-born daughter. Egyptian women married later than did their neighbors as well, only about half of them by Cleopatra’s age. They loaned money and operated barges. They served as priests in the native temples. They initiated lawsuits and hired flute players. As wives, widows, or divorcées, they owned vineyards, wineries, papyrus marshes, ships, perfume businesses, milling equipment, slaves, homes, camels. As much as one third of Ptolemaic Egypt may have been in female hands.

Product Warning If this book were a medication with a label, it would read something like this: Side Effects Include but Are Not Limited to renewed sense of self-esteem increased motivation in all areas of life You may also lose weight, fall in love, leave a bad marriage, create a better one, have closer relationships with your family, or find the job of your dreams. Some Users Have experienced a kick in their step a swing in their hips a twinkle in their eye Hair-tossing (commercial-style) is common, but seek medical attention if you pinch a nerve or can’t stop doing it.

What is love for you, Niall? A woman who accepts you unconditionally?” “No.” “Then what?” “A lady…a lady who understands there might be rough times in our lives, either because of my past or hers, but is strong enough to walk beside me through any storm. A lady who is strong enough to trust me with her emotions and well-being and knows she will be safe to cry on my shoulder always. Love with that woman will be passionate and hungry, but in the calm times, we also know that our love is still strong; we are simply slowing down. Love with her will be…” He raked his hands through his hair. “Chaotic but beautiful.

So I had this date last night,” Dane goes on, ignoring my order. “Do you remember that girl from Sigma Kappa Whatever? She was at the gig last night, and everything was going great, both of us eye-fucking for like four frickin’ hours…” He pauses and turns to me, his voice turning urgent. “She takes me home, dude, and I’m sitting in the living room while she’s in the bathroom, and I’m so ready, because she’s so hot, right? And who walks in?” “Dane.” I close my eyes, willing him to shut the fuck up. “Her mom, dude!” he bursts out. “Her mom in her light pink nightie with legs for days. And let me tell you, man…Stacy’s mom has got it going on?” I can’t help myself. I break out in a laugh at the song reference and pinch the bridge of my nose, tired but a fraction more relaxed, even if I’d never admit it to him. Such an idiot.

For some of the things that plagued the seventeenth-century New Englander we have modern-day explanations. For others we do not. We have believed in any number of things—the tooth fairy, cold fusion, the benefits of smoking, the free lunch—that turn out not to exist. We all subscribe to preposterous beliefs; we just don’t know yet which ones they are. We too have been known to prefer plot to truth; to deny the evidence before us in favor of the ideas behind us; to do insane things in the name of reason; to take that satisfying step from the righteous to the self-righteous; to drown our private guilts in a public well; to indulge in a little delusion. We have all believed that someone had nothing better to do than spend his day plotting against us. The seventeenth-century world appeared full of inexplicables, not unlike the automated, mind-reading, algorithmically enhanced modern one.

This is why I feel frustrated now when I hear people referring to suicide as a self-centered act: of course it is. Nobody would commit suicide if the pain of being inside her self, the agony of the sleepless, tortured hours spent watching the world get smaller and uglier, were bearable or could be relieved by other people telling her how they wanted her to feel. A depressed person is selfish because her self, the very core of who she is, will not leave her alone, and she can no more stop thinking about this self and how to escape it than a prisoner held captive by a sadistic serial killer can forget about the person who comes in to torture her every day. Her body is brutalized by her mind. It hurts to breathe, sleep, eat, walk, think. The gross maneuverings of her limbs are so overwhelming, so wearying, that the fine muscle movements or quickness of wit necessary to write, to actually say something, are completely out of the question.