Terror Friendship Quotes

What is society but an individual? [...] The ocean is not society; it is individuals. This was how I managed to gain a modicum of freedom from my terror at the illusion of the ocean called the world.

Sometimes I think you rely too much on friendship, Reagan. For all of your cynicism, you tend to assume people have your sense of integrity, but I’m here to tell you they don’t.

Christmas Amnesty. You can fall out of contact with a friend, fail to return calls, ignore e-mails, avoid eye contact at the Thrifty-Mart, forget birthdays, anniversaries, and reunions, and if you show up at their house during the holidays (with a gift) they are socially bound to forgive you—act like nothing happened. Decorum dictates that the friendship move forward from that point, without guilt or recrimination. If you started a chess game ten years ago in October, you need only remember whose move it is—or why you sold the chessboard and bought an Xbox in the interim. (Look, Christmas Amnesty is a wonderful thing, but it’s not a dimensional shift. The laws of time and space continue to apply, even if you have been avoiding your friends. But don’t try using the expansion of the universe an as excuse—like you kept meaning to stop by, but their house kept getting farther away. That crap won’t wash. Just say, “Sorry I haven’t called. Merry Christmas” Then show the present. Christmas Amnesty protocol dictates that your friend say, “That’s okay,” and let you in without further comment. This is the way it has always been done.)

You should regard each meeting with a friend as a sitting he is unwillingly giving you for a portrait - a portrait that, probably, when you or he die, will still be unfinished. And, though this is an absorbing pursuit, nevertheless, the painters are apt to end pessimists. For however handsome and merry may be the face, however rich may be the background, in the first rough sketch of each portrait, yet with every added stroke of the brush, with every tiny readjustment of the "values," with every modification of the chiaroscuro, the eyes looking out at you grow more disquieting. And, finally, it is your own face that you are staring at in terror, as in a mirror by candlelight, when all the house is still.

And what is a friend? More than a father, more than a brother: a traveling companion, with him, you can conquer the impossible, even if you must lose it later. Friendship marks a life even more deeply than love. Love risks degenerating into obsession, friendship is never anything but sharing. It is a friend that you communicate the awakening of a desire, the birth of a vision or a terror, the anguish of seeing the sun disappear or of finding that order and justice are no more. That's what you can talk about with a friend. Is the soul immortal, and if so why are we afraid to die? If God exists, how can we lay claim to freedom, since He is its beginning and its end? What is death, when you come down to it? The closing of a parenthesis, and nothing more? And what about life? In the mouth of a philosopher, these questions may have a false ring, but asked during adolescence or friendship, they have the power to change being: a look burns and ordinary gestures tend to transcend themselves. What is a friend? Someone who for the first time makes you aware of your loneliness and his, and helps you to escape so you in turn can help him. Thanks to him who you can hold your tongue without shame and talk freely without risk. That's it.

In the modern world all terrors could be gutted by simple use of the transitive axiom of quality. Some fears were justified, of course (you don't drive when you're too plowed to see, don't extend the hand of friendship to snarling dogs, don't go parking with boys you don't know - how did the old joke go? Screw or walk?), but until now she had not believed that some fears were larger than comprehension, apocalyptic and nearly paralyzing. This equation was insoluble. The act of moving forward at all became heroism.

Despite the intensity of the moment, I felt no fear, and when I looked down, I knew why. Lisa had grabbed my hand in hers, and locked her eyes on me, stoic, in that moment of terror; eyes filled with neither panic nor worry, but beautiful acquiescence, as a silent apology passed between us. It filled me with love and peace as our friendship flashed before my eyes, and then everything went dark, and silent.

I like to live always at the beginnings of life, not at their end. We all lose some of our faith under the oppression of mad leaders, insane history, pathologic cruelties of daily life. I am by nature always beginning and believing and so I find your company more fruitful than that of, say, Edmund Wilson, who asserts his opinions, beliefs, and knowledge as the ultimate verity. Older people fall into rigid patterns. Curiosity, risk, exploration are forgotten by them. You have not yet discovered that you have a lot to give, and that the more you give the more riches you will find in yourself. It amazed me that you felt that each time you write a story you gave away one of your dreams and you felt the poorer for it. But then you have not thought that this dream is planted in others, others begin to live it too, it is shared, it is the beginning of friendship and love. […] You must not fear, hold back, count or be a miser with your thoughts and feelings. It is also true that creation comes from an overflow, so you have to learn to intake, to imbibe, to nourish yourself and not be afraid of fullness. The fullness is like a tidal wave which then carries you, sweeps you into experience and into writing. Permit yourself to flow and overflow, allow for the rise in temperature, all the expansions and intensifications. Something is always born of excess: great art was born of great terrors, great loneliness, great inhibitions, instabilities, and it always balances them. If it seems to you that I move in a world of certitudes, you, par contre, must benefit from the great privilege of youth, which is that you move in a world of mysteries. But both must be ruled by faith.

...it is never safe to classify the souls of one's neighbors; one is apt, in the long run, to be proved a fool. You should regard each meeting with a friend as a sitting he is unwillingly giving you for a portrait -- a portrait that, probably, when you or he die, will still be unfinished. And, though this is an absorbing pursuit, nevertheless, the painters are apt to end pessimists. For however handsome and merry may be the face, however rich the background, in the first rough sketch of each portrait, yet with every added stroke of the brush, with every tiny readjustment of the 'values,' with every modification of the chiaroscuro, the eyes looking out at you grow more disquieting. And, finally, it is your own face that you are staring at in terror, as in a mirror by candle-light, when all the house is still.

Then all at once our personal and political quarrels were made very abruptly to converge. In the special edition of the London Review of Books published to mark the events of September 11, 2001, Edward painted a picture of an almost fascist America where Arab and Muslim citizens were being daily terrorized by pogroms, these being instigated by men like Paul Wolfowitz who had talked of 'ending' the regimes that sheltered Al Quaeda. Again, I could hardly credit that these sentences were being produced by a cultured person, let alone printed by a civilized publication.

Recently someone asked, for whom does one write? That is a profound question. One should always dedicate a book. Not that one alters one's thoughts with a change of interlocutor, but because every word, whether we know it or not, is always a word with someone, which presupposes a certain degree of esteem or friendship, the resolution of a certain number of misunderstandings, the transcendence of a certain latent content and, finally the appearance of a part of the truth in the encounters we live.

Fear commonly makes adversaries of us. But sometimes, in the rarest, most frightening moments, fate brings together people, forming everlasting friendships and occasionally, the remarkable bond of love.

Shirts and jeans litter the asphalt, the empty fabric limbs askew as if they're attempting to escape. Blood smears Sarah's lips as she struggles against the chest of a dirty looking man with a beard. Terror. Terror is the only word my mind can seize on and it forgets what it means. I forget how to think - to move.

The World will not Change unless You Change the World.

Once out of the mailroom, I began to learn more about fear. As soon as fear begins to ascend, anatomically, from the pit of the stomach to the throat and brain, from fear of violence to the more nameless kind, you come to believe you are part of a horrible experiment. I learned to distrust those superiors who encouraged independent thinking. When you gave it to them, they returned it in the form of terror, for they knew that ideas, only that, could hasten their obsolescence. Management asked for new ideas all the time; memos circulated down the echelons, requesting bold and challenging concepts. But I learned that new ideas could finish you unless you wrapped them in a plastic bag. I learned that most of the secretaries were more intelligent than most of the executives and that the executive secretaries were to be feared more than anyone. I learned what closed doors meant and that friendship was not negotiable currency and how important it was to lie even when there was no need to lie. Words and meanings were at odds. Words did not say what was being said nor even its reverse. I learned to speak a new language and soon mastered the special elements of that tongue.

These people know the reality and laugh at it. Such laughter has little concern with what is funny. It is often bitter and sometimes a little mad, for it is the laugh under the mask of tragedy, and also the laughter that masks tears. They are the same. It is the laughter of people who value love and friendship and plenty, who have lived with terror and death and hate." - , Return to Laughter (1954)

Sometimes I think Earth has got to be the insane asylum of the universe. . . and I'm here by computer error. At sixty-eight, I hope I've gained some wisdom in the past fourteen lustrums and it’s obligatory to speak plain and true about the conclusions I've come to; now that I have been educated to believe by such mentors as Wells, Stapledon, Heinlein, van Vogt, Clarke, Pohl, (S. Fowler) Wright, Orwell, Taine, Temple, Gernsback, Campbell and other seminal influences in scientifiction, I regret the lack of any female writers but only Radclyffe Hall opened my eyes outside sci-fi. I was a secular humanist before I knew the term. I have not believed in God since childhood's end. I believe a belief in any deity is adolescent, shameful and dangerous. How would you feel, surrounded by billions of human beings taking Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, the tooth fairy and the stork seriously, and capable of shaming, maiming or murdering in their name? I am embarrassed to live in a world retaining any faith in church, prayer or a celestial creator. I do not believe in Heaven, Hell or a Hereafter; in angels, demons, ghosts, goblins, the Devil, vampires, ghouls, zombies, witches, warlocks, UFOs or other delusions; and in very few mundane individuals--politicians, lawyers, judges, priests, militarists, censors and just plain people. I respect the individual's right to abortion, suicide and euthanasia. I support birth control. I wish to Good that society were rid of smoking, drinking and drugs. My hope for humanity - and I think sensible science fiction has a beneficial influence in this direction - is that one day everyone born will be whole in body and brain, will live a long life free from physical and emotional pain, will participate in a fulfilling way in their contribution to existence, will enjoy true love and friendship, will pity us 20th century barbarians who lived and died in an atrocious, anachronistic atmosphere of arson, rape, robbery, kidnapping, child abuse, insanity, murder, terrorism, war, smog, pollution, starvation and the other negative “norms” of our current civilization. I have devoted my life to amassing over a quarter million pieces of sf and fantasy as a present to posterity and I hope to be remembered as an altruist who would have been an accepted citizen of Utopia.

She had always consciously or unconsciously formed fear into a simple equation: fear = unknown. And to solve the equation, one simply reduced the problem to simple algebraic terms, thus: unknown = creaky board (or whatever), creaky board = nothing to be afraid of. In the modern world all terrors could be gutted by simple use of the transitive axiom of equality. Some fears were justified, of course (you don’t drive when you’re too plowed to see, don’t extend the hand of friendship to snarling dogs, don’t go parking with boys you don’t know – how did the old joke go? Screw or walk?), but until now she had not believed that some fears were larger than comprehension, apocalyptic and nearly paralyzing. This equation was insoluble. The act of moving forward at all became heroism.

They say, still, that no Wizarding duel ever matched that between Dumbledore and Grindelwald in 1945. Those who witnessed it have written of the terror and the awe they felt as they watched these two extraordinary wizards do battle. Dumbledore’s triumph, and its consequences for the Wizarding world, are considered a turning point in magical history to match the introduction of the International Statute of Secrecy or the downfall of He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named. Albus Dumbledore was never proud or vain; he could find something to value in anyone, however apparently insignificant or wretched, and I believe that his early losses endowed him with great humanity and sympathy. I shall miss his friendship more than I can say, but my loss is as nothing compared to the Wizarding world’s. That he was the most inspiring and the best loved of all Hogwarts headmasters cannot be in question. He died as he lived: working always for the greater good and, to his last hour, as willing to stretch out a hand to a small boy with dragon pox as he was on the day that I met him.

More than anything, Natalie wanted to move to the bed, take Sophie's hand, sit beside her.Lay her head against her shoulder. But she didn't dare. Or maybe just couldn't. Fear. Friendship. Desire. Regret. Remorse. Longing. Hunger. Terror. It was getting so hard to tell the difference between any of those things. If she'd ever been able to. If anyone really could.

Death has but few terrors for the crushed and broken spirit; but how heavy and icy is his hand when it grasps the heart which has just begun to live and revel in the joys of life! I felt that I had emerged from the tomb, and had for a moment enjoyed the greatest delights of life, love, friendship, and liberty; and now the door of the sepulcher was again opened, and an unseen force compelled me once more to enter it forever.

Damn! What did Ansermet, that most faithful friend, know about Stravinsky's poverty of heart? What did he, that most devoted friend, know about Stravinsky's capacity to love? And where did he get his utter certainty that the heart is ethically superior to the brain? Are not vile acts committed as often with the heart's help as without it? Can't fanatics, with their bloody hands, boast of a high degree of "affective activity"? Will we ever be done with this imbecile sentimental Inquisition, the heart's Reign of Terror?

Every human creature is a terror to every other human creature. Human minds are like unknown planets, encountering and colliding. Every one of them contains jagged precipices, splintered rock-peaks, ghastly crevasses, smouldering volcanoes, scorched and scorching deserts, blistering sands, evil dungeons from behind whose barred windows mad and terrible faces peer out. Every pair of human eyes is a custom-house gate into a completely foreign port; a port whose palaces and slums, whose insane asylums and hospitals, whose market-places and sacred shrines represent the terrifying and the menacing as well as the promising and the pleasure-giving! But when once any small group of persons has been together for any reasonable length of time the official warders of these custom-house gates are withdrawn. Each individual in such a group feels he can wander freely through the purlieus of these other enclosed fortresses! He does not necessarily move a step. The point is that the gates into the unknown streets no longer bristle with bayonets, are no longer thronged with “dreadful faces” and “fiery arms.

There is no greater species better crafted for emotional terrorism than women. We slice away at the Achilles until our victims are left feeling completely devoid of value and unfit for love, friendship, and in extreme cases, air. We’ve been bred to see others’ successes as a direct assault to our own, and this is especially true when it comes to weight. Seeing someone who is heavier than us viewing themselves in a positive light is detrimental to our own self-esteem. So we attack and tear down until eventually that person feels as bad about herself as we do about ourselves.

So small footprint yet the shovelling jealous sea has not erased it. You were for me the necessary exemplary figure of dedication and endurance. Whatever your inner life truly was it was ardently pursued. You observed with acute imagination. When you spoke you drove to the heart of things though sometimes through wry indirection. You manifested the value of the life dedicated to an art. Whatever terrors you underwent they may have been very great you did not evince them. You were never indecent. Of course in making this thing about you or around you I am talking about my youth and homesick for it. But that is not the point. The point is that at one time in one place I met someone who became to me a living conscience.

On reading a translated copy of the covenant, Philip V was horrified. The Muslim ruler of Jerusalem, through his emissary, the viceroy of Islamic Granada, was extending to the Jewish people the hand of eternal peace and friendship. The gesture was occasioned by the recent discovery of the lost ark of the Old Testament and the stone tablets upon which God had etched the Law with His finger. Both were found in perfect condition in a ditch in the Sinai Desert and had awoken in the Muslims, who discovered them, a desire to be circumcised, convert to Judaism, and return the Holy Land to the Jews. However, since this would leave millions of Palestinian Muslims homeless, the King of Jerusalem wanted the Jews to give him France in return. The guilty homeowner Bananias told French authorities that after the Muslim offer, the Jews of France concocted the well-poisoning plot and hired the lepers to carry it out. After reading the translation and several corroborating documents, including a highly incriminating letter from the Muslim King of Tunisia, Philip ordered all Jews in France arrested for “complicity . . . to bring about the death of the people and the subjects of the kingdom.” Two years later, any Jewish survivors of the royal terror were exiled from the country.   The

I want to return to the theme of pleasure and the epicurean life. For centuries, Epicurus's philosophy of pleasure has been repudiated by moralists, but occasionally his central themes break through and are given at least momentary consideration—sensuality, pleasure, friendship, moderation—I think he has been neglected, because there is so much soul in his philosophy, and it is not insignificant that his classes were held in an Athenian garden, a place where the soul is most at home. The garden of Epicurus invites us to reflect on the epicurean aspects of gardens, especially the sensual pleasures they provide. In a disenchanted world, it's important to get somewhere and accomplish something, but the time spent in a garden gets us nowhere....The garden reconciles human art and wild nature, hard work and deep pleasure, spiritual practice and the material world. It is a magical place because it is not divided. The many divisions and polarizations that terrorize a disenchanted world find peaceful accord among mossy rock walls, rough stone paths, and trimmed bushes. Maybe a garden sometimes seems fragile, for all its earth and labor, because it achieves such an extraordinary balance of nature and human life, naturalness and artificiality. It has its own liminality, its point of balance between great extremes.

One day, early in our friendship, Svetlana had spontaneously told me that she thought I was trying to live an aesthetic life, and that it was a major difference between us, because she was trying to live an ethical life. I wasn’t sure why the two should be opposed, and worried for a moment that she thought that I thought that it was OK to cheat or steal. But she turned out to mean something else: that I took more risks than her and cared more than she did about “style,” while she cared more about history and traditions. Soon, the “ethical and the aesthetic” was the framework we used to talk about the ways we were different. When it came to choosing friends, Svetlana liked to surround herself with dependable boring people who corroborated her in her way of being, while I was more interested in undependable people who generated different experiences or impressions. Svetlana liked taking introductions and survey classes, “mastering” basics before moving to the next level, getting straight A’s. I had a terror of being bored, so I preferred to take highly specific classes with interesting titles, even when I hadn’t taken the prerequisites and had no idea what was going on. I could see how my way might be called aesthetic. It was less clear to me why Svetlana’s way was ethical, though it did seem “responsible” and obedient.

If there are so many references in the Mass to poverty, sadness, failure and loss, it is because the Church views the ill, the frail of mind, the desperate and the elderly as representing aspects of humanity and (even more meaningfully) of ourselves which we are tempted to deny, but which bring us, when we can acknowledge them, closer to our need for one another. In our more arrogant moments, the sin of pride – or superbia, in Augustine’s Latin formulation – takes over our personalities and shuts us off from those around us. We become dull to others when all we seek to do is assert how well things are going for us, just as friendship has a chance to grow only when we dare to share what we are afraid of and regret. The rest is merely showmanship. The Mass encourages this sloughing off of pride. The flaws whose exposure we so dread, the indiscretions we know we would be mocked for, the secrets that keep our conversations with our so-called friends superficial and inert – all of these emerge as simply part of the human condition. We have no reason left to dissemble or lie in a building dedicated to honouring the terror and weakness of a man who was nothing like the usual heroes of antiquity, nothing like the fierce soldiers of Rome’s army or the plutocrats of its Senate, and yet who was nevertheless worthy of being crowned the highest of men, the king of kings.

I had decided to allow no room in the universe for something which shamed and frightened me. I succeeded very well -- by not looking at the universe, by not looking at myself, by remaining, in effect, in constant motion. Even constant motion, of course, does not prevent an occasional mysterious drag, a drop, like an airplane hitting an air pocket. And there were a number of those, all drunken, all sordid. one very frightening such drop while I was in the Army which involved a fairy who was later court-martialed out. The panic his punishment cause in me was as close as I ever came to facing in myself the terrors I sometimes saw clouding another man's eyes. What happened was that, all unconscious of what this ennui meant, I wearied of the motion, wearied of the joyless seas of alcohol, wearied of the blunt, bluff, hearty, and totally meaningless friendships, wearied of wandering through the forests of desperate women, wearied of the work which fed me only the brutally literally sense. Perhaps, as we say in America, I wanted to find myself. This is an interesting phrase, not current as far as I know in the language of any other people, which certainly does not mean what it says betrays a nagging suspicion that something has been misplaced. I think now that if I had had any intimidation that the self I was going to find would turn out to be only the same self from which I had spent so much time in flight, I would have stayed at home. But again, I think I knew, at the very bottom of my heart, exactly what I was doing when I took the boat for France.

There is a particular kind of pain, elation, loneliness, and terror involved in this kind of madness. When you’re high it’s tremendous. The ideas and feelings are fast and frequent like shooting stars, and you follow them until you find better and brighter ones. Shyness goes, the right words and gestures are suddenly there, the power to captivate others a felt certainty. There are interests found in uninteresting people. Sensuality is pervasive and the desire to seduce and be seduced irresistible. Feelings of ease, intensity, power, well-being, financial omnipotence, and euphoria pervade one’s marrow. But, somewhere, this changes. The fast ideas are far too fast, and there are far too many; overwhelming confusion replaces clarity. Memory goes. Humor and absorption on friends’faces are replaced by fear and concern. Everything previously moving with the grain is now against—you are irritable, angry, frightened, uncontrollable, and enmeshed totally in the blackest caves of the mind. You never knew those caves were there. It will never end, for madness carves its own reality. It goes on and on, and finally there are only others’ recollections of your behavior—your bizarre, frenetic, aimless behaviors—for mania has at least some grace in partially obliterating memories. What then, after the medications, psychiatrist, despair, depression, and overdose? All those incredible feelings to sort through. Who is being too polite to say what? Who knows what? What did I do? Why? And most hauntingly, when will it happen again? Then, too, are the bitter reminders—medicine to take, resent, forget, take, resent, and forget, but always to take. Credit cards revoked, bounced checks to cover, explanations due at work, apologies to make, intermittent memories (what did I do?), friendships gone or drained, a ruined marriage. And always, when will it happen again? Which of my feelings are real? Which of the me’s is me? The wild, impulsive, chaotic, energetic, and crazy one? Or the shy, withdrawn, desperate, suicidal, doomed, and tired one? Probably a bit of both, hopefully much that is neither. Virginia Woolf, in her dives and climbs, said it all: “How far do our feelings take their colour from the dive underground? I mean, what is the reality of any feeling?

Excluding vacations, that's 144 gym classes a year, which comes to a lifetime total of 1,584; multiply that by forty minutes a class and it comes to 1,056 hours of nonstop harassment, or forty-four days of round-the-clock terror. POWs have died for less.

Why are They Converting to Islam? - Op-Eds - Arutz Sheva One of the things that worries the West is the fact that hundreds and maybe even thousands of young Europeans are converting to Islam, and some of them are joining terror groups and ISIS and returning to promote Jihad against the society in which they were born, raised and educated. The security problem posed by these young people is a serious one, because if they hide their cultural identity, it is extremely difficult for Western security forces to identify them and their evil intentions. This article will attempt to clarify the reasons that impel these young people to convert to Islam and join terrorist organizations. The sources for this article are recordings made by the converts themselves, and the words they used, written here, are for the most part unedited direct quotations. Muslim migration to Europe, America and Australia gain added significance in that young people born in these countries are exposed to Islam as an alternative to the culture in which they were raised. Many of the converts are convinced that Islam is a religion of peace, love, affection and friendship, based on the generous hospitality and warm welcome they receive from the Moslem friends in their new social milieu. In many instances, a young person born into an individualistic, cold and alienating society finds that Muslim society provides  – at college, university or  community center – a warm embrace, a good word, encouragement and help, things that are lacking in the society from which he stems. The phenomenon is most striking in the case of those who grew up in dysfunctional families or divorced homes, whose parents are alcoholics, drug addicts, violent and abusive, or parents who take advantage of their offspring and did not give their children a suitable emotional framework and model for building a normative, productive life. The convert sees his step as a mature one based on the right of an individual to determine his own religious and cultural identity, even if the family and society he is abandoning disagree. Sometimes converting to Islam is a form of parental rebellion. Often, the convert is spurned by his family and surrounding society for his decision, but the hostility felt towards Islam by his former environment actually results in his having more confidence in the need for his conversion. Anything said against conversion to Islam is interpreted as unjustified racism and baseless Islamophobia. The Islamic convert is told by Muslims that Islam respects the prophets of its mother religions, Judaism and Christianity, is in favor of faith in He Who dwells on High, believes in the Day of Judgment, in reward and punishment, good deeds and avoiding evil. He is convinced that Islam is a legitimate religion as valid as Judaism and Christianity, so if his parents are Jewish or Christian, why can't he become Muslim? He sees a good many positive and productive Muslims who benefit their society and its economy, who have integrated into the environment in which he was raised, so why not emulate them? Most Muslims are not terrorists, so neither he nor anyone should find his joining them in the least problematic. Converts to Islam report that reading the Koran and uttering the prayers add a spiritual meaning to their lives after years of intellectual stagnation, spiritual vacuum and sinking into a materialistic and hedonistic lifestyle. They describe the switch to Islam in terms of waking up from a bad dream, as if it is a rite of passage from their inane teenage years. Their feeling is that the Islamic religion has put order into their lives, granted them a measuring stick to assess themselves and their behavior, and defined which actions are allowed and which are forbidden, as opposed to their "former" society, which couldn't or wouldn't lay down rules. They are willing to accept the limitations Islamic law places on Muslims, thereby "putting order into their lives" after "a life of in

In virtue of these special privileges the intercession of St. Joseph is most powerful: First, for attaining the virtue of purity and overcoming the sensual inclinations of the flesh; Second, for procuring powerful help to escape sin and return to the friendship of God; Third, for increasing the love and devotion to most holy Mary; Fourth, for securing the grace of a happy death and protection against the demons in that hour; Fifth, for filling the demons with terror at the mere mention of his name by his clients; Sixth, for gaining health of body and assistance in all kinds of difficulties; Seventh, for securing issue of children in families.

Nowhere else outside the New Testament,” he wrote, “have I found terror and comfort so intertwined.

am surrounded by the most powerful beings in the universe and I have never felt more alone. That mistake, I might have understood. But you just watched Lucifer terrorize me to teach me a lesson. That’s not friendship, Jed.

Unable to situate such phenomena within their narrow understanding of nature’s operations, primitive peoples would instinctively attribute them to “the direction of some invisible and designing power.”34 In Smith’s view, then, the first religions were, like later scientific theories, inventions of the imagination designed to explain the inexplicable and thereby satisfy the human mind. Gods were created by human beings rather than the other way around, and they were created as a direct result of human ignorance. Nor was it solely, or even primarily, positive passions such as gratitude that produced belief in willful deities, according to Smith’s account; rather, it was mostly a combination of terror and cowardice that led to “the lowest and most pusillanimous superstition.”35

100 Questions of Life 6. What is perfection? Perfection is imperfections we've made peace with. ... 13. What is nature? Nature is order within chaos. 14. What is order? Order is but friendship with chaos. 15. What is chaos? Chaos is order we are yet to understand. ... 21. What is knowledge? Knowledge is ignorance we've chosen to correct. 22. What is choice? Choice is the fulcrum of freedom. 23. What is freedom? Freedom is the fulcrum of responsibility. 24. What is responsibility? Responsibility is the act of backbone. 25. What is backbone? Backbone is more than a stick to hang your head. 26. What is the head? Head is the mightiest carrier of progress. 27. What is progress? Progress is much more than mere functioning of nuts and bolts. 28. What are nuts and bolts? Nuts and bolts are our greatest defense against unforeseen terrors of nature, on earth and beyond. ... 53. What is heritage? Heritage, in moderation, is an aid to growth, unmoderated, poison. ... 57. What is death? Death is but the fear of life. 58. What is fear? Fear is but memory of our animal past. 59. What is memory? Memory is the fabric of time. 60. What is time? Time is the meaning behind moments. ... 78. What is curiosity? Curiosity is a challenge to superstition. 79. What is superstition? Superstition is nature's antidote to the insecurity of the unknown. 80. What is insecurity? Insecurity is wisdom of the jungle against possible predatory attack. 81. What is wisdom? Wisdom is the result of travel in mind, not in time or space.

I think the terror of bonds of friendship is that just as they can be chosen, they can be unchosen. You might say this of all bonds, but in friendship the risk is perhaps felt more acutely. I’m convinced that in most bonds it is not conflict we fear; it is abandonment after conflict. We fear it because we know something is at risk. For this reason, we can become cruellest to those we know will stay. And we resort to flattery or appeasement for those we are uncertain will do so. This can lead us to drink from shallow waters. Durable friendship is a bond that is able to endure both truth-telling and conflict. Bonds without these things become brittle.

ACEs: Adverse Childhood Experiences The human brain is a social organ that is shaped by experience, and that is shaped in order to respond to the experience that you’re having. So particularly earlier in life, if you’re in a constant state of terror; your brain is shaped to be on alert for danger, and to try to make those terrible feelings go away. In a healthy developmental environment, your brain gets to feel a sense of pleasure, engagement, and exploration. Your brain opens up to learn, to see things, to accumulate information, to form friendships. But if … you’re not touched or seen, whole parts of your brain barely develop; and so you become an adult who is out of it, who cannot connect with other people, who cannot feel a sense of self, a sense of pleasure. If you run into nothing but danger and fear, your brain gets stuck on just protecting itself from danger and fear. Dr. Bessel van der Kolk, “Childhood Trauma Leads to Brains Wired for Fear” (interview), Side Effects Public Media

There is a particular kind of pain, elation, loneliness, and terror involved in this kind of madness. When you’re high it’s tremendous. The ideas and feelings are fast and frequent like shooting stars, and you follow them until you find better and brighter ones. Shyness goes, the right words and gestures are suddenly there, the power to captivate others a felt certainty. There are interests found in uninteresting people. Sensuality is pervasive and the desire to seduce and be seduced irresistible. Feelings of ease, intensity, power, well-being, financial omnipotence, and euphoria pervade one’s marrow. But, somewhere, this changes. The fast ideas are far too fast, and there are far too many; overwhelming confusion replaces clarity. Memory goes. Humor and absorption on friends’ faces are replaced by fear and concern. Everything previously moving with the grain is now against—you are irritable, angry, frightened, uncontrollable, and enmeshed totally in the blackest caves of the mind. You never knew those caves were there. It will never end, for madness carves its own reality. It goes on and on, and finally there are only others’ recollections of your behavior—your bizarre, frenetic, aimless behaviors—for mania has at least some grace in partially obliterating memories. What then, after the medications, psychiatrist, despair, depression, and overdose? All those incredible feelings to sort through. Who is being too polite to say what? Who knows what? What did I do? Why? And most hauntingly, when will it happen again? Then, too, are the bitter reminders—medicine to take, resent, forget, take, resent, and forget, but always to take. Credit cards revoked, bounced checks to cover, explanations due at work, apologies to make, intermittent memories (what did I do?), friendships gone or drained, a ruined marriage. And always, when will it happen again? Which of my feelings are real? Which of the me’s is me? The wild, impulsive, chaotic, energetic, and crazy one? Or the shy, withdrawn, desperate, suicidal, doomed, and tired one? Probably a bit of both, hopefully much that is neither. Virginia Woolf, in her dives and climbs, said it all: “How far do our feelings take their colour from the dive underground? I mean, what is the reality of any feeling?

Even putting aside the culturally indoctrinated terror that someone in America will assume that two men engage in sodomy behind barely closed doors, there simply isn't an elegant way of asking someone of your gender to hang out for the first time.

The idea of a specifically Robespierrist terror was a myth, invented by the Termidoreans, the men who overthrew Robespierre, who themselves were very much implicated in the recourse to terror.

The Jacobin leaders were beset on many sides by enemies, both open and covert. But in the end the most dangerous and unforgiving enemies they faced were themselves. In choosing terror, they chose a path that led to self-destruction.

In the sense of worldly advantage, it no longer signified whether people thought of him as having been an authentic man of virtue. There was no more political power or influence to be gained from maintaining that identity. But to him it still mattered.

In whatever form and shape, hegemony neither builds the bridge of friendship nor a path of peace; it creates only hatred and terrorism.

Because they will want me in Edinburgh to make sure that the Scottish king holds to the new alliance with England. They’ll want me to hold him in friendship with Henry. They’ll think that if I am queen in Scotland then James will never invade my son-in-law’s kingdom.” “And?” I whisper. “They’re wrong,” she says vengefully. “They’re so very wrong. The day that I am Queen of Scotland with an army to command and a husband to advise, I won’t serve Henry Tudor. I won’t persuade my husband to keep a peace treaty with Henry. If I were strong enough and could command the allies I would need, I would march against Henry Tudor myself, come south with an army of terror.

We wanted a body race war, we felt it was inevitable and we would have to be the ones controllling the streets when it happened. We weren't the kind of blokes who could cry on each other's shoulders over loves gone-astray or bitter person dissatisfactions. All of these friendships were built solely on our hatred and distrust of others. The class system, or what little I knew of it, was quite obviously separate to race. There were two ways of looking at it: downtrodden and ignored because we were either white or because we were also working class.