Unpredictable Woman Quotes

Unbelievable and true. Anna Solokov is neither a frightened girl nor a criminal spider in the center of a huge web of drugs and god knows. No, that dangerous young woman could easily do both at different times, and to different people. No doubt that is part of George’s attraction to her. She is victim. Yet when necessary, or when it suits her, she is victimizer. Does he imagine he is battling for her soul?

I draw because words are too unpredictable. I draw because words are too limited. If you speak and write in English, or Spanish, or Chinese, or any other language, then only a certain percentage of human beings will get your meaning. But when you draw a picture everybody can understand it. If I draw a cartoon of a flower, then every man, woman, and child in the world can look at it and say, "That's a flower.

The fire on the mountain.” That was Anna. “Alchemy,” she said. “I feel it singing in my bones.” “Singing?” Mary would never understand Anna. The young woman turned away. Wiseman’s reply was tinged with respect. “That great pair of alchemists, Francis Ransome and Roberta Le More, believed the work they did affected the world’s spirit, the anima mundi. The Native Americans they met believed they too could and should interact with the Great Spirit. They lived with reverence for the land and all its peoples, the ancestors, the animals, the rocks, the trees, mountains.”  Mary’s jaw dropped; Caroline glowed; Anna pretended not to listen. Wiseman nodded, then continued. “You mean…?” began Mary. “Yes, it could have been so different, a meeting of like-minded earth-based spiritualities. Just imagine, what could have been?

She is unpredictable, and unpredictable is another word for 'threat' when a woman wears it well.

Well, at heart I knew she'd never be a normal woman. And I didn't want her to be one, because what I loved in her were the indomitable and unpredictable aspects of her personality

The anchor symbolizes clarity and courage during chaos and confusion,” my Grand-mere says. “Chaos and Confusion, aren’t those your cats names?” Now I know her story is a delusion.

Life can change in the flash of a shooting star, and the people we love can be out of our reach forever.

Why is being an unmarried woman something that we should be ashamed of, as if we’ve failed? Men don’t feel this way. When they haven’t married, they make it sound like they’ve gotten away with something. Their single status makes them even more appealing to the other sex.

Fighting is a soldier’s only religion. But it has proven useful to adopt the religion of the country I wish to conquer.

No snowflake in a blizzard ever feels responsible.

Politics is a moving target with no bullseye of truth, breaking up more families than uniting them.

The only clarity – if oppressive fog could ever be clarity – was the violent, throbbing, boiling agony pressing her against the ground. There were sounds, too: shouting, screaming, banging, thudding, squawking, chittering. It hurt to breathe. “No snake! No snake!” A woman’s voice shrilled. “Christ sake! Let the bloody thing out. That one, too.” A man’s voice, shouting – bellowing – commands. A hand lifted her wrist, and through the torment of pain, she realised that fingers were releasing her watch strap.

The more a person knows of himself, the more he will hesitate to define his nature and to assert what he must necessarily feel, and the more he will be astounded at his capacity to feel in unsuspected and unpredictable ways.

You're unpredictable and dangerous and protect those you love fiercely. You should be proud. To me you're more than a knight in some stupid shiny armour. You're the monster who no one can tame but the woman he loves. - Tess Snow

The truth is simple: Life is perfectly imperfect, unpredictable, and unexplainable.

She was fierce, quick to anger, her temper terrifying and unpredictable, her words deeply damaging when she wanted them to be. Because she had almost no need for people, she had no trouble hurting them. It seemed to enlarge her, give her strength. Quinn told her she had "poison blood".

The full impact of the ripple effect can at times be unpredictable, but it is what you make of it. It doesn’t matter how many stones have been thrown at you because you are the master of your actions. How you view the ripple effect’s rings will determine your outcome. Will you let them break you or will you use them to the fullest potential?

A happy woman is a woman relaxed in her body and heart: powerful, unpredictable, deep, potentially wild and destructive, or calm and serene, but always full of life, surrendered to and moved by the great force of her oceanic heart. When you ask her to analyze her heart’s emotions, it’s like building walls around a part of the ocean and turning it into a swimming pool. It’s safer and more predictable, but far less alive and enlivening. Most men have made their women into swimming pools by continually treating them like men, talking with them about their feelings as if they can be analyzed to the point of “fixing” them.

Savage and unpredictable, a woman, like the sea, takes what she wants and spits the remains back into the boiling cauldron of humanity ...

He looks at me for a long moment. “You’re not the type of woman who gives up easily, are you?” I can’t tell if he admires this trait or sees it as a sign of deteriorating mental health.

The eyes were certainly memorable and beautiful, moist calves' eyes heavily lashed and with the same look of troubled pain at the unpredictability of the world's terrors.

You see, even the inhuman ones were not always inhuman. This was a lesson that I would learn again and again—how completely unpredictable individuals could be when it came to personal morality.

That a work of the imagination has to be “really” about some problem is, again, an heir of Socialist Realism. To write a story for the sake of storytelling is frivolous, not to say reactionary. The demand that stories must be “about” something is from Communist thinking and, further back, from religious thinking, with its desire for self-improvement books as simple-minded as the messages on samplers. The phrase “political correctness” was born as Communism was collapsing. I do not think this was chance. I am not suggesting that the torch of Communism has been handed on to the political correctors. I am suggesting that habits of mind have been absorbed, often without knowing it. There is obviously something very attractive about telling other people what to do: I am putting it in this nursery way rather than in more intellectual language because I see it as nursery behavior. Art — the arts generally — are always unpredictable, maverick, and tend to be, at their best, uncomfortable. Literature, in particular, has always inspired the House committees, the Zhdanovs, the fits of moralizing, but, at worst, persecution. It troubles me that political correctness does not seem to know what its exemplars and predecessors are; it troubles me more that it may know and does not care. Does political correctness have a good side? Yes, it does, for it makes us re-examine attitudes, and that is always useful. The trouble is that, with all popular movements, the lunatic fringe so quickly ceases to be a fringe; the tail begins to wag the dog. For every woman or man who is quietly and sensibly using the idea to examine our assumptions, there are 20 rabble-rousers whose real motive is desire for power over others, no less rabble-rousers because they see themselves as anti-racists or feminists or whatever.

Doctors know nothing. Well. That's kind of unfair. Let's just say the world is unpredictable. Science is unreliable. It can't tell you who you are or what you'll want or how you'll feel. All these researchers are going crazy in their labs, trying to fit us into these little boxes so they can justify their jobs, or their government funding, or their life's work. They can theorize and they can give you a mean, median and mode but it's all standardized guesswork, made official by arrogance. You have to be pretty into yourself to think you can play a part in defining the identity of a bunch of people you don't know, of human beings with complicated shit going on in their bodies. They still don't know what certain parts of our brains do, they still don't know how to cure a common cold, and they say they know about sexuality, about gender. Well, you're not a man because you like football and you're not a woman because you're attracted to men and you're not a chick because you like to be the one who gives and you're not a dude because you like to receive or because sometimes you cry at dumb movies.

Gabriel didn't have to look at his parents to know they were thoroughly charmed by Pandora. As for him... He hardly recognized himself in his reaction to her. She was full of life, burning like sunflowers in the rime of autumn frost. Compared to the languid and diffident girls of London's annual marriage mart, Pandora might have been another species altogether. She was just as beautiful as he'd remembered, and as unpredictable. Laughing after the dog had jumped on her in the front drive, when any other young woman in her place would have been angry or humiliated. As she'd stood there wanting to argue with him about carrots, all Gabriel had been able to think of was how much he wanted to carry her somewhere cool and dark and quiet, and have her all to himself.

The desert is an unpredictable place. One day you're sweating, the next you're freezing. One moment the air is damp and cloudy like when the tide is coming in, the next the entire world is orange and dusty. The desert must be a woman.

You will always be the smaller opponent, and being a woman, you will be underestimated. When you fight, fight with everything you’ve got and let them think you’re crazy. Let them fear the fact that you’re a woman. That you are unpredictable.

She tried to keep in mind how scared and hurt Hunter was and decided to let him have that one. She chose to give him the benefit of the doubt and not take it personally. Besides, she wasn’t sure if she walked over there and slapped him, he wouldn’t slap her back. Not only did Veil put an end to chivalry—and the dichotomous gender myth overall—but it was Hunter. When combining gay, irreverent, and unpredictable, chances were high that somewhere in the mix, slapping a woman wouldn’t be unheard of.

I draw because words are too unpredictable. I draw because words are too limited. If you speak and write in English or Spanish or Chinese or any other language, then only a certain percentage of human beings will get your meaning. But when you draw a picture, everybody can understand it. If I draw a cartoon of a flower, then every man, woman, and child in the world can look at it and say “that’s a flower.” So I draw because I want to talk to the world and I want the world to pay attention to me.

The villagers were speeding up the circling of events because she was too shortsighted to see that her infidelity had already harmed the village, the waves of consequences would return unpredictably, sometimes in disguise, as now, to hurt her. This roundness had to be made coin-sized so that she would see is circumference: punish her at the birth of her baby. Awaken her to the inexorable. People who refused fatalism because they could invent small resources insisted on culpability. Deny accidents and wrest fault from the stars.

Until that moment, he hadn’t been sure he would prevail. Any woman brave enough to thrust a blade at him was unpredictable at best, and dangerous at worst.

The woman who came out in times of stress was strong but high-strung, fearless but unpredictable.

Spring in Nova Scotia could be as unpredictable as a menopausal woman's moods: warm and calm one day, cold and cutting the next.

He reached across the table and touched her hair. There was something tremendously real about the way it felt. Like life itself, it was hard and smooth, far away.

I had never thought that your class would be so useful. Going to such a useless thing, faithfully, year in year out, was, I thought, good proof of woman’s unpredictability.

Well, you never can tell with a twister. They are as mean, as ornery, and as unpredictable as an unhappy woman.

How does a hardworking sixty-four-year-old-woman end up without a house or a permanent place to stay, relying on unpredictable low-wage work to survive? Living in a mile-high alpine wilderness, with intermittent snow and maybe mountain lions in a tiny trailer, scrubbing toilets at the mercy of employers who, on a whim, could cut her hours or even fire her? What does the future look like for someone like that?

What he’d done was forbidden. It broke the Jinni code. But I had no proof; it was a woman’s word against a king’s. His Gift might be weak compared to a full-blooded Jinni, but I stared at him now the way I would eye a cobra. He was deadly. Unpredictable.

We can all name people we take for granted, because everybody’s swamped. Overwhelmed. Harried. We mean to make memories with people who matter, but often, we put it off for someday. And someday morphs into never, as Life’s unpredictability claims the people we love.

She fell in love with freedom. In the Sommers' home she had lived shut up within four walls, in a stagnant atmosphere where time moved in circles and where she could barely glimpse the horizon through distorted windowpanes. She had grown up clad in the impenetrable armor of good manners and conventions, trained from girlhood to please and serve, bound by corset, routines, social norms, and fear. Fear had been her companion: fear of God and his unpredictable justice, of authority, of her adoptive parents, of illness and evil tongues, of anything unknown or different; fear of leaving the protection of her home and facing the dangers outside; fear of her own fragility as a woman, of dishonor and truth. Hers had been a sugar-coated reality built on the unspoken, on courteous silences, well-guarded secrets, order, and discipline. She had aspired to virtue but now she questioned the meaning of the word.

But I always related to the Old Woman. The one who haunted the edgelands, the mysterious shadow in the heart of the darkwood. The exile, the rebel, the one who shrugged off the fetters of conventional society; the one who imagined and cultivated her own vision of how the world should be, thank you very much. At the earliest of ages, I already knew that was the old woman I wanted to grow into. The spirited, unpredictable, not-to-be-messed-with elder. An elder who’s always ready to tell you the often-unwelcome truths about the condition of your life — leavened, of course, with compassion, and a glint of fierce humor in her eyes.

Round-bottomed, soft-bellied, irrational, magical, too caring, too carefree, proudly demanding, unfettered by dependence, sexually unashamed, hairy, hungry, unpredictable, silently present, intangibly distant, ceaselessly gossipy, alarmingly uninhibited, seething with potential, incomprehensible, altogether unfathomable, dangerous and deliciously powerful, she is the hag. She bleeds. She laughs so hard her belly shakes, she snorts and farts. She is the dark side of woman, the inside, the raw side beneath the surface skin we are taught so well to cleanse and tone and remedy with paint. She is the woman whose self-expression is not quite under control. Mysterious, intuitive, emotional, curvaceous, lustful, needy, selfish, natural and free, she is the me we long to - but know we shouldn’t - reveal. Feeling

That old buffalo woman gave Nanapush her views. She told him that he had survived by doing the opposite of all the others. Where they abandoned, he saved. Where they were cruel, he was kind. Where they betrayed, he was faithful. Nanapush then decided that in all things he would be unpredictable. As he had completely lost trust in authority, he decided to stay away from others and to think for himself, even to do the most ridiculous things that occurred to him.

And it's like... this feeling of safety. You know exactly what's going to happen by the end. So many things are unpredictable in life. I like things you can trust.' He frowns, his golden hair mussed up off his forehead. I'm suddenly sure I've found the one unacceptable answer to his question, the one that makes him realize I am not the cool, sexy, mysterious woman he has confused me with. His teeth scrape over the fullest part of his lip. 'You can trust me, Harriet.

I draw all the time. I draw cartoons of my mother and father; my sister and grandmother; my best friend, Rowdy; and everybody else on the rez. I draw because words are two unpredictable. I draw because words are too limited. If you speak and write in English, or Spanish, or Chinese, or any other language, then only a certain percentage of human beings will get your meaning. But when you draw a picture, everybody can understand it. If I draw a cartoon of a flower, then every man, woman, and child in the world can look at it and say, "That's a flower.

OUR PUBLIC-SCHOOL SYSTEM SEES BLACK AND BROWN children as violent, disruptive, unpredictable future criminals. This may seem like the hyperbole of an angry black woman, but when I look at the way in which our black and brown students are treated in schools, it is the only conclusion I can come to. Black students make up only 16 percent of our school populations, and yet 31 percent of students who are suspended and 40 percent of students who are expelled are black. Black students are 3.5 times more likely to be suspended than white students. Seventy percent of students who are arrested in school and referred to law enforcement are black. In the 2011–2012 school year alone, 92,000 students were arrested.1 When I look at these numbers, there are two possible explanations. I can assume that our black and brown children are violent, disruptive, unpredictable future criminals who are not deserving of the same access to education as white children. I can assume that there is something fundamentally wrong with black and brown people, something fundamentally broken that is sending our kids out of school and into prison. Or, I can assume that the school system is marginalizing, criminalizing, and otherwise failing our black and brown kids in large numbers.

I draw because words are too unpredictable. I draw because words are too limited. If you speak and write in English, or Spanish, or Chinese, or any other language, then only a certain percentage of human beings will get your meaning. But when you draw a picture, everybody can understand it. If I draw a picture of a flower, then every man, woman, and child in the world can look at it and say, "That's a flower." So I draw because I want to talk to the world. And I want the world to pay attention to me. I feel important with a pen in my hand. I feel like I might grow up somebody important. An artist. Maybe a famous artist. Maybe a rich artist. So I draw because I feel like it might be my only real chance to escape the reservation. I think the world is a series of broken dams and floods, and my cartoons are tiny little lifeboats.

I draw because words are too unpredictable. I draw because words are too limited. If you speak and write in English, or Spanish, or Chinese, or any other language, then only a certain percentage of human beings will get your meaning. But when you draw a picture, everybody can understand it. If I draw a picture of a flower, then every man, woman, and child in the world can look at it and say, "That's a flower." So I draw because I want to talk to the world. And I want the world to pay attention to me. I feel important with a pen in my hand. I feel like I might grow up somebody important. An artist. Maybe a famous artist. Maybe a rich artist. So I draw because I feel like it might be my only real chance to escape the reservation. I think the world is a series of broken dams and floods, and my cartoons are tiny little lifeboats.

Look at that, Kovacs. We’re drinking coffee so far from Earth you have to work hard to pick out Sol in the night sky. We were carried here on a wind that blows in a dimension we cannot see or touch. Stored as dreams in the mind of a machine that thinks in a fashion so far in advance of our own brains, it might as well carry the name of God. We have been resurrected into bodies not our own, grown in a secret garden without the body of any mortal woman. These are the facts of our existence, Kovacs. How, then, are they different, or any less mystical, than the belief that there is another realm where the dead live in the company of beings so far beyond us we must call them gods?” I looked away, oddly embarrassed by the fervor in Hand’s voice. Religion is funny stuff, and it has unpredictable effects on those who use it. I stubbed out my cigarette and chose my words with care.

It is already the fashion to diminish Eliot by calling him derivative, the mouthpiece of Pound, and so forth; and yet if one wanted to understand the apocalypse of early modernism in its true complexity it would be Eliot, I fancy, who would demand one's closest attention. He was ready to rewrite the history of all that interested him in order to have past and present conform; he was a poet of apocalypse, of the last days and the renovation, the destruction of the earthly city as a chastisement of human presumption, but also of empire. Tradition, a word we especially associate with this modernist, is for him the continuity of imperial deposits; hence the importance in his thought of Virgil and Dante. He saw his age as a long transition through which the elect must live, redeeming the time. He had his demonic host, too; the word 'Jew' remained in lower case through all the editions of the poems until the last of his lifetime, the seventy-fifth birthday edition of 1963. He had a persistent nostalgia for closed, immobile hierarchical societies. If tradition is, as he said in After Strange Gods--though the work was suppressed--'the habitual actions, habits and customs' which represent the kinship 'of the same people living in the same place' it is clear that Jews do not have it, but also that practically nobody now does. It is a fiction, a fiction cousin to a myth which had its effect in more practical politics. In extenuation it might be said that these writers felt, as Sartre felt later, that in a choice between Terror and Slavery one chooses Terror, 'not for its own sake, but because, in this era of flux, it upholds the exigencies proper to the aesthetics of Art.' The fictions of modernist literature were revolutionary, new, though affirming a relation of complementarity with the past. These fictions were, I think it is clear, related to others, which helped to shape the disastrous history of our time. Fictions, notably the fiction of apocalypse, turn easily into myths; people will live by that which was designed only to know by. Lawrence would be the writer to discuss here, if there were time; apocalypse works in Woman in Love, and perhaps even in Lady Chatterley's Lover, but not n Apocalypse, which is failed myth. It is hard to restore the fictive status of what has become mythical; that, I take it, is what Mr. Saul Bellow is talking about in his assaults on wastelandism, the cant of alienation. In speaking of the great men of early modernism we have to make very subtle distinctions between the work itself, in which the fictions are properly employed, and obiter dicta in which they are not, being either myths or dangerous pragmatic assertions. When the fictions are thus transformed there is not only danger but a leak, as it were, of reality; and what we feel about. all these men at times is perhaps that they retreated inso some paradigm, into a timeless and unreal vacuum from which all reality had been pumped. Joyce, who was a realist, was admired by Eliot because he modernized myth, and attacked by Lewis because he concerned himself with mess, the disorders of common perception. But Ulysses ,alone of these great works studies and develops the tension between paradigm and reality, asserts the resistance of fact to fiction, human freedom and unpredictability against plot. Joyce chooses a Day; it is a crisis ironically treated. The day is full of randomness. There are coincidences, meetings that have point, and coincidences which do not. We might ask whether one of the merits of the book is not its lack of mythologizing; compare Joyce on coincidence with the Jungians and their solemn concordmyth, the Principle of Synchronicity. From Joyce you cannot even extract a myth of Negative Concord; he shows us fiction fitting where it touches. And Joyce, who probably knew more about it than any of the others, was not at tracted by the intellectual opportunities or the formal elegance of fascism.

Charlie, I want to get married," she said. "Well, so do I, darling -" "No, you don't understand," she said. "I want to get married right now." Froggy knew from the desperate look in her eyes that Red was dead serious. "Sweetheart, are you sure now is a good time?" he said. "I'm positive," Red said. "If the last month has taught me anything, it's how unpredictable life can be - especially when you're friends with the Bailey twins. This could very well be the last chance we'll ever get! Let's do it now, in the Square of Time, before another magical being can tear us apart!" The idea made Froggy's heart fill with joy, but he wasn't convinced it was the right thing to do. "Are you sure this is the wedding you want?" he asked. "I don't mean to be crude, but the whole street is covered in a witch's remains." A large and self-assured smile grew on Red's face. "Charlie, I can't think of a better place to get married than on the ashes of your ex-girlfriend," she said. "Mother Goose, will you do the honors?" Besides being pinned to the ground by a three-ton lion statue, Mother Goose couldn't think of a reason why she couldn't perform the ceremony. "I suppose I'm available," she said. "Wonderful!" Red squealed. "And for all intents and purposes, we'll say the Fairy Council are our witness, Conner is the best man, and Alex is my maid of honor. Don't worry, Alex! This will only take a minute and we'll get right back to helping you!" Red and Froggy joined hands and stood in the middle of Times Square as Mother Goose officiated the impromptu wedding. "Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today - against our will - to unexpectedly watch this frog and woman join in questionable matrimony. Do you, Charlie Charming, take Red Riding Hood as your lovably high-maintenance wife?" "I do," Froggy declared. "And do you, Red Riding Hood, take Charlie Charming as your adorably webfooted husband?" "I do," Red said. "Then it is with the power mistrusted in me that I now pronounce you husband and wife! You may kiss the frog!" Red and Froggy shared their first kiss as a married couple, and their friends cheered. "Beautiful ceremony, my dear," Merlin said. "Believe it or not, this isn't the strangest wedding I've been to," Mother Goose said.

A few minutes later Elizabeth watched Lucinda emerge from the cottage with Ian, but there was no way to guess from their closed expressions what they’d discussed. In fact, the only person betraying any emotion at all was Jake Wiley as he led two horses into the yard. And his face, Elizabeth noted with confusion-which had been stormy when he went off to saddle the horses-was now wreathed in a smile of unrestrained glee. With a sweep of his arm and a bow he gestured toward a swaybacked black horse with an old sidesaddle upon its back. “Here’s your mount, ma’am,” he told Lucinda, grinning. “His name’s Attila.” Lucinda cast a disdainful eye over the beast as she transferred her umbrella to her right hand and pulled on her black gloves. “Have you nothing better?” “No, ma’am. Ian’s horse has a hurt foot.” “Oh, very well,” said Lucinda, walking briskly forward, but as she came within reach the black suddenly bared his teeth and lunged. Lucinda struck him between the ears with her umbrella without so much as a pause in her step. “Cease!” she commanded, and, ignoring the animal’s startled grunt of pain, she continued around to his other side to mount. “You brought it on yourself,” she told the horse as Jake held Attila’s head, and Ian Thornton helped her into the sidesaddle. The whites of Attila’s eyes showed as he warily watched her land in his saddle and settle herself. The moment Jake handed Lucinda the reins Attila began to leap sideways and twist around in restless annoyance. “I do not countenance ill-tempered animals,” she warned the horse in her severest tone, and when he refused to heed her and continued his threatening antics she hauled up sharply on his reins and simultaneously gave him a sharp jab in the flank with her umbrella. Attila let out a yelping complaint, broke into a quick, animated trot, and headed obediently down the drive. “If that don’t beat all!” Jake said furiously, glowering after the pair, and then at Ian. “That animal doesn’t know the meaning of the word loyalty!” Without waiting for a reply Jake swung into his saddle and cantered down the lane after them. Absolutely baffled over everyone’s behavior this morning, Elizabeth cast a puzzled, sideways glance at the silent man beside her, then gaped at him in amazement. The unpredictable man was staring after Lucinda, his hands shoved into his pockets, a cigar clamped between his white teeth, his face transformed by a sweeping grin. Drawing the obvious conclusion that these odd reactions from the men were somehow related to Lucinda’s skillful handling of an obstinate horse, Elizabeth commented, “Lucinda’s uncle raised horses, I believe.” Almost reluctantly, Ian transferred his admiring gaze from Lucinda’s rigid back to Elizabeth. His brows rose. “An amazing woman,” he stated. “Is there any situation of which she can’t take charge?” “None that I’ve ever seen,” Elizabeth said with a chuckle; then she felt self-conscious because his smile faded abruptly, and his manner became detached and cool.

emotionally immature people are more like an amalgam of various borrowed parts, many of which don’t go together well. Because they had to shut down important parts of themselves out of fear of their parents’ reactions, their personalities formed in isolated clumps, like pieces of a puzzle that don’t fit together. This explains their inconsistent reactions, which make them so difficult to understand. Because they probably weren’t allowed to express and integrate their emotional experiences in childhood, these people grow up to be emotionally inconsistent adults. Their personalities are weakly structured, and they often express contradictory emotions and behaviors. They step in and out of emotional states, never noticing their inconsistency. When they become parents, these traits create emotional bafflement in their children. One woman described her mother’s behavior as chaotic, “flip-flopping in ways that made no sense.” This inconsistency means that, as parents, emotionally immature people may be either loving or detached, depending on their mood. Their children feel fleeting moments of connection with them but don’t know when or under what conditions their parent might be emotionally available again. This sets up what behavioral psychologists call an intermittent reward situation, meaning that getting a reward for your efforts is possible but completely unpredictable. This creates a tenacious resolve to keep trying to get the reward, because once in a while these efforts do pay off. In this way, parental inconsistency can be the quality that binds children most closely to their parent, as they keep hoping to get that infrequent and elusive positive response.

Consider a world in which cause and effect are erratic. Sometimes the first precedes the second, sometimes the second the first. Or perhaps cause lies forever in the past while effect in the future, but future and past are entwined. On the terrace of the Bundesterrasse is a striking view: the river Aare below and the Bernese Alps above. A man stands there just now, absently emptying his pockets and weeping. Without reason, his friends have abandoned him. No one calls any more, no one meets him for supper or beer at the tavern, no one invites him to their home. For twenty years he has been the ideal friend to his friends, generous, interested, soft-spoken, affectionate. What could have happened? A week from this moment on the terrace, the same man begins acting the goat, insulting everyone, wearing smelly clothes, stingy with money, allowing no one to come to his apartment on Laupenstrasse. Which was cause and which effect, which future and which past? In Zürich, strict laws have recently been approved by the Council. Pistols may not be sold to the public. Banks and trading houses must be audited. All visitors, whether entering Zürich by boat on the river Limmat or by rail on the Selnau line, must be searched for contraband. The civil military is doubled. One month after the crackdown, Zürich is ripped by the worst crimes in its history. In daylight, people are murdered in the Weinplatz, paintings are stolen from the Kunsthaus, liquor is drunk in the pews of the Münsterhof. Are these criminal acts not misplaced in time? Or perhaps the new laws were action rather than reaction? A young woman sits near a fountain in the Botanischer Garten. She comes here every Sunday to smell the white double violets, the musk rose, the matted pink gillyflowers. Suddenly, her heart soars, she blushes, she paces anxiously, she becomes happy for no reason. Days later, she meets a young man and is smitten with love. Are the two events not connected? But by what bizarre connection, by what twist in time, by what reversed logic? In this acausal world, scientists are helpless. Their predictions become postdictions. Their equations become justifications, their logic, illogic. Scientists turn reckless and mutter like gamblers who cannot stop betting. Scientists are buffoons, not because they are rational but because the cosmos is irrational. Or perhaps it is not because the cosmos is irrational but because they are rational. Who can say which, in an acausal world? In this world, artists are joyous. Unpredictability is the life of their paintings, their music, their novels. They delight in events not forecasted, happenings without explanation, retrospective. Most people have learned how to live in the moment. The argument goes that if the past has uncertain effect on the present, there is no need to dwell on the past. And if the present has little effect on the future, present actions need not be weighed for their consequence. Rather, each act is an island in time, to be judged on its own. Families comfort a dying uncle not because of a likely inheritance, but because he is loved at that moment. Employees are hired not because of their résumés, but because of their good sense in interviews. Clerks trampled by their bosses fight back at each insult, with no fear for their future. It is a world of impulse. It is a world of sincerity. It is a world in which every word spoken speaks just to that moment, every glance given has only one meaning, each touch has no past or no future, each kiss is a kiss of immediacy.

What is the greatest challenge in life for a man? Climbing Mount Everest? Winning a triathlon? Building a successful business? Becoming president of the United States? No. No. No. And no. These challenges are a piece of cake compared to life’s ultimate man test: living with a woman. Women are wonderful, fascinating, and exciting. They are also difficult to please, confusing, and unpredictable. At least they are to men.

The girl is half my size. I think I can handle her without calling council.” “You disappoint me, Hunter. Where is the patience you show with the wild horses you train? Has it gone the way of the wind?” “A horse is worth the trouble. A yellow-hair is not.” “I know men who greatly treasure golden women. Perhaps she will grow on you.” “I prefer a horse. A black one.” “Women, horses, there is little difference, eh? Well trained, they both give men smooth rides and much pleasure. What happens when you first rope a mustang?” Hunter knew where this conversation was going and refused the bait. Warrior replied for him. “Every time he runs against the rope, he flips end over end.” “And what does he learn? Not to challenge your rope, eh? After that first lesson, he knows you are his master and allows you to gentle him with kindness. The white woman is the same. She is afraid and lunging against the rope. As soon as you break her of that, the battle is won, eh?” Hunter wished it could be that simple. When a horse accepted the touch of his hand, joy filled him. After swirling the dregs of his coffee, Hunter emptied his cup onto the fire. Rising to his feet, he said, “You are both very wise, and I am glad of your advice. I will handle the woman my way, though. She is my woman, eh?” “Take care,” Old Man warned. “The tosi tivo are unpredictable. Especially the females. Wisest-One had himself a yellow-hair once. After one night in his buffalo robes, she jumped into the Talking Water River and drowned herself. Not even Wisest-One could be that bad a lover.

I think about what makes us lonely on a recent subway ride from Brooklyn to Manhattan. As the train hurtles over the Manhattan Bridge, the subway car is silent, save for the muffled beats of a pop song. A woman up front is reading a book, and a few commuters are dozing. The rest of us are glued to our devices: heads bent, earbuds in, fingers scrolling. The trains sputters and then stops completely mid-bridge; plugged into our own curated digital landscapes, no one looks up. What was once a period of contemplation, boredom, small talk, confrontations, maybe even some light flirting, has been replaced by screens. In addition to filling the blank spaces in our day, our phones double as a crutch to “lean on when we are socially anxious or uncomfortable,” says Julia Bainbridge, a freelance writer and editor, who, in 2016, launched The Lonely Hour, a podcast dedicated to exploring the condition. The world is unpredictable, but our screens provide a convenient buffer against the possibility of spontaneous human interaction.

All evening, my mother’s cheeks blushed a deep red that could be noticed even in the low light of the lamp. My books show me what it’s like to live in a reliable country where you flick on a switch and a bulb is guaranteed to shine and remain on, where you know that cars will stop at red lights and those traffic lights will not cease working a couple of times a day. How does it feel when a plumber shows up at the designated time, when he shows up at all? How does it feel to assume that when someone says she’ll do something by a certain date, she in fact does it? Compared to the Middle East, William Burroughs’s world or Gabriel García Márquez’s Macondo is more predictable. Dickens’s Londoners are more trustworthy than the Lebanese. Beirut and its denizens are famously and infamously unpredictable. Every day is an adventure. This unsteadiness makes us feel a shudder of excitement, of danger, as well as a deadweight of frustration. The spine tingles momentarily and the heart sinks.

There were moments, usually on a sunny Easter morning, when she wished that she could with sincerity call herself a Christian; but for the rest of the year she knew herself to be what she was – incurably agnostic but prone to unpredictable relapses into faith.

THIRTY-THREE MUNICH, GERMANY 1:00 PM WILKERSON HAD SLEPT WELL, SATISFIED BOTH WITH HOW HE’D handled himself at the lodge and with Dorothea afterward. Having access to money, few responsibilities, and a beautiful woman weren’t bad substitutes for not being an admiral. Provided, of course, that he could stay alive. In preparation for this assignment, he’d back-checked the Oberhauser family thoroughly. Assets in the billions, and not old money—ancient money that had lasted through centuries of political upheavals. Opportunists? Surely. Their family crest seemed to explain it all. A dog clutching a rat in its mouth, encased inside a crested cauldron. What myriad contradictions. Much like the family itself. But how else could they have survived? Time, though, had taken a toll. Dorothea and her sister were all the Oberhausers left. Both beautiful, high-strung creatures. Nearing fifty. Identical in appearance, though each tried hard to distinguish herself. Dorothea had pursued business degrees and actively worked with her mother in the family concerns. She’d married in her early twenties and birthed a son, but he was killed five years ago, a week after his twentieth birthday, in a car accident. All reports indicated that she changed after that. Hardened. Became enslaved to deep anxieties and unpredictable moods. To shoot a man with a shotgun, as she’d done last night, then make love afterward with such an unfettered intensity, proved that dichotomy. Business had never interested Christl, nor had marriage or children. He’d met her only once, at a social function Dorothea and

He eyed her hungrily. "Now, eat your cake or whatever it is and try to be a good girl." "It's German apple puff, for your information. Have you tried it? It's delicious. Here." She leaned slowly across the table and fed him a bite from her spoon. He helped himself to a leisurely look at her décolletage as he opened his mouth and accepted. "Mm. That is good." "Told you so." Her eyes twinkled as she leaned back in her chair in leisurely contentment. "I thought you said a while ago you had no room left for the sweets." "I'm pacing myself. Besides---" She took another dainty nibble off her dessert spoon. "There were no corsets in the trunk of goodies your servants brought me, so, you see, I'm wonderfully free to make a glutton of myself." This little fact arrested his full attention. His stare homed in on her figure--- what he could see of it over the table. "You mean...?" "Indeed, Your Grace. Tonight, I go au naturel." She laughed like she enjoyed teasing him and took another remorseless bite of German apple puff. Rohan watched her with strange sensations of delight. God, she was a maddening woman. An unpredictable blend of innocence and passion. Intelligent, mercurial. Her prickly side amused him, but he liked her even better like this, open and relaxed. Uncorseted. In her scintillating humor, she threw off light like the candle glow as it played over the cut-crystal facets of their wine goblets. In short, she enchanted him. Maybe she had inherited some of her ancestor Valerian's magic. Rohan had a feeling he was doomed. He could sense a most unforeseen bond growing between them and did not know what to make of it. "Staring again, Your Grace?" "I've just decided you are rather naughty. And I like it." She shrugged. "You said we were celebrating. Anyway, it's your fault. If you wanted me to behave, you shouldn't have made me try so many wines." "Why on earth would I want that?" he asked softly. "Hm." She caught a bead of condensation running down the shaft of her narrow champagne flute on her fingertip and brought it to her lips. Damn, but just watching her got him hard.

This mess couldn’t have been more representative of Jessy, Melinda realized, remembering the other woman’s scattered thoughts and unpredictable behavior. Jessy had always been a bit peculiar.

My thing was to steal the ball away from an opposing player mid-dribble, run down, and make a layup. I loved the thrill of quickly weaving around the other team. Just the rush of no script, the play being unpredictable, completely unknown, made me feel so alive. I was so small and so sweet that no one saw me coming.

She could have played it safe and stayed small and never left home and not taken the wild, unpredictable, oft treacherous path of dreaming and daring, or she could be here, standing tall, proud and brave: this wild, free, curious, mysterious, miraculous woman.

Between her fury and determination, this unpredictable woman has fire in her doe-like eyes. Beautiful doesn’t even come close to describing her.

While Wollen wasn’t wrong that society expects girls to swallow their sadness, sadness is still tolerated in a woman far more than anger. An angry woman is dangerous, unpredictable, uncontrollable. She must immediately be punished, shamed, or medicated back into complacency. Anger aims outward, disrupting systems and inconveniencing those in power, whereas we tend to turn our sadness inward, on ourselves—not bothering anyone or making a mess.

My voice betrayed me, going gravelly and coarse with the bolt of lust that had assaulted me when I smelled my soap lingering on her skin. There was something about having your scent on a woman that was beyond gratifying. And someone like Emily, who was wild and unpredictable? It made my inner beast purr with satisfaction.

Later in life, when Alma was a woman of science, she would better understand how the introduction of any new element into a controlled environment will alter that environment in manifold and unpredictable ways, but as a child, all she sensed was a hostile invasion and a premonition of doom. Alma did not embrace her interloper with a warm heart. Then again, why should she have? Who among us has ever warmheartedly embraced an interloper?

The truth is simple: Life is perfectly imperfect, unpredictable, and unexplainable. A Warrior Goddess does not try to control life or even understand it. Our job is to consciously choose what we are aligning with and then let go, and dance in joy and gratitude for every moment of existence.

We can all name people we take for granted, because everybody's swamped.Overwhelmed.Harried.We mean to make memories with people who matter, but often, we put it off for someday.And someday morphs into never as Life's unpredictability claims the people we love.

And that woman was going to marry Matthew! Matthew, who had been banking on her working in human resources, with a nice salary to complement his own, who sulked and bitched about her long, unpredictable hours and her lousy paycheck . . . couldn't she see what a stupid bloody thing she was doing? Why the fuck had she put that ring back on? Hadn't she tasted freedom on that drive up to Barrow, which Strike looked back on with a fondness that discomposed him? She's making a fucking huge mistake, that's all.

Believe me, there's only so much you can do when it comes to a young woman in love," Gemma said with a smile in her voice. "They are rare, unpredictable creatures.

You are it, Mollie,” he whispered. “You are exactly the sort of woman I have always wanted to find. The city can burn to the ground, but you don’t lose your head. You are passion and intelligence and beauty, and I love you to the bottom of my soul.” Mollie’s breath froze in her lungs. She wasn’t ready for this. Zack was a wild, unpredictable force of nature, while she lived in an orderly world of ticking watches and production schedules. She wasn’t ready for this, but there was no stopping Zack. “I want you out of that church and into someplace safe,” he said. “I want to marry you, Mollie. Say yes.” She couldn’t even draw a breath. Her life had been swept up into a whirlwind, smashed into pieces, and then reassembled into a wild and exciting world with which she had no experience. She risked a glance at his face. “You know this terrifies me, right?” His gaze did not waver; it only became more tender as he caressed the side of her face. “I’m betting you’ll brave it out.” She wanted to, but this wild, impulsive urge was frightening. She needed time to process the disordered jumble of feelings that were so unfamiliar to her. “I need to get back to the workshop and see about getting diamond powder.” He cocked a brow at her. “I lay my soul at your feet and you want to talk about buying supplies?” He smiled as he leaned down to touch his forehead to hers again. “I want to marry you, Mollie. Say yes. Say yes, and we’ll be one for the ages.” “I can’t. Not yet.” “When I get back from New York.” “Not then either. Zack, I’m not impulsive. You can’t rush me into something like this.” Zack winked down at her. “How about I rush you into lunch, then?” If he took offense at her refusal to budge on the proposal, he gave no sign of it as he strode down the street, whistling in good humor.

The Kindred were split into three distinct branches, all outcomes of their past genetic trades. There were the Tranq Kindred—a group of males with piercing blue eyes and a double set of short, sharp vestigial fangs. There were rumors that the fangs grew and they bit when they had sex with the female of their choice and other rumors that they could heal any illness with a bite. Liv wasn’t sure how much of that was true and how much was just media hype but the buzz about their sexual habits had earned this group the nickname “Blood Kindred.” Then there were the Twins, a branch of the Kindred in which the males always came in pairs and had to share a woman. No one knew exactly why and they declined to offer an explanation. Some said they were telepathic and needed sex to communicate but that hadn’t been proven—not that anyone had ever gotten a chance to study them. The Kindred as a whole kept strictly to themselves and refused to participate in any kind of scientific research or experiments. So no one really knew anything about the Twin Kindred other than they refused to make love to a woman individually. And then there were the Ragers—also known as the Beast Kindred. Working for so long in a hospital as she went through nursing school, the sight and idea of drawing blood wasn’t frightening to Liv so the Blood Kindred didn’t scare her. And being a twin herself, she wasn’t terribly afraid of the Twin Kindred either. But the Beast Kindred, well…they scared the ever-loving crap out of her. As tall and dominant as the rest of the warrior race, the Beast Kindred were said to have the most unpredictable tempers. Rumor had it that they could go into berserker-like rages when protecting their women, killing anyone that stood in their way no matter how many opposed them. But it was the other rumors, the sexual rumors, which put a lump in Liv’s throat. Besides being filled with animalistic lust, the Beast Kindred were said to have sexual stamina unequaled by anyone. Rumor had it that they could come again and again without going soft and their marathon love-making sessions put even practitioners of tantric sex to shame. Just

If the girl next door had an unpredictable, feisty twin sister, this woman would be her. With her adorably stubborn frown and quiet, kitten gaze still mulishly refusing to look directly at him again, she was drawing him in—hook, line, and sinker.

Lady Veronica was not an unknown hazard. She was a charming woman [..] and very delightful when she was, as they put it herself - but unfortunately at unpredictable intervals, she was not herself. Her husband, Major Carlton-Sandways coped fairly well.

Something about this woman sent an electric current pulsing through my veins. As a child, I would have sworn the sensation was owed to the hand of God. As an adult, I knew simple adrenaline and the unpredictability of body chemistry were to blame.

In this small county, Thelma knew the history of Emma and her family. What was saddest to Thelma, after Emma had left, was the feeling that Emma’s marriage to any man was probably doomed to failure when she was but a little girl; doomed to failure in 1904, when her father ran off to Texas with another woman, abandoned her, her mother, her three siblings. This marriage was doomed to failure when Emma’s father taught her the basic nature of men; that they were congenitally, irrevocably, and unpredictably sorry; that she could never really trust any man, even with his own money.

When women don’t assert themselves properly and instead let others walk all over them, they resent it, either consciously or unconsciously, and stockpile unexpressed angry feelings. Those resentful feelings that weren’t expressed in the original situation will tumble out and be expressed indirectly in other situations, leading to unpredictable explosions over minor annoyances or to subtle, passive-aggressive expressions [...] any woman who believes that Christians should be “sugar and spice and everything nice” 24/7 is going to build up an imposing stockpile of simmering anger. And that festering resentment is rocket fuel for passive-aggressive responses

Junior has always been bad. Bad is a self-fulfilling prophecy that, heard enough times, is believed: I am bad. The constant question, Why are you so bad? That time he stole. All the times he stole. He is always stealing, always wanting more. The answer he receives is always no -- no matter how practical and from the heart the thing is that he desires -- because he will surely ruin it, for he is bad and he must be punished for his badness. This is where we diverge. I become a black woman in the way I have been taught: silent, undeserving, inadequate in every way. And he becomes a black man: unpredictable, scary. Bad.

Helen Keller, a woman in another type of trap said, “Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it.” ▪ ▪ ▪ Many batterers control the money, allowing little access to bank accounts or even financial information. Some control the schedule, the car keys, the major purchases, the choice in clothes, the choice in friends. The batterer may be a benevolent control freak at the start of an intimate relationship, but he becomes a malevolent control freak later. And there’s another wrinkle: He gives punishment and reward unpredictably, so that any day now, any moment now, he’ll be his great old self, his honeymoon self, and this provides an ingredient that is essential to keeping the woman from leaving: hope. Does he do all this with evil design? No, it is part of his concept of how to retain love. Children who do not learn to expect and accept love in natural ways become adults who find other ways to get it. Controlling may work for a while, even a long while, but then it begins not to work, and so he escalates. He will do anything to stay in control, but his wife is changing, and that causes him to suffer. In fact, the Buddhist definition of human suffering applies perfectly: “clinging to that which changes.” When men in these situations do not find out what is going on inside them, when they do not get counseling or therapy, it is a choice to continue using violence. Such men are taking the risk that violence will escalate to homicide, for as Carl Jung said, “When an inner situation is not made conscious, it appears outside as fate.

How the hell could any girl resist this? How could any girl ever be satisfied with just one man? They must not know. They must have no idea how amazing this is. How incredible it feels. If they did, every woman in the world would demand her own harem.

Romulan dressed his face in its most charming and unpredictable smile, and as the woman rode close enough to see him fully, he turned it on her.

They knew she was necessary, but didn’t want to get close to something so unpredictable as a woman who killed men with her mind, and worst of all, cried. Right in the middle of them sometimes!

You know, time stops for no man – or woman – and I often find myself thinking what life would have been like without children. I always come up with the same answer: dull and two-dimensional. Children bring an element of unpredictability that gives our lives richness. Maybe

They also learned to be outrageous. They acted out pretend fights, threw Nazi salutes, dressed like a cleaning woman, imitated a crippled walk, mooned the audience, played prostrate from the floor, and jumped unpredictably into the crowd.

People carry electricity for me; they have a current that surges around my body until I’m exhausted. It’s hard to pinpoint what it is, exactly; something about their noise, their unruly movement, the unpredictable demands they might make on me. It makes the air feel thick, like humanity has…not a scent, but a texture. It makes me feel like I can’t breathe.

The more a person knows of himself, the more he will hesitate to define his nature and to assert what he must necessarily feel, and the more he will be astounded at his capacity to feel in unsuspected and unpredictable ways. Still more will this be so if he learns to explore, or feel deeply into, his negative states of feeling - his loneliness, sorrow, grief, depression, or fear - without trying to escape from them.

When we're juggling so many complexities that Superman and Wonder Woman together couldn't get it all done working double shifts, or when we're walking on eggshells in an unpredictable relationship, we can become stressed in ways that inhibit our ability to be creative, to be appropriately responsive, and to thrive.

When it came to my choices, I tried to be somewhat unpredictable, to prevent anyone from ascribing any sort of message to what I wore. It was a thin line to walk. I was supposed to stand out without overshadowing others, to blend in but not fade away. As a black woman, too, I knew I’d be criticized if I was perceived as being showy and high-end, and I’d also be criticized if I was too casual. So I mixed it up. I’d match a Michael Kors skirt with a T-shirt from Gap. I wore something from Target one day and Diane von Furstenberg the next.

Insatiably desiring, infinitely plastic, totally passive, and always a little bit sleepy; unpredictably labile and disloyal (to products); basically wooly-minded and non-obsessive about traditional truth; relaxed and undemanding with respect to the canons of traditional philosophy, indifferent to its values, and easily moved to buy whatever at the moment seems to help his underlying personal inadequacies—this is pecuniary philosophy's conception of man and woman in our culture.

One of the deepest feminine desires in intimacy (though not in business or simple friendship) is to be able to relax and surrender, knowing that her man is taking care of everything. Then, she can simply enjoy without having to plan it all herself and tell her man what to do. She can be pure energy, pure motion, pure love, without having to analyze all the options and decide which ones are best. She can enjoy her man taking responsibility for the direction, so she can be what the feminine is: pure energy. Like the ocean, the native state of the feminine is to flow with great power and no single direction. The masculine builds canals, dams, and boats to unite with the power of the feminine ocean and go from point A to point B. But the feminine moves in many directions at once. The masculine chooses a single goal and moves in that direction. Like a ship cutting through a vast ocean, the masculine decides on a course and navigates the direction: the feminine energy itself is undirected but immense, like the wind and deep currents of the ocean, ever changing, beautiful, destructive, and the source of life. This same principle applies to problems in intimacy. Any time you try to force your woman to be more like a ship than an ocean, you are negating her feminine energy. Any time you talk to her and expect her to analyze her mood and situation to the point of being able to fix it, you are talking “masculine” with her. She can do it, she might even be better at it than you, but it won’t make her a happy woman. A happy woman is a woman relaxed in her body and heart: powerful, unpredictable, deep, potentially wild and destructive, or calm and serene, but always full of life, surrendered to and moved by the great force of her oceanic heart. When you ask her to analyze her heart’s emotions, it’s like building walls around a part of the ocean and turning it into a swimming pool. It’s safer and more predictable, but far less alive and enlivening. Most men have made their women into swimming pools by continually treating them like men, talking with them about their feelings as if they can be analyzed to the point of “fixing” them. Don’t waste your time doing

Love and justice between a man and a woman do not stand a chance when other men’s manhood matters more. When a man has decided to love manhood most of all, there are predictable consequences in all his relationships with women. Any woman he relates to is set up to be a potential “third party.” Any woman who believes she is his “partner” in life may actually be a sitting duck for some put-down or betrayal that he may “inadvertently” or “unpredictably” commit owing to his prior allegiance to other men’s manhood.

I had to visit the special collections room again—an experience I was not anticipating—but thankfully the man who had taken such offence to me before was not working that day, and I was assisted by a kindly old woman who not only located the volume I required, but suggested I consider another book of folktales, similar in theme, which I had overlooked before, having assumed from the title that it was written in Irish. Such is the way with librarians, who are almost as unpredictable as the Folk, some minatory and persnickety, others overflowing with warmth towards humanity at large.