Unavailable Quotes

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how far have you walked for men who’ve never held your feet in their laps? how often have you bartered with bone, only to sell yourself short? why do you find the unavailable so alluring? where did it begin? what went wrong? and who made you feel so worthless? if they wanted you, wouldn’t they have chosen you? all this time, you were begging for love silently, thinking they couldn’t hear you, but they smelt it on you, you must have known that they could taste the desperate on your skin? and what about the others that would do anything for you, why did you make them love you until you could not stand it? how are you both of these women, both flighty and needful? where did you learn this, to want what does not want you? where did you learn this, to leave those that want to stay?
Warsan Shire
Mr. Weasley was unavailable for comment, although his wife told reporters to clear off or she'd set the family ghoul on them.
J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Harry Potter, #2))
The trick is not to get hooked on the highs and lows and mistake an activated attachment system for passion or love. Don't let emotional unavailability turn you on.
Amir Levine (Attached: The New Science of Adult Attachment and How It Can Help You Find—and Keep—Love)
Then I break a glass and I slit my very innermost thigh so that I can pretend that I'm menstru--- well, unavailable.
Emilie Autumn
Just about every available female--and some unavailable--seemed to think the way to his heart was through his blood sugar levels.
Kelly Moran (Puppy Love (Redwood Ridge, #1))
I would be a horrible girlfriend at this point in my life, because I’m both needy and unavailable.
Lena Dunham (Not That Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She's "Learned")
It was a long and gloomy night that gathered on me, haunted by the ghosts of many hopes, of many dear remembrances, many errors, many unavailing sorrows and regrets.
Charles Dickens (David Copperfield)
To read is to withdraw.To make oneself unavailable. One would feel easier about it if the pursuit inself were less...selfish.
Alan Bennett (The Uncommon Reader)
And in this curious state I had the realization, at the moment of seeing that stranger there, that I was a person like everybody else. That I was known by my actions and words, that my internal universe was unavailable for inspection by others. They didn't know. They didn't know, because I never told them.
Kim Stanley Robinson (Icehenge: A Novel)
Nim handed me a mug of tea. I took a sip and it was just how I like it, strong and sweet. If you added psychotic and emotionally unavailable to that, it would also cover my taste in women.
Alexis Hall (Shadows & Dreams (Kate Kane, Paranormal Investigator, #2))
Perfectionism is the unparalleled defense for emotionally abandoned children. The existential unattainability of perfection saves the child from giving up, unless or until, scant success forces him to retreat into the depression of a dissociative disorder, or launches him hyperactively into an incipient conduct disorder. Perfectionism also provides a sense of meaning and direction for the powerless and unsupported child. In the guise of self-control, striving to be perfect offers a simulacrum of a sense of control. Self-control is also safer to pursue because abandoning parents typically reserve their severest punishment for children who are vocal about their negligence.
Pete Walker
The truth you believe in and cling to makes you unavailable to hear anything new.
Pema Chödrön (The Wisdom of No Escape: How to Love Yourself and Your World)
Nowadays, we never allow ourselves the convenience of being temporarily unavailable, even to strangers. With telephone and beeper, people subject themselves to being instantly accessible to everyone at all times, and it is the person who refuses to be on call, rather than the importunate caller, who is considered rude.
Judith Martin (Common Courtesy: In Which Miss Manners Solves the Problem That Baffled Mr. Jefferson)
Our dreams and stories may contain implicit aspects of our lives even without our awareness. In fact, storytelling may be a primary way in which we can linguistically communicate to others—as well as to ourselves—the sometimes hidden contents of our implicitly remembering minds. Stories make available perspectives on the emotional themes of our implicit memory that may otherwise be consciously unavailable to us. This may be one reason why journal writing and intimate communication with others, which are so often narrative processes, have such powerful organizing effects on the mind: They allow us to modulate our emotions and make sense of the world.
Daniel J. Siegel (The Developing Mind: How Relationships and the Brain Interact to Shape Who We Are)
I am convinced that there are genuine and valid levels of perception available with cannabis (and probably with other drugs) which are, through the defects of our society and our educational system, un-available to us without such drugs.
Lester Grinspoon (Marihuana Reconsidered)
He says the only people he ever really wants to meet for a drink somewhere are all either dead or unavailable.
J.D. Salinger (Franny and Zooey)
And mostly I just want to be sure you don't come to me to discuss your romantic entanglements. I much prefer that you remain on comfortable terms with Miss Cavanaugh. Although, should she ever become unavailable," Jackaby said earnestly,"I want you to know"-he put a hand gently on my shoulder-"that Douglas is an excellent listener.
William Ritter (Beastly Bones (Jackaby, #2))
I found myself in a pattern of being attracted to people who were somehow unavailable, and what I realized was that I was protecting myself because I equate the idea of connection and love with trauma and death.
Zachary Quinto
I go in on your arm and we separate. To make me look unavailable, since Vlad likes what he can’t have, I play dumb blonde and make myself sexy.” I glared as Adam barked with laughter at my words.“No going off of the plan, when he takes you in the back room—and he will, you work the information out of him without blowing your cover, or him.” I shot the glare to Ryder. “I have no intention of bobbing on Vlad’s knob. Or yours.” I tossed into remove the wide smirk my response had given him and it worked.
Amelia Hutchins (Fighting Destiny (The Fae Chronicles, #1))
I believe most plain girls are virtuous because of the scarcity of opportunity to be otherwise. They shield themselves with an aura of unavailableness (for which after a time they begin to take credit) largely as a defense tactic.
Maya Angelou (I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (Maya Angelou's Autobiography, #1))
We need be careful how we deal with those about us, when every death carries to some small circle of survivors, thoughts of so much omitted, and so little done- of so many things forgotten, and so many more which might have been repaired! There is no remorse so deep as that which is unavailing; if we would be spared its tortures, let us remember this, in time.
Charles Dickens (Oliver Twist)
But there's this one difference: one is gold put to the use of paving-stones, and the other is tin polished to ape a service of silver. Mine has nothing valuable about it; yet I shall have the merit of making it go as far as such poor stuff can go. His had first-rate qualities, and they are lost, rendered worst than unavailing.
Emily Brontë (Wuthering Heights)
Now that may be a first. A girl who has no interest whatsoever in the handsome, emotionally unavailable, Dane Wright.
Lisa De Jong (Plastic Hearts (Hearts, #1))
The traditional gender ideals of the strong-silent man who plays his cards close to his chest and the mysterious woman who disguises her feelings with coyness go so far as to make a virtue of being unavailable and secretive. But wholehearted intimacy can develop only where two people are equally forthcoming and self-revelatory. To take the risk of loving, we must become vulnerable enough to test the radical proposition that knowledge of another and self-revelation will ultimately increase rather than decrease love. It is an awe-ful risk.
Sam Keen (To Love and Be Loved)
Our first kiss was there on the bridge in the woods. How do you describe a first kiss? It is like trying to hold water in your hands. There is an ancient Chinese proverb that compares kissing to drinking salted water. “You drink, and your thirst increases,” it says. Time, I’m sure, passed by, but we remained unavailable for comment.
Kirstie Collins Brote (Beware of Love in Technicolor)
People often learn about starvation economies in childhood, when parents who are emotionally depleted or unavailable teach us that we must work hard to get our emotional needs met, so that if we relax our vigilance for even a moment, a mysterious someone or something may take the love we need away from us.
Dossie Easton (The Ethical Slut : A Practical Guide to Polyamory, Open Relationships & Other Adventures)
Shit, Violence, bullets in the brain Unavailing. We're in too deep to pull out. Waiting for an orgasm, Mr. Baldwin? Yes, waiting for an orgasm that's all.
Allen Ginsberg (The Fall of America: Poems of These States 1965-1971)
The poet lusts after emotionally unavailable people because she doesn't have to worry about commitment. The poet desperately wants commitment.
Trista Mateer ([redacted])
Not the first time Doc had run into girl-of-his-dreams unavailability.
Thomas Pynchon (Inherent Vice)
My conclusion is this: there’s no rule that says the unavailable person you waste your life being in love with has to be the greatest human you ever met. It doesn’t make the loss of him any less painful.
Mhairi McFarlane (Last Night)
Time goes forward because energy itself is always moving from an available to an unavailable state. Our consciousness is continually recording the entropy change in the world around us. We watch our friends get old and die. We sit next to a fire and watch it's red-hot embers turn slowly into cold white ashes. We experience the world always changing around us, and that experience is the unfolding of the second law. It is the irreversible process of dissipation of energy in the world. What does it mean to say, 'The world is running out of time'? Simply this: we experience the passage of time by the succession of one event after another. And every time an event occurs anywhere in this world energy is expended and the overall entropy is increased. To say the world is running out of time then, to say the world is running out of usable energy. In the words of Sir Arthur Eddington, 'Entropy is time's arrow'.
Jeremy Rifkin (Entropy)
Never wants to what?” Meet anybody for a drink. Oh, he had to go out last night and meet this television writer for a drink downtown, in the Village and all. That’s what started it. He says the only people he ever really wants to meet for a drink somewhere are all either dead or unavailable. He says he never even wants to have lunch with anybody, even, unless he thinks there’s a good chance it’s going to turn out to be Jesus, the person – or the Buddha, or Hui-neng, or Shankaracharya, or somebody like that. You know.
J.D. Salinger (Franny and Zooey)
This pursuit of unavailable distant people has oedipal roots. … fearing the consequences, they make certain that they fail at the attempt.” ―Distancing, Kantor (p.115)
Kantor
Luis Fuentes reminded me that I'm still vulnerable. If I'm emotionally unavailable, then I don't have to worry about ever getting hurt. [...] Nikki Cruz will no longer be vulnerable.
Simone Elkeles (Chain Reaction (Perfect Chemistry, #3))
It is astonishing and a little sad to realize how many discoveries, how many advancements, have been delayed for years, for decades, not because the information was unavailable but because of sheer cowardice, fear of being laughed at, of being ostracized by one's colleagues.
Hanya Yanagihara (The People in the Trees)
The Unavailable Available Pattern.” It’s where you convince yourself (and others) that you are available for relationship, but you always find a way to stop short. That stopping short can manifest in many ways: choosing unavailable people, looking for excuses to run, focusing on a lover’s imperfections rather than their appealing qualities, getting lost in the excitement of ecstatic possibility until the first glimpse of real vulnerability sends you packing. It’s the addiction to possibility and the fear of intimacy all rolled into one.
Jeff Brown (An Uncommon Bond)
The indefatigable pursuit of an unattainable perfection, even though it consists in nothing more than in the pounding of an old piano, is what alone gives a meaning to our life on this unavailing star.
Logan Pearsall Smith (Afterthoughts)
There is a moment, if you trip or slip, before your hand shoots out to break your fall, when you feel the earth rushing up at you and you cannot help yourself, a passing, fraction-of-a-second terror. I felt that way hour after hour after hour. Being anxious at this extreme level is bizarre. You feel all the time that you want to do something, that there is some affect that is unavailable to you, that there’s a physical need of impossible urgency and discomfort for which there is no relief, as though you were constantly vomiting from your stomach but had no mouth.
Andrew Solomon (The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression)
[A]ll of life, as we know it, moves in little, unavailing circles. More justly than to anything else, it can be likened to the game of baseball. Crack! we hit the ball, and away we go. If we earn a run (in life we call it success) we get back to the home plate and sit upon a bench. If we are thrown out, we walk back to the home plate -- and sit upon a bench.
O. Henry
Traveling has become such a miserable experience that no Palestinian does it, except those who absolutely have to: students attending foreign universities, patients needing care unavailable in Gaza, businesspeople attempting to pretend that their world will eventually be normal.
Izzeldin Abuelaish (I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor's Journey on the Road to Peace and Human Dignity)
Receiving feels wonderful once you get used to it. But first you must acknowledge how scary it is to be open. If, as a child you were left to fend for yourself or there were strings attached to getting what you needed, you learned that nurturing was either unavailable or unsafe. But now, receiving doesn’t have to mean owing something back. Start asking for at least one thing you want every day.
Ellen Bass (The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse)
CAUSE AND EFFECT You can give a man who has never given you a good word, Volumes of knowledge. And you can give a man who has never given you a gift, A thousand gifts. You can give that same man who has never given you a blessing, A thousand blessings. And you can offer that same man who has never Offered a hand to help you grow, Seeds to help him grow a garden. And while you have never seen true kindness from his direction, You still offer to help push him up. And in the end, He only wants to be the hand that pulls you down. Do not worry, my friends. Cause and effect was written by the stars of the universe. He who passes suffering onto others Will also have that suffering passed onto his own children. Gifts he feels he should have in the next lifetime will be unobtainable. And the help he needs to grow in the next lifetime will be unavailable. And the people he cuts down that were good to him, Will cut him down in the next lifetime. What goes around does come back again, Even through your children. There is a vibrational effect In every action, Just as there is A vibration that rings From every letter In every word. No cause occurs without effect And no effect occurs without cause. No unjust action goes without penalty And no action or thought Flows unnoticed Throughout The universe.
Suzy Kassem (Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem)
I already have my bathroom time scheduled, so you’ll have to work around it. Please note the bathroom is unavailable for the hour before each of my scheduled usage times (I don’t like to feel as if someone has just been in there when I have to go). However, for your convenience, there is also a toilet available with minimal wait time on the first floor lobby if you have an emergency and need immediate use.
Kyle Adams (Dirty Pirate)
Emotionally unavailable men thrive because they have complicit, commitment resistant, emotionally unavailable women to accommodate their behaviour.
Natalie Lue (Mr Unavailable & The Fallback Girl)
He didn’t say he was upset because I married Grizz, thereby making me unavailable to him.
Beth Flynn (Nine Minutes (Nine Minutes, #1))
I think you’re just as emotionally unavailable as I am. I avoid men because I’m afraid I’ll lose my heart, and you go from girl to girl to keep from giving yours away.
Ann Everett
Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Don’t worry about appearing sentimental. Worry about being unavailable; worry about being absent or fraudulent. Risk being unliked. Tell the truth as you understand it. If you’re a writer, you have a moral obligation to do this. And it is a revolutionary act - truth is always subversive.
Anne Lamott
I have no language to paint the horrors of our situation. To shed tears was indeed altogether unavailing and withal unmanly yet I was not able to deny myself the relief they served to afford me.
Owen Chase (The Loss of the Ship Essex, Sunk by a Whale)
Most people in Night Vale know there is information that is forbidden or unavailable, which is almost all information. Most people in Night Vale get by with a cobbled-together framework of lies and assumptions and conspiracy theories. Diane was like most people. Most people are.
Joseph Fink (Welcome to Night Vale (Welcome to Night Vale, #1))
The older I get, the more I realize the importance of connectivity, not taking people for granted. Don't be so busy "doing you" that you lose sight of those who love and support you. They will be the ones you seek, the ones you need when those you "thought" had your back turn their's away. If you only reach out when you need something, one day you'll discover that lifeline was cut and is now unavailable. Appreciate the good people in your life when it counts, not when it's convenient.
Liz Faublas, Million Dollar Pen, Ink.
List 2: Write down everything in your life that you don’t want, like more panic attacks, depression, or partners who are emotionally unavailable. Maybe you’d like to stop smoking, or overeating, or drinking. Be specific and personal. This is about you. This will be your “before” picture.
Yehuda Berg (Living Kabbalah: A Practical System for Making the Power Work for You)
At its heart, Codependency is a set of behaviors developed to manage the anxiety that comes when our primary attachments are formed with people who are inconsistent or unavailable in their response to us. Our anxiety-based responses to life can include over-reactivity, image management, unrealistic beliefs about our limits, and attempts to control the reality of others to the point where we lose our boundaries, self-esteem, and even our own reality. Ultimately, Codependency is a chronic stress disease, which can devastate our immune system and lead to systemic and even life-threatening illness.
Mary Crocker Cook (Awakening Hope. A Developmental, Behavioral, Biological Approach to Codependency Treatment.)
Love addicts often pick partners who are emotionally unavailable because deep down, they don’t feel worthy of having a healthy, loving relationship. A love addict craves and obsesses about becoming enmeshed or ‘one’ with another human being at all costs, even if it means putting themselves in potential danger.
Christopher Dines (The Kindness Habit: Transforming our Relationship to Addictive Behaviours)
Regression lives on, not because of the unavailability of a better option but because of the inertia and fear of change. A known devil is NOT better than an unknown one because there is a fifty percent chance that unknown may not be a devil at all.
EverSkeptic
Once you let a muthafucka slide, they start figure skating.” –Source Unknown
Keisha Ervin (Emotionally Unavailable (Chyna Black Book 2))
Although unavailable for analysis the moment it happens, being struck a violent blow on the head is a very interesting experience.
Michael Cisco (Animal Money)
The only unavailable choice was whether or not to have Parkinson's. Everything else was up to me.
Michael J. Fox (Always Looking Up: The Adventures of an Incurable Optimist)
Tattoos. Tall, dark, and damaged. The more emotionally unavailable, the better.” She beams. “If he’s got a juvenile rap sheet and motorcycle, I’m open for business.
Elle Kennedy (Good Girl Complex (Avalon Bay, #1))
Life is all about timing... the unreachable becomes reachable, the unavailable become available, the unattainable... attainable. Have the patience, wait it out It's all about timing.
Stacey Charter
Trying to please someone unpredictable, someone emotionally unavailable, uncaring, unkind – trying to keep them happy, win their love – is this not an old story, Theo? A familiar story?
Alex Michaelides (The Silent Patient)
We believe in the wrong things. That's what frustrates me the most. Not the lack of belief, but the belief in the wrong things. You want meaning? Well, the meanings are out there. We're just so damn good at reading them wrong. I don't think meaning is something that can be explained. You have to understand it on your own. It's like when you're starting to read. First, you learn the letters. Then, once you know what sounds the letters make, you use them to sound out words. You know that c-a-t leads to cat and d-o-g leads to dog. But then you have to make that extra leap, to understand that the word, the sound, the "cat" is connected to an actual cat , and that "dog" is connected to an actual dog. It's that leap, that understanding, that leads to meaning. And a lot of the time in life, we're still just sounding things out. We know the sentences and how to say them. We know the ideas and how to present them. We know the prayers and which words to say in what order. But that's only spelling" It's much harder to lie to someone's face. But. It is also much harder to tell the truth to someone's face. The indefatigable pursuit of an unattainable perfection, even though it consist in nothing more than in the pounding of an old piano, is what alone gives a meaning to our life on this unavailing star. (Logan Pearsall Smith) Being alone has nothing to do with how many people are around. (J.R. Moehringer) You could be standing a few feet away...I could have sat next to you on the subway, or brushed beside you as we went through the turnstiles. But whether or not you are here, you are here- because these words are for you, and they wouldn't exist is you weren't here in some way. At last I had it--the Christmas present I'd wanted all along, but hadn't realized. His words. The dream was obviously a sign: he was too enticing to resist. Wow. You must have a lot of faith in me. Which I appreciate. Even if I'm not sure I share it. I could do this on my own, and not freak out that I had no idea what waited for me on the other side of this night. Hope and belief. I'd always wanted hope, but never believed that I could have such an adventure on my own. That I could own it. And love it. But it happened. Because I'm So uncool and so afraid. If there was a clue, that meant the mystery was still intact I fear you may have outmatched me, because not I find these words have nowhere to go. It's hard to answer a question you haven't been asked. It's hard to show that you tried unless you end up succeeding. This was not a haystack. We were people, and people had ways of finding eachother. It was one of those moments when you feel the future so much that is humbles the present. Don't worry. It's your embarrassment at not having the thought that counts. You think fairy tales are only for girls? Here's ahint- ask yourself who wrote them. I assure you, it wasn't just the women. It's the great male fantasy- all it takes is one dance to know that she's the one. All it takes is the sound of her song from the tower, or a look at her sleeping face. And right away you know--this is the girl in your head, sleeping or dancing or singing in front of you. Yes, girls want their princes, but boys want their princesses just as much. And they don't want a very long courtship. They want to know immediately. Be careful what you;re doing, because no one is ever who you want them to be. And the less you really know them, the more likely you are to confuse them with the girl or boy in your head You should never wish for wishful thinking
Rachel Cohn (Dash & Lily's Book of Dares (Dash & Lily, #1))
Whereas God, for reasons of His own, sometimes chooses to let the machine answer. The Supreme Being is unavailable to come to the phone at this time, but He wants you to know what your call is important to Him. In the meantime, for sins of pride, press one. For avarice, press two...
Richard Russo (Winesburg, Ohio)
Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Don't worry about appearing sentimental. Worry about being unavailable; worry about being absent or fraudulent.
Anne Lamott (Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life)
Since my symptoms began 13 years ago, I’ve tried every form of pain management I could access — NSAIDS, nonopioid analgesics, neurologic medications, acupuncture, laser therapy, physical therapy, prolotherapy, massage, and trigger-point injections. Most of these have been unhelpful; others provide temporary relief, often at great expense. At the end of the day, when my body is fully depleted of its resources and in the most pain, a single dose of Percocet is the only tool that silences the pain enough for me to fall asleep. I honestly don’t know what I’d do if Percocet became unavailable to me, and the very thought scares me. I’ve been taking it for five years. To avoid any chance of addiction, I only take it at night and have stayed on a consistently low dose.
Michael Bihovsky
O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle -- be Thou near them! With them -- in spirit -- we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it -- for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.
Mark Twain
all that a world could be, no matter what, is, somewhere, in some way. fullness of possibles, consistency. no matter which talking head, mine for example, adjacent to my body and why not against my face, the angel's, the black shadow face itself, but all the seats are taken, all the worlds unavailable to you.
Jacques Roubaud (Plurality of Worlds of Lewis)
O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst.
Mark Twain (The War Prayer)
According to your sources if you strike life with the radical when it cracks the inside's going to glow with the translucence of red wine. Below us people in dark coats stream home, faces unavailable for comment.
Lori Lamothe
I don’t believe she’ll be available for the rest of the day,” Gabriel said. “No? Is she in Velora, perhaps? I could go to the school and meet with her there.” “No, she’s not in Velora.” Raphael’s voice took on a note of concern. “Is she ill, then? I hope not. Is it a fever?” “No, not a fever—I mean, she’s not ill at all. She’s just unavailable.” “Raphael’s face took on a quizzical expression. “She has not been locked in her room, has she? Really, Gabriel—
Sharon Shinn (Archangel (Samaria, #1))
In a letter to Sebastian... "My brother is preoccupied with affairs of state and all the more suitable of his friends are unavailable at present, which only leaves you..." Seb winced. The minx. She knew how to deliver a neat insult.
Nicola Cornick (The Heart of Christmas (Carhart #0.5; Tallants #3.5))
I N TAOISM there’s a famous saying that goes, “The Tao that can be spoken is not the ultimate Tao.” Another way you could say that, although I’ve never seen it translated this way, is, “As soon as you begin to believe in something, then you can no longer see anything else.” The truth you believe in and cling to makes you unavailable to hear anything new.
Pema Chödrön (The Wisdom of No Escape: And the Path of Loving-Kindness)
you need to address your own availability because if you were truly available, a relationship with an unavailable man that detracts from you wouldn’t be attractive and you’d have ‘folded’ ages ago. You wouldn’t participate in the emotional dishonesty and avoidance because it would be in conflict with you being emotionally available and emotionally honest.
Natalie Lue (Mr Unavailable & The Fallback Girl)
The unexamined life is unavailable to the depressed. That is, perhaps, the greatest revelation I have had: not that depression is compelling but that the people who suffer from it may become compelling because of it. I hope that this basic fact will offer sustenance to those who suffer and will inspire patience and love in those who witness that suffering.
Andrew Solomon (The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression)
expecting anything so fine and wonderful to be turning the corner upon me? I came near being found unworthy. Hard by," says he, "is a café, snug and suitable for the entertainment of idiosyncrasies. Let us go there and have drink while we discuss the unavailability of the categorical." So saying, he marched me and Tobin to the back room of a saloon, and ordered the drinks, and laid the money on the table. He looks at me and Tobin like brothers of his, and we have the segars.
O. Henry (O. Henry: Collected Works (+200 Stories))
If you keep putting your bucket down an empty well then yes it is going to feel like very hard work, but it’s highly unproductive and not real work.
Natalie Lue (Mr Unavailable & The Fallback Girl)
It takes confidence to be wholeheartedly intimate and passionately committed. Men who are emotionally unavailable have a self-confidence deficit, plain and simple. So man up and get rid of those insecurities or whatever it is that keeps you from opening up. Because if you're not man enough to talk about your own feelings, then you're not man enough to be in a committed relationship.
Dennis James
Trying to please someone unpredictable, someone emotionally unavailable, uncaring, unkind – trying to keep them happy, win their love – is this not an old story, Theo? A familiar story?’ I clenched my fist and didn’t speak. Ruth went on, hesitantly: ‘I know how
Alex Michaelides (The Silent Patient)
Science is delighted frustration. It is about asking questions, to which the answers may be unavailable – now, or perhaps ever. It is about noticing regularities, asserting that these regularities must have natural explanations and searching for those explanations.
Brian Cox (Forces of Nature)
I felt like there was some kind of cliche 'only on TV' ad playing in the background as we walked down the hall into a growing blackness where the power had failed. 'Hormones got you in a bind? Feeling overwhelmed by your biological impulses? Are you hot for the only unavailable male around for miles?' As if I didn't have enough to worr yabout, all I could think of was when arme-i-gedding-screwed.
Nicole Sheldon (Unlikely Protector)
But my research had taught me that the tissue of contradictions that was my personality was itself, at best, a poem, where “poem” is understood as referring to a failure of language to be equal to the possibilities it figures; only then could my fraudulence be a project and not merely a pathology; only then could my distance from myself be redescribed as critical, aesthetic, as opposed to a side effect of what experts might call my substance problem, felicitous phrase, the origins of which lay not in my desire to evade reality, but in my desire to have a chemical excuse for reality’s unavailability.
Ben Lerner (Leaving the Atocha Station)
He says the only people he ever really wants to meet fort a drink somewhere are all either dead or unavailable. He says he never even wants to have lunch with anybody, even, unless he thinks there's a good chance it's going to turn out to be Jesus, the person- or the Buddha, or Huineng, or Shankaracharya, or somebody like that.
J.D. Salinger (Franny and Zooey)
Forcing everyone into the office every day is an organizational SPoF (Single Point of Failure). If the office loses power or Internet or air conditioning, it's no longer functional as a place to do work. If a company doesn't have any training or infrastructure to work around that, it means it's going to be unavailable to its customers.
David Heinemeier Hansson (Remote: Office Not Required)
But given that depression happened to me, and I did have support, I found it was possible after a time, to achieve a kind of joy totally disconnected from the world. I wanted to be unavailable and in that place without the pain. I still want it. It is coloured white and filled with a singing silence. It is an endless ice-rink. It is Antarctica.
Jenny Diski
Without an integrated formal property system, a modern market economy is inconceivable. Had the advanced nations of the West not integrated all representations into one standardized property system and made it accessible to all, they could not have specialized and divided labor to create the expanded market network and capital that have produced their present wealth. The inefficiencies of non-Western markets have a lot to do with the fragmentation of their property arrangements and the unavailability of standard representations.
Hernando de Soto (The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else)
she clung to him, she poured out her terrors, her unavailing regrets, and the far echoes turned them all to jeering laughter.
Mark Twain (The Adventures of Tom Sawyer)
Trying to please someone unpredictable, someone emotionally unavailable, uncaring, unkind—trying to keep them happy, win their love—is this not an old story,
Alex Michaelides (The Silent Patient)
With agoraphobia you feel safe only when you are in certain environments. Your anxiety increases every time your ’safe place’ is unavailable, blocked, or becomes more distant.
Thomas Marra (Depressed and Anxious: The Dialectical Behavior Therapy Workbook for Overcoming Depression and Anxiety)
Marking you will show him you’re mine. It will show others you’re unavailable.
C. Hallman (King of Corium (Corium University Trilogy, #1))
Parents who are emotionally unavailable, indifferent, uninterested, too busy and/or highly critical set their children up for self-rejection and the need for external validation.
Tara Bianca (The Flower of Heaven: Opening the Divine Heart Through Conscious Friendship & Love Activism)
The obsessions of others embarrass and repel because they seem to dehumanize, to make the obsessed one robotic and alien and unavailable.
Terry Castle (The Professor and Other Writings)
Irony was new to her and tasted oddly good, like a previously unavailable summer fruit.
Meg Wolitzer (The Interestings)
I am Farway Gaius McCarthy, son of Empra McCarthy. Birth date unavailable. With timelessness in my blood and nowhere calling to my heart
Ryan Graudin (Invictus)
To read is to withdraw. To make oneself unavailable. One would feel easier about it’, said Sir Kevin, ‘if the pursuit itself were less … selfish.
Alan Bennett (The Uncommon Reader)
it would make things much simpler for a man like him if he knew she were unavailable.
Neal Stephenson (Seveneves)
The mother’s unavailability to supply the emotional fuel dampened or thwarted the child’s desire to individuate and become his real self,
James F. Masterson (Search For The Real Self: Unmasking The Personality Disorders Of Our Age)
The biggest problem with being with an emotionally unavailable man is that his words and actions tends to confuse women,
Bruce Bryans (He's Not That Interested, He's Just Passing Time: 40 Unmistakable Behaviors Of Men Who Avoid Commitment And Play Games With Women)
Apologists cannot get away with claiming that religion provides them with some sort of inside track to defining what is good and what is bad—a privileged source unavailable to atheists.
Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion)
Mr Unavailable’s inadvertently complicit partner is you, the Fallback Girl, the woman he habitually defaults to or ‘falls back’ on to have his needs met while selling you short in the process. Accommodating his idiosyncrasies and fickle whims, you’re ripe for a relationship with him because you are unavailable yourself (although you may not know it) and are slipping your own commitment issues in through the back door behind his. You get blinded by chemistry, sex, common interests and the promise of what he could be, if only he changed or you turned into The Perfect Woman. Too understanding and making far too many excuses for him, you have some habits and beliefs that are standing in the way of you having a mutually, fulfilling healthy relationship…with an available man. Pursuing or having relationships with Mr Unavailable is symbolic of your need to learn to love yourself more and to set some boundaries and have better standards.
Natalie Lue (Mr Unavailable & The Fallback Girl)
After such knowledge, and given the persistence of racial violence and the unavailability of legal protection, I asked myself, what else was there to sustain our will to persevere but laughter?
Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man)
The flesh,' as Saint Paul used the term, refers, ironically, not to our bodies but to fallen human nature. The 'carnal' spirit is the one that devours things for itself and refuses to make them an oblation to God. The carnal spirit is cruel, egocentric, avaricious, gluttonous, and lecherous, and as such us fevered, restless, and divided. The spiritual man, on the other hand, is alone the man who both knows what flesh is for and can enter into its amplitude. The lecher, for example, supposes that he knows more about love than the virgin or the continent man. He knows nothing. Only the virgin and the faithful spouse knows what love is about. The glutton supposes that he knows the pleasures of food, but the true knowledge of food is unavailable to his dribbling and surfeited jowls. The difference between the carnal man and the spiritual man is not physical. They may look alike and weigh the same. The different lies, rather, between one's being divided, snatching and grabbing at things, even nonphysical things like fame and power, or being whole and receiving all things as Adam was meant to receive them, in order to offer them as an oblation to their Giver.
Thomas Howard (Evangelical is Not Enough: Worship of God in Liturgy and Sacrament)
He had no cause for self-reproach on the score of neglect, or want of thought, for he had been devoted to her service; and yet a hundret little occasions rose up before him on which he fancied he might have been more zealous, and more earnest, and wished he had been. We need be careful how we deal with those about us; when every death carries to some small circle of survivors, thoughts of so much omitted, and so little done; of so many things forgotten, and so many more which might have been repaired. There is no remorse so deep, as that which is unavailing; if we would be spared its tortures, let us remember this, in time.
Charles Dickens (Oliver Twist)
They have learned not to expect their father to attend to them or to be expressive about much of anything. They have come to expect him to be psychologically unavailable. They have also learned that he is not accountable in his emotional absence, that Mother does not have the power either to engage him or to confront him. In other words, Father’s neglect and Mother’s ineffectiveness at countering it teach the boys that, in this family at least, men’s participation is not a responsibility but rather a voluntary and discretionary act. Third, they learn that Mother, and perhaps women in general, need not be taken too seriously. Finally, they learn that not just Mother but the values she manifests in the family—connection, expressivity—are to be devalued and ignored. The subtext message is, “engage in ‘feminine’ values and activities and risk a similar devaluation yourself.” The paradox for the boys is that the only way to connect with their father is to echo his disconnection. Conversely, being too much like Mother threatens further disengagement or perhaps, even active reprisal. In this moment, and thousands of other ordinary moments, these boys are learning to accept psychological neglect, to discount nurture, and to turn the vice of such abandonment into a manly virtue.
Terrence Real (I Don't Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression)
Why did it have to be this way? Why did she not feel attracted to this boy, who was kind and personable, close to her in age and probably good for her? Instead it was the professor for whom she secretly yearned - a man not only old, unknown and unavailable, but also wrong. It puzzled her endlessly that she was not, and had never really been, interested in happiness - that magic word that was the subject of so many books, workshops and TV shows. She did not want to be unhappy. Of course, she didn't. It just did not occur to her to seek happiness as a worthwhile goal in life. How otherwise could she allow herself to carry a torch for a man like Azur?
Elif Shafak (Havva'nın Üç Kızı)
Another form of luxury is to be unavailable. To turn your back on the daily din is a privilege. Letting others take over tasks in your absence. The decision not to reply to text messages or pick up when the phone rings.
Erling Kagge (Silence: In the Age of Noise)
If I had to sit with a Mr Unavailable and listen to his sob story, you would see me rubbing the tips of my thumb and forefinger together as I played the smallest violin in the world. I only wish more of you would do the same.
Natalie Lue
THE MISCONCEPTION: You know why you like the things you like and feel the way you feel. THE TRUTH: The origin of certain emotional states is unavailable to you, and when pressed to explain them, you will just make something up.
David McRaney (You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself)
I believe most plain girls are virtuous because of the scarcity of opportunity to be otherwise. They shield themselves with an aura of unavailableness (for which after a time they begin to take credit) largely as a defense tactic. In my particular case, I could not hide behind the curtain of voluntary goodness. I was being crushed by two unrelenting forces: the uneasy suspicion that I might not be a normal female and my newly awakening sexual appetite.
Maya Angelou (I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (Maya Angelou's Autobiography, #1))
I’d never slept with a woman before, though I’d spent most of my teens and college years obsessed with one or another. They’d all had boyfriends, or girlfriends, or else they were just patently not someone who would ever fancy me. When I told Edith this, she asked if I thought I’d gone for unavailable people because I knew I’d never have to face the reality that being with them would not solve all my problems. I told her she had no business saying something that perceptive.
Naoise Dolan (Exciting Times)
I was extremely curious about the alternatives to the kind of life I had been leading, and my friends and I exchanged rumors and scraps of information we dug from official publications. I was struck less by the West's technological developments and high living standards than by the absence of political witch-hunts, the lack of consuming suspicion, the dignity of the individual, and the incredible amount of liberty. To me, the ultimate proof of freedom in the West was that there seemed to be so many people there attacking the West and praising China. Almost every other day the front page of Reference, the newspaper which carded foreign press items, would feature some eulogy of Mao and the Cultural Revolution. At first I was angered by these, but they soon made me see how tolerant another society could be. I realized that this was the kind of society I wanted to live in: where people were allowed to hold different, even outrageous views. I began to see that it was the very tolerance of oppositions, of protesters, that kept the West progressing. Still, I could not help being irritated by some observations. Once I read an article by a Westerner who came to China to see some old friends, university professors, who told him cheerfully how they had enjoyed being denounced and sent to the back end of beyond, and how much they had relished being reformed. The author concluded that Mao had indeed made the Chinese into 'new people' who would regard what was misery to a Westerner as pleasure. I was aghast. Did he not know that repression was at its worst when there was no complaint? A hundred times more so when the victim actually presented a smiling face? Could he not see to what a pathetic condition these professors had been reduced, and what horror must have been involved to degrade them so? I did not realize that the acting that the Chinese were putting on was something to which Westerners were unaccustomed, and which they could not always decode. I did not appreciate either that information about China was not easily available, or was largely misunderstood, in the West, and that people with no experience of a regime like China's could take its propaganda and rhetoric at face value. As a result, I assumed that these eulogies were dishonest. My friends and I would joke that they had been bought by our government's 'hospitality." When foreigners were allowed into certain restricted places in China following Nixon's visit, wherever they went the authorities immediately cordoned off enclaves even within these enclaves. The best transport facilities, shops, restaurants, guest houses and scenic spots were reserved for them, with signs reading "For Foreign Guests Only." Mao-tai, the most sought-after liquor, was totally unavailable to ordinary Chinese, but freely available to foreigners. The best food was saved for foreigners. The newspapers proudly reported that Henry Kissinger had said his waistline had expanded as a result of the many twelve-course banquets he enjoyed during his visits to China. This was at a time when in Sichuan, "Heaven's Granary," our meat ration was half a pound per month, and the streets of Chengdu were full of homeless peasants who had fled there from famine in the north, and were living as beggars. There was great resentment among the population about how the foreigners were treated like lords. My friends and I began saying among ourselves: "Why do we attack the Kuomintang for allowing signs saying "No Chinese or Dogs" aren't we doing the same? Getting hold of information became an obsession. I benefited enormously from my ability to read English, as although the university library had been looted during the Cultural Revolution, most of the books it had lost had been in Chinese. Its extensive English-language collection had been turned upside down, but was still largely intact.
Jung Chang (Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China)
The Galvin family’s DNA was part of that study. DeLisi seemed poised for a breakthrough. But within a few years, she, like Robert Freedman, learned the hard way about the vagaries of the marketplace. In 2000, Parke-Davis was bought by Pfizer. Almost right away, DeLisi learned that Pfizer was canceling DeLisi’s project. All work would stop immediately. And all the genetic material she had accumulated at Parke-Davis, including the Galvin family’s DNA, would remain the property of Pfizer—unavailable for DeLisi to use, unless
Robert Kolker (Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family)
You feel all the time that you want to do something, that there is some affect unavailable to you, that there's a physical need of impossible urgency and discomfort for which there is no relief, as though you were constantly vomiting from your stomach but had no mouth.
Andrew Solomon (The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression)
The narcissistic mother cannot give her child unconditional love. She’s not capable of being self-less, devoted, warm, mature, or attentive to you. Instead, everything is about her. Life revolves around meeting her unrealistic, immature needs. She expects your undivided attention. Your admiration. Your praises. Your loyalty to her. She demands you to meet her needs no matter how ridiculous they can be.
Dana Arcuri (Soul Rescue: How to Break Free From Narcissistic Abuse & Heal Trauma)
Meet anybody for a drink. Oh, he had to go out last night and meet this television writer for a drink downtown, in the Village and all. That's what started it. He says the only people he ever really wants to meet for a drink somewhere are all either dead or unavailable.
J.D. Salinger (Franny and Zooey)
We are all searching for love, some at the bottom of a bottle, some at the casino, some in the eyes of a new lover. The more we search outside ourselves, we more desperate we become. We suffer not because love's unavailable, but because we are not looking in the right place.
Vironika Tugaleva
And remember: if your boundaries are being crossed by your partner, it is not first and foremost your partner's fault, although they do carry responsibility for their own behavior and lack of awareness. However, it is your responsibility to ensure that your own boundaries are healthy.
Gabriella Kortsch (Emotional Unavailability & Neediness: Two Sides of the Same Coin)
You do not have to fix the whole equation. You do have to fix your part of it. This is done by accepting complete, 100 percent responsibility for everything you are thinking, feeling, doing, or not doing. It is letting go of blaming ANYone for ANYthing. It is growing up and being an adult.
Patti Henry (The Emotionally Unavailable Man)
The origin of the caste system, formulated by the great legislator Manu, was admirable. He saw clearly that men are distinguished by natural evolution into four great classes: those capable of offering service to society through their bodily labor (Sudras); those who serve through mentality, skill, agriculture, trade, commerce, business life in general (Vaisyas); those whose talents are administrative, executive, and protective-rulers and warriors (Kshatriyas); those of contemplative nature, spiritually inspired and inspiring (Brahmins). “Neither birth nor sacraments nor study nor ancestry can decide whether a person is twice-born (i.e., a Brahmin);” the Mahabharata declares, “character and conduct only can decide.” 281 Manu instructed society to show respect to its members insofar as they possessed wisdom, virtue, age, kinship or, lastly, wealth. Riches in Vedic India were always despised if they were hoarded or unavailable for charitable purposes. Ungenerous men of great wealth were assigned a low rank in society. Serious evils arose when the caste system became hardened through the centuries into a hereditary halter. Social reformers like Gandhi and the members of very numerous societies in India today are making slow but sure progress in restoring the ancient values of caste, based solely on natural qualification and not on birth. Every nation on earth has its own distinctive misery-producing karma to deal with and remove; India, too, with her versatile and invulnerable spirit, shall prove herself equal to the task of caste-reformation.
Paramahansa Yogananda (Autobiography of a Yogi)
Sentimentality was used because other political avenues were closed, and authors hoped that through it they could bring about a political change that would fulfill the egalitarian promises of the Revolution. Real political venues were unavailable, so fiction became a medium for authors to appeal to audiences for change.
Todd M. Brenneman (Homespun Gospel: The Triumph of Sentimentality in Contemporary American Evangelicalism)
{Freedom} is certainly not the right to own the economic, social, political, or cultural capital in order to dominate others and trade their happiness in a monopolistic market. Freedom is the process by which you develop a practice for being unavailable for servitude. -Avery F Gordon paraphrasing Toni Cade Bambara p.42
Maggie Nelson (On Freedom: Four Songs of Care and Constraint)
A real person, open-ended, can only be approached as a hypothesis. A character in fiction is demanded to be accountable. Some characters are more willing to offer a context. The young women in Jane Austen's novels, for instance, seek happiness and suffer when happiness is made unavailable, by situation, chance, or folly.
Yiyun Li (Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life)
prominent spokespeople lecture us that cocaine is a drug with “neuropsychological properties” that “lock people into perpetual usage” so that the only way people can stop is when “supplies become unavailable,” after which “the user is then driven to obtain additional cocaine without particular regard for social constraints.
Stanton Peele (Diseasing of America: How We Allowed Recovery Zealots and the Treatment Industry to Convince Us We Are Out of Control)
Emotionally unavailable means not fully emotionally present. It’s struggling or being unable to access emotions healthily and as a result, being emotionally distant due to ‘walls’ which basically act as barriers to true emotional intimacy. Fully experiencing all feelings, whether good, bad, or indifferent, is avoided because they create vulnerability, so feelings are experienced often for a limited time and in bursts as opposed to consistently feeling on an ongoing basis. Emotionally unavailable equates to intimacy issues, which is being afraid of the consequences of getting truly emotionally close to someone such that to lose them would hurt.
Natalie Lue (Mr Unavailable & The Fallback Girl)
Now that seemed like a blatantly obvious metaphor—his keeping a literal gulf between us, my readily meeting him each night. No wonder I'd gotten so confused. He'd been keeping careful boundaries and I'd been ignoring them. I was so bad at this, so unprepared to find myself drawn to someone completely emotionally unavailable.
Emily Henry (Beach Read)
When our caregivers are unavailable, most of time it has nothing to do with LOVE for the child, however, the child cannot possibly know this. The child winds up believing that the unavailable parent is not available due to some defect within the child. We believe that if we were “enough” the parent would CHOOSE to be available.
Mary Crocker Cook (Awakening Hope. a Developmental, Behavioral, Biological Approach to Codependency Treatment.)
The bartender is Irish. Jumped a student visa about ten years ago but nothing for him to worry about. The cook, though, is Mexican. Some poor bastard at ten dollars an hour—and probably has to wash the dishes, too. La Migra take notice of his immigration status—they catch sight of his bowl cut on the way home to Queens and he’ll have a problem. He looks different than the Irish and the Canadians—and he’s got Lou Dobbs calling specifically for his head every night on the radio. (You notice, by the way, that you never hear Dobbs wringing his hands over our border to the North. Maybe the “white” in Great White North makes that particular “alien superhighway” more palatable.) The cook at the Irish bar, meanwhile, has the added difficulty of predators waiting by the subway exit for him (and any other Mexican cooks or dishwashers) when he comes home on Friday payday. He’s invariably cashed his check at a check-cashing store; he’s relatively small—and is unlikely to call the cops. The perfect victim. The guy serving my drinks, on the other hand, as most English-speaking illegal aliens, has been smartly gaming the system for years, a time-honored process everybody at the INS is fully familiar with: a couple of continuing education classes now and again (while working off the books) to get those student visas. Extensions. A work visa. A “farm” visa. Weekend across the border and repeat. Articulate, well-connected friends—the type of guys who own, for instance, lots of Irish bars—who can write letters of support lauding your invaluable and “specialized” skills, unavailable from homegrown bartenders. And nobody’s looking anyway. But I digress…
Anthony Bourdain (Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook)
Mortal, what hast thou of such grave concern That thou indulgest in too sickly plaints? Why this bemoaning and beweeping death? For if thy life aforetime and behind To thee was grateful, and not all thy good Was heaped as in sieve to flow away And perish unavailingly, why not, Even like a banqueter, depart the hall, Laden with life?
Lucretius
There are countless digital versions, but Futura ND comes directly from original sources, and the latest release includes alternatives previously unavailable. Caution: the protrusion of pointed apexes (“M,” “N,” “w”) is called “overshoot,” an optical compensation for type intended for Text sizes, but potentially distracting when large.
Stephen Coles (The Anatomy of Type)
Go for the best, not the best available. You'd be surprised how many people have time for you when they appear to be unavailable. My best resources and people I spend time with the most are often people with families, kids and multiple jobs or responsibilities. All you have to do is ask, and the best will be available or can direct you to someone who is.
Robert J. Braathe
Hardening the heart against vulnerability, trust and a new partner will either forever keep us from a truly emotionally satisfying, enriching, and growth-producing partnership, or will throw us unwittingly back into precisely the same type of painful thing again, because we have not examined what happened, except under the out-of-focus microscope of blame.
Gabriella Kortsch (Emotional Unavailability & Neediness: Two Sides of the Same Coin)
aren’t you tired of needing things from those who are incapable of providing the things you need
R.H. Sin (Algedonic)
I write a lot because I don't talk much. If I don't write, I'll talk much.
Nurina Izzati (Single Unavailable)
The bottom line is you must do your part to change the system. It will not get better without your active, loving participation.
Patti Henry (The Emotionally Unavailable Man)
People THRIVE on positive reinforcement. They wither with criticism.
Patti Henry (The Emotionally Unavailable Man)
You want to commit to those who don’t want to commit and who actively resist commitment.
Natalie Lue (Mr Unavailable & The Fallback Girl)
Make a list of what you’re waiting for because you know that inaction is often waiting on others or some random cosmic shit to come along and make things easy for you.
Natalie Lue (Mr Unavailable & The Fallback Girl)
How to tell your pretend-boyfriend and his real boyfriend that your internal processors are failing: 1. The biological term is depression, but you don't have an official diagnostic (diagnosis) and it's a hard word to say. It feels heavy and stings your mouth. Like when you tried to eat a battery when you were small and your parents got upset. 2. Instead, you try to hide the feeling. But the dark stain has already spilled across your hardwiring and clogged your processor. You don't have access to any working help files to fix this. Tech support is unavailable for your model. (No extended warranty exists.) 3. Pretend the reason you have no energy is because you're sick with a generic bug. 4. You have time to sleep. Your job is canceling out many of your functions; robots can perform cleaning and maintenance in hotels for much better wage investment, and since you are not (yet) a robot, you know you will be replaced soon. 5. The literal translation of the word depression: you are broken and devalued and have no further use. 6. No one refurbishes broken robots. 7. Please self-terminate.
A. Merc Rustad (The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2015)
Elephants are therefore left only the option of being afraid of little things that sneak up and surprise them. Such things include mice, loud noises, spreadsheet surprises and sudden disappointments, food that is on the menu but unavailable, unannounced visitors, word of the displeasure of a higher executive, bad news about the effect of NutraSweet on the human kidney.
Stanley Bing (Throwing the Elephant)
Empaths may unknowingly get involved with toxic partners and become anxious, depressed, or ill. They give their hearts too easily to narcissists and other unavailable people. Empaths are loving and expect others to be that way, which doesn’t always happen. They also absorb their partner’s stress and emotions, such as anger or depression, simply by interacting with them,
Judith Orloff (The Empath's Survival Guide: Life Strategies for Sensitive People)
The following are a few of the ways Nice Guys unconsciously maintain a monogamous bond to their mothers. Look over the list. Note any of the behavior patterns that may serve to keep you monogamous to your mother. Share this information with a safe person. •​Over-involvement with work or hobbies. •​Creating relationships with people who need fixing. •​Addictions to drugs or alcohol. •​Sexual addictions to pornography, masturbation, fantasy, chat lines, or hookers. •​Affairs. •​Sexual dysfunction — lack of desire, inability to get or maintain an erection, or premature ejaculation. •​Forming relationships with women who are angry, sick, depressive, compulsive, addicted, unfaithful, or otherwise unavailable. •​Avoiding intercourse or taking vows of celibacy.
Robert A. Glover (No More Mr. Nice Guy)
In larger scale disasters, bicycles are also proving to be valuable resources. After a hurricane, a tornado, or a flood, the streets tend to be clogged with debris, fuel is unavailable, cars are out of commission, and resources are strained. A bicycle with tough, knobby tires is often the only way to get around the city. These are times when the latent demand for bicycling makes itself known.
Elly Blue (Bikenomics: How Bicycling Can Save The Economy)
This country’s in the grips of total pandemonium. All over Japan, it’s as if eighty million people had simultaneously gone out of their minds. Staple foods are either rationed or else completely unavailable, and the distribution always seems to be running behind schedule. On top of that, the authorities have cracked down on hoarding, and anyone caught laying in supplies is ruthlessly punished.
Akimitsu Takagi (Tattoo Murder Case (Soho crime))
But there's a period in which every law student-every good law student- finds that their vision shifts, somehow, and realises that the law is inescapable, that no interaction, no aspect of daily life, escapes it's long graspy fingers. A street becomes a shocking disaster, a riot of violations and potential civil lawsuits. A marriage looks like a divorce. The world becomes temporarily unavailable.
Hanya Yanagihara (A Little Life)
Most people in the psychology field believe that if we do not get a child to bond at a deep level with someone by age eight, we have lost them. We can never recover them and teach them empathy. Never.
Patti Henry (The Emotionally Unavailable Man)
Try to write in a directly emotional way, instead of being too subtle or oblique. Don't be afraid of your material or your past. Be afraid of wasting any more time obsessing about how you look and how people see you. Be afraid of not getting your writing done. If something inside you is real, we will probably find it interesting, and it will probably be universal. So you must risk placing real emotion at the center of your work. Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Don't worry about appearing sentimental. Worry about being unavailable; worry about being absent or fraudulent. Risk being unliked. Tell the truth as you understand it. If you're a writer, you have a moral obligation to do this. And it is a revolutionary act - truth is always subversive.
Anne Lamott (Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life)
But even as I said that, I didn’t believe it. Neither did Ruth. “I don’t think so. I think her behavior suggests she is quite damaged—lacking in empathy and integrity and just plain kindness—all the qualities you brim with.” I shook my head. “That’s not true.” “It is true, Theo.” Ruth hesitated. “Don’t you think perhaps you’ve been here before?” “With Kathy?” Ruth shook her head. “I don’t mean that. I mean with your parents. When you were younger. If there’s a childhood dynamic here you might be replaying.” “No.” I suddenly felt irritated. “What’s happening with Kathy has got nothing to do with my childhood.” “Oh, really?” Ruth sounded disbelieving. “Trying to please someone unpredictable, someone emotionally unavailable, uncaring, unkind—trying to keep them happy, win their love—is this not an old story, Theo? A familiar story?” I clenched my fist and didn’t speak. Ruth went on hesitantly, “I know how sad you feel. But I want you to consider the possibility that you felt this sadness long before you met Kathy. It’s a sadness you’ve been carrying around for many years. You know, Theo, one of the hardest things to admit is that we weren’t loved when we needed it most. It’s a terrible feeling, the pain of not being loved.
Alex Michaelides (The Silent Patient)
It was unfair to have enjoyed her body when she was young and then burdened her with children and a thousand duties, only to now feel miserable whenever he had to venture into public with her and her sorry hair, her unavailing makeup, her seemingly self-spiting choice of dress. He pitied her for the unfairness; he felt guilty. But he couldn’t help blaming her, too, because her unattractiveness advertised unhappiness.
Jonathan Franzen (Crossroads)
In therapy, when pathological defenses start to crumble, the patient lets in more material from their background that they've been defending against. Suddenly, memories emerge that were unavailable at the beginning of the therapy. When Laura had been intent on defending her father, she'd blocked many of her negative memories of him; but now, after two years of therapy, those painful memories began to flow like hot lava.
Catherine Gildiner (Good Morning, Monster: A Therapist Shares Five Heroic Stories of Emotional Recovery)
There’s nothing like nine months of pregnancy and eighteen hours of childbirth to make you see that men and women are really, really different. Men can’t gestate and birth new human life. Women can. There’s a huge area of activity that the sexes do not share. Whether the author of life is God or simply Nature, it seemed to declare that people can have vastly different roles, unavailable to certain other people, and yet all be valued equally.
Jennifer Fulwiler (Something Other than God: How I Passionately Sought Happiness and Accidentally Found It)
Don’t you get it?” I spring up from the chair and pace. “It’s hopeless and I know it and I have no urge to date him. No urge, whatsoever. I don’t expect him to tell me he loves me because I don’t want him to and I know he won’t.
Saffron A. Kent (The Unrequited)
Thus despite the bland assertions of sociologists, “high visibility” actually rendered one un -visible—whether at high noon in Macy’s window or illuminated by flaming torches and flashbulbs while undergoing the ritual sacrifice that was dedicated to the ideal of white supremacy. After such knowledge, and given the persistence of racial violence and the unavailability of legal protection, I asked myself, what else was there to sustain our will to persevere but laughter?
Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man)
The unpredictability of our unavailing lives is inane and frivolous, with the grim reaper only ever one step behind us. Your greatest challenge is to live the life you dream of, before his deathly scythe decapitates your peripheral existence
Michael Khatkar
Americans are beginning to wake up to the travesty that a federal government that controls our medical care has become. Everyone is finally realizing that what’s happening in veterans’ hospitals now will happen across our entire medical system under the Affordable Care Act. Many are now saying that what we see going on in our VA medical system—double sets of books, people dying because of delayed or unavailable treatment—is likely to be what’s coming to the American medical industry.
Michael Savage (Stop the Coming Civil War: My Savage Truth)
I chose people who made me feel anxious and insecure and re-created my childhood circumstances of getting erratic attention. I gravitated toward people who were either physically or emotionally unavailable to subconsciously ensure I was getting a constant hit from my “internal drug cabinet.” Instead of heroin or cocaine, I used to be addicted to cortisol and adrenaline (which turns into dopamine! Yay!). That drove me to pick people who couldn’t give me safety or stability, which caused those chemicals to go buck wild on my brain. You live in London? Yes, please. You work until three A.M., and when you are available, you’re super tired, so every time we have the chance to connect, your eyes are half closed? Sure, let’s move in together. One day you tell me you’re in love with me, but then you disappear and go on a week-long bender on Long Island? Absolutely. You travel for four months at a time in places that have horrible cell service? Don’t mind if I do marry ya.
Whitney Cummings (I'm Fine...And Other Lies)
Oh, it is true enough. I may as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb (an old country saying, not of much account, but it will do for a rough soldier), and so I will speak my mind, regardless of your pleasure, and without hoping or intending to get your pardon. Why, Miss Everdene, it is in this manner that your good looks may do more harm than good in the world." The sergeant looked down the mead in critical abstraction. "Probably some one man on an average falls in love with each ordinary woman. She can marry him: he is content, and leads a useful life. Such women as you a hundred men always covet—your eyes will bewitch scores on scores into an unavailing fancy for you—you can only marry one of that many. Out of these say twenty will endeavour to drown the bitterness of despised love in drink; twenty more will mope away their lives without a wish or attempt to make a mark in he world, because they have no ambition apart from their attachment to you; twenty more—the susceptible person myself possibly among them—will be always draggling after you, getting where they may just see you, doing desperate things. Men are such constant fools! The rest may try to get over their passion with more or less success. But all these men will be saddened. And not only those ninety-nine men, but the ninety-nine women they might have married are saddened with them. There's my tale. That's why I say that a woman so charming as yourself, Miss Everdene, is hardly a blessing to her race.
Thomas Hardy
... the American press tended to portray a China that was overwhelmingly negative and Beijing-centered. And yet like any waiguoren in China, I knew that I had access to a great deal of information that was unavailable to the Chinese, and as a result I often felt as if I understood the political situation better than the locals. It was impossible to avoid this type of arrogance, even though I realized that it was misleading and condescending, and I was careful not to voice my opinions openly.
Peter Hessler (River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze)
Mr Unavailable blindly assumes that he acts as he does because he’s never met the ‘right’ woman. His ego forgets to remind himself that in his unavailable state, he’s not the right man – for anyone. By playing silly games (even if he doesn’t think he is), he gets to let himself off the hook and continue looking to the future where he thinks that his perfect woman exists. He’s failed to recognise that his resistance in relationships isn’t caused by the women he’s involved with, but by himself.
Natalie Lue (Mr Unavailable & The Fallback Girl)
If it were not for the thicket— RAPUNZEL’S PRINCE:                   A thicket’s no trick.                   Is it thick? CINDERELLA’S PRINCE:                   It’s the thickest. RAPUNZEL’S PRINCE:                   The quickest                   Is pick it                   Apart with a stick— CINDERELLA’S PRINCE:                   Yes, but even one prick—                   It’s my thing about blood. RAPUNZEL’S PRINCE:                   Well, it’s sick! CINDERELLA’S PRINCE:                   It’s no sicker                   Than your thing with dwarves. RAPUNZEL’S PRINCE:                   Dwarfs. CINDERELLA’S PRINCE:                   Dwarfs . . . RAPUNZEL’S PRINCE:                   Dwarfs are very upsetting. BOTH:                   Not forgetting                   The tasks unachievable,                   Mountains unscalable—                   If it’s conceivable                   But unavailable,                   Ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah-ah—                   Agony!
James Lapine (Into the Woods)
I once heard a woman who'd lost her dog say that she felt as though a color were suddenly missing from her world: the dog had introduced to her field of vision some previously unavailable hue, and without the dog, that color was gone. That seemed to capture the experience of loving a dog with eminent simplicity. I'd amend it only slightly and say that if we are open to what they have to give us, dogs can introduce us to several colors, with names like wildness and nurturance and trust and joy.
Caroline Knapp
She was without memory: Roche had decided that some time ago. She was without consistency or even coherence. She knew only what she was and what she had been born to; to this knowledge she was tethered; it was her stability, enabling her to adventure in security. Adventuring, she was indifferent, perhaps blind, to the contradiction between what she said and what she was so secure of being; and this indifference or blindness, this absence of the sense of the absurd, was part of her unavailability.
V.S. Naipaul (Guerrillas)
What a set up for little girls! What a set up to be taught a wonderful prince will come along and meet all your emotional needs while at the same time we are teaching our little boys not to feel. To be tough. To cut off from their emotional selves. The
Patti Henry (The Emotionally Unavailable Man)
According to the prevailing notion, freedom manifests as “preference-satisfying behavior.” About the preferences themselves we are to maintain a principled silence, out of deference to the autonomy of the individual. They are said to express the authentic core of the self, and are for that reason unavailable for rational scrutiny. But this logic would seem to break down when our preferences are the object of massive social engineering, conducted not by government “nudgers” but by those who want to monetize our attention.
Matthew B. Crawford
Deviance of any type, she argued, was no more than a mismatch between an individual’s way of navigating through life and the catalog of behaviors and emotions that her society tended to prefer and value. Normalcy in any society was only an edited version of the grand text of all possible human behaviors; there was no reason to expect that every society would do the editing in precisely the same way. Ways of being in the world were abnormal only in the sense that the local context created “the psychic dilemmas of the socially unavailable.
Charles King (Gods of Upper Air: How a Circle of Renegade Anthropologists Reinvented Race, Sex, and Gender in the Twentieth Century)
Arin nearly got his throat cut. “The god of life preserve you,” Cheat gasped. He staggered back, his knife glinting in the shadows of his small bedroom. “What the hell are you doing here? Breaking into my home like a thief in the night. Climbing through the window. You’re lucky I saw your face in time.” “There’s something I have to tell you.” “Start with why you couldn’t come by the auction house at a decent hour. I thought you had a free pass. What about the girl’s seal ring?” “Unavailable.” Cheat squinted up at Arin, tapping the flat of the short blade against his thigh. In the dim light of a streetlamp, a slow grin spread across his face. “Had a falling-out with your lady, did you? A lovers’ quarrel?” Arin felt his face go dark and tight. “Easy, lad. Just tell me: are the rumors true?” “No.” “All right.” Cheat held up his hands as if in surrender, the knife held loosely. “If you say they’re not, they’re not.” “Cheat. I broke curfew, scaled the general’s wall, and stole through a guarded city to speak with you. Don’t you think we have more important things to discuss than Valorian gossip?
Marie Rutkoski (The Winner's Curse (The Winner's Trilogy, #1))
Sombre thoughts and fancies often require a little real soil or substance to flourish in; they are the dark pine-trees which take root in, and frown over the rifts of the scathed and petrified heart, and are chiefly nourished by the rain of unavailing tears, and the vapors of fancy.
John Frederick Boyes
For almost the entirety of our species’ existence on this planet, grains have been unavailable as a food source, as they are toxic to humans when eaten raw. The discovery of methods for rendering them edible was the spark that ignited the agricultural revolution. Grains are nutrient poor and contain substances that block nutrient absorption (phytates), disrupt the intestinal lining (lectins), lead to life-threatening gastrointestinal illness in vulnerable populations, and may be a critical factor in the pathogenesis of a whole host of chronic diseases (gluten).
Josh Turknett (The Migraine Miracle: A Sugar-Free, Gluten-Free, Ancestral Diet to Reduce Inflammation and Relieve Your Headaches for Good)
I don’t know why some of these memories must remain so crystal clear. I recall one sliver and the whole picture comes rushing back, while other things, for instance, other things I would like to remember, are completely unavailable. If only memory were a library with everything stored where it should be. If only you could walk to the desk and say to the assistant, I’d like to return the painful memories about David Fry or indeed his mother and take out some happier ones, please. About stickleback fishing with my father. Or picnicking on the banks of the Cherwell when I was a student. And the assistant would say, Certainly, madam. We have all those. Under “F” for “Fishing.” As well as “P” for “Picnicking.” You’ll find them on your left. So there my father would be. Tall and smiling in his work overalls, a hand-rolled cigarette in one hand and my fishing net in the other. I’d skip to keep up with him as he strode the broken lane down to the stream. “Where is that girl? Where are you?” The hedgerow flowers would boil with insects and my father would lift me to his shoulders and then—What? I haven’t a clue. I don’t remember the rest.
Rachel Joyce (The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy (Harold Fry, #2))
But unlike Paul, his alternatives present him with a "double avoidance conflict"-neither is acceptable, for to hear the plain sense of both texts means to cancel the basis for heeding either, since scripture is seen not to be free of contradiction. On the other hand, to harmonize them is to admit that one employs some type of "canon-within-the-canon" since one must choose which text's plain sense is to prevail as authoritative. The other text will be harmonized into it, as if some "less obvious" sense, unavailable by exegesis of the text itself, would give a more agreeable reading.
Robert M. Price
With other black boys the strife was not so fiercely sunny: their youth shrunk into tasteless sycophancy, or into silent hatred of the pale world about them and mocking distrust of everything white; or wasted itself in a bitter cry, Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house? The shades of the prison-house closed round about us all: walls strait and stubborn to the whitest, but relentlessly narrow, tall, and unscalable to sons of night who must plod darkly on in resignation, or beat unavailing palms against the stone, or steadily, half hopelessly, watch the streak of blue above.
W.E.B. Du Bois (The Souls of Black Folk)
Sadly, it seems as though society encourages this type of behavior in which men pursue women, then back off when commitment appears imminent. It’s the classic playboy model and sowing-wild-oats excuse and such behavior leaves the emotional wreckage of confused and hurt women in its wake. It is perceived as a male prerogative—love them and leave them and don’t suffer any consequences. You may try to rationalize his behavior—perhaps he was engulfed by his mother, his father was emotionally unavailable, he was never breast-fed. The bottom line, however, is that he can’t commit and you’ve got a problem.
Felicia Brings (Older Women, Younger Men: New Options for Love and Romance)
The shades of the prison house closed round about us all: walls strait and stubborn to the whitest, but relentlessly narrow, tall, and unscalable to sons of night who must plod darkly on in resignation, or beat unavailing palms against the stone, or steadily, half hopelessly, watch the streak of blue above.
W.E.B. Du Bois (The Souls of Black Folk)
Dallas pointed out to me once that there is a world of difference between being busy and being hurried. Being busy is an outward condition, a condition of the body. It occurs when we have many things to do. Busy-ness is inevitable in modern culture. If you are alive today in North America, you are a busy person. There are limits to how much busy-ness we can tolerate, so we wisely find ways to slow down whenever we can. We take vacations, we sit in a La-Z-Boy® with a good book, we enjoy a leisurely meal with friends. By itself, busy-ness is not lethal. Being hurried is an inner condition, a condition of the soul. It means to be so preoccupied with myself and my life that I am unable to be fully present with God, with myself, and with other people. I am unable to occupy this present moment. Busy-ness migrates to hurry when we let it squeeze God out of our lives. Note the differences between the two: Busy Hurried A full schedule Preoccupied Many activities Unable to be fully present An outward condition An inner condition of the soul Physically demanding Spiritually draining Reminds me I need God Causes me to be unavailable to God I cannot live in the kingdom of God with a hurried soul. I cannot rest in God with a hurried soul.
John Ortberg (Soul Keeping: Caring For the Most Important Part of You)
According to the prevailing notion, to be free means to be free to satisfy one’s preferences. Preferences themselves are beyond rational scrutiny; they express the authentic core of a self whose freedom is realized when there are no encumbrances to its preference-satisfying behavior. Reason is in the service of this freedom, in a purely instrumental way; it is a person’s capacity to calculate the best means to satisfy his ends. About the ends themselves we are to maintain a principled silence, out of respect for the autonomy of the individual. To do otherwise would be to risk lapsing into paternalism. Thus does liberal agnosticism about the human good line up with the market ideal of “choice.” We invoke the latter as a content-free meta-good that bathes every actual choice made in the softly egalitarian, flattering light of autonomy. This mutually reinforcing set of posits about freedom and rationality provides the basic framework for the discipline of economics, and for “liberal theory” in departments of political science. It is all wonderfully consistent, even beautiful. But in surveying contemporary life, it is hard not to notice that this catechism doesn’t describe our situation very well. Especially the bit about our preferences expressing a welling-up of the authentic self. Those preferences have become the object of social engineering, conducted not by government bureaucrats but by mind-bogglingly wealthy corporations armed with big data. To continue to insist that preferences express the sovereign self and are for that reason sacred—unavailable for rational scrutiny—is to put one’s head in the sand. The resolutely individualistic understanding of freedom and rationality we have inherited from the liberal tradition disarms the critical faculties we need most in order to grapple with the large-scale societal pressures we now face.
Matthew B. Crawford (The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction)
Girls, I was dead and down in the Underworld, a shade, a shadow of my former self, nowhen. It was a place where language stopped, a black full stop, a black hole Where the words had to come to an end. And end they did there, last words, famous or not. It suited me down to the ground. So imagine me there, unavailable, out of this world, then picture my face in that place of Eternal Repose, in the one place you’d think a girl would be safe from the kind of a man who follows her round writing poems, hovers about while she reads them, calls her His Muse, and once sulked for a night and a day because she remarked on his weakness for abstract nouns. Just picture my face when I heard - Ye Gods - a familiar knock-knock at Death’s door. Him. Big O. Larger than life. With his lyre and a poem to pitch, with me as the prize. Things were different back then. For the men, verse-wise, Big O was the boy. Legendary. The blurb on the back of his books claimed that animals, aardvark to zebra, flocked to his side when he sang, fish leapt in their shoals at the sound of his voice, even the mute, sullen stones at his feet wept wee, silver tears. Bollocks. (I’d done all the typing myself, I should know.) And given my time all over again, rest assured that I’d rather speak for myself than be Dearest, Beloved, Dark Lady, White Goddess etc., etc. In fact girls, I’d rather be dead. But the Gods are like publishers, usually male, and what you doubtless know of my tale is the deal. Orpheus strutted his stuff. The bloodless ghosts were in tears. Sisyphus sat on his rock for the first time in years. Tantalus was permitted a couple of beers. The woman in question could scarcely believe her ears. Like it or not, I must follow him back to our life - Eurydice, Orpheus’ wife - to be trapped in his images, metaphors, similes, octaves and sextets, quatrains and couplets, elegies, limericks, villanelles, histories, myths… He’d been told that he mustn’t look back or turn round, but walk steadily upwards, myself right behind him, out of the Underworld into the upper air that for me was the past. He’d been warned that one look would lose me for ever and ever. So we walked, we walked. Nobody talked. Girls, forget what you’ve read. It happened like this - I did everything in my power to make him look back. What did I have to do, I said, to make him see we were through? I was dead. Deceased. I was Resting in Peace. Passé. Late. Past my sell-by date… I stretched out my hand to touch him once on the back of the neck. Please let me stay. But already the light had saddened from purple to grey. It was an uphill schlep from death to life and with every step I willed him to turn. I was thinking of filching the poem out of his cloak, when inspiration finally struck. I stopped, thrilled. He was a yard in front. My voice shook when I spoke - Orpheus, your poem’s a masterpiece. I’d love to hear it again… He was smiling modestly, when he turned, when he turned and he looked at me. What else? I noticed he hadn’t shaved. I waved once and was gone. The dead are so talented. The living walk by the edge of a vast lake near, the wise, drowned silence of the dead.
Carol Ann Duffy (The World's Wife)
Not only does sleep maintain those memories you have successfully learned before bed (“the vision that was planted in my brain / Still remains”), but it will even salvage those that appeared to have been lost soon after learning. In other words, following a night of sleep you regain access to memories that you could not retrieve before sleep. Like a computer hard drive where some files have become corrupted and inaccessible, sleep offers a recovery service at night. Having repaired those memory items, rescuing them from the clutches of forgetting, you awake the next morning able to locate and retrieve those once unavailable memory files with ease and precision.
Matthew Walker (Why We Sleep: The New Science of Sleep and Dreams)
Why? Because we are setting up little boys to be emotionally unavailable men and, at the same time, setting up little girls to be emotionally unhappy women. How? By teaching our little girls that they are princesses. Special. And that someday their prince will come. Not only will their prince come, but he will be strong, smart, romantic and will take care of their every princess need and desire. Little princesses are taught the fantasy that they will be whisked away by the man of their dreams. That man being, of course, someone who will meet all of her needs — especially emotionally. That man will have undying love and devotion for the princess. And, by the way, no needs of his own.
Patti Henry (The Emotionally Unavailable Man)
It is often said that what most immediately sets English apart from other languages is the richness of its vocabulary. Webster’s Third New International Dictionary lists 450,000 words, and the revised Oxford English Dictionary has 615,000, but that is only part of the total. Technical and scientific terms would add millions more. Altogether, about 200,000 English words are in common use, more than in German (184,000) and far more than in French (a mere 100,000). The richness of the English vocabulary, and the wealth of available synonyms, means that English speakers can often draw shades of distinction unavailable to non-English speakers. The French, for instance, cannot distinguish between house and home, between mind and brain, between man and gentleman, between “I wrote” and “I have written.” The Spanish cannot differentiate a chairman from a president, and the Italians have no equivalent of wishful thinking. In Russia there are no native words for efficiency, challenge, engagement ring, have fun, or take care [all cited in The New York Times, June 18, 1989]. English, as Charlton Laird has noted, is the only language that has, or needs, books of synonyms like Roget’s Thesaurus. “Most speakers of other languages are not aware that such books exist” [The Miracle of Language, page 54]. On the other hand, other languages have facilities we lack. Both French and German can distinguish between knowledge that results from recognition (respectively connaître and kennen) and knowledge that results from understanding (savoir and wissen). Portuguese has words that differentiate between an interior angle and an exterior one. All the Romance languages can distinguish between something that leaks into and something that leaks out of. The Italians even have a word for the mark left on a table by a moist glass (culacino) while the Gaelic speakers of Scotland, not to be outdone, have a word for the itchiness that overcomes the upper lip just before taking a sip of whiskey. (Wouldn’t they just?) It’s sgriob. And we have nothing in English to match the Danish hygge (meaning “instantly satisfying and cozy”), the French sang-froid, the Russian glasnost, or the Spanish macho, so we must borrow the term from them or do without the sentiment. At the same time, some languages have words that we may be pleased to do without. The existence in German of a word like schadenfreude (taking delight in the misfortune of others) perhaps tells us as much about Teutonic sensitivity as it does about their neologistic versatility. Much the same could be said about the curious and monumentally unpronounceable Highland Scottish word sgiomlaireachd, which means “the habit of dropping in at mealtimes.” That surely conveys a world of information about the hazards of Highland life—not to mention the hazards of Highland orthography. Of
Bill Bryson (The Mother Tongue: English and How it Got that Way)
Consider this sobering statistic: Shortly before the 2009 H1N1 pandemic, CIDRAP undertook a national survey of hospital pharmacists and intensive care and emergency department doctors, as we detailed in chapter 18. The update of that survey identified more than 150 critical lifesaving drugs for all types of diseases frequently used in the United States, without which many patients would die within hours. All of them are generic and many, or their active pharmaceutical ingredients, are manufactured primarily in China or India. At the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak, sixty-three were already unavailable to pharmacies on short notice or on shortage status under normal conditions—just one example of how vulnerable we are.
Michael T. Osterholm (Deadliest Enemy: Our War Against Killer Germs)
In Europe, the dimensions of physical space seemed compressed. The looming vertical presence of mountains cut me off from the horizon. I'd not lived with that kind of spatial curtailment before. Even a city of skyscrapers is more porous than a snowcapped range. Alps form a solid barrier, an obstacle every bit as conceptual as visual and physical. Alpine bluffs and crags just don't rear up, they lean outwards, projecting their mass, and their solidity does not relent. For a West Australian like me, whose default setting is in diametric opposition, and for whom space is the impinging force, the effect is claustrophobic. I think I was constantly and instinctively searching for distances that were unavailable, measuring space and coming up short.
Tim Winton (Island Home)
The conditions that breed a disorganized attachment adaptation are not specific to CNM by any means, but I have seen a variation that is unique to CNM. There can be something very disorienting that happens for some new CNM couples who were first monogamous together and were accustomed to being each other’s main source of comfort, support and relief from distress. As the relationship opens, a partner’s actions with other people (even ethical ones that were agreed upon) can become a source of distress and pose an emotional threat. Everything that this person is doing with other people can become a source of intense fear and insecurity for their pre-existing partner, catapulting them into the paradoxical disorganized dilemma of wanting comfort and safety from the very same person who is triggering their threat response. Again, the partner may be doing exactly what the couple consented to and acting within their negotiated agreements, but for the pre-existing partner, their primary attachment figure being away, unavailable and potentially sharing levels of intimacy with another person registers as a debilitating threat in the nervous system. As someone in this situation simultaneously wants to move towards and away from one’s partner, the very foundation of their relationship and attachment system can begin to shudder, and people can begin acting out in ways that are destructive to each other and the relationship. When this happens, I recommend working with a professional to re-establish inner and outer safety.
Jessica Fern (Polysecure: Attachment, Trauma and Consensual Nonmonogamy)
it’s not something you’ve said or done that’s ‘made’ him this way - he was this way before you met him, while you were with him, and will be long after you’re gone until he sees fit to address his reasons for being unavailable. You haven’t misunderstood although you may have applied meaning where there is no meaning at times. You’re not going crazy, you don’t need to change yourself for him (although you do need to address your love habits), and you cannot change him. While it’s upsetting, it’s also empowering because you can stop making his problems, your problems. You, like many a Fallback Girl that has come before you and will no doubt follow, have probably spent far too much time and brain energy trying to ‘figure him out’, which is like rationalising the irrational.
Natalie Lue (Mr Unavailable & The Fallback Girl)
To the cycle of drama. You’re not that sure about him until he starts catering to your fear of abandonment and making you jump through hoops, and after a while, you’re not really going out with him, you’re going out with the high created by Relationship Crack. You’re the Fallback Girl that commits even though you weren’t really that interested until he started messing you around and got your attention.
Natalie Lue (Mr Unavailable & The Fallback Girl)
she had to question Mariana’s assessment of him as a loving parent. The man Ruth heard described sounded authoritarian, cold, emotionally unavailable, often critical and highly unkind—even cruel. None of these qualities had anything to do with love. “Love isn’t conditional,” Ruth said. “It’s not dependent on jumping through hoops to please someone—and always failing. You can’t love someone if you’re afraid of them, Mariana. I know it’s hard to hear. It’s a kind of blindness—but unless you wake up and see clearly, it will persist throughout your whole life, affecting how you see yourself, and others too.” Mariana shook her head. “You’re wrong about my father,” she said. “I know he’s difficult—but he loves me. And I love him.” “No,” said Ruth firmly. “At best, let’s call it a desire to be loved. At worst, it’s a pathological attachment to a narcissistic man:
Alex Michaelides (The Maidens)
HE WHO MUST NOT BE NAMED RETURNS ‘In a brief statement on Friday night, Minister for Magic Cornelius Fudge confirmed that He Who Must Not Be Named has returned to this country and is once more active. ‘“It is with great regret that I must confirm that the wizard styling himself Lord – well, you know who I mean – is alive and among us again,” said Fudge, looking tired and flustered as he addressed reporters. “It is with almost equal regret that we report the mass revolt of the Dementors of Azkaban, who have shown themselves averse to continuing in the Ministry’s employ. We believe the Dementors are currently taking direction from Lord – Thingy. ‘“We urge the magical population to remain vigilant. The Ministry is currently publishing guides to elementary home and personal defence which will be delivered free to all wizarding homes within the coming month.” ‘The Minister’s statement was met with dismay and alarm from the wizarding community, which as recently as last Wednesday was receiving Ministry assurances that there was “no truth whatsoever in these persistent rumours that You-Know-Who is operating amongst us once more”. ‘Details of the events that led to the Ministry turnaround are still hazy, though it is believed that He Who Must Not Be Named and a select band of followers (known as Death Eaters) gained entry to the Ministry of Magic itself on Thursday evening. ‘Albus Dumbledore, newly reinstated Headmaster of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, reinstated member of the International Confederation of Wizards and reinstated Chief Warlock of the Wizengamot, has so far been unavailable for comment. He has insisted over the past year that You-Know-Who is not dead, as was widely hoped and believed, but is recruiting followers once more for a fresh attempt to seize power. Meanwhile, the “Boy Who Lived” –
J.K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Harry Potter, #5))
No society has succeeded in abolishing the distinction between ruler and ruled... to be a ruler gives one special status and, usually, special privileges. During the Communist era, important officials in the Soviet Union had access to special shops selling delicacies unavailable to ordinary citizens; before China allowed capitalist enterprises in its economy, travelling by car was a luxury limited to tourists and those high in the party hierarchy Throughout the 'communist' nations, the abolition of the old ruling class was followed by the rise of a new class of party bosses and well-placed bureaucrats, whose behaviour and life-style came more and more to resemble that of their much-denounced predecessors. In the end, nobody believed in the system any more. That, couple with its inability to match the productivity of the less bureaucratically controlled, more egoistically driven capitalist economies, led to its downfall.
Peter Singer (Marx: A Very Short Introduction)
A higher form of communication, verbal language, is also unavailable or inadequate to describe the intensity of a cutter's inner state. As kids, by and large, self-injurers were not allowed to have or express their own feelings—especially anger. Instead they were forced to carry the feelings of their parents and grew up feeling responsible for their parents' anger, frustration, and unhappiness. They were expected to fill their parents' need for love and gratification, rather than the parents satisfying their children's needs. When a child's feelings and perceptions are actively denied or minimized by her parents, the child's ability to develop a language of feelings is stunted, and she is left with a mute hopelessness about the possibility of communicating in a way that will help her to get critical needs met. Words then seem to take on terrifying proportions; they are both too powerful and completely useless. Emotions are so damned up that sadness seems annihilating, rage often feels murderous.
Marilee Strong (A Bright Red Scream: Self-Mutilation and the Language of Pain)
Hunding, stop skulking in the hallway and get in here.” The bellhop poked his head around the doorway. “I wasn’t skulking,” he said defensively. “I was lingering.” “Come in. I need you to do three things. One: Find a way to track Thor’s FitnessKnut. Report his whereabouts at all times.” “Won’t he just circle the worlds in order?” I made a face. “Thor’s sense of direction is terrible. His path will likely be erratic. Moving on. Two: Have squads of einherjar launch surprise attacks on the Bifrost. I want to know that Heimdall is on guard.” “Very good, sir. And the third thing?” “Inform the thanes that as of tomorrow, I will be unavailable for a while.” I transformed my appearance from a rugged one-eyed god of wisdom to a beautiful two-eyed woman clad in chain mail. “I will be living with my Valkyries to decide for myself which of them deserves to be captain.” Hunding raised a hairy eyebrow. “An idea from Utgard-Loki, Lord Odin?” “Wisdom can be gleaned from any source if one only looks hard enough.” I paused, thinking. “Let’s put that on a T-shirt. And, Hunding?” “My lord?” I transformed back into my true form. “Download cute baby goat videos to my phablet. I must learn what all the fuss is about.
Rick Riordan (9 From the Nine Worlds)
Mike had taken the rest of the day off, and he had rested, but unfortunately, he had also shared his tale of the ghost in the beam with his girlfriend of fourteen months, Melody, who first suggested that he might have had a ministroke, because that had happened to a guy on the Internet. When he insisted that no, he had seen and heard what he had seen and heard, she responded that he needed to see a shrink, that he was emotionally unavailable, and furthermore, there were much hotter guys than him at the gym who wanted to sleep with her and she had known deep down that there was something wrong with him and that’s why she’d never given up her apartment. He agreed that she was probably right about those things and that she would probably be better off if she slept with the hotter guys at the gym. He’d lost a girlfriend, but he’d gained a drawer in his dresser, a third of the clothes rod in his closet, and all three shampoo shelves in his shower, so he really wasn’t all that broken up about the breakup. Once she was gone, he realized that he didn’t feel any more alone than he had when she had been in the room with him, and he was a little sad that he didn’t feel sadder. All in all, it had been a productive day off. He’d been back at
Christopher Moore (Secondhand Souls (Grim Reaper, #2))
women are socially conditioned to believe that they need a man in their life pretty much as soon as they become adults, whereas men are programmed to sow their wild oats and spread their options. Unfortunately while he’s terrified of missing out, his friends all drop off the radar and settle down, and after a while he becomes the odd one out, clinging to his bachelorhood and claiming that he hasn’t met the ‘right’ woman yet and that they’re all ‘psychos’ or ‘too needy’. At some point he’ll likely have a midlife crisis and panic himself into his version of commitment to some poor woman who thinks she’s hit the jackpot.
Natalie Lue (Mr Unavailable & The Fallback Girl)
How do we evaluate the claims of the biblical story? We begin by recognizing that the Bible is not objective history, nor was it ever intended to be. The idea, and much more so the practice, of “objective history” was unavailable to its authors. To state it baldly, the Bible is not history: it is the Bible. The biblical narrative breaks most of the fundamental rules of modern history writing. We find in the biblical story, presented as fact, aspects that no historian could know: private and unverifiable elements, including events that occurred behind closed doors; dialogues; and even internal monologues. We find characterizations of the various individuals in the story that are far from unbiased. And, perhaps most notably, we find the introduction of divine intervention as an explanation for the course of events. We can hardly blame the biblical author for failing to follow conventions of history writing that developed thousands of years after he wrote his narrative. At the same time, however, we cannot read the biblical text as if it were a piece of modern history writing. It may be describing the past, and in that sense it is historical in nature, but it describes the past using conventions more familiar to us from the genre of historical fiction.
Joel S. Baden (The Historical David: The Real Life of an Invented Hero)
The old laissez faire failed because it was based on erroneous premises regarding human behavior. As a theory it failed because it mistook for ineradicable characteristics of individuals qualities that were in fact inseparable from social groups. As a policy it failed because its atomistic propositions were inevitably unavailing against the reality of enlarging masses of insecure individuals. Far from proving a check upon the growth of the omnicompetent State, the old laissez faire actually accelerated this growth. Its indifference to every form of community and association left the State as the sole area of reform and security.
Robert A. Nisbet (The Quest For Community: A Study In The Ethics Of Order And Freedom (Ics Series In Self Governance))
The doctrine of justification by faith—a Biblical truth, and a blessed relief from sterile legalism and unavailing self-effort—has in our time fallen into evil company and been interpreted by many in such manner as actually to bar men from the knowledge of God. The whole transaction of religious conversion has been made mechanical and spiritless. Faith may now be exercised without a jar to the moral life and without embarrassment to the Adamic ego. Christ may be "received" without creating any special love for Him in the soul of the receiver. The man is "saved," but he is not hungry nor thirsty after God. In fact he is specifically taught to be satisfied and encouraged to be content with little.
A.W. Tozer (The Pursuit of God)
General Mario Vargas Salinas, now retired from Bolivia’s Eighth Army Division, was one of the young army officers present at Guevara’s burial. It was his duty to accompany an old dump truck carrying the bodies of the six dead rebels, including that of “Che” Guevara, to the airstrip in Vallegrande, Bolivia. Knowing that the facts surrounding the burials were leaking out, he decided that after 28 years the world should know what had happened to “Che” Guevara’s body. At the time, Captain Vargas, who had also led the ambush in which Tamara “Tania” Bunke, Guevara’s lover, was shot dead, said that Guevara was buried early on the morning of October 11th, 1967, at the end of the town’s landing strip. After the gruesome facts became known, the Bolivian government ordered the army to find Guevara's remains for a proper burial. General Gary Prado Salmón, retired, had been the commander of the unit that had captured Guevara. He confirmed General Vargas’ statement and added that the guerrilla fighters had been burned, before dumping their bodies into a mass grave, dug by a bulldozer, at the end of the Vallegrande airstrip. He explained that the body of “Che” Guevara had been buried in a separate gravesite under the runway. The morning after the burials, “Che” Guevara’s brother arrived in Vallegrande, hoping to see his brother’s remains. Upon asking, he was told by the police that it was too late. Talking to some of the army officers, he was told lies or perhaps just differing accounts of the burial, confusing matters even more. The few peasants that were involved and knew what had happened were mysteriously unavailable. Having reached a dead end, he left for Buenos Aires not knowing much more than when he arrived….
Hank Bracker
She told him the origins of the “buck dance,” when “white people would come up and say ‘N____r, dance’, and then start shooting around the feet of blacks so that they would dance like everything.” 45 Big Ma was an important presence in Jimmy’s childhood and adolescence, and he credited her with giving him a unique and powerful sense of historical change. “When she talked about slavery,” he recalled, “she always talked not about how they freed the slaves, but about how [slaveholders] surrendered. There was a big difference. She saw the change as something that had been won by somebody, not something that had been given. She realized that there had been a struggle and that somebody had to lose.” 46 It would not take much for young Jimmy to see a historical connection and a continuity in struggle between these two moments—the buck dance that Big Ma witnessed in her childhood and the marauding Selma sheriff who came to town “shooting and raising Cain to see the colored folks run” during his childhood. Big Ma lived until the mid-1930s, when Jimmy was in his teens. By this time he could see new spaces of struggle emerging from shifts in the region’s economy and black people’s employment patterns. These shifts had impacted his family, specifically through his father’s work opportunities, and would shape his own prospects. Cotton continued to be an important part of the economy, both in the state and in the Black Belt region, but its significance declined relative to Alabama’s growing industrial economy. African Americans saw expanded employment opportunities, as labor shortages, strikes, and union organizing during the first two decades of the century led companies to open up jobs previously unavailable to black workers. The steel industry, which had previously satisfied its need for cheap labor with immigrant workers, came to rely heavily on black labor after World War I. 47
Stephen Ward (In Love and Struggle: The Revolutionary Lives of James and Grace Lee Boggs (Justice, Power, and Politics))
Burns immediately left the class, and going into the small inner room where the books were kept, returned in half a minute, carrying in her hand a bundle of twigs tied together at one end. This ominous tool she presented to Miss Scatcherd with a respectful curtesy; then she quietly, and without being told, unloosed her pinafore, and the teacher instantly and sharply inflicted on her neck a dozen strokes with the bunch of twigs. Not a tear rose to Burns’ eye; and, while I paused from my sewing, because my fingers quivered at this spectacle with a sentiment of unavailing and impotent anger, not a feature of her pensive face altered its ordinary expression. “Hardened girl!” exclaimed Miss Scatcherd; “nothing can correct you of your slatternly habits: carry the rod away.” Burns obeyed: I looked at her narrowly as she emerged from the book-closet; she was just putting back her handkerchief into her pocket, and the trace of a tear glistened on her thin cheek.
Charlotte Brontë (Jane Eyre)
The truth is that everyone has some level of fear of commitment and being vulnerable, but he allows it to transcend everything. Unfortunately he has a fear of failure and making mistakes, hence why he maintains a best of both worlds position. He’s thinking “If I’m not in it and minimising the impact on me, how the hell can I be impacting her so much? He doesn’t genuinely believe that anything is his fault - most things are ‘seemingly’ totally out of his control and a byproduct of the interaction and the other person not safeguarding themselves. He may assume that because he’s safeguarding himself that you are and that if you’re not, it’s some sort of ‘fault’ in you. He won’t be accountable as it equates to being vulnerable so if you call him on his behaviour he’ll only turn it around on you or deny it. Being noncommittal means that when he thinks about ‘sticking’ with you, he panics that there may be a better option. When you tell him to “Jog on” he panics that you are his best option, so he uses fear to continue keeping his options open.
Natalie Lue (Mr Unavailable & The Fallback Girl)
CONFESSIONS OF A CLING-ON If a man is walking in a forest and makes a statement, but there is no woman around to hear it, is he still wrong? Or if a woman is walking in the forest and asks for something, and there is no man around to hear her, is she still needy? These Zen koans capture some of the frustrations people have with the opposite gender. And where is the dividing line between someone simply having a need, and someone being a needy person? Is it written in heaven somewhere what is too much need, too little need and just right amount of need for the “normal person?” Ask pop radio psychologists Dr. Laura, or Sally Jessie Rafael, or any number of experts who claim to know for sure, and you’ll get some very different answers. And isn’t it fun to see the new sophisticated ways our advanced culture is developing to make each other wrong? You better keep up with the latest technical terminology or you will be at the mercy of those who do. Whoever has read the latest most recent self-help book has the clear advantage. Example: Man: “Get real, would you! Your Venusian codependency has got you trapped in your learned helpless victim act, and indulging in your empowerment phobia again.” Woman: “When you call me codependent, I feel (notice the political correctness of the feeling word) that you are simply projecting your own disowned, unintegrated, emotionally unavailable Martian counterdependency to protect your inner ADD two year old from ever having to grow up. So there!” Speaking of diagnosis, remember the codependent. Worrying about codependency was like a virus that everyone had from about 1988 to 1994. Here’s a prayer to commemorate the codependent: The Codependent’s Prayer by Kelly Bryson Our Authority, which art in others, self-abandonment be thy name. Codependency comes when others’ will is done, At home, as it is in the workplace. give us this day our daily crumbs of love. And give us a sense of indebtedness, As we try to get others to feel indebted to us. And lead us not into freedom, but deliver us from awareness. For thine is the slavery and the weakness and the dependency, For ever and ever. Amen.
Kelly Bryson (Don't Be Nice, Be Real)
The constant evolution of technology and the growing market demand for efficiency makes companies increasingly need IT systems, applications, mobile devices, equipment, internet link, telephony, and other resources. For a company to keep up with this pace, as well as support the complexity of new technologies, it needs to be backed by the best computer tech support company Wisconsin that can keep you free from problems such as – Piracy and compliance issues, Idle and / or obsolete resources, Failures and unavailability in the operation, Network vulnerabilities and information leakage, Lack of information to make the right decisions, Adoption of new technical resources, Purchase of machinery and equipment, Improved business management, Strengthening of the research and development area, Computer maintenance and Support Company Regardless of the size of the company, having a team of specialists in information technology is very important. In start-up companies, IT acts as a fundamental pillar within the strategy, helping in the scale of the business and saving costs. As the company grows, the integration between departments and the use of new technologies become essential to gain competitive advantage. When hiring computer technical support services it is necessary to pay attention to technical knowledge, experience and also to the strategic vision. Core competencies include – Assess the needs of the organization in relation to software and hardware, Repair defective machines and parts, Update and configure operating systems and other programs, Make the configuration of the entire internet and local network of the business, Ensure efficient backup solutions, Provide quality support and in a satisfactory time interval, Focus on securing company data and preventing attacks and viruses. Besides these more technical characteristics, it is also very important to select a professional with a strategic vision to understand how technology can best be applied in the context of each organization. How to choose the ideal company? An alternative for companies is to outsource computer tech support services online at affordable prices. IT professionals can specialize in several areas, such as hardware, software, networking, security, etc. Assembling a complete team and with employees with different expertise requires a high investment. Outsourcing this service is cheaper. The company has the security of having constant monitoring, 24x7. When choosing the ideal company, research on all the points presented above. It is essential to understand the services and conditions that it offers, how it works and the other clients it serves.
IT Simpli
Upon the listening spirit of God fell also the unspoken part of the prayer. He commandeth me to put it into words. Listen!   “Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth into battle — be Thou near them! With them — in spirit — we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended in the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames in summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it —   For our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimmage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet!   We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.   (After a pause.) “Ye have prayed it; if ye still desire it, speak! The messenger of the Most High waits.”   …
Smedley D. Butler (War Is A Racket!: And Other Essential Reading)
My smile says: Hello, I am warm, polite, and unavailable. I smile like a period.
Glennon Doyle (Untamed)
Well, why not? My dream woman has always been been unavailable to me. What difference does a mere three-quarters of a century make?
Richard Matheson (Somewhere In Time)