Thought Catalog Quotes

Holy Abercrombie catalog, Megan thought.

That night in my sister’s bed I stared at the ceiling and felt the true loss of our father. Not his money or his house, but the man I sat next to in the car. He had protected me from the world so completely that I had no idea what the world was capable of. I had never thought about him as a child. I had never asked him about the war. I had only seen him as my father, and as my father I had judged him. There was nothing to do about that now but add it to the catalog of my mistakes.

I think part of the reason we hold on to something so tight is because we fear something so great won’t happen twice. —Anonymous

Anything that feels forced or harder than it should be or causes you pain and distress is not meant for you.

The way he talked about thoughts was the way i experienced them---not as a choice,but as a destiny. Not a catalog of my consciousness, but a refutation of it.

...What’s the one superpower of June Elbus?” I thought about myself from head to toe. It was like being forced to read the most boring part of the Sears catalog. Like leafing through the bathroom accessories pages. Boring brain. Boring face. No sex appeal. Clumsy hands. “Heart. Hard heart,” I said, not sure where it came from. “The hardest heart in the world.” “Hmmm,” Toby said, tapping a finger in the air. “That’s a useful one, you know. Very handy. The question is . . .” Toby paused like he was considering this all very seriously. “What’s the question?” “The question is, stone or ice? Crack or melt?

In the words of C. Joybell C., we’re all stars that think they’re dying until we realize we’re collapsing into supernovas – to become more beautiful than ever before. It often takes the contrast of pain to completely appreciate what we have, it often takes hate to incite self-recognition. Sometimes the way light enters us is, in fact, through the wound. 5.

The way he talked about thoughts was the way I experienced them—not as a choice but as a destiny. Not a catalog of my consciousness, but a refutation of it.

Whatever it is you’re feeling, feel it. Don’t bury it, don’t hide from it, don’t ignore it. Feel the awful, brutal feelings.

Those relationships didn’t actually hurt you, they showed you an unhealed part of yourself, a part that was preventing you from being truly loved.

You're not my matchmaker any longer. But we're still friends, and in the interest of our friendship we need to discuss page thirteen." "Page thirteen ?" "You've accused me of being arrogant. I've always thought of myself as confident, but I'm here to tell you, no more. After studying these pictures... Honey, if this is what you're looking for in a man, I don't think any of us are going to measure up." "I have no idea what you're talking about." "Who knew flexible silicone came in so many colors?" Her sex toy catalog. He'd taken it months ago. She'd hoped he forgotten it by now. " Most of these products are hypoallergenic. That's good, I guess. Some with batteries, some without. I suppose that's a matter of preference. There's a harness on this one. That's pretty kinky. And...Son of a bitch ! It says this one is dishwater safe. I'm sorry but there's just something unappetizing about that.

we are just programmed to complicate life sometimes

There is power in letting go, a power that brings more peace and serenity than being stuck in situations that make your heart a bit heavier each and every day.

In the strangest, most inexplicable way, we need those lovers that we never fully let go of. Because each one of them represents a whole entire world within ourselves.

The more you fight for something that is not meant for you, the more it will fight you.

What is destined will reach you, even if it be underneath two mountains. What is not destined, will not reach you, even if it be between your two lips.

There’s no right way to be twenty-five. Because there’s no one, single, specific way to be human. As long as you keep your eyes open, as long as you keep trying new things and working hard and refusing to accept mediocrity as your fate, you will be okay. You will be happy. You will be exactly where you’re supposed to be.

He stood there weeping and watching us go, while behind him Lucky Paul entered and collapsed the prospector's tent, and I thought, Here is another miserable mental image I will have to catalog and make room for.

The only thing more unthinkable than leaving was staying; the only thing more impossible than staying was leaving.

The way he talked about thoughts was the way I experienced them - not as a choice but as a destiny. Not a catalog of my consciousness, but a refutation of it.

2. You don’t meet people by accident, and that each person who crosses your path brings life lessons to you that God knew you needed.

Our culture teaches us about shame—it dictates what is acceptable and what is not. We weren’t born craving perfect bodies. We weren’t born afraid to tell our stories. We weren’t born with a fear of getting too old to feel valuable. We weren’t born with a Pottery Barn catalog in one hand and heartbreaking debt in the other. Shame comes from outside of us—from the messages and expectations of our culture. What comes from the inside of us is a very human need to belong, to relate.

Go outside occasionally to smoke a cigarette. It’s a good way to make friends, it makes you look cool, and you’re already dead on the inside, anyway.

If you’re brave enough to say goodbye, life will reward you with a new hello.

Life isn’t about waiting for the storm to pass, it’s about learning to dance in the rain.—Vivian Greene

Some endings are not bad; sometimes they are not even endings, just bridges to new beginnings.

Any time you feel like you’re making the wrong choice, remember that life is not built exclusively on perfect decisions and that your recoveries are just as important as your mistakes.

Forgiveness means giving up hope for a different past. It means knowing that the past is over, the dust has settled and the destruction left in its wake can never be reconstructed to resemble what it was. It’s accepting that there’s no magic solution to the damage that’s been caused. It’s the realization that as unfair as the hurricane was, you still have to live in its city of ruins. And no amount of anger is going to reconstruct that city. You have to do it yourself.

Information wants to be free.' So goes the saying. Stewart Brand, the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, seems to have said it first. I say that information doesn't deserve to be free. Cybernetic totalists love to think of the stuff as if it were alive and had its own ideas and ambitions. But what if information is inanimate? What if it's even less than inanimate, a mere artifact of human thought? What if only humans are real, and information is not? ... Information is alienated experience.

The truth about anger is that it’s nothing more than the refusal to heal, because you’re scared to. Because you’re afraid of who you’ll be once your wounds close up and you have to go on living in your new, unfamiliar skin. You want your old skin back. And so anger tells you to keep that wound bleeding.

But the truth is going to heal your heart a lot faster than simply letting it break over and over until you finally face what you knew all along anyway: If he wanted to be with you, he would be with you.

Speaking of libraries: A big open-stack academic or public library is no small pleasure to work in. You're, say, trying to do a piece on something in Nevada, and you go down to C Floor, deep in the earth, and out to what a miner would call a remote working face. You find 10995.497S just where the card catalog and the online computer thought it would be, but that is only the initial nick. The book you knew about has led you to others you did not know about. To the ceiling the shelves are loaded with books about Nevada. You pull them down, one at a time, and sit on the floor and look them over until you are sitting on a pile five feet high, at which point you are late home for dinner and you get up and walk away. It's an incomparable boon to research, all that; but it is also a reason why there are almost no large open-stack libraries left in the world.

In feeling helpless, you learn to take care of yourself. In feeling used, you recognize your worth. In being abused, you develop compassion. In feeling like you’re stuck, you realize there is always a choice. In accepting what was done to you, you realize that nobody has control at the end of the day, but in surrendering the need for something we’ll never have, we can find peace, which is what we were actually seeking in the first place.

The truth is, when someone doesn’t want you, no reason matters. No amount of fixing could change that and actually, there isn’t anything that needs to be fixed because nothing was wrong or missing in the first place. You have always been wholly you, before or after them, including all the flaws and imperfections that make you unique. So if you ever feel the need to redeem or validate yourself after being rejected, please don’t because no one can take anything away from you by not wanting you and you aren’t born to prove yourself to anyone.

If an opportunity passed you by, it didn’t really want to stop at your station, if someone let you go, they didn’t really want to stay, if someone else got what you were praying for, this blessing was not written for you to begin with and you will be blessed in another way.

The greatest weapon against stress is our ability to choose one thought over another.” —WILLIAM JAMES I don’t know what superpower William James enjoyed, but I can no more choose my thoughts than choose my name. The way he talked about thoughts was the way I experienced them—not as a choice but as a destiny. Not a catalog of my consciousness, but a refutation of it. When I was little, I used to tell Mom about my invasives, and she would always say, “Just don’t think about that stuff, Aza.” But Davis got it. You can’t choose. That’s the problem.

The mail was junk: a couple of furniture catalogs, a credit card offer, a dead mouse, and a flyer with coupons for 50 percent off the moon. The faceless old woman who secretly lives in her home had censored the credit card offer, using charcoal to blot out entire lines and amounts. Diane looked through the coupons, considering what a great deal it would be if anyone actually wanted the moon. It's a hideous rock, Diane thought. You couldn't pay me to take it.

I bought new lingerie today I wanted to show you, but I didn’t get a chance with all that happened.” “You’ll have to return tomorrow night then…. Maybe we’ll order an entire catalog.” His smile and the glint of mischievousness in his eyes reflected lascivious thoughts. “You can model all the outfits you’d like for me.

Go for a walk and make yourself a promise for the duration of your walk. I will allow myself to feel whatever I feel. And listen. With every step, check in with yourself. Are you sad? Are you angry? Do you feel utterly lost? Listen to all of it. Accept all of it. Decide this walk will be the time you finally let yourself off the hook.

The way he talked about thoughts was the way I experienced them --- not as a choice but as a destiny. Not a catalog of my consciousness, but a refutation of it. When I was little, I used tell Mom about my invasives, and she would always say, "Just don't think about that stuff, Aza." But Davis got it. You can't choose. That's the problem.

A relationship should bring out the best in you. A relationship should be eternally supportive, and you should lift each other up in your worst moments.

I would never give someone complete power over me where I lost control; complete power over me where I felt I was worthless.

Grief is in two parts. The first is loss. The second is the remaking of life. —Anne Roiphe

There are only two types of women— goddesses and doormats. —Pablo Picasso

Just survive. Life is about surviving the best way you know how.

Growing up is a lot like that, I think. Convincing the world you’ve got it all figured out. Even when we know it’s a lie. We’re all still trying.

That reaching a destination hasn’t got a thing to do with the difficulty of the path you’ve chosen to take, but instead the passion and persistence you walk it with.

Your Potential Is Infinite If You’re Willing To Persevere

Tell the people you love how much you appreciate them more than you think is necessary.

See it for what is, not what you want it to be.

But I still hope when you kiss her, you taste me. And maybe one day you’ll forgive yourself.

The more you fight for something that is not meant for you, the more it will fight you

If you’re brave enough to say goodbye, life will reward you with a new hello. —Paulo Coelho

There are a thousand minute intricacies that make up the tapestry of who you are and not a single one has ceased to exist since the last time that somebody loved you. I

It doesn’t matter if its a relationship, a lifestyle, or a job. If it doesn’t make you happy, let it go.

Not everything makes sense, and sometimes trying will drive you insane.

So please, refuse to let the wounded people extinguish you. Refuse to be tamed. Refuse to flicker down into a meagre, burnt-out coal because somebody else is not tending to your flame.

My father worked behind closed doors inside the house, had a huge ancient Latin dictionary on a wrought-iron stand, spoke Spanish on the phone, and drank sherry and ate raw meat, in the form of chorizo, at five o'clock. Until the day in the yard with my playmate I thought this was what fathers did. Then I began to catalog and notice. They mowed lawns. They drank beer. They played in the yard with their kids, walked around the block with their wives, piled into campers, and, when they went out, wore joke ties or polo shirts, not Phi Beta Kappa keys and tailored vests.

Someday someone’s going to love all of those tiny things about you. Someone’s going to love the way you cough. They’re going to laugh at the way you lose your keys while you’re actually holding them. Someday, someone is going to stare at you from across a crowded room and know exactly how you’re feeling based on the way your head is tilting or the type of wine you’ve used to fill your glass. Someone is going to appreciate all of your obscurities eventually but right now they are all only your own. And that’s okay. First and foremost, you will always belong to yourself.

He meant rather that the evolution of our minds from bits of inanimate matter was more beautiful and more extraordinary than any of the miracles cataloged down through the ages by the religions of our world. And so he had an instinctive skepticism of any system of thought, religious or theorical, that pretended to encompass that miracle, and in so doing sought to draw limits around it.

The truth is if you reach a point where letting go is the only option, it usually means that this thing or someone already let you go. You are trying to stay in a place where you are not welcome anymore.

I had never thought about him as a child. I had never asked him about the war. I had only seen him as my father, and as my father I had judged him. There was nothing to do about that now but add it to the catalog of my mistakes.

68. Love is stronger than death even though it can’t stop death from happening, but no matter how hard death tries it can’t separate people from love. It can’t take away our memories either. In the end, life is stronger than death. —Anonymous

Yet inner behavior was still behavior, thought Aron, even if it was difficult to catalog. So what is the inner behavior of people whose most visible feature is that when you take them to a party they aren’t very pleased about it? She decided to find out.

If an opportunity passed you by, it didn’t really want to stop at your station, if someone let you go, they didn’t really want to stay, if someone else got what you were praying for, this blessing was not written for you to begin with and you will be blessed in another

Relationships with expiration dates teach us that love doesn’t have to last forever to be meaningful. That someone doesn’t have to stick around to make an impact. That the best things in life are not always measured by their longevity but by their intensity. Their complexity.

This was a habit Alizeh had mastered long ago. Cataloging moments of grace even in the midst of disaster often helped steady her mind; indeed there had been days in her life so bleak that Alizeh had resorted to counting her teeth if only to prove she still owned something of value. Just then she forced herself to listen to the susurrations of the wind, to appreciate that she'd never seen the moon so close, in all its unobstructed glory. She drew in a deep breath at the thought, tasting pure cold on her tongue, and lifted a searching hand to the night. The skies passed under her fingertips much like a cat, demanding to be pet.

There’s a particular way you laugh that can make an entire room light up, if only for a moment in time. There is a way you tilt your head when you are concentrating that makes you look unbearably kissable — as if you were placed on this earth only to stare at things and frown in the most endearing form humanely possible.

So make a list of what you can and can’t control, and focus on the former and leave the latter to the heavens. It helps. Counting your blessings help. Keeping your life and lifestyle in moderation helps; talking helps. You are not your anxiety, your worries, or your problems. These things will pass because they always do.

Any mode of thought that lays out complete and final answers to great existential questions is liable to dogmatism. A great attraction of care ethics, I think, is its refusal to encode or construct a catalog of principles and rules. One who cares must meet the cared-for just as he or she is, as a whole human being with individual needs and interests. [...] At most, it directs us to attend, to listen, and to respond as positively as possible. [...] it recognizes that virtually all human beings desire not to be hurt, and this gives us something close to an absolute: We should not inflict deliberate hurt or pain. Even when we must fight to save our children, we must not inflict unnecessary or deliberate pain.

I leaned back across the table and shut my eyes and thought that at some point in the future, long after humanity had run its course, after some other creature had replaced us, maybe, or maybe even after the next creatures had been replaced by whatever came after them, at some point in a future I could not fully imagine, a question might occur in some mind, and that question might be What was the human? What was the world of the human? - though it would be in some unforeseen language, perhaps a language that was without sound, perhaps a language that did not have to grow from a damp, contaminated mouth - and if this question ever did arise in that future being's mind, would it even be possible to catalog and make sense of all our griefs, our pains and wars? Our delineations? Our need for order? The question arose then - did all this human trouble begin in our bodies, these failing things, weaker or stronger, lighter or darker, taller or shorter? Why did they cause so much trouble for us? Why did we use them against one another? Why did we think the content of a body meant anything?

I wouldn’t go that far. Anyway, what’s yours, then? What’s the one superpower of June Elbus?” I thought about myself from head to toe. It was like being forced to read the most boring part of the Sears catalog. Like leafing through the bathroom accessories pages. Boring brain. Boring face. No sex appeal. Clumsy hands. “Heart. Hard heart,” I said, not sure where it came from. “The hardest heart in the world.

81. You will lose someone you can’t live without, and your heart will be badly broken, and the bad news is that you never completely get over the loss of your beloved. But this is also the good news. They live forever in your broken heart that doesn’t seal back up. And you come through. It’s like having a broken leg that never heals perfectly—that still hurts when the weather gets cold, but you learn to dance with the limp. —Anne Lamott

The strange thing was that, inside, I always felt I was the same as everyone around me. I am just like you, I thought when kids squinted at me in mockery of my own eyes; why can’t you see that? When I was young I certainly felt more like a white girl than an Asian one, and sometimes it was shocking to catch a glimpse of my face in the mirror and be forced to catalog the hated differences; to encounter tormentors and former friends and know that what they saw was so at odds with the person I believed I was.

Another thing I liked about the Dewey decimal system was that it could sometimes function as a secret code. Every once in a while during my high school years, I would hesitantly and cautiously type “gay” into a search bar in a card catalog. Just “gay,” as if more specificity would kill me right on the spot. Libraries were the only space I felt remotely comfortable even acknowledging the question—which didn’t yet even have words or language, just the faint outline of the punctuation. And where if not a library could I go to understand the unknown, to expand my world, to make sense out of gibberish? I would type “gay” and then survey the titles that came up and then click the window closed without ever doing any further exploring. I didn’t know what I thought I might find if I actually went to the aisle where the books were. A very quiet gay bar, perhaps? I figured it wasn’t worth the risk. But as I closed the screen, I memorized the Dewey decimal number of the section where, I presumed, a mirror ball sprinkled stardust across the aging carpet and the rows of books waiting to be opened.

I thought back to a soliloquy I’d seen on TV about pain as women’s birthright. It’s not hard to catalog the dazzling torment life puts us through: childbirth and menstrual cramps and the suffocating heat of menopause. We do our best to avoid it, but men run toward it: war and wrestling and football that cracks their skulls, bruises the fragile gray matter underneath. Their bravado is just them manufacturing their own pain, trying to seem strong. But fear—fear is at least as strong a motivator as pain. Maybe the TV show had it wrong; maybe men aren’t out to experience pain so much as fear, the icy jolt of feeling alive. They crave it because they have no idea how miserable it is to feel that frigid blast a hundred times a day.

I thought back to a soliloquy I’d seen on TV about pain as women’s birthright. It’s not hard to catalog the dazzling torment life puts us through: childbirth and menstrual cramps and the suffocating heat of menopause. We do our best to avoid it, but men run toward it: war and wrestling and football that cracks their skulls, bruises the fragile gray matter underneath. Their bravado is just them manufacturing their own pain, trying to seem strong. But fear—fear is at least as strong a motivator as pain. Maybe the TV show had it wrong; maybe men aren’t out to experience pain so much as fear, the icy jolt of feeling alive. They crave it because they have no idea how miserable it is to feel that frigid blast a hundred times a day. I

Did dinosaurs sing? Was there a teeming, singing wilderness with all the species thumping around, tuning up for the next millennia? Of course, dinosaurs sang, I thought. They are the ancestors of the singing birds and cousins to the roaring crocodiles…turns out, no. Turns out the syrinx, the organ that produces birdsong and the larynx, the organ that produces operatic arias, didn’t evolve until after the dinosaur extinction event…Some dinosaurs blew air into their closed mouths and through nasal cavities into resonance chambers, which we see in fossils as bony crests. They made the forest echo with clear, ominous tones, eerily like a cello. I have heard it in recordings scientists made of the sound they produced when they blew air through crests constructed to mimic lambeosaurus’s. Some dinosaurs cooed to their mates like doves…turns out that even if dinosaurs didn’t sing, they danced. There is evidence in vigorous scrape marks found in 100-million year old Colorado sandstone. From the courting behavior of ostriches and grouse, scientists envision the dinosaur males coming together on courting grounds, bobbing and scratching, flaring their brilliant feathers and cooing. Imagine: huge animals, each weighing more than a dozen football teams, shaking the Earth for a chance at love. What the story of the dinosaurs tells me is that if the earth didn’t have music, it would waste no time inventing it. In birds, tantalizing evidence of birdsong is found in 67-million-year old fossils, marking the first know appearance of the syrinx. Now the whole Earth can chime, from deep in the sea to high in the atmosphere with the sounds of snapping shrimp, singing mice, roaring whales, moaning bears, clattering dragonflies, and a fish calling like a foghorn. Who could catalog the astonishing oeuvre of the Earth? And more songs are being created every year.

If anyone had ever asked me to defend my work, here’s what I would have said: The more complex a behavior is, the more rigorous and complicated the science behind it. Math, chemistry, that’s the easy stuff—closed models with discrete answers. To understand behavior—human or elephant—the systems are far more complex, which is why the science behind them must be that much more intricate. But no one ever asked. I’m pretty sure my boss, Grant, thought this was a phase I was going through, and that sooner or later, I’d get back to science, instead of elephant cognition. I had seen elephants die before, but this was the first time since I’d changed my research focus. I wanted every last detail to be noted. I wanted to make sure I didn’t overlook anything as too mundane; any action that I might learn later was critical to the way elephants mourn. To that end, I stayed there, sacrificing sleep. I marked down which elephants came to visit, identifying them by their tusks, their tail hair, the marks on their bodies, and sometimes even the veins on their ears, which had patterns as unique as our own thumbprints. I cataloged how much time they spent touching Mmaabo,

One day, at a quiet hour, I found myself alone in a certain gallery, wherein one particular picture of pretentious size set up in the best light, having a cordon of protection stretched before it, and a cushioned bench duly set in front for the accommodation of worshipping connoisseurs, who, having gazed themselves off their feet, might be fain to complete the business sitting. This picture, I say, seemed to consider itself the queen of the collection. It represented a woman, considerably larger, I thought, than the life. I calculated that this lady, put into a scale of magnitude suitable for the reception of a commodity of bulk, would infallibly turn from fourteen to sixteen stone. She was indeed extremely well fed, very much butcher's meat, to say nothing of bread, vegetables, and liquids must she have consumed to attain that breadth and height, that wealth of muscle, that affluence of flesh. She lay half reclined on a couch – why, it would be difficult to say. Broad daylight blazed round her. She appeared in hearty health, strong enough to do the work of two plain cooks. She could not plead a weak spine. She ought to have been standing, or at least sitting bolt upright. She had no business to lounge away the noon on a sofa. She ought likewise to have worn decent garments – a gown covering her properly, which was not the case. Out of abundance of material, seven and twenty yards I should say, of drapery, she managed to make inefficient raiment. Then, for the wretched untidiness surrounding her, there could be no excuse. Pots and pans – or perhaps I ought to say, vases and goblets – were rolled here and there on the foreground, a perfect rubbish of flowers was mixed amongst them, and an absurd and disorderly mass of curtain upholstery smothered the couch and cumbered the floor. On referring to the catalog, I found that this this notable production bore name: 'Cleopatra.

Gray froze as Miss Turner emerged from the hold. For weeks, she’d plagued him-by day, he suffered glimpses of her beauty; by night, he was haunted by memories of her touch. And just when he thought he’d finally wrangled his desire into submission, today she’d ruined everything. She’d gone and changed her dress. Gone was that serge shroud, that forbidding thundercloud of a garment that had loomed in his peripheral vision for weeks. Today, she wore a cap-sleeved frock of sprigged muslin. She stepped onto the deck, smiling face tilted to the wind. A flower opening to greet the sun. She bobbed on her toes, as though resisting the urge to make a girlish twirl. The pale, sheer fabric of her dress billowed and swelled in the breeze, pulling the undulating contour of calf, thigh, hip into relief. Gray thought she just might be the loveliest creature he’d ever seen. Therefore, he knew he ought to look away. He did, for a moment. He made an honest attempt to scan the horizon for clouds. He checked the hour on his pocket watch, wound the small knob one, two, three, four times. He wiped a bit of salt spray from its glass face. He thought of England. And France, and Cuba, and Spain. He remembered his brother, his sister, and his singularly ugly Aunt Rosamond, on whom he hadn’t clapped eyes in decades. And all this Herculean effort resulting in nothing but a fine sheen of sweat on his brow and precisely thirty seconds’ delay in the inevitable. He looked at her again. Desire swept through his body with starling intensity. And beneath that hot surge of lust, a deeper emotion swelled. It wasn’t something Gray wished to examine. He preferred to let it sink back into the murky depths of his being. An unnamed creature of the deep, let for a more intrepid adventurer to catalog. Instead, he examined Miss Turner’s new frock. The fabric was of fine quality, the sprig pattern evenly stamped, without variations in shape or hue. The dressmaker had taken great pains to match the pattern at the seams. The sleeves of the frock fit perfectly square with her shoulders, in a moment of calm, the skirt’s single flounce lapped the laces of her boots. Unlike that gray serge abomination, this dress was expensive, and it had been fashioned for her alone. But it no longer fit. As she turned, Gray noted how the neckline gaped slightly, and the column of her skirt that ought to have skimmed the swell of her hip instead caught on nothing but air. He frowned. And in that instant, she turned to face him. Their gazes caught and held. Her own smile faded to a quizzical expression. And because Gray didn’t know how to answer the unspoken question in her eyes, and because he hated the fact that he’d banished the giddy delight from her face, he gave her a curt nod and a churlish, “Good morning.” And then he walked away.

I've always believed it's easier ti be hurt, that it is to hurt someone else.

Few things in life make me more zen than knowing that one can take notes on an almost infinite variety of colors, shapes, and sizes of sticky paper. Ever since I was a kid, the sheer possibilities for organization- the thought that no matter how unpredictable life gets, there are tools to neatly catalog it- have been massively appealing.

the more he knew of the complexity of the mind, and the cosmos with which it was inextricably and mysteriously bound up, the more inclined he was to see it as a kind of miracle—not in quite the same sense that our Deolaters use the term, for he considered it altogether natural. He meant rather that the evolution of our minds from bits of inanimate matter was more beautiful and more extraordinary than any of the miracles cataloged down through the ages by the religions of our world. And so he had an instinctive skepticism of any system of thought, religious or theorical, that pretended to encompass that miracle, and in so doing sought to draw limits around it.

Later, he had wandered off. The huge ship was an enchanted ocean in which you could never drown, and he threw himself into it to try to understand if not it, then the people who had built it. He walked for days, stopping at bars and restaurants whenever he felt thirsty, hungry or tired; mostly they were automatic and he was served by little floating trays, though a few were staffed by real people. They seemed less like servants and more like customers who’d taken a notion to help out for a while. “Of course I don’t have to do this,” one middle-aged man said, carefully cleaning the table with a damp cloth. He put the cloth in a little pouch, sat down beside him. “But look, this table’s clean.” He agreed that the table was clean. “Usually,” the man said. “I work on alien — no offense — alien religions; Directional Emphasis In Religious Observance; that’s my speciality . . . like when temples or graves or prayers always have to face in a certain direction; that sort of thing? Well, I catalog, evaluate, compare; I come up with theories and argue with colleagues, here and elsewhere. But . . . the job’s never finished; always new examples, and even the old ones get reevaluated, and new people come along with new ideas about what you thought was settled . . . but” — he slapped the table — “when you clean a table you clean a table. You feel you’ve done something. It’s an achievement.” “But in the end, it’s still just cleaning a table.” “And therefore does not really signify on the cosmic scale of events?” the man suggested. He smiled in response to the man’s grin, “Well, yes.” “But then, what does signify? My other work? Is that really important, either? I could try composing wonderful musical works, or day-long entertainment epics, but what would that do? Give people pleasure? My wiping this table gives me pleasure. And people come to a clean table, which gives them pleasure. And anyway” — the man laughed — “people die; stars die; universes die. What is any achievement, however great it was, once time itself is dead? Of course, if all I did was wipe tables, then of course it would seem a mean and despicable waste of my huge intellectual potential. But because I choose to do it, it gives me pleasure. And,” the man said with a smile, “it’s a good way of meeting people. So where are you from, anyway?

We focus so much of our attention on trying to get others to love us, to adore us, and to admire us that we forget to do those things to ourselves.

Jaylynn has a halo of spikes and thorns over her head, which digs into her forehead, and the blood runs down her shadowy brown wavy wispy hair. Her eyes can glow the color of pink. ‘I call them Olivia Cooper eyes! You know, with the black teardrops!’ and her dark cherry black blood flows from them too, as we talk. I think I saw from time to time a black widow crawling on her, making webs on her body. (So- hair-raising.) Along with the markings of unlucky, thirteen were tattooed on her and chiseled into her chest. Other insignias are cataloging her, she has numbers on her marking her like a beast. She has the cereal barcode numbers of- (J-N-0069699611) on her left butt cheek, which glows lime green in the dark! You are nothing but a number along with your first and last initials when you are a dark angel. She can have fire readily available at her fingertips, sharp retracting claws. Along with withdrawing fangs and horns. She also has a very elaborate samurai-like sword with a curved blade. As well as, yes you guessed it! She can sparkle like many thousands of little reflective broken mirrors in the brilliant full moonlight. I never thought I would speak to a black angel, yet she is my little girl, how could I not? ‘To live is to be haunted, to die is to be unperturbed.’ I remember back when she was on the edge of fifteen, and my life was entertaining, pleasurable, and stimulating. Not at all like now; I remember her first days of high school everything seemed flawless, little did I know, that the tower's children had their children, and their evil spirits were passed down to the next demons in the circle of pain; his clan started torturing my little girl until her end. Just as there, mothers did with me. All my life I have tried to prove this story… but how do I write a story that seems so silly to other people that do not understand?

Anne stared through the open doorway, a look of comprehension on her face. "Hiro, what spell did you cast?" "I thought it said Chain Lightning," said Hiro. Penelope yanked the catalog out of his hand and examined it. "Two of the pages are taped together, you ninny. You ready the first part of Chain Lightning and the second part of Summon Chicken Swarm." She handed the catalog back to him. "Congratulations, O Master of Magick, you just invented chicken lightning." Hiro looked horrified[.]

Stop chasing what you want to be, and start chasing what you want to do.

There’s no downside to telling each other exactly why you love each other as often as possible.

When a flower doesn’t bloom, you fix the environment in which it grows, not the flower. – Alexander Den Heijer

There is nothing that time and space won’t heal.

So if you knew, with indisputable certainty, that love was never going to be yours, how would you live your life differently?

So stop looking for The One to spend the rest of your life with. Be The One. And let everybody else come searching for you.

Jealous, Liv? I thought you were only keeping tabs on me for Knox. Not sure why my dating life would be pertinent to cataloging my career accomplishments.

Here’s something that really surprises me: The more stuff I have, the more stuff I want. And so I looked around and saw that everyone else was the same way. It was not until I had a few things that I noticed how this works. The material stuff is addicting! Remembering my parents, I try to fight against the “stuff addiction.” I refuse to buy jewelry or trinkets. I don’t need expensive toys like Jet Skis or snowblowers. I keep the material things under control, and I banish thoughts of them from my brain. Besides, I am very busy. My life doesn’t include window-shopping or paging through mail-order catalogs by the pool or jaunts to compact disc stores or Home Depot. These are all invitations to spend money unnecessarily.… Greed is the destroyer of success. You cannot be creatively successful and greedy at the same time. I’m talking about both material and emotional greed here. Sorry,

It was Evan. He leaned against the door frame, his hands in his pockets. He was wearing distressed khakis, a white T-shirt, and a perfectly broken-in brown suede car coat. “Hey,” he said. Holy Abercrombie catalog, Megan thought.

What is destined will reach you, even if it be underneath two mountains. What is not destined, will not reach you, even if it be between your two lips. —Proverb Anything

Maybe he didn’t choose me because he only liked the idea of me.

Through the years I experimented with all different types of materials and frames. Finally, I settled upon one that was so simple, easy, and inexpensive to use that it was almost ridiculous. Then I began growing all different types of plants vertically. I originally thought I would need to design some special way to hold up and accommodate heavier fruits such as winter squash and pumpkins, but as it turned out, these plant vines seemed to understand the situation; the stem supporting the heavy fruit grows thicker and heavier as the fruit becomes larger. If you have a framework and support that will hold the plant, the plant will hold the fruit; it is as simple as that! Mother Nature always seems to know best. Pea and bean netting can be stretched taut across a box frame and held in place by four metal posts. Plants will then grow up through the netting and be supported. Best Material I use the strongest material I can find, which is steel. Fortunately, steel comes in tubular pipe used for electrical conduit. It is very strong and turns out to be very inexpensive. Couplings are also available so you can connect two pieces together. I designed an attractive frame that fits right onto the 4 × 4 box, and it can be attached to the wooden box with clamps that can be bought at any store. Or, steel reinforcing rods driven into the existing ground outside your box provide a very steady and strong base; then the electrical conduit slips snugly over the bars. It’s very simple and inexpensive to assemble. Anyone can do it—even you! To prevent vertically grown plants from shading other parts of the garden, I recommend that tall, vertical frames be constructed on the north side of the garden. To fit it into a 4 × 4 box, I designed a frame that measured 4 feet wide and almost 6 feet tall. Tie It Tight Vertically growing plants need to be tied to their supports. Nylon netting won’t rot in the sun and weather, and I use it exclusively now for both vertical frames and horizontal plant supports. It is very strong—almost unbreakable—and guaranteed for twenty years. It is a wonderful material available at garden stores and in catalogs. The nylon netting is also durable enough to grow the heavier vine crops on vertical frames, including watermelons, pumpkins, cantaloupes, winter and summer squashes, and tomatoes. You will see in Chapter 8 how easy it is to train plants to grow vertically. To hold the plants to the frame, I have found that nylon netting with 7-inch square openings made especially for tomato growing works well because you can reach your hand through. Make sure it is this type so it won’t cut the stem of the plant when it blows against it in the wind. This comes in 4-foot widths and can easily be tied to the metal frame. It’s sometimes hard to find, so call around.