Typical Love Quotes

Friendship arises out of mere Companionship when two or more of the companions discover that they have in common some insight or interest or even taste which the others do not share and which, till that moment, each believed to be his own unique treasure (or burden). The typical expression of opening Friendship would be something like, "What? You too? I thought I was the only one." ... It is when two such persons discover one another, when, whether with immense difficulties and semi-articulate fumblings or with what would seem to us amazing and elliptical speed, they share their vision - it is then that Friendship is born. And instantly they stand together in an immense solitude.

The typical expression of opening Friendship would be something like, 'What? You too? I thought I was the only one!

But, like anyone in love, Madeleine believed that her own relationship was different from every other relationship, immune from typical problems.

I don't have a ring. I don't have a pretty speech prepared. All I know is that I love you more than life itself and I want every single person in this room to know that I want you forever, Shaw Landon. I love you. Marry me." Typical Rule: he didn't ask, he just told her. "Be an Archer. Be mine.

You know, Miss Holly, you look very dramatic like that, backlit by the fire. Very attractive, if I may say so. I know you shared a moment passionne with Artemis which he subsequently fouled up with his typical boorish behavior. Let me just throw something out there for you to consider while we're chasing the probe: I share Artemis's passion but not his boorishness. No pressure; just think about it. This was enough to elicit a deafening moment of silence even in the middle of a crisis, which Orion seemed to be blissfully unaffected by.

The main point of Christianity was this: that Nature is not our mother: Nature is our sister. We can be proud of her beauty, since we have the same father; but she has no authority over us; we have to admire, but not to imitate. This gives to the typically Christian pleasure in this earth a strange touch of lightness that is almost frivolity. Nature was a solemn mother to the worshipers of Isis and Cybele. Nature was a solemn mother to Wordsworth or to Emerson. But Nature is not solemn to Francis of Assisi or to George Herbert. To St. Francis, Nature is a sister, and even a younger sister: a little, dancing sister, to be laughed at as well as loved.

The normal reasons. Like, I love you and I want to spend the rest of my life with you. It’s all the dumb clichés about how even when I’m mad at you I love you and how every day the best part of it is waking up next to you. And it kills me that this is all the normal, typical people-in-love stuff, because I want to believe our love is special—that it’s bigger and more interesting than any love that anyone else has had before—but the heartbreaking truth is my love for you is so consistent and predictable and boring.

Love is not concerned with a person’s accomplishments, it is a response to a person’s being: This is why a typical word of love is to say: I love you, because you are as you are.

People who follow Jesus, though, are no longer typical - God is constantly inviting them into a life that moves away from typical.

Most people would say they love animals, but the reality is, if your using animals for food, clothing, or entertainment, you're only considering the lives of certain animals, typically those of cats and dogs.

Dear Goat, How does one fall in love? Do you trip? Do you stumble, lose your balance and drop to the sidewalk, graze your knee, graze your heart? Do you crash to the stony ground? Is there a precipice, from which you float, over the edge, forever? I know I'm in love when I see you, I know when I long to see you. Not a muscle has moved. Leaves hang unruffled by any breeze. The air is still. I have fallen in love without taking step. When did this happen? I haven't even blinked. I'm on fire. Is that too banal for you? It's not, you know. You'll see. It's what happens. It's what matters. I'm on fire. I no longer eat, I forget to eat. Food looks silly to me, irrelevant. If I even notice it. But I notice nothing. My thoughts are full and raging, a house full of brothers, related by blood, feuding blood feuds: "I'm in love." "Typically stupid choice." "I am, though, I'm racked by love as if love were pain." "Go ahead. Fuck up your life. It's all wrong and you know it. Wake up. Face it." "There's only one face, it's all I see, awake or asleep." I threw the book out the window last night. I tried to forget. You are all wrong for me, I know it, but I no longer care for my thoughts unless they're thoughts of you. When I'm close to you, in your presence, I feel your hair brush my cheek when it does not. I look away from you, sometimes. Then I look back. When I tie my shoes, when I peel an orange, when I drive my car, when I lie down each night without you, I remain, As ever, Ram

I don't think anyone aims to be typical, really. Most people even vow to themselves some time in high school or college not to be typical. But still, they just kind of loop back to it somehow. Like the circular rails of a train at an amusement park, the scripts we know offer a brand of security, of predictability, of safety for us. But the problem is, they only take us where we've already been. They loop us back to places where everyone can easily go, not necessarily where we were made to go. Living a different kind of life takes some guts and grit and a new way of seeing things.

Typical!” he said to Sophie. “ I break my neck to get here, and I find you peacefully tidying up!” Sophie looked up at him. As she had feared, the hard black-and white light coming through the broken wall showed her that Howl had not bothered to shave or tidy his hair. His eyes were still red-rimmed and his black sleeves were torn in several place. There was not much to choose between Howl and the scarecrow. Oh, dear! Sophie thought. He must love Miss Angorian very much. “I came for Miss Angorian,” she explained. “And I thought if I arranged for your family to visit you, it would keep you quiet for once!” Howl said disgustedly. “But no---“.

First impressions are rarely worth preserving. Men typically fall short of our expectations.

The people who slowly became typical have the greatest problem wrapping their minds around a dynamic friendship with an invisible, alive God.

In typical Filipino fashion, my aunt expressed her love not through words of encouragement or affectionate embraces, but through food. Food was how she communicated. Food was how she found her place in the world.

A typical human mind remains under control of the external world, Maya, which has a never-ending arsenal of highs-lows, good-bad, right-wrong, love-hate, pleasure-pain, likes-dislikes, pure-impure, spiritual-materialistic, belief-disbelief, rational-irrational, and so on to keep a mind engaged. Therefore, Maya has all the powers to enslave a human mind and control what information the latter receives.

He turned to leave, then hesitated. "One more thing." He walked up to me. "I've also been thinking about your declaration of undying love or whatever." "I didn't - it wasn't -" He clamped his hands on the sides of my gooey face and kissed me. I had to wonder: was it possible to dissolve into chocolate on a molecular level and melt into a puddle on the carpet? Because that's how I felt. I'm pretty sure Valhalla had to resurrect me several times during the course of that kiss. Otherwise, I don't know how I was still in one piece when Alex finally pulled away. He studied me critically, his brown and amber eyes taking me in. He had a chocolate moustache and goatee now, and chocolate down the front of his sweater vest. I'll be honest. A small part of my brain thought, Alex is male right now. I have just been kissed by a dude. How do I feel about that? The rest of my brain answered: I have just been kissed by Alex Fierro. I am absolutely great with that. In fact, I might have done something typically embarrassing and stupid, like making the aforementioned declaration of undying love, but Alex spared me. "Eh." He shrugged. "I'll keep thinking about it. I'll get back to you. In the meantime, definitely take that shower." He left, whistling a tune that might have been a Frank Sinatra song from the elevator, "Fly Me to the Moon".

It is not depression or anxiety that truly hurts us. It is our active resistance against these states of mind and body. If you wake up with low energy, hopeless thoughts, and a lack of motivation - that is a signal from you to you. That is a sure sign that something in your mind or in your life is making you sick, and you must attend to that signal. But what do most people do? They hate their depressed feelings. They think "Why me?" They push them down. They take a pill. And so, the feelings return again and again, knocking at your door with a message while you turn up all the noise in your cave, refusing to hear the knocks. Madness. Open the door. Invite in depression. Invite anxiety. Invite self-hatred. Invite shame. Hear their message. Give them a hug. Accept their tirades as exaggerated mistruths typical of any upset person. Love your darkness and you shall know your light.

Emotional incest is yet another form of emotional abuse. Emotional incest commonly involves the reversal of the parent/child roles. When this occurs, the mother or father "parentifies" the child who is then manipulated to gratify the unmet childhood needs of the parent. This typically manifests as the parent pumping the child for the unconditional love that she should herself be giving.

The start receives such disproportionate attention because it isn't deemed to be just one phase among many; for the Romantic, it contains in a concentrated form everything significant about love as a whole. Which is why, in so many love stories, there is simply nothing else for the narrator to do with a couple after they have triumphed over a range of initial obstacles other than to consign them to an ill-defined contented future--or kill them off. What we typically call love is only the start of love.

I used to think I had to act a certain way to follow God, but now I know God doesn’t want us to be typical.

One of the most fundamental problems in the spiritual order is that we sense within ourselves the hunger for God, but we attempt to satisfy it with some created good that is less than God. Thomas Aquinas said that the four typical substitutes for God are wealth, pleasure, power, and honor. Sensing the void within, we attempt to fill it up with some combination of these four things, but only by emptying out the self in love can we make the space for God to fill us. The classical tradition referred to this errant desire as "concupiscence," but I believe that we could neatly express the same idea with the more contemporary term "addiction." When we try to satisfy the hunger for God with something less than God, we will naturally be frustrated, and then in our frustration, we will convince ourselves that we need more of that finite good, so we will struggle to achieve it, only to find ourselves again, necessarily, dissatisfied. At this point, a sort of spiritual panic sets in, and we can find ourselves turning obsessively around this creaturely good that can never in principle make us happy.

...for Christians typical dating can often be a swerver - an approach to relationships that wants to go in a different direction than the one God has for us.

I hated the term "heartbroken." It was such an understatement. "Broken" typically implied you were talking about something you could put back together. Or replace. My heart didn't feel like it was broken. It felt like it had been tossed into the blender and liquidized at 180 MPH.

We typically misunderstand what's wrong about consumerism. It's not that it makes us love material things too much. To be a good consumer, you have to desire to get lots of things, but you must not love any of them too much once you have them. Consumerism needs children who do not stay attached to their toys for very long and learn to expect the next round of presents as soon as possible. When consumerism succeeds, our attachments are shallow, easily broken, so we can move on to the next thing we're supposed to get. Being a good consumer means desiring new things, not cherishing old ones. And the new things you're supposed to desire are not always material things. Spirituality is now a consumerist enterprise, too.

It’s probably a pretty safe bet to stay away from anyone who brags about their skills in bed. They are typically only well versed in their own pleasure and who wants a dude like that anyway? No mystery, no class, and almost always: all talk. The Talker is a Regular Guy with a marketing plan.

Alec was used to feeling a combination of affection and annoyance toward the people he loved. Typically, he’d start the relationship with a feeling of total annoyance and minimal affection, and then as time passed, the annoyance diminished and the affection grew. This described the arc of his relationship with Jace, his parabatai and closest friend, and more recently described how he’d felt about Clary Fairchild when she’d come into their lives.

Go to other countries. Not a typical backpacking tour. Planned tour means you will hang with Americans on bikes and flirt with drunk Germans and someone will steal your Levi’s in the hostel and a guy from Poland will sock you in the face while bad techno plays everywhere and you will learn nothing except that your face hurts and not everyone showers. Get into other cultures and talk politics and love. Meeting other people is the only way to know if you believe what you believe cause it’s been handed to you, or if it really rings true in your heart. Getting lost should be seen as a sweet chance to be found. Remember, you belong everywhere.

Don't fall in love with me. Not unless you're ready for a God damn fight. I don't do fragility, or friction and fairy tales. I want you to be irrational because I'm irrational. Be bold. Speak your mind. I want your wildfires and obscenities. I want your passion and priorities. Protect what's yours. I'll defend what's ours. Let us fight against routines and bad habits, and anything typical. And don't you dare quit. Not on us, not on yourself. God help the person who threatens us. Forgive me when I let you down, but don't overlook it, or allow it. We're all insecure about something. Show me yours. We're all terrified sometimes. Turn to me. People come in and out of my life so often and easily that I just look for a love that stays. I don't mind your blemishes or scars, I have a few of my own. Don't be another flash in the pan. Falling for me will be easy. Staying with me will be impossible. But you deserve a love that most people don't believe in anymore.

In no way did God want me to settle for one of the typical “jerks” who were a dime a dozen. He wanted me to save myself for a man who had His very nature and character within him. And He wanted me to trust Him enough to bring that special man to me in His perfect time.

A typical submissive lives to serve. She likely grew up believing that service to the people you care for is how you express your love for them. It had little or nothing to do with relationship dynamics, sex, kink, or anything anywhere near that complicated. It is a simple, sweet principle of love: If you care for someone, you do nice things for that person. It makes you feel better, it makes him feel better, and it makes the world - or at least your little corner of it - a better place for a time.

In my mind, MDMA is a mild drug. People who prefer it to the typical psychedelics tend not to do well when stressed, either by life or by taking more potent mind-bending drugs. MDMA is what I like to call a “love and light” drug, one that accentuates the positive and minimizes the negative. If only life were so simple.

love typically gives rise to responsiveness regarding the beauty of a very specific individual taken as a whole rather than for values taken individually.

And I love being a sinner too much to ever be a saint.' 'No one would nominate you for sainthood.' 'And be glad of that. Saints don't typically kill to protect their investments.

In contrast, investing time and energy in your relationship with your spouse and children typically doesn’t offer that same immediate sense of achievement. Kids misbehave every day. It’s really not until 20 years down the road that you can put your hands on your hips and say, “I raised a good son or a good daughter.” You can neglect your relationship with your spouse, and on a day-to-day basis, it doesn’t seem as if things are deteriorating. People who are driven to excel have this unconscious propensity to underinvest in their families and overinvest in their careers—even though intimate and loving relationships with their families are the most powerful and enduring source of happiness.

A general word of advice: It’s always more effective to assume the best in conflict situations. In fact, expecting the worst—which is typical of people with insecure attachment styles—often acts as a self-fulfilling prophecy. If you assume your partner will act hurtfully or reject you, you automatically respond defensively—thus starting a vicious cycle of negativity.

Maybe you're meant to be. Love at first sight. It happened to me" "I don't accept that as a hypothesis." "That's because you're a Virgo." "I thought you said virginity was a construct." "A Virgo, you fucking Virgo nightmare. All this and you still don't believe in things. Typical Virgo bullshit.

The Age Of Reason 1. ‘Well, it’s that same frankness you fuss about so much. You’re so absurdly scared of being your own dupe, my poor boy, that you would back out of the finest adventure in the world rather than risk telling yourself a lie.’ 2. “ I’m not so much interested in myself as all that’ he said simply. ‘I know’, said Marcelle. It isn’t an aim , it’s a means. It helps you to get rid of yourself; to contemplate and criticize yourself: that’s the attitude you prefer. When you look at yourself, you imagine you aren’t what you see, you imagine you are nothing. That is your ideal: you want to be nothing.’’ 3. ‘In vain he repeated the once inspiring phrase: ‘I must be free: I must be self-impelled, and able to say: ‘’I am because I will: I am my own beginning.’’ Empty, pompous words, the commonplaces of the intellectual.’ 4. ‘He had waited so long: his later years had been no more than a stand-to. Oppressed with countless daily cares, he had waited…But through all that, his sole care had been to hold himself in readiness. For an act. A free, considered act; that should pledge his whole life, and stand at the beginning of a new existence….He waited. And during all that time, gently, stealthily, the years had come, they had grasped him from behind….’ 5. ‘ ‘It was love. This time, it was love. And Mathiue thought:’ What have I done?’ Five minutes ago this love didn’t exist; there was between them a rare and precious feeling, without a name and not expressible in gestures.’ 6. ‘ The fact is, you are beyond my comprehension: you, so prompt with your indignation when you hear of an injustice, you keep this woman for years in a humiliating position, for the sole pleasure of telling yourself that you are respecting your principles. It wouldn’t be so bad if it were true, if you really did adapt your life to your ideas. But, I must tell you once more…you like that sort of life-placid, orderly, the typical life of an official.’ ‘’That freedom consisted in frankly confronting situations into which one had deliberately entered, and accepting all one’s responsibilities.’ ‘Well…perhaps I’m doing you an injustice. Perhaps you haven’t in fact reached the age of reason, it’s really a moral age…perhaps I’ve got there sooner than you have.’ 7. ‘ I have nothing to defend. I am not proud of my life and I’m penniless. My freedom? It’s a burden to me, for years past I have been free and to no purpose. I simply long to exchange it for a good sound of certainty….Besides, I agree with you that no one can be a man who has not discovered something for which he is prepared to die.’ 8. ‘‘I have led a toothless life’, he thought. ‘ A toothless life. I have never bitten into anything. I was waiting. I was reserving myself for later on-and I have just noticed that my teeth have gone. What’s to be done? Break the shell? That’s easily said. Besides, what would remain? A little viscous gum, oozing through the dust and leaving a glistering trail behind it.’ 9.’’ A life’, thought Mathieu, ‘is formed from the future just like the bodies are compounded from the void’. He bent his head: he thought of his own life. The future had made way into his heart, where everything was in process and suspense. The far-off days of childhood, the day when he has said:’I will be free’, the day when he had said: ’I will be famous’, appeared to him even now with their individual future, like a small, circled individual sky above them all, and the future was himself, himself just as he was at present, weary and a little over-ripe, they had claims upon him across the passage of time past, they maintained their insistencies, and he was often visited by attacks of devastating remorse, because his casual, cynical present was the original future of those past days.

Here are some things I didn't have space for: putting on Alone by Heart and miming the lyrics in Leah's face until she started laughing, Leah's long hands and her yellow hair and the werewolf quality of her eyebrows. The way she walked around the flat in shorts and a sports bra and told me off for staring. The way she kissed me and then apologized for biting. The time Leah told me that making me laugh was an achievement because my face was so typically set against it. The way I was often bored and Leah never was. Talking with Leah on early dates about the panic of doing what everyone else was doing and then feeling like a dick about it. The way Leah was kind by nature whereas I always seemed to struggle. The way she tipped my face towards hers and told me otherwise. "You're the kindest person I know and I know six or seven people.

He downed the last of his coffee, carried his mug over to the pot, poured himself a refill, and returned to the table. Why, yes, thank you, I'd love some more coffee. Hmmm, Narcisstic Personality Disorder? Attention Deficit Disorder? Or just a typical male?

But there was something else going on here. He had to admit even to himself that the woman challenged his intellect and his beliefs with her own, and she wasn’t afraid to disagree with him or to disapprove of his views. Nor did she make any attempt to school her sentiments behind the polite, prim, and proper demeanor of the typical English noblewoman. She was fierce. She was passionate. She was fiery and intense. She was like no other woman he had ever met. And suddenly, just like that, he was under her spell once again.

In a typical college romance novel, this was the moment I would’ve been waiting for. The validation of all my shame and suffering at the hands of other men: a beautiful boy loved me. What had been done to my body didn’t ruin me for Mr. Right. Zippity-fucking-doo-dah.

You have to let her know you’re in charge!” “I thought I was!” Typical female. The mare had only let him THINK he was in charge.

I was hot and horny as hell. Which was typical of me. I’m twenty-five, and I’m healthy, and a healthy girl is always thinking about sex.

Our love was not typical and certainly not easy, but it was soul-deep and destined.

The God of the universe--the creator of nitrogen and pine needles, galaxies and E-minor--loves us with a radical, unconditional, self-sacrificing love. And what is our typical response? We go to church, sing songs, and try not to cuss.

I feel compelled to make another 'nonapology.' Many readers are likely to be concerned about my use of masculine pronouns in relation to God. I think I both understand and appreciate this concern. It is a matter to which I have given much thought. I have generally been a strong supporter of the women's movement and action that is reasonable to combat sexist language. But first of all, God is not neuter. He is exploding with life and love and even sexuality of a sort. So 'It' is not appropriate. Certainly I consider God androgynous. He is as gentle and tender and nurturing and maternal as any woman could ever be. Nonetheless, culturally determined though it may be, I subjectively experience His reality as more masculine than feminine. While He nurtures us, He also desires to penetrate us, and while we more often than not flee from His love like a reluctant virgin, He chases after us with a vigor in the hunt that we most typically associate with males. As CS Lewis put it, in relation to God we are all female. Moreover, whatever our gender or conscious theology, it is our duty---our obligation---in response to His love to attempt to give birth, like Mary, to Christ in ourselves and in others. "I shall, however, break with tradition and use the neuter for Satan. While I know Satan to be lustful to penetrate us, I have not in the least experienced this desire as sexual or creative---only hateful and destructive. It is hard to determine the sex of a snake.

The emptiness of the narcissist often means that they are only focused on whatever is useful or interesting to them at the moment. If at that moment it is interesting for them to tell you they love you, they do. It’s not really a long game to them, and when the next interesting issue comes up, they attend to that. The objectification of others—viewing other people as objects useful to his needs—can also play a role. When you are the only thing in the room, or the most interesting thing in the room, then the narcissist’s charisma and charm can leave you convinced that you are his everything. The problem is that this is typically superficial regard, and that superficiality results in inconsistency, and emotions for the narcissistic person range from intense to detached on a regular basis. This vacillation between intensity and detachment can be observed in the narcissist’s relationships with people (acquaintances, friends, family, and partners), work, and experiences. A healthy relationship should feel like a safe harbor in your life. Life throws us enough curve balls in the shape of money problems, work issues, medical issues, household issues, and even the weather. Sadly, a relationship with a narcissist can be one more source of chaos in your life, rather than a place of comfort and consistency.

A year later we were in a coffee shop, the kind taking a last stand against Starbucks with its thrift-store chairs, vegan cookies, and over-promising teas with names like Serenity and Inner Peace. I was curled up with a stack of causes, trying to get in a few extra hours of work over the weekend, and Andrew sat with one hand gripping his mug, his nose in The New York Times; the two of us a parody of the yuppie couple of the new millennium. We sat silently that way, though there wasn't silence at all. On top of the typical coffee-shop sounds - the whir of an expresso machine, the click of the cash register, the bell above the door - Andrew was making his noises, an occasional snort at something he read in the paper, the jangle of his keys in his pocket, a sniffle since he was getting over a cold, a clearing of his throat. And as we sat there, all I could do was listen to those Andrew-specific noises, the rhythm of his breath, the in-out in-out, its low whistle. Snort. Jangle. Sniffle. Clear. Hypnotized. I wanted to buy his soundtrack. This must be what love is, I thought. Not wanting his noises to ever stop.

Typically, the daughter of a narcissistic mother will choose a spouse who cannot meet her emotional needs. Even though our intuition will tell us in some way when something is not right for us, we tend to block it out if it isn’t saying what we want to hear. When the hope for love blossoms, we override the intuitive inner voice or gut feeling. Years of treating and interviewing daughters with maternal deprivation have shown me that we have a deep sense of intelligent intuition, but it seems to be accompanied by a special brand of “deafness.” In the desperate search for love that did not exist in her childhood, the daughter chooses not to pay attention to the red flags that may be waving. We do know. We just don’t listen. In

The little secret in product is that engineers are typically the best single source of innovation; yet, they are not even invited to the party in this process.

The typical American preferred the canned version of philosophy found in how-to manuals, but even average Frenchmen and Vietnamese cherished a love of knowledge.

There’s nothing typical about Genuine Love. To be loved authentically is to be blessed beyond measure. Only a fool would take advantage of something that so many people yearn for.

Playing an instrument says you have passion. Taking the time to teach someone else, especially someone younger, says you’re not only sweet, but patient. It told me you obviously like music. Musicians typically appreciate all music, so it told me you were more open. The fact that your little brother thought you were good meant you’re dedicated. And the way he looked at you, like you hung the moon, spoke loudest of all. It told me that someone loved you. That you had to be a good person to have so much respect from your brother when most brothers can’t seem to get along. It told me you were special.

It is a special blessing to belong among those who can and may devote their best energies to the contemplation and exploration of objective and timeless things. How happy and grateful I am for having been granted this blessing, which bestows upon one a large measure of independence from one's personal fate and from the attitude of one's contemporaries. Yet this independence must not inure us to the awareness of the duties that constantly bind us to the past, present and future of humankind at large. Our situation on this earth seems strange. Every one of us appears here, involuntarily and uninvited, for a short stay, without knowing the why and the wherefore. In our daily lives we feel only that man is here for the sake of others, for those whom we love and for many other beings whose fate is connected with our own. I am often troubled by the thought that my life is based to such a large extent on the work of my fellow human beings, and I am aware of my great indebtedness to them. I do not believe in free will. Schopenhauer's words: 'Man can do what he wants, but he cannot will what he wills,' accompany me in all situations throughout my life and reconcile me with the actions of others, even if they are rather painful to me. This awareness of the lack of free will keeps me from taking myself and my fellow men too seriously as acting and deciding individuals, and from losing my temper. I have never coveted affluence and luxury and even despise them a good deal. My passion for social justice has often brought me into conflict with people, as has my aversion to any obligation and dependence I did not regard as absolutely necessary. [Part 2] I have a high regard for the individual and an insuperable distaste for violence and fanaticism. All these motives have made me a passionate pacifist and antimilitarist. I am against any chauvinism, even in the guise of mere patriotism. Privileges based on position and property have always seemed to me unjust and pernicious, as does any exaggerated personality cult. I am an adherent of the ideal of democracy, although I know well the weaknesses of the democratic form of government. Social equality and economic protection of the individual have always seemed to me the important communal aims of the state. Although I am a typical loner in daily life, my consciousness of belonging to the invisible community of those who strive for truth, beauty, and justice keeps me from feeling isolated. The most beautiful and deepest experience a man can have is the sense of the mysterious. It is the underlying principle of religion as well as of all serious endeavour in art and science. He who never had this experience seems to me, if not dead, then at least blind. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is a something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly: this is religiousness. In this sense I am religious. To me it suffices to wonder at these secrets and to attempt humbly to grasp with my mind a mere image of the lofty structure of all there is.

A life of faith without love is like sunlight without warmth—the type of light that occurs in winter, when nothing grows and everything droops and dies. Faith rising out of love, on the contrary, is like light from the sun in spring, when everything grows and flourishes. Warmth from the sun is the fertile agent. The same is true in spiritual and heavenly affairs, which are typically represented in the Word by objects found in nature and human culture.

Origins Of Cptsd How do traumatically abused and/or abandoned children develop Cptsd? While the origin of Cptsd is most often associated with extended periods of physical and/or sexual abuse in childhood, my observations convince me that ongoing verbal and emotional abuse also causes it. Many dysfunctional parents react contemptuously to a baby or toddler’s plaintive call for connection and attachment. Contempt is extremely traumatizing to a child, and at best, extremely noxious to an adult. Contempt is a toxic cocktail of verbal and emotional abuse, a deadly amalgam of denigration, rage and disgust. Rage creates fear, and disgust creates shame in the child in a way that soon teaches her to refrain from crying out, from ever asking for attention. Before long, the child gives up on seeking any kind of help or connection at all. The child’s bid for bonding and acceptance is thwarted, and she is left to suffer in the frightened despair of abandonment. Particularly abusive parents deepen the abandonment trauma by linking corporal punishment with contempt. Slaveholders and prison guards typically use contempt and scorn to destroy their victims’ self-esteem. Slaves, prisoners, and children, who are made to feel worthless and powerless devolve into learned helplessness and can be controlled with far less energy and attention. Cult leaders also use contempt to shrink their followers into absolute submission after luring them in with brief phases of fake unconditional love.

I really want us to grow old together, you know? Go through all the typical life stuff together, even if that means we can only e-mail each other once a week because you moved to the middle of nowhere in Nebraska with your ten kids, and I'm still California because it's amazing. Just like in that one movie - we'll never lose touch with each other, ever. Is that weird?! No, Feenie said. It's perfectly fucking normal.

If the frustrations are not surrounded by anxiety, fear of life, insecure love and support, then the child progresses easily and naturally to the new challenges of a symbolic, social way of life. The child that we call, typically, autistic or schizophrenic, is the one who has not been able to feel this secure sense of support to his body; and so he does not make a confident transition from the biological to the social world. The “lever” of

Wilhelm Reich identified "armor" as the sum total of typical character attitudes, which an individual develops as a blocking against his emotional excitations, resulting in rigidity of the body, lack of emotional contact, "deadness". Functionally identical to muscular armor (chronic muscular spasms)

She pressed her hands against my chest and tried to push me away. "I can't think straight when you 're this close." I backed her up against the wall. "I don't like the thoughts running through your head. I plan on staying here until you look me in the eye and tell me you 're mine." "This isn't going to work. It never would have." "Bullshit. We belong together." Echo sniffed and the sound tore at me. I softened my voice. "Look at me, baby. I know you love me. Three nights ago you were willing to offer everything to me. There is no way you can walk away from us." "God Noah..." Her voice broke. "I'm a mess." A mess? "You 're beautiful." "I'm a mental mess. In two months you 're going to face some judge and convince him that you are the best person to raise your brothers. I'm a liability." "Not true. My brothers will love you and you 'll love them. You are not a liability." "But how will the judge see me? Are you really willing too take that risk? [...] What happens if the judge find out about me? What if he discovers what a mess you 're dating?" Breathing became a painful chore. Her lips turned down while her warm fingers caressed my cheek. That touch typically brought me to knees, but now it cut me open. "Did you know that when you stop being stubborn and accept i may be right on something, your eyes widen a little and you tilt your head to the side?" she asked. I forced my head straight and narrowed my eyes. "I love you." She flashed her glorious smile and then it became the saddest smile in the world. "You love your brothers more. I'm okay with that. In fact, it's one of the things i love about you. You were right the other day. I do want to be a part of a family. But i'd never forgive myself if i was the reason you didn't get yours." To my horror, tears pricked my eyes and my throat swelled shut. "No, you 're not pulling this sacrificial bullshit on me. I love you and you love me and we 're supposed to be together." Echo pressed her body to mine and her fingers clung to my hair. Water glistened in her eyes. "I love you enough to never make you choose." She pushed off her toes toward me, guiding my head down, and gently kissed my lips. No. This wouldn't be goudbye. I'd fill her up and make her realize she'd always be empty without me. I made Echo mine. My hands claimed her hair, her back. My lips claimed her mouth, her tongue. Her body shook against mine and i tasted salty wetness on her skin. She forced her lips away and i latched tighter to her. "No, baby, no," i whispered into her hair. She pushed her palms against my chest, then became a blur as she ran past. "I'm sorry.

Are you trying to tell me—in your own typically macho way—that you want to make love again?” He glanced at her. “I’m not trying to tell you anything. I want you. You want me. Someone is going to end up wearing nothing but a satisfied smile on her lips.” “I don’t know, Nick, I might talk afterward. Do you think you can handle it?” “I can handle anything you can think up, and a few things you’ve probably never even thought of.” “Do I have a choice?” “Sure, wild thing. I have four bedrooms. You can choose which one we use first.

Song " I am stuck in traffic in a taxicab which is typical and not just of modern life mud clambers up the trellis of my nerves must lovers of Eros end up with Venus muss es sein? es muss nicht sein, I tell you how I hate disease, it’s like worrying that comes true and it simply must not be able to happen in a world where you are possible my love nothing can go wrong for us, tell me

Actually, I believe there are only two kinds of women in this world: Martha people and Oprah people. That doesn’t mean one can’t have an affinity for both of them, but my theory is that every chick is more firmly in one camp than the other. The typical Oprah woman is all self-actualized and best-life-y and Eat, Pray, Love. The Big O seems like the kind of gal who’d insist we all spend the afternoon wearing jammy pants. And how fun would that be?! But Martha? She’s not putting up with that nonsense, and that makes me adore her all the more. She’ll tell you what to eat, where to pray, and who to love, and I appreciate the guidance.

Our Master puts the desire to procreate in us to be sure that we are fruitful and multiply. He knows how important animals are to the planet because most animals He allows to reproduce in great number. He put every one of us on the ark for a reason. Do you think it’s a mistake that dogs and cats have litters of 8, 9, 10 or more and people typically only have one or maybe two? It’s no mistake. It’s because God intends that there is more than enough four-legged love to go around.

There was nothing normal or typical about our love. We should’ve been one hot mess of madness for all that we’d suffered, but just as a flower grows from the sky’s tears, our love grew from pain. It blossomed in darkness and thrived with time.

The most damaging example of the systems archetype called “drift to low performance” is the process by which modern industrial culture has eroded the goal of morality. The workings of the trap have been classic, and awful to behold. Examples of bad human behavior are held up, magnified by the media, affirmed by the culture, as typical. This is just what you would expect. After all, we’re only human. The far more numerous examples of human goodness are barely noticed. They are “not news.” They are exceptions. Must have been a saint. Can’t expect everyone to behave like that. And so expectations are lowered. The gap between desired behavior and actual behavior narrows. Fewer actions are taken to affirm and instill ideals. The public discourse is full of cynicism. Public leaders are visibly, unrepentantly amoral or immoral and are not held to account. Idealism is ridiculed. Statements of moral belief are suspect. It is much easier to talk about hate in public than to talk about love.

If in fact your time to be called before God, you typically won't know it. Sometimes you will, and these are the hardest of times: When the blood pours from your nose and down your throat, clogging it, causing you to spit and gag. You heave for breath in the smoke and dust. Your equipment seems to suffocate you. You wipe the salty sweat and grime from your eyes, only to realize that it is blood, either yours or that of the enemy. You would stand, but you can't move your legs. You grasp the open, gaping wounds in your body, trying not to pass out from the pain. You feel the anger thinking of the loved ones you will never see again, and losing your life infuriates your soul. You rage to get to your feet and grab for a weapon, any weapon. Regardless of your race, culture, or religion, you want to die standing, fighting like a warrior, an American, so others won't have to. For those looking for a definition, this is the price of freedom.

Before we fully learn to love ourselves, all people of color in the United States learn that we are supporting characters and spectators in the collective story of white people's lives. The stories we watch and read ask us to put aside their whiteness and relate to their very "universal" human struggles around conflict with the world, the self, and others. The problem is that only the experiences of white people are treated as universal. Meanwhile, Black movies, shows, and books are typically seen as limited and particular.

In any case, our love is not a typical love, as is typically felt between men and women. We share something else between us - something more immediate, more cherishing. That has been evident to me from the beginning, and I pray it has been evident to you. My wish is that we two could live together as one, both contented and elevated, and ever-seeking.

If we want masculinity to be different, we must confront and tackle the baseline instead of longing for exceptions. Loving your mother, holding a door open for a woman, being a good listener, or even being a feminist doesn't make a man an exception. Experiencing oppression—including racism, homophobia, and transphobia—doesn't make a man an exception. If we are invested in perpetuating and glorifying the myth of the "good man," we are also complicit in overlooking, if not permitting, the reprehensible behaviour of the "typical man.

I am so thankful to MOTHER for making my ordinary life extraordinary. MOTHER - Multiplied Opportunities Through Her Endless Reinvention.

Typically as the relationship ages, avoidants will begin to find fault and focus on petty shortcomings of their partner.

Devaluing your partner when things become too close is very typical of people with an avoidant attachment style and is used as a way to create emotional distance.

Woman! One-half of mankind is weak, typically sick, changeable, inconstant... she needs a religion of weakness that glorifies being weak, loving, and being humble as divine: or better, she makes the strong weak--she rules when she succeeds in overcoming the strong... Woman has always conspired with the types of decadence, the priests, against the 'powerful', the 'strong', the men.

Carmen's ex-boyfriend Tom was a social worker and weekend DJ who eventually left her for reasons I never quite managed to grasp. Carmen typically speaks about him the way one might refer to a degree: a three-year period one has to endure in order to talk with overbearing authority on exactly one subject. She is the world's living expert on loving and losing thirty-year-old men named Tom.

One of Chekhov’s earliest stories was a parody of mental arithmetic questions asked of schoolchildren, of which Chekhov’s question 7 is typical: Wednesday, June 17, 1881, a train had to leave station A at 3 a.m. in order to reach station B at 11 p.m.; just as the train was about to depart, however, an order came that the train had to reach station B by 7 p.m. Who loves longer, a man or a woman?3

I remember another thing Cosmo said. It typically takes half the time you’re dating a guy to fall out of love with him. My ex and I were together almost ten months before he admitted over the holidays that he’d fallen out of love with me, so by that measure I should’ve been cured weeks ago. But once you’ve anticipated spending forever with someone, I’m not convinced you can ever feel complete after being uncoupled. I think you just learn to live without the person. Like when someone dies, you don’t stop loving them just because they’re not around to love you back anymore. Breakups truly are a kind of death.

Much later, when I thought about it, I realized that my folks were typical of their generation of parents: Their idea of raising children was making sure we were clothed, fed, and protected. They didn't focus much on us unless we were sick or had done something wrong. They didn't hold conversations with us. Love was understood rather than expressed, and values were transmitted by example, not word of mouth.

The path to accepting your sexuality has to start somewhere. For those identify as heterosexual, the childhood bliss of an early crush is typically encouraged and praised. Milestones such as your first date and the prom are celebrated by parents and friends. But when you’re anything other than straight, it’s more complicated; your growth gets shrouded and stunted. That’s why a lot of queer people, when they fall in love and get into a relationship for the first time, revert to a kind of prepubescent puppy love: spontaneous, impulsive, obsessive, and ecstatic. I’ve heard many people express annoyance at friends who “just came out and it’s totally cool and whatever, but do they have to talk about it all the time?” My answer to that is “Yes. Yes, they do. Don’t you remember puppy love? Well, imagine if you had to hide it for twenty years. So yeah, if they wanna gush about it, let them gush. There’s a first time for everything.

All this, combined with typical British reticence to discuss their relationship and its problems, led them to behave in such a repressed way to each other that everyone else around them knew immediately they were in love.

Through discussions, reading, contemplation, and practice I've come to recognize the importance of subtle feelings and symbols. By paying attention to subtle energy, typically in the form of thoughts and feelings, we began to tap into our inner capacity to commune with those we've loved and lost, as well as other streams of consciousness and information.

The people who live in sadness tend to be depressives and can struggle with that their entire lives. They typically have huge amounts of empathy for others. These people also tend to love animals more than the average person loves animals. They are sensitive to others and are typically great listeners, but again, they can also have serious issues with depression.

Raw emotions and the need to hold him close overwhelmed me. Every part of ached for him-my mind, my soul and my body. Without hesitation, i closed the gap between us and pressed my lips eagerly to his. Noah's hands were everywhere, my hair, my face, my back, and for the love of all things holy, my breasts. My hands roamed his glorious body just as greedily. After drugging me with delicious kisses for not nearly long enough, his warm lips skimmed my throat and kissed down the center of my breasts, causing me to arch my back and lose my ever loving mind. Without meaning to, i moaned and whispered his name when his hands wandered to my thighs and set my world and blood on fire. Noah eased me back into the bed and my hair sprawled all around me. "I love how you smell," he whispered as he suckled my earlobe. "I love how beautiful you are." I reclaimed his lips and hooked a leg around his as we moved in rhythm with each other. In between frantic kisses, i whispered the words, "I love you". Because i did. Noah listened to me. He made me laugh and he made me feel special. He was strong and warm and caring and...everything. I loved him. I loved him more than i'd ever loved another person in my life. Every muscle in my body froze when Noah stopped kissing and stare down at me with wide eyes. He caressed my cheek twice over and tilted his head. "Make love to me, Echo. I've never made love." No way. Noah's experienced reputation walked down the hallway before he did. "But..." Noah cut me off with a kiss. "Yes, but never love. Just girls who didn't mean anything" You..." His tongue teased my bottom lip, thawing my body. "Are everything. I got tested over winter break and i'm clean and i've got protection." He reached to the side of the bed and magically produced a small orange square. I froze again. Sensing my hesitation, Noah kissed my lips slowly while stroking my cheek. "And since break?" I asked. "There's been no one," he whispered against my lips. "I met you soon after and i could never think of touching anyone else." I loved him and we were together. I entwined my fingers in his hair and pulled his head back to mine, but the second his hand touched the waist of my jeans, my heart shook and my hands snapped out to stop him. "Please. Wait. Noah..." Oh, God, i was actually going to say it. "I'm a virgin." Now Noah froze. "But you were with Luke." A faint smile grew on my lips. I was typically the tongue-tied one and found it amusing to see him confused for once. "That's why we broke up. I wasn't ready." He shifted his body off of mine and tuckled me close against his warmth. I laid my head on his chest and listened to the comforting sound of his beating heart. Noah ran his hand through my hair. "I'm glad you told me. This needs to be right for you and i'll wait, for as long as you need.

I suspect that in the late ’90s alone, youth group games were responsible for millions of mono breakouts, thousands of broken bones, dozens of stomach pumps, and countless hours of therapy, for they typically involved placing insecure, hormonally charged teenagers in as physically awkward and borderline dangerous a situation as possible, preferably in the company of food,

used to secretly watch Nick listening to Alice when she told a story; that tender, proud look he got on his face, the way he laughed harder than anyone else when she said something funny or typically Alice. He got Alice, the way we did, or maybe even more so than us. He made her more confident, funnier, smarter. He brought out all the things that were there already and let her be fully herself, so she seemed to shine with this inner light. He loved her so much, he made her seem even more lovable.

Unrequited love was typically my favorite kind of love. The non-reciprocal nature of it appealed to me in much the same way boy bands appealed to me; it was theoretical love because it was untested—hopeless in its one-sidedness, yet tragically inspiring.

If the wood burned up, so did Frank. Such a typical controlling Hera thing to do: I love you and you’re my special hero, and also here’s a stick—when it burns you die HA-HA-HA-HA-HA. I disliked that woman. Ella ruffled her feathers, providing Aristophanes

Typically, people allow differences and mistakes to lower their respect and value for other people. But you know the pillar of honor is strong in a relationship when you can look at the other person and say, “You are really different from me. It makes me sad when I see you making that choice. But I love you. I value you, I believe in you, and I am here for you in this relationship.

I don’t think of you as a typical beauty. I never once did. To me your hair mimics asphalt more than the lustrous feathers of ravens. Comparing your eyes to heavenly lights seems a stretch when they are the common color of dirt. I can’t imagine you as a tall, pole-slender image; your God-given shape is right bulky. But I never cared about such pointless things anyway. What good have trivial attributes ever done the world? When I look at you, I see you—or in other words, all of you that really matters. I see a kind heart and compassionate arms. I see a patient, gentle spirit abounding with love towards all of God’s creatures. I see the perfect blend of humility and strength of character. I see a wise intellect as well as an endearing sense of humor. I see all the qualities that make you the person I love, regardless of the bodily package you’re bound in. So forgive me if I don’t think you’re beautiful, because I find you to be far superior to that worthless and pointless nonsense the world calls beauty.

If you're nice, decent, attractive, get good grades and are talented, no one wants to read about that...They want to read what's out-of-the-ordinary, the scandalous, the shocking and the tragic. They want a story; they want to be captivated and what's typical does not give them that...unless, of course, that person ends up a victim, commits a crime or loses their minds via a love affair.

This is what depression felt like. I thought it had been bad back when I was with Neil. But this was a darkness I’d never experienced before. My body felt atrophied, like the simple act of getting up was a feat. Nothing made me smile. None of the things I typically loved appealed to me. And it occurred to me that I had drowned. I didn’t save myself. And now I was just floating, weightless, dead inside.

It may be that psychologists are off-base in their preoccupation with children’s need to feel that their father or some other parent loves them. It also seems valid to consider the child’s desire to feel that a parent actually likes them, as love itself is so automatic and preprogrammed in a parent that it isn’t a very good test of whatever it is that the typical child feels so anxious to pass the test of

Time and again I've been in a group of people in their forties, fifties, and up who, when talk turns to aging, make the typical lamentations, but sometimes, later, softly, confess that they prefer their lives now, prefer themselves now. This secret is kept from those who need to hear it - the despairing young. Movies certainly don't spoil the secret - how rarely they present a middle-aged woman falling in love, for example, or living by herself in any kind of creative and productive way. What I want you to know: so far, it just gets better.

For both men and women, Good Men can be somewhat disturbing to be around because they usually do not act in ways associated with typical men; they listen more than they talk; they self-reflect on their behavior and motives, they actively educate themselves about women’s reality by seeking out women’s culture and listening to women…. They avoid using women for vicarious emotional expression…. When they err—and they do err—they look to women for guidance, and receive criticism with gratitude. They practice enduring uncertainty while waiting for a new way of being to reveal previously unconsidered alternatives to controlling and abusive behavior. They intervene in other men’s misogynist behavior, even when women are not present, and they work hard to recognize and challenge their own. Perhaps most amazingly, Good Men perceive the value of a feminist practice for themselves, and they advocate it not because it’s politically correct, or because they want women to like them, or even because they want women to have equality, but because they understand that male privilege prevents them not only from becoming whole, authentic human beings but also from knowing the truth about the world…. They offer proof that men can change.

For what it's worth, I accept the basic idea that parents instinctively do 'love' their offspring no matter what -- the evolutionary reasoning behind this premise is too obvious to ignore. But actually 'liking' them, or enjoying them as people, seems like a totally different thing. It may be that psychologists are off-base in their preoccupation with children's need to feel that their father or some other parent loves them. It also seems valid to consider the child's desire to feel that a parent actually likes them, as love itself is so automatic and preprogrammed in a parent that it isn't a very good test of whatever it is that the typical child feels so anxious to pass the test of.

I love you, you know,’ he said conversationally. ‘Will you marry me?’ The manner in which he made this abrupt proposal struck her as being so typical of him that a shaky laugh was dragged from her. ‘Of all the graceless ways of making me an offer – ! No, no, you are not serious! you cannot be!’ ‘Of course I’m serious! A pretty hobble I should be in if I weren’t, and you accepted my offer! The thing is that it is such a devil of a time since I proposed marriage to a girl that I’ve forgotten how to set about it. If I ever knew, but I daresay I didn’t, for I was always a poor hand at making flowery speeches.’ He smiled at her again, a little ruefully. ‘That I should love a bright particular star!

Typically, the louder a voice gets, the bigger the knot in my gut grows. So I have to turn my heart and mind toward our Heavenly Father and ask, “Is this pit in my stomach about today or is it about what already happened in the past or about what I’m afraid might happen in the future?

We kiss good-bye. It's our typical morning good-bye kiss. A quick peck. A well-intentioned habit. I look down and notice Lucy's round, blue eyes paying close attention. I flash to studying my own parents kissing when I was little... I promised myself that when I got married someday, I would have kisses that meant something. Kisses that would make me weak in the knees. Kisses that would embarrass the kids. Kisses like Han Solo kissing Princess Leia... Now I get it. we aren't living in some George Lucas blockbuster adventure. Our morning kiss good-bye isn't romantic, and it certainly isn't sexual. It's a routine kiss, but I'm glad we do it. It does mean something. It's enough. And it's all we have time for.

The encounter and separation, for all its wildness, is typical of the sufferings of love. For when a heart insists on its destiny, resisting the general blandishment, then the agony is great; so too the danger. Forces, however, will have been set in motion beyond the reckoning of the senses. Sequences of events from the corners of the world will draw gradually together, and miracles of coincidence bring the inevitable to pass.

   'You said we were exactly alike,' I spoke again. 'In what way?'    But yes, yes we are — she exclaimed —in the way, like you, I've no access to that instinctive enjoyment of things that's typical of normal people. She could sense it very clearly: for me, no less than for her, the past counted far more than the present, remembering something far more than possessing it. Compared to memory, every possession can only ever seem disappointing, banal, inadequate...She understood me so well! My anxiety that the present 'immediately' turned into the past so that I could love it and dream about it at leisure was just like hers, was identical. It was 'our' vice, this: to go forwards with our heads forever turned back.

Before entering Joaquin’s house I always reminded myself that this wasn’t exactly where I was meant to be, but pit stops are okay on the road of life, aren’t they? I thought of myself as some kind of spy, undercover as a girl with low self-esteem, bringing back detailed intelligence reports on the dark side for girls with boyfriends who looked like lesbians and watched Friday Night Lights with them while eating takeout. They could have their supportive relationships and typical little love stories. I’d be Sid and Nancy–ing it up, refusing to settle for the status quo. I’d be cool.

Fathers are able to see themselves as other things because, typically, their professional identity is less affected by having children, and also because they simply have the uninterrupted time and the space to do so--thanks to mothers doing more than their share of unpaid care and domestic work.

To extend compassion to a so-called villain, to forgive those who have wronged you, and to find common ground with someone who has been awfully isolated are not acts typically met with fireworks and swelling violins. More often than not, they are pushed away. To love, really love, is to do them anyway.

This good sir Knight here was showing me his most impressive weapon." "Oh?" His eyebrow arched, and I tried to ignore the way it sent heat dspeeding down my spine. "Are you seeking out others then? Does my weapon no longer interest you? I had to bite down hard on my bottom lip to keep from laughing. We were blowing right past subtle innuendo today. "Oh, Captain." I fluttered my eyelashes dramatically. "I believe you are quite aware that I have no complaints with your... weapon." He choked for a split second, but covered it with a small cough before he leaned a casual elbow against the bar. "I hope not, love." His smile was as broad as ever. "I would hate to think I would have to duel with another for your affections." "I hope not, for your sake." I rounded my eyes in feigned horror. "I've seen you fight, sir. It typically ends on your knees in the dirt with a knife at your throat, does it not?" I shook my head, clucking my tongue. "Not a good ending." A nearby patron snorted, and it was all I could do to not turn my head. Great. Simon and I turned into a show all on our own. Come for the beer, stay for the bad comedy. "Odd." He tiled his head and considered me, his eyes doing the same slow travel mine had done on him. It took everything I had not to fidget under his gaze. "Typically women don't mind when I'm on my knees in front of them.

The typical Anarchist, then, may be defined as follows: A man perceptible by the spirit of revolt under one or more of its forms,—opposition, investigation, criticism, innovation,—endowed with a strong love of liberty, egoistic or individualistic, and possessed of great curiosity, a keen desire to know. These traits are supplemented by an ardent love of others, a highly developed moral sensitiveness, a profound sentiment of justice, and imbued with missionary zeal.” To the above characteristics, says Alvin F. Sanborn, must be added these sterling qualities: a rare love of animals, surpassing sweetness in all the ordinary relations of life, exceptional sobriety of demeanor, frugality and regularity, austerity, even, of living, and courage beyond compare.[2]

Those girls were not stupid, and probably not even bigoted. But in their entirely typical and well-intentioned education, they had learned about Jews mainly because people had killed Jews. Like most people in the world, they had only encountered dead Jews: people whose sole attribute was that they had been murdered, and whose murders served a clear purpose, which was to teach us something. Jews were people who, for moral and educational purposes, were supposed to be dead.

We need to realize that any individual, and generally it is someone that we call a boyfriend or girlfriend, lover, mate, husband, wife, friend, consort, or anyone that is getting us to learn more about ourselves, to see aspects of ourselves that we don’t typically like to see or want to see, is, in fact, our actual soul mate.

We don’t need to measure our notions of happiness or progress against imagined universal constants for those concepts. They don’t exist. Even the typical notions of success change with time, context, and fashion. We do not need to prove that our ideas of identity or purpose are watertight in some objective, evidence-based sense.

If you found those fucking seeds at the boring United Nations interesting,” she said, “then you’re really going to love working here, where things are actually interesting.” I loved that. And I’d learn soon enough, this was typical. In one sentence, she simultaneously dissed my work history, told me I’d bored her, and winked at me.

this style also her letter on bleeding, on lemons and so forth, supposing it to be typical of the letters of Madame de Sévigné. But my grandmother who had approached that lady from within, attracted to her by her own love of kinsfolk and of nature, had taught me to enjoy the real beauties of her correspondence, which are altogether different

Maybe Mama was right, and you could learn to love someone. Maybe knowing a guy loved you was enough to flip the switch in your heart that made you love him back.

in relationships, it typically takes about five positive interactions to overcome the effects of a single negative one (Gottman 1995).

It is to be questioned whether in the whole length and breadth of the world there is a more admirable spot for a man in love to pass a day or two than the typical English village.

The people who slowly become typical have the greatest problem wrapping their minds around a dynamic friendship with an invisible, alive God.

Henry Miller, Genet, Sade, Bataille are really important writers for me and I love them, but I feel often they don’t love me, you know? I feel I always have to wrap my head around the way the girl is treated in the works, and the way the woman writer has been treated within their philosophies. I think of Kathy Acker’s Blood and Guts in High School, where Janey Smith is in an S&M relationship with Jean Genet, who she follows around the deserts of Algeria, and he’s horrible to her, and that’s what I think of when I think of my relationship to those writers. I think you have to read the text, obviously, despite that. You seem to be subverting Sade and Bataille’s ideas of the whore, and Henry Miller – all of his cunt portraits, all of his horrors that he writes about – you’re writing about it from an interiority and a subjectivity that we don’t typically get with the ‘whore’ or the ‘slut’ or the sexual girl.

We kissed for two hours. Eventually, I led him into my bedroom and pulled off both of our shirts. He stopped me. "This might sound weird; it's not typical guy response." I froze, suddenly awkward. "I mean, if I didn't feel the way I do with you I would be all for it, but I kind of think maybe it would be good to wait. I've rushed into sex, and had it be a mistake." He shrugged apologetically. "I mean, if it's safe to assume you are experiencing the same date that I am, then I think we will have time." I was a little flabbergasted and more than a little embarrassed. How could I explain that the idea sounded like a huge relief to me, that I didn't quite understand where the impulse to start taking my clothes off came from? I had had the same experience. I rarely enjoyed first-time sex with partners, largely because I usually did it before I really knew or trusted them. Here was where the difference between what I knew and did remained wide. The shame I felt wash over me was tinged with that hatred of my own innocence. Was I still so green? So unconfident? Had I gone straight out of the extremity of sex work to the innocence of my adolescence? Where was my self-knowledge? Still, I was relieved. "Of course. I agree totally." I clutched my T-shirt to my chest and smiled at him. "And yes, I am on the same date you are on." "I thought so," he said. "I mean, I don't think you can feel like this when it's not reciprocal." He left at 2:00 A.M. and called me at 11:00 the next morning to schedule our second date.

I told her that prayers from those who don’t typically pray — but who love me enough to pray anyway — are extra special. Perhaps the softest most timid prayers ring the sweetest in God’s ear.

And then there I was, literally tenderized like pounded meat by my year of work, failure, and physical and emotional battering. My New Zealand beach realization that I was ready for all of the things I had feared I was too broken to ever want felt both good because it meant that I was normal, but also terrifying. I was normal. Years later, Lena Dunham’s character on Girls would have a similar moment when she broke down and wept to a nice, handsome doctor with a beautiful house, “Please don’t tell anyone this, but I want to be happy … I want all the things everyone wants.” I was embarrassed to be a thirty-five-year-old woman who was looking for true love, and a family. It was so freaking typical. But I was also deeply relieved that I’d finally gotten there.

A small sample of some girl-written words That summer was a new beginning, a new end. When I look back, I remember my slippery hands of paint and the sound of Papa's feet on Munich Street, and I know that a small piece of the summer of 1942 belonged to only one man. Who else would do some paintwork for the price of half a cigarette? That was Papa, that was typical, and I loved him.

Feelings of abandonment commonly masquerade as the physiological sensations of hunger. Hunger pain soon after a big meal is rarely truly about food. Typically it is camouflaged emotional hunger and the longing for safe, nurturing connection. Food cannot satiate the hunger pain of abandonment. Only loving support can. Geneen Roth’s book offers powerful self-help book on this subject.

Chris loved to look at every type of plant, animal, and bug he hadn’t seen before on the trail and point out those he did recognize. He enjoyed walking along small streams, listening to the water as it traveled, and searching for eddies where we could watch the minnows scurry amongst the rocks. On one Shenandoah trip, while we were resting at a waterfall, eating our chocolate-covered granola bars and watching the water pummel the rocks below, he said, “See, Carine ? That’s the purity of nature. It may be harsh in its honesty, but it never lies to you”. Chris seemed to be most comfortable outdoors, and the farther away from the typical surroundings and pace of our everyday lives the better. While it was unusual for a solid week to pass without my parents having an argument that sent them into a negative tailspin of destruction and despair, they never got into a fight of any consequence when we were on an extended family hike or camping trip. It seemed like everything became centered and peaceful when there was no choice but to make nature the focus. Our parents’ attention went to watching for blaze marks on trees ; staying on the correct trail ; doling out bug spray, granola bars, sandwiches, and candy bars at proper intervals ; and finding the best place to pitch the tent before nightfall. They taught us how to properly lace up our hiking boots and wear the righ socks to keep our feet healthy and reliable. They showed us which leaves were safe to use as toilet paper and which would surely make us miserable downtrail. We learned how to purify water for our canteens if we hadn’t found a safe spring and to be smart about conserving what clean water we had left. At night we would collect rocks to make a fire ring, dry wood to burn, and long twigs for roasting marshmallows for the s’more fixings Mom always carried in her pack. Dad would sing silly, non-sensical songs that made us laugh and tell us about the stars.

I understand now that unsolicited advice is always driven by panic on the part of the person bestowing it, and I am frequently guilty of that panic myself. (I would much rather tell you what to do, in other words, than sit with my sadness or anger or fear about what you are doing.) And the more we love and need someone, typically, the more we try to control them—especially when we are afraid.

He wanted it to be just right; he didn’t want to make the mistake of trying to tell her he loved her, and having the words come out confused or ending up saying something completely different. He changed into a fresh suit, checked his hair and took a few deep breaths to calm himself, before returning to Amelia’s chambers…only to find her gone. A sigh of frustration escaped him. It was so typical. He told her there was a surprise for her, she was excited, and he was about to confess that he loved her…of course it was only natural for her to ruin it by running off. It was so typically Amelia.

RONNIE CUTRONE: I loved Jim Morrison dearly, but Jim was not fun to go out with. I hung out with him every night for just about a year, and Jim would go out, lean up against the bar, order eight screwdrivers, put down six Tuinals on the bar, drink two or three screwdrivers, take two Tuinals, then he’d have to pee, but he couldn’t leave the other five screwdrivers, so he’d take his dick out and pee, and some girl would come up and blow his dick, and then he’d finish the other five screwdrivers and then he’d finish up the other four Tuinals, and then he’d pee in his pants, and then Eric Emerson and I would take him home. That was a typical night out with Jim. But when he was on acid, then Jim was really fun and great. But most of the time he was just a lush pill head. RAY MANZAREK: Jim was a shaman.

Both sexes typically get extremely upset at cues to both sexual and emotional infidelity, as they should—people sometimes fall in love with those with whom they have sex and conversely have sex with those with whom they become emotionally involved. So researchers asked: What would upset you more: (A) Imagining your partner having sexual intercourse with someone else? Or (B) imagining your partner falling in love with someone else? This method revealed large sex differences, with the majority of men, roughly 60 percent, selecting sexual infidelity (A) and most women, roughly 85 percent, selecting emotional infidelity (B).

Finding a taxi, she felt like a child pressing her nose to the window of a candy store as she watched the changing vista pass by while the twilight descended and the capital became bathed in a translucent misty lavender glow. Entering the city from that airport was truly unique. Charles de Gaulle, built nineteen miles north of the bustling metropolis, ensured that the final point of destination was veiled from the eyes of the traveller as they descended. No doubt, the officials scrupulously planned the airport’s location to prevent the incessant air traffic and roaring engines from visibly or audibly polluting the ambience of their beloved capital, and apparently, they succeeded. If one flew over during the summer months, the visitor would be visibly presented with beautifully managed quilt-like fields of alternating gold and green appearing as though they were tilled and clipped with the mathematical precision of a slide rule. The countryside was dotted with quaint villages and towns that were obviously under meticulous planning control. When the aircraft began to descend, this prevailing sense of exactitude and order made the visitor long for an aerial view of the capital city and its famous wonders, hoping they could see as many landmarks as they could before they touched ground, as was the usual case with other major international airports, but from this point of entry, one was denied a glimpse of the city below. Green fields, villages, more fields, the ground grew closer and closer, a runway appeared, a slight bump or two was felt as the craft landed, and they were surrounded by the steel and glass buildings of the airport. Slightly disappointed with this mysterious game of hide-and-seek, the voyager must continue on and collect their baggage, consoled by the reflection that they will see the metropolis as they make their way into town. For those travelling by road, the concrete motorway with its blue road signs, the underpasses and the typical traffic-logged hubbub of industrial areas were the first landmarks to greet the eye, without a doubt, it was a disheartening first impression. Then, the real introduction began. Quietly, and almost imperceptibly, the modern confusion of steel and asphalt was effaced little by little as the exquisite timelessness of Parisian heritage architecture was gradually unveiled. Popping up like mushrooms were cream sandstone edifices filigreed with curled, swirling carvings, gently sloping mansard roofs, elegant ironwork lanterns and wood doors that charmed the eye, until finally, the traveller was completely submerged in the glory of the Second Empire ala Baron Haussmann’s master plan of city design, the iconic grand mansions, tree-lined boulevards and avenues, the quaint gardens, the majestic churches with their towers and spires, the shops and cafés with their colourful awnings, all crowded and nestled together like jewels encrusted on a gold setting.

If you want to be happy, don’t gossip, don’t spread hate, don’t talk about other people, don’t spread fear, don’t complain, and don’t relay stories that are detrimental to the well-being of those around us. That will cut out the vast majority of most people’s conversations. There is a time for honest, well-intentioned directness, but it is not found in typical conversation and is a learned skill. Be a bringer of peace and healing.

Technothinkers tend to have an “engineering mind”—to put it less politely, they have autistic tendencies. While they don’t usually wear ties, these types tend, of course, to exhibit all the textbook characteristics of nerdiness—mostly lack of charm, interest in objects instead of persons, causing them to neglect their looks. They love precision at the expense of applicability. And they typically share an absence of literary culture.

This, Gushee writes, goes well beyond the typical process of adults growing up and charting their own life course, as humans have always done to some extent: “What we are seeing is not just rebellion against parents or normal ebb and flow. We are witnessing conscientious objection. Ex-evangelicals are leaving based on what they believe to be specific offenses against them personally, or against their family and friends, and specific experiences of trauma that have left lasting damage…” Those experiences, he says, include a host of ills within the evangelical community: clergy sex abuse, bigotry against LGTBQ+ people, hypocritical leaders, and more.12

I’m taking it all in and I’m thinking about magic. Not the fairy tale kind of magic or the witchcraft you’d learn at Hogwarts, but the magic that we, as humans, typically tend to overlook. Because it’s everywhere. It exists in everything. It exists in books and in castles, in forests and in mountains. It guards secrets and guides spirits and reassures time and time again that there is more to our existence than we could ever hope to know.

I took this art class freshman year of college where we had to imitate the style of different artists. When we got to Van Gogh, the teacher went on about how sunflowers weren't very common to paint at the time. They were rough and coarse, and other artists preferred more delicate flowers. But that's exactly why Van Gogh liked them. And it's just never left me the idea of creating something lovely from something that isn't typically viewed that way.

From when she was young, Molly had learned that the fence was an important landmark for the Mardudjara people of the Western Desert who migrated south from the remote regions. They knew that once they reached Billanooka Station, it was simply a matter of following the rabbit-proof fence to their final destination, the Jigalong government depot; the desert outpost of the white man. The fence cut through the country from south to north. It was a typical response by the white people to a problem of their own making. Building a fence to keep the rabbits out proved to be a futile attempt by the government of the day. For the three runaways, the fence was a symbol of love, home and security.

Complexes of inferiority (so fashionable nowadays) arise mostly because we make an unhealthy comparison between the accomplishments of another person and ourselves. But how little attention is paid to the person’s being, his kindness, generosity, humility, patience? The less we respect ourselves as persons made to God’s image, the more shall we be led to identifying ourselves with our social role, our job, our accomplishments, real or imaginary. We are led to believe that success in life lies primarily in our being able to bring credentials, and yet, who would dream of saying to another person, “I love you because you are the most efficient secretary I have met in my life,” or because “you are the teacher who best organizes his material.” Love is not concerned with a person’s accomplishments, it is a response to a person’s being, this is why a typical word of love is to say, “I love you, because you are as you are.

I can’t wait to see them both when you get them done.” Kane playfully nudged me. “I could get them done tomorrow if junior here would hurry up and vacate your premises.” I giggled. “She will come out when she is good and ready.” “Like a typical woman then?” Kane mused. “Her way or the highway option.” I bobbed my head up and down. “You got it.” “Good thing it’s a boy then.” He grinned as he leaned in and kissed my head. “I love you, babydoll.” “And I love you.

The experience of psychological trauma, as is typically diagnosed (posttraumatic stress disorder [PTSD]), has at least some of the following symptoms: • Reliving the trauma: This can happen through nightmares, flashbacks, or reexperiencing as a result of being in the presence of stimuli reminiscent of the traumatic event. • Efforts to avoid thoughts or feelings that are associated with the trauma. • Efforts to avoid activities or situations that arouse memories of the trauma. • Inability to remember some important aspect of the trauma (psychogenic amnesia). • Marked reduced interest in important activities. • Feeling of a lack of interest or expulsion by others. • Limited affect; such as inability to cherish loving feelings. • A feeling of not having any future (foreshortened future); not expecting to have a career, get married, have children, or live a long life. • Hypervigilance (heightened sensitivity to possible traumatic stimuli).

Have the private emotions also their gutter press? Margaret thought so, and feared that good Aunt Juley and Frieda were typical specimens of it. They might, by continual chatter, lead Helen into a repetition of the desires of June. Into a repetition—they could not do more; they could not lead her into lasting love. They were—she saw it clearly—Journalism; her father, with all his defects and wrong-headedness, had been Literature, and had he lived, he would have persuaded his daughter rightly.

Same ol’ shit. Imani is mother hen-ing every damn person in here, even though they’re all terrified of her. Your friend Li Jun doesn’t know his best friend is in love with his sister even though she’s turned into a demon, and most of those girls from Hekla’s group are as helpless as I was when I was still in the wheelchair. On top of that, some crazy asshole who doesn’t want everybody to think he’s a crazy asshole is throwing a train full of explosives in our direction. So, you know. Typical day.

Because I sincerely hate and despise them. Not pity them, no—only hate and despise. I can justify the stupidity and brutality of the kid I just passed all I want— the social conditions, the appalling upbringing, anything at all—but I now clearly see that he’s my enemy, the enemy of all that I love, the enemy of my friends, the enemy of what I hold most sacred. And I don’t hate him theoretically, as a “typical specimen,” but him as himself, him as an individual. I hate his slobbering mug, the stink of his unwashed body, his blind faith, his animosity toward everything other than sex and booze. There he goes, stomping around, the oaf, who half a year ago was still being thrashed by a fat-bellied father in a vain attempt to prepare him for selling stale flour and old jam; he’s wheezing, the dumb lug, struggling to recall the paragraphs of badly crammed regulations, and he just can’t figure out whether he’s supposed to cut the noble don down with his ax, shout “Stop!” or just forget about it. No one will find out anyway, so he’ll forget about it, go back to his recess, stuff some chewing bark into his mouth and chew it loudly, drooling and smacking his lips. And there’s nothing that he wants to know, and there’s nothing he wants to think about.

I’ve found it’s most important to be thoughtful and intentional with your actions. That means advocating with respect, instead of being the typical Westerner who always wants to impose their annoying points of view and not-always-shared opinions on others.

Although we each believe our thoughts are specific and personal, our thoughts, fears, and desires are typical to all egos and commonly shared. In this way, it is relatively easy to read the thoughts of most humans with just a few subtle cues. Thoughts tend to run along the same worn tracks leading to the same worn conclusions. Combining this knowledge with an understanding of the types of thoughts that individuals at different levels of consciousness gravitate towards will, with experience, lead to becoming a most astute mind reader.

I've always been his favorite." "Is that so?" Lazily Shelby folded her arms behind her head. She could picture him as a boy,seeing beyond what other boys saw and storing it. "Why?" "If I weren't modest,I'd confess that I was always a well-mannered, even-tempered child who never gave my parents a moment's trouble." "Liar," she said easily. "How'd you get the broken nose?" The grin became rueful. "Rena punched me." "Your sister broke your nose?" Shelby burst out with delighted and unsympathetic laughter. "The blackjack dealer, right? Oh,I love it!" Alan caught Shelby's nose between two fingers and gave it a quick twist. "It was rather painful at the time." "I imagine." She kept right on laughing as he shifted to her side. "Did she make a habit of beating you up?" "She didn't beat me up," he corrected with some dignity. "She was trying to beat Caine up because he'd teased her about making calf's eyes at one of his friends." "Typical brotherly intimidation." "In any event," Alan put in mildly, "I went to drag her off him,she took another swing,missed him, and hit me. A full-power roundhouse,as I remember. That's when," he continued as Shelby gave another peal of laughter, "I decided against being a diplomat. It's always the neutral party that gets punched in the face." "I'm sure..." Shelby dropped her head on his shoulder. "I'm sure she was sorry." "Initially.But as I recall, after I'd stopped bleeding and threatening to kill both her and Caine, her reaction as a great deal like yours." "Insensitive." Shelby ran apologetic kisses over his face. "Poor baby. Tell you what, I'll do penance and see about fixing you breakfast.

The pain and the fear are so intense for the love addict that she often develops her own secret life as well. Where the avoidant wants the highs, the addict typically goes for the lows. She wants benzodiazepines, alcohol, romance novels, shopping till she drops, or anything that depresses the central nervous system. If she acts out sexually or has an emotional affair, it’s not for intensity, but to numb the pain and get away from the agonizing hurt. Soon, the relationship is no longer about love for either partner, but about escaping from reality.

No one really just wakes up one day and decides to love themselves. It’s also rare for someone to be taught how to have self-love (unless you have a very self-aware parent, guardian or teacher in your youth). The choice is usually only made right after a significant moment. This is the moment I call the “Breakdown to Breakthrough.” There are typically tears, yelling, screaming (probably mostly to the air, or God, or the Universe—whatever you like to call it), or sometimes it can be a very deep and serious, “I’ve had enough, I can no longer live like this” moment.

Behind this lies not just impact or drama, but a typically Japanese tendency. The story of Pygmalion, the Greek myth — in which Pygmalion falls in love with the statue of a young woman that he creates and which is hen transformed into a human by Aphrodite who imbues it with life — represents a Western approach in which the statue represents the human body. In Japan, however, there is a unique predilection for dolls ... This can be interpreted as a decadent, necrophiliac erotic story but it can also be interpreted as a propensity for Japanese men to fall in love with figures. These men's desires are directed at the figure for the very reason that it is a doll. The overwhelming passivity of the doll is a reflection of the behavior of a certain type of Japanese man whose immaturity makes it very difficult for him to establish an equal relationship with a mature woman.

The Dilemma of Human Suffering Nothing external ensures freedom from suffering. Even when we human beings possess all the things we typically use to gauge external success—great looks, loving parents, terrific children, financial security, a caring spouse—it may not be enough. Humans can be warm, well fed, dry, physically well—and still be miserable. Humans can enjoy forms of excitement and entertainment unknown in the nonhuman world and out of reach for all but a fraction of the population—high-definition TVs, sports cars, exotic trips to the Caribbean—and still be in excruciating psychological pain.

There is no such thing as fear until you allow it to enter your heart. If I told you what really happens to your soul when it is put to eternal sleep, you would not fear death; hence, you would never have fear — or fear Fear. But this is something I will share with you another day and time, in another story. We are taught to fear anything that can bring us closer to death — to keep us from taking huge leaps that involve risk. The only thing you should fear in this lifetime is not taking risks while you are living. I do not mean to go jump off a bridge. I mean, to go all out to reach your dreams, to dare to do things you typically would not do out of fear. Pain has a threshold and so does death. Fear neither, and never fear what has no right to be feared. Fear only the Almighty, for he is the only one who can terminate a soul forever. No man can do that. No leader can do that. Only the Creator can do that. As long as the heart is good, a soul can live forever. The body is simply a coating for the soul, and when you die, your soul takes the soul of your heart along with it. Love strengthens both, while fear cripples both. Starting today, train your mind and heart to reject fear. Once you reject fear, you will become the perfect candidate to receive and reflect Truth.

I hit my chest with my fist, accusing my body of failing. I’ve had eighty years to adjust and never have. Am I broken? We’ll start there. No. You’re not broken. You are possibly the most loyal and faithful siren I’ve ever had. So, one of the best? Is it bad to tell You that I don’t really want to be good at this job? She swirled around my face and hair, trying to console me. No one with a beating heart could enjoy killing their own. I’m not human, I argued. I’m less than that. Kahlen, my sweet girl, you are still human. Your body may be unchanging, but your soul still bends and sways. I assure you, in the deepest part of yourself, you are still connected to humanity. I kept crying, my tears joining Her waves. Then why can’t I cope with any human contact? Elizabeth has had her lovers. As have many a siren before her. It’s not surprising, considering how beautiful you are. If it’s so typical, then why can’t I do that? She laughed, a motherly sound in my head, as if She knew me better than I knew myself. Because you and Elizabeth are very different people. She’s looking for passion and excitement. In her dark world, those interludes are like fireworks. You long for relationships, for love. It’s why you protect your sisters so fiercely, why you always return to Me even when I don’t call, and why you mourn so heavily at taking lives.

Ambiverts typically . . . • Can process information both internally and externally. They need time to contemplate on their own, but consider the opinions and wisdom from people whom they trust when making a decision. • Love to engage and interact enthusiastically with others, however, they also enjoy calm and profound communication. • Seek to balance between their personal time and social time, they value each greatly. • Are able to move from one situation to the next with confidence, flexibility, and anticipation. “Not everyone is going to like us or understand us. And that is okay. It may have nothing to do with us personally; but rather more about who they are and how they relate to the world.

When left alone, the typical teenager begins to wonder: “What is my girlfriend doing now? Am I getting zits? Will I get to finish the math assignment on time? Are those dudes I had a fight with yesterday going to beat me up?” In other words, with nothing to do, the mind is unable to prevent negative thoughts from elbowing their way to center stage. And unless one learns to control consciousness, the same situation confronts adults. Worries about one’s love life, health, investments, family, and job are always hovering at the periphery of attention, waiting until there is nothing pressing that demands concentration. As soon as the mind is ready to relax, zap! the potential problems that were waiting in the wings take over.

American style of talking, typically with the stress on vowels above consonants, as opposed to standard English, which shrinks vowels and beats time on consonants. It is in the consonants that we keep instructions, orders and directions. But emotions are displayed and imparted in vowels. The vowels are color, consonants black and white. The American accent has more access to emotion than English. You’re more likely to sound like a friend than a public information announcement. On the other hand, standard English is more trustworthy, being less emotive. American accents sound more partisan. It is a voice that has grown out of debate, out of long seasons with little company and no more entertainment than the sound of voices.

Typical relationship books, they are about communicating more clearly, being more loving, and making time for your relationship. All of this is lovely advice, only if the other person is noticing or listening! Kierkegaard noted that “Love is the expression of the one who loves, not of the one who is loved.” The challenge is that when this expression is not met with any reciprocity, and in fact the opposite, it can be exhausting and demoralising. If you love more, then you will get more back. It’s not that linear, and while that may apply in a factory— work harder, make more widgets—it does not work in relationships, least of all with a narcissist. Personality patterns tend to be pretty entrenched—and the rules of rescue do not apply.

During my first few years as a believer I not only couldn’t shut up about my faith, I was sometimes judgmental toward some of those who didn’t share it. But on the other side of that equation, I remember having powerful feelings of love and empathy toward total strangers, a sense of God’s love for them, and a desire to do anything I could to show them his love, to bless them, to help them. It was all somewhat overwhelming, but I’m happy to say that most of it was on the positive side of this equation. I was often hardest on those who were already in the Christian world but whom I felt were not as zealous as they could be in reaching those who didn’t know God. As is typical, I was hardest on my own—my family and my childhood church, the Greek Orthodox Church.

Last month, on a very windy day, I was returning from a lecture I had given to a group in Fort Washington. I was beginning to feel unwell. I was feeling increasing spasms in my legs and back and became anxious as I anticipated a difficult ride back to my office. Making matters worse, I knew I had to travel two of the most treacherous high-speed roads near Philadelphia – the four-lane Schuylkill Expressway and the six-lane Blue Route. You’ve been in my van, so you know how it’s been outfitted with everything I need to drive. But you probably don’t realize that I often drive more slowly than other people. That’s because I have difficulty with body control. I’m especially careful on windy days when the van can be buffeted by sudden gusts. And if I’m having problems with spasms or high blood pressure, I stay way over in the right hand lane and drive well below the speed limit. When I’m driving slowly, people behind me tend to get impatient. They speed up to my car, blow their horns, drive by, stare at me angrily, and show me how long their fingers can get. (I don't understand why some people are so proud of the length of their fingers, but there are many things I don't understand.) Those angry drivers add stress to what already is a stressful experience of driving. On this particular day, I was driving by myself. At first, I drove slowly along back roads. Whenever someone approached, I pulled over and let them pass. But as I neared the Blue Route, I became more frightened. I knew I would be hearing a lot of horns and seeing a lot of those long fingers. And then I did something I had never done in the twenty-four years that I have been driving my van. I decided to put on my flashers. I drove the Blue Route and the Schuylkyll Expressway at 35 miles per hour. Now…Guess what happened? Nothing! No horns and no fingers. But why? When I put on my flashers, I was saying to the other drivers, “I have a problem here – I am vulnerable and doing the best I can.” And everyone understood. Several times, in my rearview mirror I saw drivers who wanted to pass. They couldn’t get around me because of the stream of passing traffic. But instead of honking or tailgating, they waited for the other cars to pass, knowing the driver in front of them was in some way weak. Sam, there is something about vulnerability that elicits compassion. It is in our hard wiring. I see it every day when people help me by holding doors, pouring cream in my coffee, or assist me when I put on my coat. Sometimes I feel sad because from my wheelchair perspective, I see the best in people. But those who appear strong and invulnerably typically are not exposed to the kindness I see daily. Sometimes situations call for us to act strong and brave even when we don't feel that way. But those are a few and far between. More often, there is a better pay-off if you don't pretend you feel strong when you feel weak, or pretend that you are brave when you’re scared. I really believe the world might be a safer place if everyone who felt vulnerable wore flashers that said, “I have a problem and I’m doing the best I can. Please be patient!

You get the feeling from the Bible that being unsettled is almost a normal part of the process. Not that we should go looking for it-- it will find us soon enough-- but struggling in some way seems like something we should expect on our own spiritual journeys. True struggling in faith is a stretching experience, and without it, you don't mature in your faith. You either remain an infant or get cocky. Feeling dis-ease and challenged in faith may be God pushing us out of our own safety zone, where we rest on our own ideas about God and confuse those ideas with the real thing. God may be pushing us to experience him more fully, with us kicking and screaming all the way if need be. Feeling unsettled may be God telling us lovingly, but still in his typical attention-getting manner, it's time to grow.

They were castaways in one of the most savage regions of the world, drifting they knew not where, without a hope of rescue, subsisting only so long as Providence sent them food to eat. And yet they had adjusted with surprisingly little trouble to their new life, and most of them were quite sincerely happy. The adaptability of the human creature is such that they actually had to remind themselves on occasion of their desperate circumstances. On November 4, Macklin wrote in his diary: "It has been a lovely day, and it is hard to think we are in a frightfully precarious situation." It was an observation typical of the entire party. There was not a hero among them, at least not in the fictional sense. Still not a single diary reflected anything beyond the matter-of-fact routine of each day's business.

The word power typically signifies a capacity for action. The Oxford English Dictionary tells us power lies in an 'ability to do or effect something or anything, or to act upon a person or thing'. The person who has power may influence the material or social environment, generally on the basis of possessing high-tech weapons, money, oil, superior intelligence or large muscles. In war, I am powerful because I can blow up your city walls or drop bombs on your airfields. In the financial world, I am powerful because I can buy up your shares and invade your markets. In boxing, I am ,ore powerful because my punches outwit and exhaust yours. But in love, this issue appears to depend on a far more passive, negative definition; instead of looking at power as a capacity to do something, one may come to think of it as the capacity to do nothing.

Each of us is a child of parents, perhaps a sibling to someone, a friend to friends, a colleague to coworkers. Following Jesus starts here. It starts with learning to see these people again for the first time, now visible to us anew as we learn to see them as made and loved by God, see their lives whole and seek their flourishing. This typically brings us face-to-face with the challenges of our vocation. We don’t see people this way when they’re annoying to us or clearly self-interested or rejecting us and our faith or failing to do their share of the work. Right there, in the midst of ordinary life, we face the gritty task of following Jesus by learning to love and serve those at our doorstep. This will be true throughout our lives as disciples. We will never be called to do less than this. And sometimes this is the hardest part of all.

The philosopher Andrew Taggart believes that crisis moments lead to “existential openings” that force us to grapple with the deepest questions about life.16 He argues there are two typical ways this happens. One is the “way of loss,” when things that matter are taken from us, such as loved ones, our health, or a job. The other path is the “way of wonderment,” when we are faced with moments of undeniable awe and inspiration.

Both men had talked of their intentions to commit suicide. Both used the typical argument —they had nothing more to expect from life. In both cases it was a question of getting them to realize that life was still expecting something from them; something in the future was expected of them. We found, in fact, that for the one it was his child whom he adored and who was waiting for him in a foreign country. For the other it was a thing, not a person. This man was a scientist and had written a series of books which still needed to be finished. His work could not be done by anyone else, any more than another person could ever take the place of the father in his child’s affections. This uniqueness and singleness which distinguishes each individual and gives a meaning to his existence has a bearing on creative work as much as it does on human love. When the impossibility of replacing a person is realized, it allows the responsibility which a man has for his existence and its continuance to appear in all its magnitude. A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life. He knows the “why” for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any “how.” The

It is well-known that a big percentage of all marriages in the United States end in divorce or separation (about 39 percent, according to the latest data).[30] But staying together is not what really counts. Analysis of the Harvard Study data shows that marriage per se accounts for only 2 percent of subjective well-being later in life.[31] The important thing for health and well-being is relationship satisfaction. Popular culture would have you believe the secret to this satisfaction is romantic passion, but that is wrong. On the contrary, a lot of unhappiness can attend the early stages of romance. For example, researchers find that it is often accompanied by rumination, jealousy, and “surveillance behaviors”—not what we typically associate with happiness. Furthermore, “destiny beliefs” about soul mates or love being meant to be can predict low forgiveness when paired with attachment anxiety.[32] Romance often hijacks our brains in a way that can cause the highs of elation or the depths of despair.[33] You might accurately say that falling in love is the start-up cost for happiness—an exhilarating but stressful stage we have to endure to get to the relationships that actually fulfill us. The secret to happiness isn’t falling in love; it’s staying in love, which depends on what psychologists call “companionate love”—love based less on passionate highs and lows and more on stable affection, mutual understanding, and commitment.[34] You might think “companionate love” sounds a little, well, disappointing. I certainly did the first time I heard it, on the heels of great efforts to win my future wife’s love. But over the past thirty years, it turns out that we don’t just love each other; we like each other, too. Once and always my romantic love, she is also my best friend.

What are the final lessons learned? I came to the conclusion that the most powerful human motive by far is the striving for attachment to loved ones in perpetuity. Humans will do anything for this, including blowing themselves (and others) to pieces. I learned that tribalism is universal. It may start with the attachment to another (typically, the mother and disinterest in those who are not her), and it may be furthered by the division of in-group as those we recognize and out-group as the rest, but our capacity for symbolism established in- and outgroups in us all, and we view their actions completely differently. We need, if we are to survive, a sense both of humanity as a tribe and of humanity’s potential for radical violence. If we delude ourselves that we are the civilized entity we appear to be on the surface, we are doomed to repeat the mistakes of the past, only with more powerful and devastating weapons.

It is said that when Martin Luther would slip into one of his darker places (which happened a lot, the dude was totally bipolar), he would comfort himself by saying, “Martin, be calm, you are baptized.” I suspect his comfort came not from recalling the moment of baptism itself, or in relying on baptism as a sort of magic charm, but in remembering what his baptism signified: his identity as a beloved child of God. Because ultimately, baptism is a naming. When Jesus emerged from the waters of the Jordan, a voice from heaven declared, “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased.” Jesus did not begin to be loved at the moment of his baptism, nor did he cease to be loved when his baptism became a memory. Baptism simply named the reality of his existing and unending belovedness. As my friend Nadia puts it, “Identity. It’s always God’s first move.”9 So, too, it is with us. In baptism, we are identified as beloved children of God, and our adoption into the sprawling, beautiful, dysfunctional family of the church is celebrated by whoever happens to be standing on the shoreline with a hair dryer and deviled eggs. This is why the baptism font is typically located near the entrance of a church. The central aisle represents the Christian’s journey through life toward God, a journey that begins with baptism. The good news is you are a beloved child of God; the bad news is you don’t get to choose your siblings.

In summary, the typical educated Roman of this age was orderly, conservative, loyal, sober, reverent, tenacious, severe, practical. He enjoyed discipline, and would have no nonsense about liberty. He obeyed as a training for command. He took it for granted that the government had a right to inquire into his morals as well as his income, and to value him purely according to his services to the state. He distrusted individuality and genius. He had none of the charm, vivacity, and unstable fluency of the Attic Greek. He admired character and will as the Greek admired freedom and intellect; and organization was his forte. He lacked imagination, even to make a mythology of his own. He could with some effort love beauty, but he could seldom create it. He had no use for pure science, and was suspicious of philosophy as a devilish dissolvent of ancient beliefs and ways. He could not, for the life of him, understand Plato, or Archimedes, or Christ. He could only rule the world.

While women suffer from our relative lack of power in the world and often resent it, certain dimensions of this powerlessness may seem abstract and remote. We know, for example, that we rarely get to make the laws or direct the major financial institutions. But Wall Street and the U.S. Congress seem very far away. The power a woman feels in herself to heal and sustain, on the other hand--"the power of love"--is, once again, concrete and very near: It is like a field of force emanating from within herself, a great river flowing outward from her very person. Thus, a complex and contradictory female subjectivity is constructed within the relations of caregiving. Here, as elsewhere, women are affirmed in some way and diminished in others, this within the unity of a single act. The woman who provides a man with largely unreciprocated emotional sustenance accords him status and pays him homage; she agrees to the unspoken proposition that his doings are important enough to deserve substantially more attention than her own. But even as the man's supremacy in the relationship is tacitly assumed by both parties to the transaction, the man reveals himself to his caregiver as vulnerable and insecure. And while she may well be ethically and epistemically disempowered by the care she gives, this caregiving affords her a feeling that a mighty power resides within her being. The situation of those men in the hierarchy of gender who avail themselves of female tenderness is not thereby altered: Their superordinate position is neither abandoned, nor their male privilege relinquished. The vulnerability these men exhibit is not a prelude in any way to their loss of male privilege or to an elevation in the status of women. Similarly, the feeling that one's love is a mighty force for the good in the life of the beloved doesn't make it so, as Milena Jesenka found, to her sorrow. The feeling of out-flowing personal power so characteristic of the caregiving woman is quite different from the having of any actual power in the world. There is no doubt that this sense of personal efficacy provides some compensation for the extra-domestic power women are typically denied: If one cannot be a king oneself, being a confidante of kings may be the next best thing. But just as we make a bad bargain in accepting an occasional Valentine in lieu of the sustained attention we deserve, we are ill advised to settle for a mere feeling of power, however heady and intoxicating it may be, in place of the effective power we have every right to exercise in the world.

In fact, Paul’s uncompromising stance on this issue was not typical. As a Pharisee, Paul had believed that once a person had been circumcised, he had to observe the entire Torah, including the mass of orally transmitted legal traditions of Israel that would later be codified in the Mishnah.4 But not many other Jews would have agreed with Paul, and the rabbis would eventually decide that circumcision was not necessary for salvation since “there are righteous men among the gentiles who have a share in the world to come.

These are the two physiological realities upon and out of which the doctrine of salvation has sprung. I call them a sublime super-development of hedonism upon a thoroughly unsalubrious soil. What stands most closely related to them, though with a large admixture of Greek vitality and nerve-force, is epicureanism, the theory of salvation of paganism. Epicurus was a typical décadent: I was the first to recognize him.—The fear of pain, even of infinitely slight pain—the end of this can be nothing save a religion of love....

Before we fully learn to love ourselves, all people of color in the United States learn that we are supporting characters and spectators in the collective story of white people’s lives. The stories we watch and read ask us to put aside their whiteness and relate to their very “universal” human struggles around conflict with the world, the self, and others. The problem is that only the experiences of white people are treated as universal. Meanwhile, Black movies, shows, and books are typically seen as limited and particular.

Ichimei's fingers, capable of returning a dying plant to life or repairing a watch without looking, revealed to Alma her own rebellious, hungry nature. She enjoyed shocking him, challenging him, seeing him blush with embarrassment and delight. She was daring, he was restrained; she was noisy during her orgasms, he covered her mouth. She dreamed up a rosary of romantic, passionate, flattering, and filthy phrases to whisper in his ear or write to him in urgent missives; he maintained the reserve typical of his character and culture.

The human brain's mechanism is intended to gather resources and seek threats, so anything that is repeated is likely to be ignored. Let's assume you're a very lovely and caring person, but you always feel that you don't get what you offer, that others don't appreciate you. It's because your act of compassion has been repeated, which a typical person's brain will automatically disregard. People who are highly conscious of how kindness is scarce are very unique, and those who are kind but aren't valued, don't ever change. Shine brightly.

Most of us are not prepared to read the Word of God as He deserves. Our training in reading has been typically ordered to anything but reverence. We read in school for tests, developing the art of anticipating the questions of our teachers. We read casually for entertainment and pleasure, as scarce time permits, scanning and skipping around as we freely choose. We read for business, and profit, culling through words for whatever seems of value to us here and now. Words are for us seen as information for our profit, or entertainment or pleasure. Rarely do we have a sense of words as treasure as infinite value, or of food for life of famine, or of clear and clean water in parched, dead-dry desert. Yet the Word of God, in Scripture, is all this and more. His words are a living seed with potentials for full growth that we cannot fully imagine. His words are healing medicine to dying mankind. His words are boundless wealth to the destitute poor, and rejuvenation to those broken by age. His words are all this and more, because they are His words to us, His children whom He loves with a love we can hardly begin to grasp.

What the hell is all this I read in the papers?" "Narrow it down for me," Alan suggested. "I suppose it might have been a misprint," Daniel considered, frowning at the tip of his cigar before he tapped it in the ashtray he kept secreted in the bottom drawer of his desk. "I think I know my own flesh and blood well enough." "Narrow it just a bit further," Alan requested, though he'd already gotten the drift.It was simply too good to end it too soon. "When I read that my own son-my heir, as things are-is spending time fraternizing with a Campbell, I know it's a simple matter of misspelling. What's the girl's name?" Along with a surge of affection, Alan felt a tug of pure and simple mischief. "Which girl is that?" "Dammit,boy! The girl you're seeing who looks like a pixie.Fetching young thing from the picture I saw.Good bones; holds herself well." "Shelby," Alan said, then waited a beat. "Shelby Campbell." Dead silence.Leaning back in his chair, Alan wondered how long it would be before his father remembered to take a breath. It was a pity, he mused, a real pity that he couldn't see the old pirate's face. "Campbell!" The word erupted. "A thieving, murdering Campbell!" "Yes,she's fond of MacGregor's as well." "No son of mine gives the time of day to one of the clan Campbell!" Daniel bellowed. "I'll take a strap to you, Alan Duncan MacGregor!" The threat was as empty now as it had been when Alan had been eight, but delivered in the same full-pitched roar. "I'll wear the hide off you." "You'll have the chance to try this weekend when you meet Shelby." "A Campbell in my house! Hah!" "A Campbell in your house," Alan repeated mildly. "And a Campbell in your family before the end of the year if I have my way." "You-" Emotions warred in him. A Campbell versus his firmest aspiration: to see each of his children married and settled, and himself laden with grandchildren. "You're thinking of marriage to a Campbell?" "I've already asked her.She won't have me...yet," he added. "Won't have you!" Paternal pride dominated all else. "What kind of a nitwit is she? Typical Campbell," he muttered. "Mindless pagans." Daniel suspected they'd had some sorcerers sprinkled among them. "Probably bewitched the boy," he mumbled, scowling into space. "Always had good sense before this.Aye, you bring your Campbell to me," he ordered roundly. "I'll get to the bottom of it." Alan smothered a laugh, forgetting the poor mood that had plagued him only minutes earlier. "I'll ask her." "Ask? Hah! You bring the girl, that daughter of a Campbell, here." Picturing Shelby, Alan decided he wouldn't iss the meeting for two-thirds the popular vote. "I'll see you Friday, Dad.Give Mom my love." "Friday," Daniel muttered, puffing avidly on his cigar. "Aye,aye, Friday." As he hung up Alan could all but see his father rubbing his huge hands togther in anticipation. It should be an interesting weekened.

When did you realize you should stop playing? There was no one moment. Moments of realization are generally seductive lies concocted by unscrupulous memoirists. Typically, the process of epiphany is not instant—your mind doesn’t just crack open. You usually realize something long after you’ve suspected that it might be true, after it’s been lurking there for a long time, in the form of an uncomfortable thought that might have been droning in the background for weeks or years, like the purr of a detuned oboe. What we call “realization” is often the death of a self-serving rationale after it’s been strangled by reality for a long time.

I'm asking you if you'll spend the rest of your life with me.” I stared down at my still-warm hand. Hadi's touch had been more remarkable than the question I'd spent night after night imagining. Those words did not slow time or cause music to erupt from the walls. They did not make fireworks burst from the sky or conjure up a crowd hooting congratulatory cheer. I didn't want to accept that such life-changing words could feel so ordinary, that this moment I'd been waiting for my entire life could already be over with such little ceremony. “Yes,” I said and then added, “But this doesn't count, okay? You still have to ask me for real.

Fall behind me States! A man before all—myself, typical, before all. Give me the pay I have served for, Give me to sing the songs of the great Idea, take all the rest, I have loved the earth, sun, animals, I have despised riches, I have given aims to every one that ask'd, stood up for the stupid and crazy, devoted my income and labor to others, Hated tyrants, argued not concerning God, had patience and indulgence toward the people, taken off my hat to nothing known or unknown, Gone freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young, and with the mothers of families, Read these leaves to myself in the open air, tried them by trees, stars, rivers, Dismiss'd whatever insulted my own soul or defiled my body, Claim'd nothing to myself which I have not carefully claim'd for others on the same terms, Sped to the camps, and comrades found and accepted from every State, (Upon this breast has many a dying soldier lean'd to breathe his last, This arm, this hand, this voice, have nourish'd, rais'd, restored, To life recalling many a prostrate form;) I am willing to wait to be understood by the growth of the taste of myself, Rejecting none, permitting all. (Say O Mother, have I not to your thought been faithful? Have I not through life kept you and yours before me?)

Deacon met my glare with an impish grin. “Anyway, did you celebrate Valentine’s Day when you were slumming with the mortals?” I blinked. “Not really. Why?” Aiden snorted and then disappeared into one of the rooms. “Follow me,” Deacon said. “You’re going to love this. I just know it.” I followed him down the dimly-lit corridor that was sparsely decorated. We passed several closed doors and a spiral staircase. Deacon went through an archway and stopped, reaching along the wall. Light flooded the room. It was a typical sunroom, with floor-to-ceiling glass windows, wicker furniture, and colorful plants. Deacon stopped by a small potted plant sitting on a ceramic coffee table. It looked like a miniature pine tree that was missing several limbs. Half the needles were scattered in and around the pot. One red Christmas bulb hung from the very top branch, causing the tree to tilt to the right. “What do you think?” Deacon asked. “Um… well, that’s a really different Christmas tree, but I’m not sure what that has to do with Valentine’s Day.” “It’s sad,” Aiden said, strolling into the room. “It’s actually embarrassing to look at. What kind of tree is it, Deacon?” He beamed. “It’s called a Charlie Brown Christmas Tree.” Aiden rolled his eyes. “Deacon digs this thing out every year. The pine isn’t even real. And he leaves it up from Thanksgiving to Valentine’s Day. Which thank the gods is the day after tomorrow. That means he’ll be taking it down.” I ran my fingers over the plastic needles. “I’ve seen the cartoon.” Deacon sprayed something from an aerosol can. “It’s my MHT tree.” “MHT tree?” I questioned. “Mortal Holiday Tree,” Deacon explained, and smiled. “It covers the three major holidays. During Thanksgiving it gets a brown bulb, a green one for Christmas, and a red one for Valentine’s Day.” “What about New Year’s Eve?” He lowered his chin. “Now, is that really a holiday?” “The mortals think so.” I folded my arms. “But they’re wrong. The New Year is during the summer solstice,” Deacon said. “Their math is completely off, like most of their customs. For example, did you know that Valentine’s Day wasn’t actually about love until Geoffrey Chaucer did his whole courtly love thing in the High Middle Ages?” “You guys are so weird.” I grinned at the brothers. “That we are,” Aiden replied. “Come on, I’ll show you your room.” “Hey Alex,” Deacon called. “We’re making cookies tomorrow, since it’s Valentine’s Eve.” Making cookies on Valentine’s Eve? I didn’t even know if there was such a thing as Valentine’s Eve. I laughed as I followed Aiden out of the room. “You two really are opposites.” “I’m cooler!” Deacon yelled from his Mortal Holiday Tree room

In men, there is the familiar distinction between the Madonna on a pedestal and the lowlife whore, in the sense that they elevate the love object to unknown—and, above all, unattainable—heights. These are the super-conventional husbands who respect their wives. They often respect them so much that they become psychologically impotent. The shadow of the for-bidden mother covers the beloved in this cloak of respect, so that any sexual approach becomes impossible. However, this impotence wholly melts away, together with the respect, when such a man goes to a whore, either in his imagination or in reality. The pendulum swings the other way, because in this case the woman, in the figure of the whore, is humiliated just as much as the wife-mother is extolled. The dimension of lust appears here, inevitably accompanied by feelings of guilt. It is in this context that we come across the typical male fantasy, well known to every prostitute, of 'saving' a woman. A large number of her clients want to 'save' her from her ruin. They want to restore to her the status of being an object of love. In other words, they want her to become a wife-mother, which brings them back to respect, and completes the circle. Interestingly, in either case, whether he saves her or humiliates her, the power lies with the man. This in itself is a rewrite of the original mother-child scenario. His position has shifted from passive to active.

Shapers are people who can go from visualization to actualization. I wrote a lot about the people I call “shapers” in the first part of this book. I use the word to mean someone who comes up with unique and valuable visions and builds them out beautifully, typically over the doubts of others. Shapers get both the big picture and the details right. To me, it seems that Shaper = Visionary + Practical Thinker + Determined. I’ve found that shapers tend to share attributes such as intense curiosity and a compulsive need to make sense of things, independent thinking that verges on rebelliousness, a need to dream big and unconventionally, a practicality and determination to push through all obstacles to achieve their goals, and a knowledge of their own and others’ weaknesses and strengths so they can orchestrate teams to achieve them. Perhaps even more importantly, they can hold conflicting thoughts simultaneously and look at them from different angles. They typically love to knock things around with other really smart people and can easily navigate back and forth between the big picture and the granular details, counting both as equally important. People wired with enough of these ways of thinking that they can operate in the world as shapers are very rare. But they could never succeed without working with others who are more naturally suited for other things and whose ways of thinking and acting are also essential.

By failing to make the obvious connection between an openly misogynistic culture and the mysterious lack of women, Levy contributed to the myth of innately talented hackers being implicitly male. And, today, it’s hard to think of a profession more in thrall to brilliance bias than computer science. ‘Where are the girls that love to program?’ asked a high-school teacher who took part in a summer programme for advanced-placement computer-science teachers at Carnegie Mellon; ‘I have any number of boys who really really love computers,’ he mused. ‘Several parents have told me their sons would be on the computer programming all night if they could. I have yet to run into a girl like that.’ This may be true, but as one of his fellow teachers pointed out, failing to exhibit this behaviour doesn’t mean that his female students don’t love computer science. Recalling her own student experience, she explained how she ‘fell in love’ with programming when she took her first course in college. But she didn’t stay up all night, or even spend a majority of her time programming. ‘Staying up all night doing something is a sign of single-mindedness and possibly immaturity as well as love for the subject. The girls may show their love for computers and computer science very differently. If you are looking for this type of obsessive behavior, then you are looking for a typically young, male behavior. While some girls will exhibit it, most won’t.

In my own periods of darkness, in the underworld of the soul, I find myself frequently overcome and amazed by the ability of people to befriend each other, to love their intimate partners and parents and children, and to do what they must do to keep the machinery of the world running. I knew a man, injured and disabled by a car accident, who was employed by a local utility. For years after the crash he worked side by side with another man, who for his part suffered with a degenerative neurological disease. They cooperated while repairing the lines, each making up for the other’s inadequacy. This sort of everyday heroism is the rule, I believe, rather than the exception. Most individuals are dealing with one or more serious health problems while going productively and uncomplainingly about their business. If anyone is fortunate enough to be in a rare period of grace and health, personally, then he or she typically has at least one close family member in crisis. Yet people prevail and continue to do difficult and effortful tasks to hold themselves and their families and society together. To me this is miraculous—so much so that a dumbfounded gratitude is the only appropriate response. There are so many ways that things can fall apart, or fail to work altogether, and it is always wounded people who are holding it together. They deserve some genuine and heartfelt admiration for that. It’s an ongoing miracle of fortitude and perseverance

Anastasia Rossi, born Edith Simmons, sat upright, her bulk filling the chair to its arms. She was dressed in her typical costume for a séance: silk kimono trimmed with cambric, loops of jet beads cascading down her bosom, “Pocahontas” headband with its diadem and ostrich plume. To her right sat Mr. Farnsworth, a tall, bearded man with russet eyebrows, to whom she had made love that morning beneath a rearing stuffed panther, lips (the panther’s) pinned back to show her fearsome teeth. To her left, her thin fingers trembling in Anastasia’s ample palm, was Mrs. Farnsworth, a slight, hysterical woman in a neck-high blouse with bishop sleeves. It was she who had first heard the ghosts that August, and for whose relief the séance was being conducted

On the Dangers of Confusing Saga with History The Four Loves (From Chapter II, “Likings and Loves for the Sub-human”) THE ACTUAL HISTORY OF EVERY COUNTRY IS FULL OF shabby and even shameful doings. The heroic stories, if taken to be typical, give a false impression of it and are often themselves open to serious historical criticism. Hence a patriotism based on our glorious past is fair game for the debunker. As knowledge increases it may snap and be converted into disillusioned cynicism, or may be maintained by a voluntary shutting of the eyes. But who can condemn what clearly makes many people, at many important moments, behave so much better than they could have done without its help? I think it is possible to be strengthened by the image of the past without being either deceived or puffed up. The image becomes dangerous in the precise degree to which it is mistaken, or substituted, for serious and systematic historical study. The stories are best when they are handed on and accepted as stories. I do not mean by this that they should be handed on as mere fictions (some of them are after all true). But the emphasis should be on the tale as such, on the picture which fires the imagination, the example that strengthens the will. The schoolboy who hears them should dimly feel—though of course he cannot put it into words—that he is hearing saga. Let him be thrilled—preferably ‘out of school’—by the ‘Deeds that won the Empire’; but the less we mix this up with his ‘history lessons’ or mistake it for a serious analysis—worse still,

After I left finance, I started attending some of the fashionable conferences attended by pre-rich and post-rich technology people and the new category of technology intellectuals. I was initially exhilarated to see them wearing no ties, as, living among tie-wearing abhorrent bankers, I had developed the illusion that anyone who doesn’t wear a tie was not an empty suit. But these conferences, while colorful and slick with computerized images and fancy animations, felt depressing. I knew I did not belong. It was not just their additive approach to the future (failure to subtract the fragile rather than add to destiny). It was not entirely their blindness by uncompromising neomania. It took a while for me to realize the reason: a profound lack of elegance. Technothinkers tend to have an “engineering mind”—to put it less politely, they have autistic tendencies. While they don’t usually wear ties, these types tend, of course, to exhibit all the textbook characteristics of nerdiness—mostly lack of charm, interest in objects instead of persons, causing them to neglect their looks. They love precision at the expense of applicability. And they typically share an absence of literary culture. This absence of literary culture is actually a marker of future blindness because it is usually accompanied by a denigration of history, a byproduct of unconditional neomania. Outside of the niche and isolated genre of science fiction, literature is about the past. We do not learn physics or biology from medieval textbooks, but we still read Homer, Plato, or the very modern Shakespeare. We cannot talk about sculpture without knowledge of the works of Phidias, Michelangelo, or the great Canova. These are in the past, not in the future. Just by setting foot into a museum, the aesthetically minded person is connecting with the elders. Whether overtly or not, he will tend to acquire and respect historical knowledge, even if it is to reject it. And the past—properly handled, as we will see in the next section—is a much better teacher about the properties of the future than the present. To understand the future, you do not need technoautistic jargon, obsession with “killer apps,” these sort of things. You just need the following: some respect for the past, some curiosity about the historical record, a hunger for the wisdom of the elders, and a grasp of the notion of “heuristics,” these often unwritten rules of thumb that are so determining of survival. In other words, you will be forced to give weight to things that have been around, things that have survived.

Situated in the center of family values debates is an imagined traditional family ideal. Formed through a combination of marital and blood ties, "normal" families should consist of heterosexual, racially homogeneous couples who produce their own biological children. Such families should have a specific authority structure, namely, a father-head earning an adequate family wage, a stay-at-home wife and mother, and children. Idealizing the traditional family as a private haven from a public world, family is seen as being held together through primary emotional bonds of love and caring. assuming a relatively fixed sexual division of labor, wherein women's roles are defined as primarily in the home with men's in the public world of work, the traditional family ideal also assumes the separation of work and family. Defined as a natural or biological arrangement based on heterosexual attraction, instead this monolithic family type is actually supported by government policy. It is organized not around a biological core, but a state-sanctioned, heterosexual marriage that confers legitimacy not only on the family structure itself but on children born in this family. In general, everything the imagined traditional family ideal is thought to be, African-American families are not. Two elements of the traditional family ideal are especially problematic for African-American women. First, the assumed split between the "public" sphere of paid employment and the "private" sphere of unpaid family responsibilities has never worked for U.S. Black women. Under slavery, U.S. Black women worked without pay in the allegedly public sphere of Southern agriculture and had their family privacy routinely violated. Second, the public/private binary separating the family households from the paid labor market is fundamental in explaining U.S. gender ideology. If one assumes that real men work and real women take care of families, then African-Americans suffer from deficient ideas concerning gender. in particular, Black women become less "feminine," because they work outside the home, work for pay and thus compete with men, and their work takes them away from their children. Framed through this prism of an imagined traditional family ideal, U.S. Black women's experiences and those of other women of color are typically deemed deficient. Rather than trying to explain why Black women's work and family patterns deviate from the seeming normality of the traditional family ideal, a more fruitful approach lies in challenging the very constructs of work and family themselves. Understandings of work, like understandings of family, vary greatly depending on who controls the definitions.

This meant that I went from being the person who responded to everyone all the time, to being a person who doesn’t respond to hardly anyone, at all. At first, it was hard. My text inbox went from typically ten unread messages to over four hundred. I would read letters from readers, and instead of responding with a novel-length letter, I began saving them to a folder and sending out energetic blessings instead. If an email landed in my inbox, I would let it sit sometimes for up to seven days before even opening it. I got to things when I got to things. At first, some people were super annoyed, but after a few years of this practice, people came to understand I don’t respond to things immediately, and sometimes I don’t respond at all. To me, this is the only sane way to live. I’m not chained to my phone or to other people’s expectations of responsiveness. I don’t prove my love by texting back in two minutes.

Lady Thornton!” the prosecutor rapped out, and he began firing questions at her so rapidly that she could scarcely keep track of them. “Tell us the truth, Lady Thornton. Did that man”-his finger pointed accusingly to where Ian was sitting, out of Elizabeth’s vision-“fid you and bribe you to come back here and tell us this absurd tale? Or did he find you and threaten your life if you didn’t come here today? Isn’t it true that you have no idea where your brother is? Isn’t it true that by your own admission a few moments ago you fled in terror for your life from this cruel man? Isn’t it true that you are afraid of further cruelty from him-“ “No!” Elizabeth cried. Her gaze raced over the male faces around and above her, and she could see not one that looked anything but either dubious or contemptuous of the truths she had told. “No further questions!” “Wait!” In that infinitesimal moment of time Elizabeth realized that if she couldn’t convince them she was telling the truth, she might be able to convince them she was too stupid to make up such a lie. “Yes, my lord,” her voice rang out. “I cannot deny it-about his cruelty, I mean.” Sutherland swung around, his eyes lighting up, and renewed excitement throbbed in the great chamber. “You admit this is a cruel man?” “Yes, I do,” Elizabeth emphatically declared. “My dear, poor woman, could you tell us-all of us-some examples of his cruelty?” “Yes, and when I do, I know you will all understand how truly cruel my husband can be and why I ran off with Robert-my brother, that is.” Madly, she tried to think of half-truths that would not constitute perjury, and she remembered Ian’s words the night he came looking for her at Havenhurst. “Yes, go on.” Everyone in the galleries leaned forward in unison, and Elizabeth had the feeling the whole building was tipping toward her. “When was the last time your husband was cruel?” “Well, just before I left he threatened to cut off my allowance-I had overspent it, and I hated to admit it.” “You were afraid he would beat you for it?” “No, I was afraid he wouldn’t give me more until next quarter!” Someone in the gallery laughed, then the sound was instantly choked. Sutherland started to frown darkly, but Elizabeth plunged ahead. “My husband and I were discussing that very thing-my allowance, I mean-two nights before I ran away with Bobby.” “And did he become abusive during that discussion? Is that the night your maid testified that you were weeping?” “Yes, I believe it was!” “Why were you weeping, Lady Thornton?” The galleries tipped further toward her. “I was in a terrible taking,” Elizabeth said, stating a fact. “I wanted to go away with Bobby. In order to do it, I had to sell my lovely emeralds, which Lord Thornton gave me.” Seized with inspiration, she leaned confiding inches toward the Lord Chancellor upon the woolsack. “I knew he would buy me more, you know.” Startled laughter rang out from the galleries, and it was the encouragement Elizabeth desperately needed. Lord Sutherland, however, wasn’t laughing. He sensed that she was trying to dupe him, but with all the arrogance typical of most of his sex, he could not believe she was smart enough to actually attempt, let alone accomplish it. “I’m supposed to believe you sold your emeralds out of some freakish start-out of a frivolous desire to go off with a man you claim was your brother?” “Goodness, I don’t know what you are supposed to believe. I only know I did it.” “Madam!” he snapped. “You were on the verge of tears, according to the jeweler to whom you sold them. If you were in a frivolous mood, why were you on the verge of tears?” Elizabeth gave him a vacuous look. “I liked my emeralds.

Putting it all together, fluctuations in attitudes and behavior combine to make the stock market the ultimate pendulum. In my 47 full calendar years in the investment business, starting with 1970, the annual returns on the S&P 500 have swung from plus 37% to minus 37%. Averaging out good years and bad years, the long-run return is usually stated as 10% or so. Everyone’s been happy with that typical performance and would love more of the same. But remember, a swinging pendulum may be at its midpoint “on average,” but it actually spends very little time there. The same is true of financial market performance. Here’s a fun question (and a good illustration): for how many of the 47 years from 1970 through 2016 was the annual return on the S&P 500 within 2% of “normal”—that is, between 8% and 12%? I expected the answer to be “not that often,” but I was surprised to learn that it had happened only three times! It also surprised me to learn that the return had been more than 20 percentage points away from “normal”—either up more than 30% or down more than 10%—more than one-quarter of the time: 13 out of the last 47 years. So one thing that can be said with total conviction about stock market performance is that the average certainly isn’t the norm. Market fluctuations of this magnitude aren’t nearly fully explained by the changing fortunes of companies, industries or economies. They’re largely attributable to the mood swings of investors. Lastly, the times when return is at the extremes aren’t randomly distributed over the years. Rather they’re clustered, due to the fact that investors’ psychological swings tend to persist for a while—to paraphrase Herb Stein, they tend to continue until they stop. Most of those 13 extreme up or down years were within a year or two of another year of similarly extreme performance in the same direction.

I’ll say it: I am lucky enough to not have to work, in the sense that Jesse and I could change how we organize our life to live on one income. I work because I like to. I love my kids! They are amazing. But I wouldn’t be happy staying home with them. I’ve figured out that my happiness-maximizing allocation is something like eight hours of work and three hours of kids a day. It isn’t that I like my job more than my kids overall—if I had to pick, the kids would win every time. But the “marginal value” of time with my kids declines fast. In part, this is because kids are exhausting. The first hour with them is amazing, the second less good, and by hour four I’m ready for a glass of wine or, even better, some time with my research. My job doesn’t have this feature. Yes, the eighth hour is less fun than the seventh, but the highs are not as high and the lows are not as low. The physical and emotional challenges of work pale in comparison to the physical and emotional challenges of being an on-scene parent. The eighth hour at my job is better than the fifth hour with the kids on a typical day. And that is why I have a job. Because I like it. It should be okay to say this. Just like it should be okay to say that you stay home with your kids because that is what you want to do. I’m well aware that many people don’t want to be an economist for eight hours a day. We shouldn’t have to say we’re staying home for children’s optimal development, or at least, that shouldn’t be the only factor in the decision. “This is the lifestyle I prefer” or “This is what works for my family” are both okay reasons to make choices! So before you even get into reading what the evidence says is “best” for your child or thinking about the family budget, you—and your partner, or any other caregiving adults in the house—should think about what you would really like to do.

Can I make you a cup of tea?” He says that would be wonderful, and she smiles handsomely; then her face darkens in terrible sorrow. “And I am so sorry, Mr. Arthur,” she says, as if imparting the death of a loved one. “You are too early to see the cherry blossoms.” After the tea (which she makes by hand, whisking it into a bitter green foam—“Please eat the sugar cookie before the tea”) he is shown to his room and told it was, in fact, the novelist Kawabata Yasunari’s favorite. A low lacquered table is set on the tatami floor, and the woman slides back paper walls to reveal a moonlit corner garden dripping from a recent rain; Kawabata wrote of this garden in the rain that it was the heart of Kyoto. “Not any garden,” she says pointedly, “but this very garden.” She informs him that the tub in the bathroom is already warm and that an attendant will keep it warm, always, for whenever he needs it. Always. There is a yukata in the closet for him to wear. Would he like dinner in the room? She will bring it personally for him: the first of the four kaiseki meals he will be writing about. The kaiseki meal, he has learned, is an ancient formal meal drawn from both monasteries and the royal court. It is typically seven courses, each course composed of a particular type of food (grilled, simmered, raw) and seasonal ingredients. Tonight, it is butter bean, mugwort, and sea bream. Less is humbled both by the exquisite food and by the graciousness with which she presents it. “I most sincerely apologize I cannot be here tomorrow to see you; I must go to Tokyo.” She says this as if she were missing the most extraordinary of wonders: another day with Arthur Less. He sees, in the lines around her mouth, the shadow of the smile all widows wear in private. She bows and exits, returning with a sake sampler. He tries all three, and when asked which is his favorite, he says the Tonni, though he cannot tell the difference. He asks which is her favorite. She blinks and says: “The Tonni.” If only he could learn to lie so compassionately.

What are you doing?” “Coming to pick you up in a little bit,” he said. I loved it when he took charge. It made my heart skip a beat, made me feel flushed and excited and thrilled. After four years with J, I was sick and tired of the surfer mentality. Laid-back, I’d discovered, was no longer something I wanted in a man. And when it came to his affection for me, Marlboro Man was anything but that. “I’ll be there at five.” Yes, sir. Anything you say, sir. I’ll be ready. With bells on. I started getting ready at three. I showered, shaved, powdered, perfumed, brushed, curled, and primped for two whole hours--throwing on a light pink shirt and my favorite jeans--all in an effort to appear as if I’d simply thrown myself together at the last minute. It worked. “Man,” Marlboro Man said when I opened the door. “You look great.” I couldn’t focus very long on his compliment, though--I was way too distracted by the way he looked. God, he was gorgeous. At a time of year when most people are still milky white, his long days of working cattle had afforded him a beautiful, golden, late-spring tan. And his typical denim button-down shirts had been replaced by a more fitted dark gray polo, the kind of shirt that perfectly emphasizes biceps born not from working out in a gym, but from tough, gritty, hands-on labor. And his prematurely gray hair, very short, was just the icing on the cake. I could eat this man with a spoon. “You do, too,” I replied, trying to will away my spiking hormones. He opened the door to his white diesel pickup, and I climbed right in. I didn’t even ask him where we were going; I didn’t even care. But when we turned west on the highway and headed out of town, I knew exactly where he was taking me: to his ranch…to his turf…to his home on the range. Though I didn’t expect or require a ride from him, I secretly loved that he drove over an hour to fetch me. It was a throwback to a different time, a burst of chivalry and courtship in this very modern world. As we drove we talked and talked--about our friends, about our families, about movies and books and horses and cattle.

Friendship arises out of mere Companionship when two or more of the companions discover that they have in common some insight or interest or even taste which the others do not share and which, till that moment, each believed to be his own unique treasure (or burden). The typical expression of opening Friendship would be something like, ‘What? You too? I thought I was the only one.’ We can imagine that among those early hunters and warriors single individuals—one in a century? one in a thousand years?—saw what others did not; saw that the deer was beautiful as well as edible, that hunting was fun as well as necessary, dreamed that his gods might be not only powerful but holy. But as long as each of these percipient persons dies without finding a kindred soul, nothing (I suspect) will come of it; art or sport or spiritual religion will not be born. It is when two such persons discover one another, when, whether with immense difficulties and semi-articulate fumblings or with what would seem to us amazing and elliptical speed, they share their vision—it is then that Friendship is born. And instantly they stand together in an immense solitude.

I had always felt that trust was the bedrock of any partnership, especially a business one. My associate and I had what I thought was a non-shakeable alliance. We would strategize; we would go to conferences about crypto and toast our wins with a glass of liquor. He was the only person I had trusted with my financial insight. Unfortunately, he was also the last person I should have trusted. WhatsApp info:+12723 328 343 I woke up one morning to the stuff of nightmares: I had absolutely no access to my Bitcoin wallet, holding $290,000. My password didn't work, my backup keys were useless, and my hardware wallet? Completely wiped. Panic set in as I tried to work out what was going on. Then, a chilling realization hit me. Only a week before, my ever-so-helpful colleague had made an offer to "optimize" my wallet security. I thought at that time, Wow, what a great guy. Well, it turns out he was great-at deception. The real gut punch? He had the audacity to sit across from me at work the next day, sipping coffee like nothing had happened. I confronted him, expecting some elaborate excuse, but he played dumb-so dumb it was insulting. That's when I knew what I needed were professionals, not empty denials. After hours of frantic research, I came across ADWARE RECOVERY SPECIALIST. Their reputation in high-stakes crypto theft gave me hope. From the first conversation, they took my case seriously, breaking down the recovery process in a way that finally made sense. Their forensic team got to work tracking the stolen funds across multiple wallets. A few tense days later, I got the call: my money was back. Every single dollar. It turned out that my trusted colleague had tried to launder the funds through multiple transactions, but ADWARE RECOVERY SPECIALIST untangled his mess with ease. The feeling of relief was overwhelming; I had prepared myself for the worst, yet I walked away victorious. My colleague probably had a pretty good inkling, because he quit before I could file any report. Typical. Some people just love to disappear rather than confront the music. Email info: Adware recovery specialist (@) auctioneer.net I emerged from that fiasco with my money still in one piece, and more painfully but preciously, with the lesson not to confuse control for kindness: you earn trust; you don't give it away freely-especially where money intervenes.

Korie: Willie and I dated for about eight months, and then I was getting ready to leave for school at Harding University. Willie was still attending seminary school, and I wanted him to go to Harding University with me. But Willie said he wasn’t leaving West Monroe. He wanted me to stay in West Monroe with him. We broke up before I left for school in August, and I’m sure he thought I’d find someone else at college, because that’s what typically happens when you leave home. Willie called me one night in September 1991 after I had been gone a few weeks and said, “Let’s get back together.” I knew I loved him, but I told him I wasn’t sure about it. He was trying to change my life, and it was really his way or no way. I just didn’t know what to do. “Let me think about it,” I said. “I’ll call you back tomorrow.” I was convinced she’d found someone else. I was telling all my buddies that it was over between us, and I was gathering other girls’ phone numbers to prepare myself to move on. I just knew it was over, and I wasn’t waiting to hear it from her the next day. I was convinced she wanted to end our relationship but couldn’t muster the courage to tell me. Korie called me the next day, and I was ready to tell her that I didn’t want to get back together anymore and that our relationship was over. I was certainly going to end it before she ended it. I just knew she already had a new boyfriend at Harding. “I’ve got something I want to tell you,” Korie told me. “What do you want to say?” I asked her, deciding I’d better hear her out first. “Let’s get back together,” she said. My ears started buzzing. I threw all the girls’ phone numbers in the trash can. About a month later, Korie and I decided we were going to get married. Korie: I had turned eighteen in October 1991, so legally I was allowed to do whatever I wanted. But I knew I had to call my parents, Johnny and Chrys, to get their permission. We had had some discussions about my getting married that summer that had not gone so well, so I knew they were not going to be excited about it. I mustered up the courage to make the phone call. “Look, I’m legal, so I’m just going to say it,” I told them. “I’m getting married, and you’re going to have to be behind me or not.” Of course, my parents told me it was the worst idea ever, and they were naturally worried that I was going to leave school and come home. They asked me to at least wait until I’d finished college. I hung up the phone and called Willie immediately. “I just told them and it didn’t go so well,” I blurted out. “They’ve already called me and they’re on their way over here,” he said.

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

But once the work was done, we sat down in a warm patch of Sunlight outside his house where the peonies were slowly coming into bloom, and the whole world seemed covered in a fine layer of gold leaf. “What have you done in life?” Boros suddenly asked. This question was so unexpected that I instantly let myself be carried away by memories. They began to sail past my eyes, and typically for memories, everything in them seemed better, finer, and happier than in reality. It’s strange, but we didn’t say a word. For people of my age, the places that they truly loved and to which they once belonged are no longer there. The places of their childhood and youth have ceased to exist, the villages where they went on holiday, the parks with uncomfortable benches where their first loves blossomed, the cities, cafés and houses of their past. And if their outer form has been preserved, it’s all the more painful, like a shell with nothing inside it anymore. I have nowhere to return to. It’s like a state of imprisonment. The walls of the cell are the horizon of what I can see. Beyond them exists a world that’s alien to me and doesn’t belong to me. So for people like me the only thing possible is here and now, for every future is doubtful, everything yet to come is barely sketched and uncertain, like a mirage that can be destroyed by the slightest twitch of the air. That’s what was going through my mind as we sat there in silence. It was better than a conversation. I have no idea what either of the men was thinking about. Perhaps about the same thing.

We may finally summarize the emotional dilemma of the schizoid thus: he feels a deep dread of entering into a real personal relationship, i.e. one into which genuine feeling enters, because, though his need for a love-object is so great, he can only sustain a relationship at a deep emotional level on the basis of infantile and absolute dependence. To the love-hungry schizoid faced internally with an exciting but deserting object all relationships are felt to be 'swallowing-up things' which trap and imprison and destroy. If your hate is destructive you are still free to love because you can find someone else to hate. But if you feel your love is destructive the situation is terrifying. You are always impelled into a relationship by your needs and at once driven out again by the fear either of exhausting your love-object by the demands you want to make or else losing your own individuality by over-dependence and identification. This 'in and out' oscillation is the typical schizoid behaviour, and to escape from it into detachment and loss of feeling is the typical schizoid state. The schizoid feels faced with utter loss, and the destruction of both ego and object, whether in a relationship or out of it. In a relationship, identification involves loss of the ego, and incorporation involves a hungry devouring and losing of the object. In breaking away to independence, the object is destroyed as you fight a way out to freedom, or lost by separation, and the ego is destroyed or emptied by the loss of the object with whom it is identified. The only real solution is the dissolving of identification and the maturing of the personality, the differentiation of ego and object, and the growth of a capacity for cooperative independence and mutuality, i.e. psychic rebirth and development of a real ego.

I am proud that I am an Australian, a daughter of the Southern Cross, a child of the mighty bush. I am thankful I am a peasant, a part of the bone and muscle of my nation, and earn my bread by the sweat of my brow, as man was meant to do. I rejoice I was not born a parasite, one of the blood-suckers who loll on velvet and satin, crushed from the proceeds of human sweat and blood and souls. Ah, my sunburnt brothers!—sons of toil and of Australia! I love and respect you well, for you are brave and good and true. I have seen not only those of you with youth and hope strong in your veins, but those with pathetic streaks of grey in your hair, large families to support, and with half a century sitting upon your work-laden shoulders. I have seen you struggle uncomplainingly against flood, fire, disease in stock, pests, drought, trade depression, and sickness, and yet have time to extend your hands and hearts in true sympathy to a brother in misfortune, and spirits to laugh and joke and be cheerful. And for my sisters a great love and pity fills my heart. Daughters of toil, who scrub and wash and mend and cook, who are dressmakers, paperhangers, milkmaids, gardeners, and candle-makers all in one, and yet have time to be cheerful and tasty in your homes, and make the best of the few oases to be found along the narrow dusty track of your existence. Would that I were more worthy to be one of you—more a typical Australian peasant—cheerful, honest, brave! I love you, I love you. Bravely you jog along with the rope of class distinction drawing closer, closer, tighter, tighter around you: a few more generations and you will be as enslaved as were ever the moujiks of Russia. I see it and know it, but I cannot help you. My ineffective life will be trod out in the same round of toil—I am only one of yourselves, I am only an unnecessary, little, bush commoner, I am only a—woman!

If I understand anything at all about this great symbolist, it is this: that he regarded only subjective realities as realities, as “truths”—that he saw everything else, everything natural, temporal, spatial and historical, merely as signs, as materials for parables. The concept of “the Son of God” does not connote a concrete person in history, an isolated and definite individual, but an “eternal” fact, a psychological symbol set free from the concept of time. The same thing is true, and in the highest sense, of the God of this typical symbolist, of the “kingdom of God,” and of the “sonship of God.” Nothing could be more un-Christian than the crude ecclesiastical notions of God as a person, of a “kingdom of God” that is to come, of a “kingdom of heaven” beyond, and of a “son of God” as the second person of the Trinity. All this—if I may be forgiven the phrase—is like thrusting one’s fist into the eye (and what an eye!) of the Gospels: a disrespect for symbols amounting to world-historical cynicism.... But it is nevertheless obvious enough what is meant by the symbols “Father” and “Son”— not, of course, to every one—: the word “Son” expresses entrance into the feeling that there is a general transformation of all things (beatitude), and “Father” expresses that feeling itself —the sensation of eternity and of perfection.—I am ashamed to remind you of what the church has made of this symbolism: has it not set an Amphitryon story at the threshold of the Christian “faith”? And a dogma of “immaculate conception” for good measure?... And thereby it has robbed conception of its immaculateness— The “kingdom of heaven” is a state of the heart—not something to come “beyond the world” or “after death.” The whole idea of natural death is absent from the Gospels: death is not a bridge, not a passing; it is absent because it belongs to a quite different, a merely apparent world, useful only as a symbol. The “hour of death” is not a Christian idea —“hours,” time, the physical life and its crises have no existence for the bearer of “glad tidings.”... The “kingdom of God” is not something that men wait for: it had no yesterday and no day after tomorrow, it is not going to come at a “millennium”—it is an experience of the heart, it is everywhere and it is nowhere.... This “bearer of glad tidings” died as he lived and taught—not to “save mankind,” but to show mankind how to live. It was a way of life that he bequeathed to man: his demeanour before the judges, before the officers, before his accusers—his demeanour on the cross. He does not resist; he does not defend his rights; he makes no effort to ward off the most extreme penalty—more, he invites it.... And he prays, suffers and loves with those, in those, who do him evil.... Not to defend one’s self, not to show anger, not to lay blames.... On the contrary, to submit even to the Evil One—to love him.... 36. —We free spirits—we are the first to have the necessary prerequisite to understanding what nineteen centuries have misunderstood—that instinct and passion for integrity which makes war upon the “holy lie” even more than upon all other lies.... Mankind was unspeakably far from our benevolent and cautious neutrality, from that discipline of the spirit which alone makes possible the solution of such strange and subtle things: what men always sought, with shameless egoism, was their own advantage therein; they created the church out of denial of the Gospels.... That mankind should be on its knees before the very antithesis of what was the origin, the meaning and the law of the Gospels—that in the concept of the “church” the very things should be pronounced holy that the “bearer of glad tidings” regards as beneath him and behind him—it would be impossible to surpass this as a grand example of world- historical irony—

Have you understood me? That which defines me, that which makes me stand apart from the whole of the rest of humanity, is the fact that I unmasked Christian morality. For this reason I was in need of a word which conveyed the idea of a challenge to everybody. Not to have awakened to these discoveries before, struck me as being the sign of the greatest uncleanliness that mankind has on its conscience, as self-deception become instinctive, as the fundamental will to be blind to every phenomenon, all causality and all reality; in fact, as an almost criminal fraud in psychologicis. Blindness in regard to Christianity is the essence of criminality—for it is the crime against life. Ages and peoples, the first as well as the last, philosophers and old women, with the exception of five or six moments in history (and of myself, the seventh), are all alike in this. Hitherto the Christian has been the "moral being," a peerless oddity, and, as "a moral being," he was more absurd, more vain, more thoughtless, and a greater disadvantage to himself, than the greatest despiser of humanity could have deemed possible. Christian morality is the most malignant form of all false too the actual Circe of humanity: that which has corrupted mankind. It is not error as error which infuriates me at the sight of this spectacle; it is not the millenniums of absence of "goodwill," of discipline, of decency, and of bravery in spiritual things, which betrays itself in the triumph of Christianity; it is rather the absence of nature, it is the perfectly ghastly fact that anti-nature itself received the highest honours as morality and as law, and remained suspended over man as the Categorical Imperative. Fancy blundering in this way, not as an individual, not as a people, but as a whole species! as humanity! To teach the contempt of all the principal instincts of life; to posit falsely the existence of a "soul," of a "spirit," in order to be able to defy the body; to spread the feeling that there is something impure in the very first prerequisite of life—in sex; to seek the principle of evil in the profound need of growth and expansion—that is to say, in severe self-love (the term itself is slanderous); and conversely to see a higher moral value—but what am I talking about?—I mean the moral value per se, in the typical signs of decline, in the antagonism of the instincts, in "selflessness," in the loss of ballast, in "the suppression of the personal element," and in "love of one's neighbour" (neighbouritis!). What! is humanity itself in a state of degeneration? Has it always been in this state? One thing is certain, that ye are taught only the values of decadence as the highest values. The morality of self-renunciation is essentially the morality of degeneration; the fact, "I am going to the dogs," is translated into the imperative," Ye shall all go to the dogs"—and not only into the imperative. This morality of self-renunciation, which is the only kind of morality that has been taught hitherto, betrays the will to nonentity—it denies life to the very roots. There still remains the possibility that it is not mankind that is in a state of degeneration, but only that parasitical kind of man—the priest, who, by means of morality and lies, has climbed up to his position of determinator of values, who divined in Christian morality his road to power. And, to tell the truth, this is my opinion. The teachers and I leaders of mankind—including the theologians—have been, every one of them, decadents: hence their) transvaluation of all values into a hostility towards; life; hence morality. The definition of morality; Morality is the idiosyncrasy of decadents, actuated by a desire to avenge themselves with success upon life. I attach great value to this definition.